Tech tricks, tips and Tantras - 06/01/2012

Some tech hacks which are interesting,helpful  and hopefully insightful .


1)  Whenever you are on a long journey or going to a place where there would be no cellular signals, better put the phone in Flight Mode.This will save a lot of battery. Cellphones use lot of power just to search for signals.

2)  If you have an android phone , you dont need to go to playstore in your phone and download the apps. One can browse the playstore from web interface and install it from there. I believe this is true for all appstores.

3) Skype is completely free for 1 month as trial offer. Follow this link  for signing for this and this link  for instructions. Yes, you an call US numbers for free for a month :)

4) Utorrent remote is an amazing app to monitor your utorrent downloads from anywhere .

5) If you think, your email is getting spammed a lot , just search for "unsubscribe" and unsubcribe to all those unnecessary things you might have subscribed earlier and are no mood to read all those now.


Happy Weekend !!

- Vams

Websites of the Year - 2012

Its the new year , new aspirations , new resolutions, new insights and new hopes.leaving all the bad and cherishing all the good  Internet plays a major role in our daily life. And this is my tribute to the Best of Internet for me in the year 2012. Hope you like this as well:)

1) Quora

If browsing something has inspired me, made me addicted , made me Q(C)urious and Qu(V)oracious , its Quora.
The most wonderful discovery i made on this internet space this year.Hop on and thank me later.The real knowledge Hub of the internet . Question Jimmy Wales,Checkout answers of Ashton Kutcher, Stephen Fry and follow the most intelligent people on this planet.And get credits :)

2) Paytm

If there is a option to recharge your Indian cellular phone with maximum benefit and miniumum effort, its this paytm.com . They even launched bus tickets with a bang offer of flat 50% discount on Dec 12, the online shopping festival day. You can even store your credit card and can complete recharge in a whiff. Did i tell you there android app is awesome.

3) Pocket

I am a big time procrastinator and a voracious internet reader. So what can be my biggest internet tool than a facility to read all those internet stuff later when i have time. Initially i was a fan of Instapaper, but after the Samsung Tab added to my digital ecosystem , I had to shift to Pocket as Instapaper App was a paid one.And this is one shift i regret not doing earlier.
Pocket has one of the awesomest user interfaces i have seen. Love the way it displays those Arrays of my to-read list.

4) Livemocha.com

Havent made much progress in my 2012 new year resolution of learning a foreign language, but livemocha.com is one of the best website if you also have a similar bucket list.

5) http://kaipullai.com/
And why should we not end the list with an awesome blog which has some excellent stories to tell in more excellent way. These blogposts blew my mind .if you are interesting in  history and current affairs of India, visit this .

- Vams.

PS- Happy New year 2013.

WesBites for the Week - Oct 14

Continuing the series :)

There is a saying in internet world "If you are not paying for the product, YOU are the product" .
And this link http://rcs.seerinteractive.com/money/ gives you details of some free websites we use regularly and how they are monetized and how are they surviving. Interesting business models like freemium, Selling data etc.

And let me introduce  the best search engine i have come across .
http://duckduckgo.com/ is even better than google. It doesnt show results based on user preferences and uses crowd sourced sources like wikipedia for better results.

Ever wonder what are the best radio resources on web for listening music. Yea, leave Pandora , spotify etc which doesnt work in India . http://www.sky.fm/ is one which is awesome when it comes with some super radio streams . Tune it in.!!

Many say that the ambience of the work desk is most important for one to be productive. Would it not be awesome to have the http://raining.fm/ with rain as background song while you are focussing on something. :) Try it .. Its awesome...

Iam sure everyones bucket list contains a "World Tour" . If not , you should :) . Well, it might not be possible to see the whole world even if u can . Google simplifies this  and brings http://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/worldwonders/wonders-of-nature/
Start touring !!

Thanks to the social networking and instagram-ish sites, everyone is a photographer now ..  No offence to the those guys .. but you should look at this http://camerasim.com/camera-simulator/ and improve your skills . It will help you simulate the various feature available in the DSLRs.

And, last but not least, some mind crunching reading..http://www.ijreview.com/2012/04/688-tax-system-explained-beer/ Iam not sure how to explain 'Taxes" in better way. Also, tells you whats wrong with our world.

Cheerio.. Have an  Awesome week !!

Websites for the Week - Oct 7

This is the list of websites i have found interesting while i do the 'random" browsing everyday.


