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Plasma TVs generally offer better picture quality than equivalent LCD or LED models but with a few downsides – Plasma displays aren’t as razor-thin as LEDs, the back-panel can get hot after few hours of usage and then there’s the screen burn-in problem that might occur when the same picture is displayed on the TV screen for a long period of time.

I have been testing Panasonic VIERA TH-P65VT30D which, at this time, is the most high-end 3D Plasma HDTV from Panasonic with a 65" display and there are plenty of good things to say about this unit. (Related reading: TV Buying Guide)

The P65VT30 is thin and the display panel, which is made of a single sheet of glass, looks absolutely gorgeous. I have been using the TV unit for about two weeks now and, even after several hours of continuous usage, the unit barely gets hot. A Panasonic representative told me that they have added extra fans at the rear to solve the heat problem and it seems to work quite well.

Multiple HDMI and USB ports are available at the sides to help you connect external devices conveniently while the lesser-used A/V and Internet (Ethernet) ports are located at the rear of the TV. I have placed the TV on a pedestal stand but if you are planning to wall-mount the unit, accessing the rear ports maybe an issue. The slot for inserting SD memory cards is also at the side.

The unit ships with a pair of 3D glasses and they have a mini-USB port so you may charge them even by connecting to your computer. The TV remote is a similar to the older Plasma models – extra long with too many buttons – but this one has a dedicated 3D button to help you quickly switch between 2D and 3D modes. In addition to watching pure 3D content, the VT30 has a special converter mode that lets you enjoy 2D programming in 3D – this however works with Blu-ray content only and I couldn’t test it.

Panasonic Viera VT30 is Internet-ready and, as a Google TV user, I was particularly interested in the Internet experience on this TV.

There are two ways to connect the TV to the network – you can either use a LAN cable or, if you have Wi-Fi at home, plug the supplied network adaptor into one of the available USB ports. It is surprising that Wi-Fi support is not built-in and that you need to attach a dongle to connect the TV to your wireless network. It means another wire coming out of your TV that you need to hide.

The network setup was quick and simple though it is worth mentioning that the on-screen keyboard, available on the password screen, misses a few special characters (like the @ symbol). That means if your Wi-Fi password makes use of one of those characters, it won’t be possible to connect the TV to the network unless you change the password of your wireless network.

Panasonic VIERA Connect

The Panasonic TV has apps and a marketplace – called the VIERA Market – from where you can download more apps directly to your TV. If you have used the Android Market or the iTunes Apps Store on your phone, the experience of installing apps on your TV is similar. It is DLNA compliant meaning your easily stream music and photos from the phone or your computer running Windows Media Player directly to your TV.

There’s a convenient “Internet” button on the remote to help you quickly switch from cable programming to the world of apps. Once there, you’ll find apps for Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Skype, Accuweather, and certain India-specific apps like IndiaTimes and MoneyControl. Then there apps around games like Solitaire or Minesweeper that aren’t pre-installed but you may download from the Viera Market.

Every single app that is available on VIERA is extremely well designed, beautiful and I also found them very intuitive to use (see video). VIERA uses “screens” to arrange your apps and, unlike your mobile phones, they only have a limited number of apps per screen so it doesn’t look cluttered or confusing. The screens are completely customizable so you can move your most frequently used apps on the initial screen.

The Weather app is available as a live widget so you can see the current weather conditions of your city on main screen itself without having to launch the app. The TV has Skype as well for video calling though I couldn’t test it as it requires a special Skype camera that doesn’t ship with the unit.

Overall, the VIERA Connect (formerly known as VIERA Cast) experience was enjoyable and extremely easy to use though you would obviously want to see more apps in the VIERA Market. For instance, there’s no built-in web browser nor can you check your emails on the TV because there’s no app for that. I also missed a podcasting app on this Panasonic TV.

The picture quality of Panasonic VIERA TH-P65VT30D is outstanding and with such a large display, it almost gives that cinema-like feel. And because the display is all glass with no bulging bezels, the picture can be viewed from virtually all angles. The TV does have a slightly reflective screen that becomes evident if you place it in a room with too many windows. I also noticed that it could not access the installed apps if the TV was not connected to the network – this is surprising because some apps, games for example, should ideally work in offline mode as well.

Video Demo: Panasonic VIERA Connect

This story, A Review of Panasonic VIERA Plasma HDTV, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on October 23, 2011 under Tv, Gadgets.

