Bikini Parade: Australians Break World Record

Guinness World Records adjudicator Chris Sheedy holds the certificate awarded to the participants at Surfers Paradise Beach in Gold Coast City on October 2, 2011 after they broke the world record for the longest bikini parade. AFP PHOTO / MURRAY RIX.


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Top 10 Tips for Quitting Smoking

1. Find Your Motivation

Your girlfriend hates you smoking? Your children look down on you for smoking? Find yourself a very good reason to quit and engrave it in your mind. Repeat it to yourself every morning, the first thing you get up. Every urge, remind yourself. After you do this consciously for a couple of days, your mind will automatically start reminding you (sub-consciously) of your motivation as the urge comes.


2. Join an Online Community.

There are tons of people around trying to quit. Motivate them to quit and drive motivation from them at the same time. It helped me, its bound to help anybody. Post about your urges, read about others' urges. Embrace members of the community and their suggestions. Let them help you quit. If you find the urge intolerable, let people in the community know of your moment of weakness. Make this a habit. The repeated embarrassment will help you reduce to the very least. If you end up quitting, stick to the community for about 30 or so days, and empower people with your success story.

3. Apply delay tactics.

If you have an urge, apply some delay tactics. Snack & Drink Water: Another way to kill the urge is to snack. When the urge comes, treat yourself with any snack of your choice. You may switch to healthier food after the first two weeks. Here are some foods that may help you quit.

4. No Moment of Weakness.

Your mind will play games. When the urge strikes, remind yourself of your motivation, meditate for 2 minutes, take ten to fifteen deep breaths and ignore. Do not rationalize with your mind and adopt a 'just a puff wont hurt' attitude. The one puff makes all the difference. If your friends smoke, don't ask them for a quick puff. Don't go out with them. A single puff leads to another, and then another, and then another. In such moments, if you find yourself justifying your habit, this may help you.

5. Build a Strategy.

Quitting wasn't easy for me. Rest assured, it isn't going to be easy for you either. Unless you have super human control over your will, you're going to need a solid strategy. Start by preparing a list of things to do when you get the urge. Print out this list, engrave it in your mind. Just make sure, you are ready with your strategy BEFORE the urge strikes.

6. Incentivize Yourself

It's simple. You pass a day without smoking, reward yourself. You pass a week, reward yourself. You pass a month, you're there. The nicotine is almost flushed out, and the urges will fade, reward yourself big. You need to incentivize yourself at each milestone. Ensure you put these rewards in your strategy list. Go three months without smoking, and you may safely claim that you've quit. Keep a reward ready. An iPhone, a new car, a Mac book air, go crazy, you deserve every bit of it.

7. Follow your milestones as if your life depended on it.

Your life actually does depend on it. But this article is not to demoralize you. Your first and hardest milestone is day 2. Second hardest is the week. Pass these two milestones and you're golden. After this, it gets easier. As long as you're meticulously following the other tips i mentioned, the road to recovery will be smooth sailing.

8. Never say never again. If you fail, don't give up.

These tips have been compiled through learnings made after a number of trials. You too, will fail on numerous occasions. What is important is to make a mental note of the reasons for your failure and learn from them. If you've failed, don't give up. Try again, and again, and again.

9. Be genuinely committed.

No half hearted efforts are ever successful. Do you actually want to quit? Have you found your motivation yet? If you find yourself succumbing to the urge very easily, without a fight, question yourself!. Are you actually committed to quitting? After a series of moments of weakness, i realized i wasn't genuinely committed. Quitting was a conscious decision that i had to take with myself. After i decided, there was no turning back. (This article tells you how you may trick yourself into quitting.)

10. Be Positive

This is perhaps the most important tip. Adopt an extremely, overtly, obsessively optimistic attitude towards quitting. Get cute about it. Remind yourself that you're a happier and healthier person post addiction. Be positive! In your moments of weakness, remember to be positive. Adopt the "yes you can, yes you will" - Obama mantra. If it helps, you may even choose to go to the extent of seeing some cheesy motivational speeches on Youtube. Bottom line, If you want to quit smoking, you need to be positive about your approach.

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15 Ultimate Tips to Extend Your Laptop’s Battery Life

Notebooks tend to lose their charm quickly when you find yourself searching for a power terminal once in every couple of hours to help your dieing battery that is plunging towards the red zone! How do you keep your laptop/notebook battery going for as long as possible? Here are 15 easy tips to do so. Read them now. You’ll thank yourself later.

1. Sleeping Rejuvenates your Body, and your Laptop Battery Too
Use your laptop’s power management features (in Windows XP, under Power Options in the Control Panel; or in Vista, under Mobile PC in the Control Panel) sensibly. The system will run at lower processor speeds when enabling power management features and it will go into “sleep” mode faster when inactive. And if you can spare the extra time it takes for the machine to resume, make sure that you set your laptop to hibernate, not just sleep, when you close the lid.

