Since my Mac Mini is my primary computer, I have been using an iBall keyboard and mouse combination with it, something that I purchased almost 2 years back with my PC. The keyboard has been playing well so far, the mouse however conked off a couple of weeks back. Since then, I’ve been stuck with a lame mouse which has a non-functional scroll wheel and is a mini mouse, so small that two of my fingers are enough to cover it completely. It was too plasticky and made weird clicky noises.

I’ve been trying to find a good mouse for the last couple of weeks and had zeroed in on the Logitech MX Revolution mouse. However, at a price of Rs. 5000, it didn’t seem worthwhile.

However, it was not until @shadez told me about the Logitech MX518 that I realized that I could get something as awesome as the MX Revolution at less than 25% of the cost.

Continue Reading »

Twitter has been having its own set of problems lately. Even though the status blog set up by them helps the users in knowing what’s going on at their end, all they can do is wait for the services to be back to normal.

Twitter engineers have been trying to keep the high load off by turning off a few of the features. The API requests limit, which was 70 at one time has now been brought down to 30 20. This has rendered most of the apps making uses of the API such as twitterrific, hahlo and Twhirl useless.

Also, one of twitter’s most used features, the @replies tab is also disable many a times by the engineers to keep the load off, thus making it extremely difficult to track tweets which have been addressed to you. Interestingly, the @replies tab is only capable of tracking tweets which begin with @username. If a tweet has @username somewhere in the middle of the tweet, it goes unnoticed. A lot of users, who log in to twitter after a break have found it difficult and annoying to scan to pages of tweets to see if someone addressed them. It gets more annoying when twitter turns off the pagination feature.

What does one do in such a scenario ?

This is where sites like Summize and TweetScan are helpful. Let’s take a look at Summize.

Continue Reading »

Two days from now, I complete 8 awesome months of using a Mac. My Mac Mini has been one of the two best purchases I’ve made, the second being my iPhone. These eight months have made me realize what I’ve been missing all these years and that there’s more to computing than viruses and BSODs.

No matter what kind of task it may be, doing it on a Mac is so much simpler and yet better. Everything in Mac OS X is so well thought out and implemented. And then came along Mac OS 10.5 Leopard which was like the icing on the cake. This version of Mac OS X brought along some super-useful features and one of them being the super awesome ‘Quick Look’.

However, this post is not about the OS but rather, some great apps written for the OS that completely blow you away. Here’s my list of 5 Mac OS X apps that I just can’t do without.

1. MailPlane: MailPlane is a SSB ( Site Specific Browser ) for GMail. The app combines the features of Gmail with the friendliness a Mac by offering some nifty features such as (a) Drag and Drop attachment of files, (b) Attaching pics right from iPhoto, (c) Multiple Gmalil accounts, (d) Growl Notifications, (e) Same Gmail keyboard shortcuts and many other features. MailPlane also lets you set labels to your messages on the fly. There is also a OmniFocus plugin that lets your create tasks right from your conversations. I’ve been trying the latest beta releases too and I must say, the app looks really promising.

Grab the demo here, or buy the app here. There is also a family option available and a special discount if you’re a student.

Continue Reading »

And I can proudly call myself an “Airtel-Boy”. I have now made the switch onto Airtel Broadband making me someone who uses Airtel services only. I have a Airtel postpaid connection with unlimited EDGE connection on it and an Airtel Landline phone with an unlimited 512kbps broadband connection on it.

I’ve had a MTNL Triband connection for the past 3+ years. I have had absolutely zero issues with the connection. The connection was stable, gave good speeds and rarely went down. However, I had two issues with MTNL and I have previously written about it here, here and here, with a special mention of this particular post. The two primary issues were:

1) Lack of an unlimited connection
2) Pathetic customer service

Fortunately, I was successful in convincing the society committee to allow Airtel to lay their cables in the society and I received my connection a week back. So far, I am extremely happy with the performance the connection has been giving me.

I have opted for their 512kbps unlimited plan allowing me to upload and download without those sleepless nights and without even a bit on worry. Interestingly, even though it’s a 512kbps plan, I get speeds upwards of 800kbps. Torrent download speed touch a high of 120KB/s with the low being around 85KB/s. I couldn’t be more happy.

If you aren’t yet on Airtel Broadband, I’d advice you to make the move now.

Jack Dorsey Presents Twitter from biz stone on Vimeo.

Wonderful presentation

I was recently pulled into the tag wave by Sathya, and so here I am trying to pull others onto the bandwagon.

4 Jobs I’ve Had (in chronological order)

Well, I’m still studying, so I haven’t yet had a full fledged job yet. But, I’ve done some part time stints at a few places which have taught me a lot. They include:
1. Server-Logix.com
2. Startups.in
3. Burrp.com
4. IndiaGSM.com

4 Movies I Could Watch Over and Over

Seriously, there are quite a few of these.

4 Places I’ve Lived (in order)

Just Mumbai, India.