Don’t believe everything you see on the Internet because screenshots can be easily faked. Sometimes these fake images are for pure fun – like you putting your picture on the cover of TIME magazine, sometimes they may be deceptive.

My favorite is Wall Machine – a service that lets you you create fake screenshots of Facebook walls and other Facebook related activity – like X is now a friend of Y or Z changed their relation status on Facebook. Every part of that screenshot can be customized including the conversation text, the profile images and you can have as many comments on a Facebook post as you like.

Another service – iFakeText – lets you make screenshot images of text messages exchanged on an iPhone. Just enter the text of the SMS conversation in a proper format and generate the screenshot – see example.

I also like Fake Tweet Builder for creating screenshot images of Twitter conversations that may or may not have happened. The screenshots of individual tweets look extremely real – see example – and you may also use customize the profile pictures, the name of the Twitter client and how many times a particular tweet has been retweeted.

Ticket-o-Matic lets you print boarding passes of any popular airline, Fodey generates newspaper clippings while Expense Steak creates PDF receipts of restaurant bills and office supplies for a given amount. When you print these receipts on paper, they’ll look real but there’s little potential for misuse as they carry old dates.

Finally, if a web form makes it mandatory to fill the street address or the phone number, use this website to generate random data for putting into that form.

This story, The Internet of Fake Screenshots, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on October 21, 2011 under Screenshots, Internet.

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5 Days of Facebook is a story of two school friends – a boy and a girl – who meet on Facebook several years later. The boy find an old classmate on Facebook, sends her a friend request and the split-screen video illustrates his expectations from that add request versus the reality.

Several copies of the video exist on YouTube and one of them, with 100k+ views, has already made it to the “most viewed videos” chart on YouTube India for this month.

The music video is in Hindi but even if even you don’t know that language, you can still make sense of the video from the visuals. Like!

This story, Indian Video on Facebook Relationships Goes Viral, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on October 20, 2011 under Facebook, India.

Like Amazon, you can now use the Google Alerts service to keep track of new books from your favorite authors or upcoming titles that are around your topics of interest. It is also possible to track books from a particular book publisher.

Go to google.com/alerts and set the type of alert as Books. Then use one, or a combination, of the following queries to set up your book alert.

inauthor:"david pogue"

Get an alert when there’s a new book from your favorite author – example, David Pogue.

intitle:"google chrome"

Get an alert when there’s a new book with a particular title – example, Google Chrome.

inpublisher:oreilly 

Get an alert when your favorite book publisher releases a new title – in this case, O’Reilly.

subject:"Microsoft Office"

Get an alert when there’s a new book around a particular topic – in this case, Microsoft Office. This is different from the intitle search operator as the book title many not always have the topic name.

Once the alerts are setup, you will get an email as soon as any new matching book enters the Google Books database. Found via the Google Books blog.

This story, Keep Track of New Books with Google Alerts, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on October 20, 2011 under Books, Google Alerts, Internet.

Your computer has voice recognition software to help you write emails without touching the keyboard. Your phone can probably understand voice commands as well so you can speak and take notes or even search the web.

Now how about driving a car that does voice recognition?

The New Ford Fiesta Does Voice Recognition

Ford recently introduced the All-New Ford Fiesta in India and I have test-driving the petrol version (Titanium model) for about two weeks now. The new Fiesta sports a very attractive exterior body (the blue color definitely is an eye-turner), the interiors feel quiet, the car comes fitted with parking sensors at the rear but the one feature that interested me the most was voice control.

The All-New Ford Fiesta lets you control the air-conditioning, radio, the CD player and your phone using simple voice commands. The first time I used the voice feature to change the fan speed, you could hear that collective wow from everyone inside the car.

The voice button attached to the steering wheel is easily approachable. You just need to press that button once, the car makes a short beep sound and you are in voice mode.

Next you "speak" the command. For instance, you say ‘temperature’, the car repeats if it successfully recognizes your command and then you say a number – like twenty three – to set the temperature at 23°C. If you try setting a very high temperature, the system says "not possible" and cancels the command.

Similarly, if you want to tune the radio to a particular frequency, you say the command Radio followed by AM or FM and then the station frequency. The voice commands are easy to remember though it may take a couple of days to master them well. I kept using the command "fan speed" and it would fail every time, turned out the command was "fan" which I only realized after going back to the car manual.