2. All that Glitters are Not Always Gold
Unless you are still using the laptop that your dad gifted you in the summer of 1999, most modern laptops come with the ability to dim the laptop screen.  Some even come with ways to modify the processor and cooling performance.  Turn down the brightness of the LCD panel (via the Function-key combo, or in the Control Panel’s Display Settings dialog). Cut them down to the minimum level you can tolerate to squeeze out some extra battery juice. And also consider switching off the backlight that sucks away power from your notebook’s battery like a vacuum cleaner!

3. Cut down Gaming when Running on Battery
Unless you’re running high-order mathematical calculations to solve the university project, chances are great that you don’t need the maximum processing power that your CPU can give. So in Vista, select the “Power saver” power plan (found in the Control Panel, in the Power Options section) to extend battery life when on DC power, and leave the 3D video gaming for when you’re near an AC outlet.

4. Avoid Memory-Hungry and Less-Essential Apps
When you aren’t actively using the Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and IR radios, turn them off (via the hard switch, if your laptop has it, or in the appropriate utility set), so that they don’t trickle you dry trying to connect. Photoshop, iTunes, Google Desktop Search, etc.  All these add to the CPU load and cut down battery life drastically.  Shut down everything that isn’t crucial when you’re running solely on battery power.

5. Turn Off the Auto-Save Function
Microsoft Word and Excel’s autosave functions are great but because they keep saving at regular intervals, they make your hard drive spin harder than it should. However, if you plan to do this, you may want to turn it back on when the battery runs low. While it saves battery life in the beginning, you will not want to lose your unsaved work when your battery dies, will you?

6. Wisely Schedule Virus Scans
Be sure that your periodic virus scan is set to a time when you’re usually plugged in; running a full-disk virus check keeps the hard drive and CPU fully engaged for the better part of an hour.

7. Lower the Graphics Use
You can do this by changing the screen resolution and shutting off fancy graphic drivers. Graphics cards (video cards) use as much or even more power as hard drives.

8. Go Easy on the Multimedia
A little music is nice while you construct that PowerPoint presentation for your upcoming meeting, but streaming music from your hard drive (or playing a CD) means the disk is always spinning thus sipping away power from your notebook battery.

9. Defrag once in a while
The faster your hard drive does its work – less demand you are going to put on the hard drive and your laptop’s battery.  Make your hard drive as efficient as possible by defragging it regularly (but not while it’s on battery of course!) Mac OSX is better built to handle fragmentation so it may not be needed for Apple systems.

10. Cut down External Devices
Use USB-attached devices only when absolutely necessary. They aren’t getting their power from positive ions in the air, you know. USB devices (including your mouse) & WiFi drain down your laptop battery.  Remove or shut them down when not in use.  It goes without saying that charging other devices (like your iPod) with your laptop when on battery is a surefire way of quickly wiping out the charge on your laptop battery.

11. Get more RAM
This is probably obvious but this will allow you to process more with the memory your laptop has, rather than relying on virtual memory.  Virtual memory results in hard drive use, and is much less power efficient. Note that adding more RAM will consume more energy, so this is most applicable if you do need to run memory intensive programs which actually require heavy usage of virtual memory.

12. Use Hard Drive rather than CD/DVD
As power consuming as hard drives are, CD and DVD drives are even worse.  Even having one disk in the drive can be power consuming.  They spin, taking power, even when they’re not actively being used.  Wherever possible, try to run on virtual drives using programs like Alcohol 120% rather than optical ones.

13. Operate at Low Temperature
Your laptop operates more efficiently when it’s cooler.  Clean out your laptop’s air vents with a cloth or keyboard cleaner.

14. Jack of all, Master of None! Avoid Multitasking
Do one thing at a time when you’re on battery.  Rather than working on a spreadsheet, letting your email client run in the background and listening to your latest set of MP3’s, focus your mind to one thing only.  If you don’t you’ll only drain out your batteries before anything gets completed!

15. Prevent the Memory Effect
If you’re using a very old laptop, you will want to prevent the ‘memory effect’ – Keep the battery healthy by fully charging and then fully discharging it at least once every two to three weeks. Exceptions to the rule are Li-Ion batteries (which most laptops have) which do not suffer from the memory effect.

What do you do to extend your laptop’s battery life? How do you make sure that your battery doesn’t die down in the middle of your work? Do share your ideas with us.

News from - http://techchunks.com/gadgets/15-ultimate-tips-to-extend-your-laptops-battery-life/

View Your Route In A Virtual Helicopter In New Google Maps 3D

Ever wondered what your route would look like if you were flying in a chopper? After giving us their uber-popular Satellite View, Street View and Earth View, Google Maps has now brought us Helicopter (chopper) View. Now, when ever you plug in a route on the Google Maps site, you’ll start to see a new “3D” button that will show you your route as if you were flying on a chopper (helicopter).