4 TV Shows I Like

Friends
How I met your mother
The Big Bang Theory
CSI ( All 3 )

4 Favorite Foods

Chicken dishes
Prawns
Chocolates
Coffee

4 Places I’d Rather Be

Cupertino
New Zealand
An island
Space

4 People I’m Tagging

goobimama
Aayush
Sumeet
Omkarnath

The Mac OS X is a great OS. It comes bundled with some great hardware built into some fabulous design. The apps available for Mac OS X are far better than their Windows counter parts. So obviously, a lot of people are amazed by it.

The wise owls obviously either decide to go ahead and buy an Apple product for themselves, like this author did, or they decide to stick to their current OS thinking the MicroLord will churn out a better OS for them, yet knowing deep inside that it will be just another resource hungry monster which will render their slightly old hardware useless.

Ofcourse some choose to ride the path which leads to the Open Source Community. Many have chosen to use this and are wonderfully happy with it.

But then, there a separate breed of nerds who hack their way into the Mac OS X to make it run on any hardware. Now, many are already doing this effectively. But when some people decide to try their hand at Mac OS X just because they can, without thinking things out, things get nasty. It is often seen that they do something awfully wrong to their machines and then blame Mac OS X for being crappy OS, obviously ignoring the fact that it was not made to function in the way they intend to.

Take a look at the following conversation I recently had over IM. This dude got hold of a Mac OS X DVD from some source, installed it on his system and then starts blaming it.

Continue Reading »

There are a million reasons why I find Mac OS X better than the other OS around ( Yes, I said better. NOT best. ) One of them, is GrabUp.

GrabUp is a preference pane for your Mac OS X that makes it extremely easy to share screenshots with other people quickly. All it takes is 3 keys. Let me elaborate a little about this nifty little utility. I’m pretty sure, I’ll find this installed on your Macs, if you haven’t already by now.

Installation:

The 567kb file can be downloaded from the site and once installed, it can be accessed as a preference pane from the System Preferences.

Usage:

Apple and Mac OS have already made it easy to take screen shots of your desktop or the apps that you have running.

1) Command + Shift + 3 ( ⌘ Shift 3 ) - This takes a screenshot of the entire screen and saves the file to the desktop.
2) Command + Shift + 4 ( ⌘ Shift 4 ) - This will give you a crosshair, using which you can select the area you want to take a screenshot of.
3) Command + Shift + 4 + Spacebar - After hitting a spacebar after the above, you can click the mouse to take the screenshot of only the window or app that is in focus. Similar to Alt + PrintScreen in windows.

All the 3 methods above, save the screenshot taken as a file on the desktop.

But what happens when you have to share the screenshots with a friend or colleague ? Your options would be to email them, drag the screenshot to an IM window or as most other users, upload the images to an image hosting site.

Here’s where GrabUp comes into the picture. GrabUp automatically uploads the images to their server and returns the URL by copying it to clipboard. That leaves you to just paste it wherever you want to. Fantastic, isn’t it ?

But, is that all it does ? No. There’s more to it.

What’s more?

GrabUp stores the URLs of your last 10 screenshots and links them to the URLs. This is presented to you with the exact date and time at which it was taken, accessible from the menu bar.

Clicking on it opens up the image in your default browser. There is an option to clear the list of recent items too.

The URL returned changes the filename to a randomly generated string, so it is almost impossible to guess the images uploaded to the server. An example of the link would be /uploads/799366f2e6b804dcee28de284e431015.png

Limitations/Disadvantages?

The developers have tried to keep it as simple as possible. So there are no options to configure at all, except the option to start at login and show in menu bar. However, I would really like to have one option in the preference pane. There are times where I don’t want the screenshot to be uploaded to the server. At such moments, I have to quit GrabUp, take the screenshot and then then relaunch it again. Instead, there can be a hot key setting that would somehow not upload the screenshot to their servers.

Secondly, I don’t know if this has been left out on purpose, but some kind of user login system would be helpful to retrieve old screenshots.

At the time of publishing this article, GrabUp has had 4180 downloads and 24,406 grabs have been uploaded to their servers.

There was one thing living in my society that really fascinated me, everytime I looked at it. It has been living from the time I wasn’t even born and has lived all these years with it’s head held high.

All the children in the society have grown up playing under it’s shadow. Every child in the society has had a special liking for the tree.

We used to play with almost all the parts of the tree. There was that sweet little game called sword fight that we used to play with the flowers. The leaves were fun to put atop fans in the society’s office, so when switched on, they would be showered on everyone. The wood could be used for occasional bon fires. The tree provided excellent shadow to play box-cricket.

However, everything was snatched away from us yesterday. All that it left now, is this.

Good bye, oh great tree.

[Image courtesy: My flickr stream]

Okay, before you start hitting URLs, I am NOT an active member on Facebook or Orkut for that matter. I have accounts on the respective sites, just for the sake of it.

I found this video in one of my RSS subscriptions. Take a looksie. This is how Facebook in real life would be.

[Via Textually]