Chronicles of Gautam

The Blackberry Curve 8900 Recently I have been using the Blackberry smart phones. I used the Curve 8320 for around 3 months, and now I am in the possession of a sleek and sexy Curve 8900. I would say that Blackberry is not just a phone, but a way of life. I am surprised how quickly I am addicted to my berry. I have almost stopped checking my mails on the computer, because before they appear there, they pop up on my berry. SMS, MMS, Net browsing, GPS, Facebook, Twitter - I use all the services through Blackberry Internet services from airtel. Even with such a scenario, I wouldn't recommend blackberry to others, simple because they are not worth the money they come for. Compared to other phones in the price range, blackberries are mediocre at best. The OS crashes quite often compared to android, more like windows XP. The camera is mediocre, media features are mediocre, and the battery life is average. The only feature that is really, I mean REALLY great about the phone is the ...

Am writing this blog post from my mobile, a sexy Curve 8900 newly in my possession,.while on a ride back home in the company cab. I have Blackberry internet services enabled on it, and I think if I send an email to a particular address, it will be directly published as a post. If you are able to read this, then it has worked! More about my shiny new toy (and the Blackberry experience in general) later. Sent from BlackBerry® on Airtel

Love them or hate them, but you cannot ignore Apple's products. The Ipod, Iphone and the Ipad have not just become iconic products of this decade, but have redefined the industry and become synonymous with the product itself. I wouldn't be exaggerating if I say music player = iPod and tablet = iPad. Apple has die hard fanboys, who swear by its products and have an almost blind adoration for the  person largely behind them, Steve Jobs. Few companies or people evoke such strong emotions or reactions as Apple and Steve jobs. Your Electronic Life as Apple sees it! After the spectacular success of the Ipad, it is natural that other companies want to have their share of the 'tablet' pie. But competing with the likes of Apple is no mean task, though lots of companies have tried, and failed ( Zune , anyone?). Interestingly Google has succeeded quite a bit in arresting the Iphone's free-rise, by developing the android mobile platform, and giving it away, for free ! Andro...

Am I connected or not? One of the frustrating things about using Windows is, surprising as it may seem, having to deal with problems involving wi-fi. It would appear that using Windows would at least guarantee a pain-free, hassle free experience with wireless drivers. But Alas! It is not so. Nowadays I can safely declare that any Ubuntu (rather any Linux} box outperforms Windows with regards to just about everything - including driver support. And if just dealing with problems is not enough, there are those confounding messages that as Windows users one must inevitably encounter. Just the other day, I was having some problems connecting to a network, and above is a screenshot of the screen that I was presented with after fiddling around for some time. Now what in the world am I supposed to infer from this? Is some kind of cruel joke being played on my by some bored Microsoft programmer? Poor me (and the legions of other Windows users out there).

Here I was innocuously working on my embedded linux terminal, at the place of my work; when out of the blue I found out that using the Linux operating system might mean supporting terrorism in this world! Or at least supporting the ideas that terrorists seem to believe in. Have a look at the above screenshot of the my terminal. My box does not want peace, has no satisfaction, is not interested in love, but as soon as I say kill, it eagerly asks "Whom to kill?"

Protoype of Android cordless home phone ( source: Curventa ) Motorola and SGW Global are introducing Android powered Cordless phones in the market. Both the companies have showcased their upcoming Cordless phones at the CES 2010 in Jan. (See http://androidandme.com/2010/01/news/motorola-introduces-android-powered-home-phone/ and http://www.sgwglobal.com/ ) SGW Global's Phone: SGW's phone is equipped with DECT CAT-iq 2.0 and WiFi, offers a large 3.2” touch screen and virtual keyboard. The Android Cordless phone promises to offer a rich set of telephony and advanced audio features including HD sound and multi-base/handset/line support. The phone will support a range of connected applications – from “always on” web browsing, email and widgets to internet radio and Picasa. Other solid features are social networking and IM, photo viewer, music player, YouTube, news and weather. Interestingly i...