The Voice Button and the 3.5″ Display in Ford Fiesta

You can pair your mobile phone with the car and make or receive phone calls hands-free. The pairing is wireless – it uses Bluetooth – and you can configure up to six different phones with the car (much needed if other family members also use the car).

Once the phone is connected, making calls is easy. Press the Voice Control button, say the command Dial Number and say the number. The system would repeat the number to confirm and you say Dial to begin dialing. The car has an internal memory that you may use to store frequently dialed numbers and attach them with a name – thus you don’t you have say the whole number again. If you are on a busy route, you can use the command "Reject Calls" and the car would automatically reject all your incoming phone calls.

The car’s dashboard is also fitted with a phone-like keyboard to help you quickly dial numbers manually in case the voice system isn’t able to recognize your spoken digits correctly. Alternatively, and this is interesting, you can access your complete phone logs and your phone’s address book on the 3.5” screen attached to the dashboard but there’s no way to navigate this list with voice.

Voice control is a useful feature and the implementation is very user-friendly but how well does it work. The first two days with the system were frustrating as it would not recognize most of the voice commands. Either I was speaking too fast or, I thought, the car’s voice recognition system had trouble recognizing my Indian accent.

Things however got a little better with time. I was still speaking in natural tone but added a little extra pause between letters and that seemed to do the trick most of the times. I have captured a quick video here detailing my experience with the various voice commands of the All-New Ford Fiesta.

Voice Commands in Ford Fiesta – Video Review

You would ideally want the system to recognize your voice command in the first attempt but in my experience, that happened only 60-70% of the times. The system especially had trouble recognizing the number “two” in the phone mode (see video). In another instance, I kept saying "FM" for radio and the system would always recognize that as "AM" so there was no other choice but to use the physical buttons.

Overall, voice commands in the new Ford Fiesta are a nice-to-have feature, the phone connectivity feature is especially impressive but the built-in speech recognition system definitely needs improvement to better understand our Indian English accent.

This story, The New Ford Fiesta 2011 has Voice Control [Video], was originally published at Digital Inspiration on October 20, 2011 under Car, Speech Recognition, India.

A Wikipedia entry states that only 1% of Internet data and voice traffic is transmitted through satellite links while the remaining 99% is still carried by undersea cables spread across the world’s oceans. This explains why Internet services get disrupted when these undersea cables are damaged due to passing ships or in the event of an

You should also check the recently updated Submarine Map which gives some good idea about the physical routes of these cables lying under the sea bed. This is an interactive map so you can zoom-in or click on any particular colored cable to know about their respective owners. Fascinating stuff.

This story, A World Map of the Undersea Internet Cables, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on September 23, 2011 under Cables, Infographics, Wide, Internet.

Let’s say you have two computers on your desk and, in an effort to save space, you want to operate them all using a single pair of keyboard and mouse.

There are two solutions here. If the computers are connected to the same network, you can use software programs like Input Director or Synergy to operate them with a common keyboard and mouse. In the other scenario where the machines aren’t connected, you can get a KVM switch to share one keyboard and mouse between them.

A Better Alternative – Mouse without Borders

My work setup is quite similar to what you see in the illustration above and I have been using the Input Director software all this while to control the two Windows PCs with one keyboard and mouse. Input Director is reliable and (mostly) works without problems though it does require some understanding of the Master and Slave concept.

Last week, I switched to a new Windows utility called Mouse without Borders and find it so much better than my previous solution. Wondering why?

The best part about Mouse without Borders is how easy it is to set up. You install the utility on all your Windows computers, enter the security code provided by the software and your computers will get linked. This is almost as simple as pairing a set of Bluetooth devices.

Installing Mouse without Borders – Step by Step

Once installed, you can not only use the same keyboard and mouse across your computers in a seamless manner but you can also drag and drop files between them. This is so convenient. Earlier, I had to create shared network folders or had to use Dropbox to transfer files but now I can simple drag them from desktop A to desktop B as if they were on the same computer.

With the Mouse without Borders utility installed, you can also send screen capture of one desktop to another by pressing a hotkey or from the system tray menu. After having used the tool for about a week, I never experienced a crash though I did have problems sharing clipboard especially when the copy operation was done inside a Flash application.

Mouse without Borders can only be used to control Windows based computers. If your work environment involves a mix of Windows, Linux or Mac computers, Synergy could still be the only good choice for you.

This story, Control Two Computers with a Single Keyboard and Mouse, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on September 23, 2011 under Keyboard, Mouse, Software.