We think this is yet another great innovative step after Google introduced 3D Trees, Closer Street View Integration in Google Earth 6 last year. This new helicopter view offers an aerial view (courtesy of Google Earth) of your route — a bit like taking a helicopter ride instead of your car.

How to Use Helicopter View in Google Maps?

You will first need the Google Earth plug-in for the function to work.  To see the 3D button – which shows up next to ‘driving directions’ in the left hand bar – you first have to click the ‘Earth’ mapping option, which shows up when you hover over ‘Map’ in the upper right hand corner.  You will then be prompted to download the plug-in.

The smoothness of your experience is somewhat dependent on your internet connection speed and your computer’s processing power.


Start by entering your starting point, destination, and mode of transport like any directions.  Then, click on the ’3D’ play button. The map will switch to Earth view and automatically start flying you along your recommended route.

You can pause the flight by clicking anywhere in the 3D view or on the pause button in the lower left of the map. While the flight is paused, you can explore the surrounding area in 3D by clicking and dragging the map.

In fact, You can get back to 2D mode by clicking on the ’2D’ button in the left panel at any time.

You could even take a break from your helicopter ride and click on photos, YouTube videos or Wikipedia pages that are geo-linked to locations along your route.

However, it doesn’t seem like the 3D preview features works much outside of popular, well-known routes (like the California coast drive featured in the Google Blog post).

3D route previews, on first glance, appear to combine the Google Earth and Google Maps experiences quite nicely. But we wonder when it will be available for Indian routes, especially after Bangalore suspended Google’s Street View Service.

News from - http://techchunks.com/technology/view-your-route-in-a-virtual-helicopter-new-google-maps-3d/

Is Apple iPhone 4S Worth the Upgrade?

It's not an iPhone 5, but it is a marked improvement over the last model. Apple on Tuesday rolled out the iPhone 4S, complete with a fresh operating system and other bells and whistles that aim to woo new and existing iPhone users alike. But is it worth an upgrade from an iPhone 3GS or iPhone 4?
The iPhone 4S may be tempting for consumers. It offers a dual-core A5 chip that promises up to twice the processing power and up to seven times faster graphics. An all-new camera offers advanced optics and full 1080p HD resolution video recording. A new dual-antenna design lets the phone switch between two antennas automatically to send and receive. And a voice-control app called Siri Assistant takes voice commands to find information and perform other tasks on the go.

For its part, iOS 5 has more than 200 new features of its own. And iCloud brings a set of cloud services that work with the iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Mac or PC to automatically and wirelessly store digital content in the cloud and push it to various devices.

Steve Jobs-Like Remarks

Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, made the types of statements former CEO Steve Jobs used to make, calling the iPhone 4S, iOS 5 and iCloud combination a breakthrough. He also took a jab at the competition (read: Android.)
"While our competitors try to imitate iPhone with a checklist of features," he said, "only iPhone can deliver these breakthrough innovations that work seamlessly together."

The iPhone 4S comes in either black or white and will sell for $199 for the 16 GB model and $299 for the 32 GB model with a two-year contract. There's also a new 64 GB model that's going for $399. The iPhone 4, meanwhile, is getting a price drop to $99 for an 8 GB model, and the iPhone 3GS is free with a two-year contract.

"This is definitely an evolutionary upgrade with revolutionary features," said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Gartner. "The same way that users upgraded from 3G to 3GS, I think we are going to see that pattern here."

Should You Upgrade?

The camera on the iPhone 4S is all new, with an 8-megapixel sensor that offers 60 percent more pixels. More pixels means higher quality. iPhone 4S includes a new custom lens with a larger f/2.4 aperture and an advanced hybrid infrared filter that works to produce sharper, brighter and more accurate images. With the iPhone 4S, Apple said, the camera app launches much faster and the shot-to-shot capability is twice as fast.

Meanwhile, new features in the camera and photos apps give users instant access to the camera right from the lock screen, and users can also use the volume-up button to quickly snap a photo. Optional grid lines help line up the shot and a simple tap locks focus and exposure on one subject. The new Photos app lets users crop, rotate, enhance and remove red-eye, and organize photos into albums.

"The faster processor is going to give way to a lot of new applications that just won't run well on the older devices. The new imaging and the new voice assistance all make it kind of worthwhile," Gartenberg said. "What's nice is that Apple is keeping the old models in the line all the way back to the 3GS. It means that we are going to see new customers coming in at these new price points. So I'd say it's a pretty successful day for Apple."

News from - http://news.yahoo.com/apple-iphone-4s-worth-upgrade-203235237.html