Some of the popular personas on firefox Do you use firefox? If yes, then do you use Firefox personas ? Personas are what themes in Firefox could never be: methods to change the look and colours of Firefox at the click of a single button without trying to change the overall browsing experience. I highly recommend choosing from the thousands of available personas and dressing up your browser according to your mood. Beware tough, if you use linux, or a system with low memory, you might have trouble using it. I tried using it in linux but could not get it running properly to my satisfaction. The colours would only half load, and no amount of reinstalling/changing the persona could coax the browser to wear the persona properly. It might have something to do with the low memory on that machine also, because I see no reason for it not to work otherwise. Suggestions are welcome.

Gmail has added a theme feature . Its great. This is what my gmail looks like now :)

One of my friends had the following status message on Gtalk: "I had to google for the meaning of JFGI, and the irony of it was overwhelming." It indeed is.

Thats my Windows desktop! Cool isn't it? Possible thanks to Yod'm3D (Yet anOther Desktop Manager). "Yod'm 3D is a virtual desktop manager available for Windows 2000, XP and Vista. It is notably the first program to offer a cube-style virtual desktop management feature on Windows operating systems.It offers a "cube-effect" like e.g. VirtueDesktops for Mac OS X or Compiz and Beryl for the X Window System when switching between virtual desktops. It's the first desktop manager that makes this feature available on Microsoft Windows. Yod'm 3D makes use of and requires DirectX 9 in contrast to most other virtual desktop managers that use OpenGL. It does not require installation to run." You can get it here . WinFlip is another application that you might want to check out if you like desktop effects. It provides for Vista-like flips between running applications, and does it really well. But it is a bit unstable crashing arbitrarily sometimes (doesn'...

The Biggest news of the day: Google is launching an open source browser ' Chrome '. It promises "a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of Web applications that aren't even possible in today's browsers". Have a look at their official comic strip here Can't wait to get my hands on it.

Please click on the Image to enlarge it. What seems so special about the screenshot? It seems that somebody just clicked on "start" in windows. So whats the fuss and why am I writing a post about it? Well, it turns out that (surprise!) it is not windows at all, but an operating system called ReactOS . To quote the ReactOS site verbatim "ReactOS® is a free, modern operating system based on the design of Windows® XP/2003. Written completely from scratch, it aims to follow the Windows® architecture designed by Microsoft from the hardware level right through to the application level. This is not a Linux based system, and shares none of the unix architecture". ReactOS is doing something unimaginable to me till some time ago, reverse engineering the whole windows opertating system itself! . And all the while maintaining compatibility with windows. Right now it claims that it is in pre alpha stage, but already it has many features like remote desktop, e...

This is a screenshot of Amarok , the best music player in my opinion. How can one see the player and not fall in love with it? I just loved it from the day I saw it. Its highly customizable, plays every format once the codecs are installed, and generally does all that can be expected from a top notch media player, and then some more.I quite like the Moodbar feature- it is the colourful bar that Amarok generates for each song that corresponds to the 'mood' of the song. You can see it at the bottom right corner in the screenshot. Sadly, it is not available on Windows, though there is an official project to port it . Hope the binary for windows comes out soon. I have tried all kinds of softwares for windows, ( Windows Media Player , Winamp , Quintessential Player , Mediamonkey , Itunes ), but none of them really gives me the feel that I get from Amarok, if you know what I mean. Just for comparision's sake though, I felt Quintessential was one of the better music players. Thou...

I am really proud of my laptop- I never had to format it due to a virus/spyware infection. (Though I did format it quite a few times due to my Linux addiciton). Here I would like to share some of the softwares which I use, most of which I am really fond of, and free. (I rather like to use free software unless there is a compelling reason to use a paid one.(Did I say paid ? :P) Firefox : Oh it just gets better and better. Version 3.1 has all I could ask. My fav Firefox add-ons: NoScript, flashgot, colourful tabs, google preview, cooliris, piclens, Mcafee siteadvisor, pdf download. CDBurnerXP : Its a CD/DVD burning software for Windows. And needless to say, beats Nero is every aspect. Did you know that a full installation of Nero 7 actually creates 35 entries in the Startup menu? Yeah you read it right. Thirty-five . IrfanView : Cool software for viewing/editing photos. Try it out. Google talk : I love google talk. Gmail : Best mail facility out there. Beats Yahoomail by far. 1by1 : It...