There is no excuse now if you wanted to learn something on the web and time has flown . This has been the inspiration for Xuan Li  , the curator for this awesome website http://www.noexcuselist.com/index.html .
All the open course ware links are brought under one roof. Learn Music, learn cooking , learn a new language and what not.And all the links are FREE and not some tutor sites .

If u miss having a HD tv at home with an music channel on it. This http://grapevinyl.com website substitutes you for this . Wonderful songs with an HD format and can play randomly . Yea, you can do this on youtube as well with some effort by yourself . But if someone takes care of curation of content, are we not happy a little bit more :)

Well, the perfect address for  edutainment, inspiration and most awesome talks is the TED. http://blog.ted.com/2012/08/21/the-20-most-watched-ted-talks-to-date/ gives the best TED talks , rather the most watched TED talks of all time. I completed this bucket list and you should also give it a try.

Ever wonder, how awesome your office can be . http://www.officesnapshots.com/ is the link you should be browsing . Well, i am not responsible if your management doesnt agree to the changes you suggest to office landscape after seeing this link .:)

This one is for techies and the guys who want to START. http://whattouse.com/toolkit/web-site-launch-toolkit gives a list of things you need to take care when your website is being started.

And this one is for Indian history, political buffs like me . http://kiranasis.blogspot.in/2012/01/jammu-and-kashmir-injustices-and-myths.html illustrates brilliantly about the notions we have about Jammu and Kashmir .


PS: Hoping to run such series every sunday :) 

IFTTT– IF This Then That

One of the most awesome things i came across the internet is IFTTT. 

Put the internet to work for you. Seriously, automate everything what you do on internet.

For example, If u want to send out a tweet whenever u upload a video on youtube , that can be done.

Do you want to add ur favourite tweets which contain links  to the instapaper to read later , that can be done.

If you want an SMS to be sent whenever some stock raises , that can be done.

If you want all your instagram pics to be saved into dropbox, that can be done.

The total permutations and combinations one can do with all the services listed here is huge.

One such example is

 

The thing in background is pretty simple, take api of one service and poll it for every interval and if found, trigger another service.

Such an awesome idea you see. Add to that the awesomest interface to work on.

 

PS- Iam still exploring all these things.

Right now , iam using this for whenever i favourite a tweet with a link, it adds to up to my instapaper read later list.

whenever i add  a favorite to my readability list, it gets bookmarked to delicious.

Whenever i star an item in Google Reader, a tweet is sent.

Alternatives to Snaptu Twitter client

Snaptu is by far the best mobile app for low end mobile phones. I have a s40 nokia 5130 express music mobile.

Its my favourite timepass while in long journeys, the best twitter app i have seen, which also supports multiple accounts and such more awesome things.

 

Recently, Facebook has acquired Snaptu .

The snaptu facebook mobile app is now replacing or becoming the facebook app. And they have decided to not support whole lot of apps present in snapstore. Twitter was one of them and was removed starting 11/11/11.

 

So, Now currently searching for alternatives to snaptu.(or a awesome twitter client for s40) .

Looked at some of the alternatives like Gravity,socially Tweets60 etc. But nothing works on s40.

Dabr seems to be a better alternative for  its mobile browser version. Twitter mobile browsing version is also good.

 

BUT, nothing is comparable to the awesomeness of SNAPTU twitter client.

If you can find something, pls let me know.

Make Browsing Simpler

Browsing has become too complex with the advent of social media like Twitter and Facebook. http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

We got lot of links to watch videos , recommendations for articles shared by friends and fellow tweeple.But how to cope with all these. This is what i have been trying to do and hope it helps for all.

Three main bookmarklets to be added to your browser are Google bookmarks,Instapaper and radbox.





Google Bookmarks - Adding a new bookmark when you come across an interesting website is as easy as adding a bookmark in you browser.So far, the best bookmarking tool for me is google bookmarks.


Instapaper (Read Later bookmarklet) - This can be mainly used for articles which you find interesting and want to read later in the day.The bookmarked can be easily found at http://www.instapaper.com/u.

Radbox - This is the best for viewing the youtube videos at a later time. Whenever, you are playing a outube video file , one can bookmark that video like the above and watch them later.One can actually save it in watch later playlist, the youtube provided one. However with radbox, the videos can be viewed rom radbox website itself and can eliminate the clutter of youtube comments and recommended/related videos thereby saving the valuable previous time.

Hope these are helpful.:)