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IndianExpress:  It was yet another day marked by individual journeys of discovery by the citizens in the absence of a viable public transport system. With the roads flooded with two-wheelers, auto-rickshaws and cars, it was left to each one to scale new heights of hardship. There were plenty of choices though from falling into fresh potholes that never existed a day back, falling into manholes left open or simply getting stuck in all parts of the city right through the day and well into the night.

The general mood of discontent, mingled with kind of being resigned to their fate was reflected in some of the short text messages (SMS) that were doing the rounds. ‘‘In the rest of the country, people drive on the left side of the road; in Pune, they drive on what is left of the road,’’ said one such gem.

IndianExpress:  Senior leader and environmentalist Mohan Dharia has opposed the reconstruction of the PMC’s employee colonies at Wakdewadi and allowing the builder to develop land worth Rs 100-125 crore. ‘‘Not a single inch land owned by PMC should be allowed to sold,’’ he said. Dharia has also threatened to hold a protest against the land deal on October 2.

Dharia alleged that the corruption in the land deal was akin to the fodder scam. He said that the names of those corporators who supported the proposal should be declared as the common man will know the people involved in the matter.

IndianExpress: To bring the traffic situation in the city under control, the traffic police will be placing people on chowks that get the most jammed. For patrolling on Monday and Tuesday, an additional 78 traffic policemen were called in while around 50 traffic wardens were assisting the traffic police.

Police inspector Shahajirao Patil said that of the 150 wardens, an additional 100 wardens will be deployed on Wednesday for patrolling. Additional policemen will be deputed at chowks like Parnakuti, Mahatma Gandhi garden, Inspection Bungalow chowk, Regional Transport Office chowk, Sancheti chowk and Veer Chafekar chowk for smooth movement of traffic.
 

IndianExpress: The social security cell of Pune police has rescued 12 girls from Disco apartment in Budhwar Peth on Tuesday afternoon. Of the rescued girls, 9 are minors. Of the 12 girls, 6 girls are from Nepal, 5 from West Bengal, while 1 from Bangalore. They all have been living in the city from the last five months. Police has detained Pushpa Lama (45) and Tara Tamang (40) fro running the brothel.
 
 

IndianExpress: The Rashtriya Shikshan Mandal (RSM) and the Ayurved Rasshala (AR) will be preparing a special ayurvedic herbal medicine that will be standardised and tested to increase the CD4 count levels of 50-odd HIV infected children of Manavya Sanstha, at Bhugaon.

Dr Suhas Parchure, chairman of the mandal said that a project had been taken up ten years ago, along with the Armed Forces Medical College (AFMC) towards preparing an ayurvedic formulation, to help improve the quality of life of the people living with HIV/AIDS (PLHA).

Parchure who lamented that the project got stuck due to transfers of officers has now embarked upon a new project that hopes to improve the quality of life of these children. The ayurvedic formulation will be tested and standardised at the AR and then given to children with periodic check-ups for a year, for the initial period. ‘‘This should help to improve the quality of their life,’’ says Parchure.

TechTree.com: Acer India has announced the launch of the Acer Power 330 series PC, based on Intel’s latest Pentium 4 Processor with hyper-threading technology. The PC is equipped with the Pentium 4 Processor with hyper-threading technology (3.06 Ghz, EM64T, 1 MB L2 cache, 533 Mhz FSB), which makes for increased power and excellent performance.

With system memory of 128 MB DDR RAM, upgradeable to 2 GB; and storage capacity of 40 GB HDD Hard Drive at 5400 RPM; the Acer Power 330 has a 10/100 Network Integrated Card (NIC); 52 X CD ROM; PS/2 Acer Black 104 Keys Keyboard; Black PS/2 Optical Mouse; multiple ports; 15-inch CRT Black Monitor; and on board sound and graphics.

According to company sources, using the Linux Operating system, the Power 330, apart from having the latest Intel 64-bit hyper threading technology for power-packed performance, has Lifetime Anti Virus from E Trust.

TechTree.com: For the first time, Apple Computer has previewed Mac OS X version 10.5 Leopard, the sixth major version of Mac OS X, which is scheduled to ship in the spring of 2007.

According to Apple, Leopard has new innovative features, including Time Machine and Spaces.

Time Machine, Apple says, has the unique ability to let users travel back in time to find deleted files, applications, photos, or other digital media. The feature automatically backs up everything on the Mac to an external hard drive, or Mac OS X Server.

Whereas Spaces is a new way to group applications required for a given task into a “space,” and then instantly switch between different spaces to bring up the specific applications required for the given task. The user can get a bird’s eye view of all his/her Spaces, and choose where to go next with just one click.

TechTree.com: ASUSTeK Computer (Asus) today introduced its P5W DH Deluxe motherboard, which according to the company, puts together digital home features; Intel’s Core2 Extreme plus Core2 Duo processors; and ATI’s CrossFire graphics to deliver multimedia entertainment, wireless networking, data protection, and easy access to and management of various functions.

Some of the P5W DH’s unique features include the DH Remote which allows users to turn on/off their computers, as also to manage other digital home features of the motherboard; EZ-Backup which enables users obtain backup hard drive data without complicated software configurations; WiFi AP Solo which makes for a new level in PC versatility, by providing both access point and wireless client modes; and MP3-In which lets users play music stored in their portable music players even whilst the

ABCNews.com: Kodak and Casio separately announced several new consumer-friendly compact digital cameras on Tuesday. On the Kodak side, the EasyShare C875 is an 8-megapixel compact camera with a 5X optical zoom, and includes a novel technology that Kodak calls Smart Scene. This feature sets the camera in one of nine scene modes. After it reads the lighting condition of a particular scene, it then determines which scene configuration will take the best shot. The scene modes it chooses include portrait, text, backlight, and beach/snow modes, among others. Stay tuned for our upcoming First Looks review to see how smart the Smart Scene technology actually is.

The C875, which will list for $299.95, sport a 2.5-inch LCD screen, has full manual functionality (rare for low- and mid-range compacts), on-screen help, plus VGA video capabilities at 30 fps with MPEG-4 compression. Expect it to ship at the end of August.