Tech Tonic

Here’s the Featured Thread of the Week from the Tech Tonic community on Orkut.com

Here’s the Featured Thread of the Week from the Tech Tonic community on Orkut.com

If there’s one workshop I’m itching to attend, it’s a “DIY Case Modding” session. I’ve seen Parvez in action slicing through metal, though I don’t know of too many others who make a living out of it in India.

Ours is the generation, straddling the analog, digital and now high-def. We remember taking photos with film cameras, watching scratchy VHS tapes, later VCDs and listening to cassettes before making the changeover to CDs. Stuff is getting outdated faster than ever before and keeping up with involves constant conversion of personal media into newer digital formats for convenience, archival value and easy access. If Con-version 1.0 was about converting VHS tapes and audio cassettes, then 2.0 involves disposal of what was once cutting-edge. The problem is that all this involves engaging in some fairly monotonous tasks that will never get done in the regular routine and cannot as yet, be outsourced easily. They’re best left to lazy days, whilst watching sitcom reruns, test matches or mindless movies that don’t need full concentration. Typical summer vacation stuff! Now most of us don’t have the luxury of two whole months like the good ol’ days anymore, but if you do, here are some summer tech projects I recommend. :

Music:
Apple has officially overtaken Wal*Mart & Best Buy as the US’ number one music retailer and while India has been slow to catch on to the legal download bandwagon, the future is pretty bleak for CDs. “Ripping” your CDs ie. converting them to a friendlier digital format like MP3 is relatively easy. You can use a program like iTunes if you’re an iPod user or the default Windows Media Player for one-click ripping. If you’re connected to the net, these programs automatically pick up song, artist and album information. You’re literally a zombie, ejecting, inserting and replacing CDs and before you know it, the music collection is fully wired!

Video:
With the new high definition format, ‘Blu-Ray’ players and discs, trickling into the market, VCD is officially TWO generations behind the curve, even as DVD reigns supreme. As most people upgrade to big-screen TVs, VCDs will look stretched and awful. The only displays that will justify their existence are the ones on small portable media players such as the iPod Touch or the Cowon A3. Ripping VCDs though is much more painful than CDs. You have to pop the disc into your PC and open the MPEGAV folder, in which you’ll see many files with .DAT extensions. Typically, the largest sized file will be the movie while the rest will be annoying trailers that VCDs usually force on you. Rip the movie into a compressed format such as MP4 using a program such as Free iPod Video Converter available at jodix.com. The next problem is that most VCDs are spread over 2-3 discs, which means you have to repeat this fairly time-consuming process for each disc. After half an hour or so you’ll have three MP4 files which need to be stitched together. Yamb is one of the simplest programs for this and can be downloaded free at softpedia.com or download.com.

Documents & Photos:
This is most worthwhile one. Buy a basic scanner, and just put your head down for a whole day - you won’t regret it. On most flatbed scanners, you can arrange four or five photographs in the preview and select them individually for final scanning. Some of the higher end visiting card scanners are easier to use for small 4×6″ photos. Most scanners will save multi-page things like passports or contracts into a single PDF file - all you have to do is remember to ’scan as document’ and not as ‘image.’ Trust me, the effects on quality of life of this one-time painful task are immense. About nine months after the fun and frolic, when nasty surprises come your way (I’m talking about tax deadlines, whatever were YOU thinking?) you’ll be grinning like a Cheshire cat!

I would highly recommend outsourcing these tasks to your kids, especially during hot summer afternoons, when there isn’t much to do. If you have some to spare, do get in touch - don’t worry, I have considerable experience in exploiting underage labour for technological pursuits. I remember one particular summer vacation just after first year of college, when I wanted all my hand-written articles and essays converted into digital format. Having just turned 18 and with more interesting things to do, I decided to offer my 13-year old brother the task. About a week of 4-hours-a-day labour for 50 bucks. My brother couldn’t believe his luck: “FIFTY whole bucks AND I get to use the computer? All to myself? Which means if I type it out fast I can use the remaining time to play games? Deal!” Sigh. No wonder, the Indian IT industry was my calling as a journalist - I’d understood the business model way before its time!

I’ve been avoiding getting onto Twitter for a long time now hoping to maintain one last bastion of sanity in my wired world. My colleague Aalaap, a ‘Twittervangelist’ of sorts,  recently conducted a “Why Are You Not On Twitter?” session at BarCamp Mumbai and even that didnt shake my inertia though it got me teetering on the brink!

It was this news item about Twitter coming to an arrested journalist’s rescue in Egypt, that finally had me convinced. I’m now well and truly on my way to a Twittered existence. Of course, I realised how “behind the curve” I was when, promptly, the very day after I siged up, TechCrunch officially declared the Web 3.0 manifesto - less Twitter, more peace!

follow abhi2point0 at http://twitter.com

Here’s the Featured Thread of the Week from the Tech Tonic community on Orkut.com

From the discussion it seems that AMD is once again on the radar of hard-core gamers with the new Phenom processor range. A recent AMD exec I met told me that folks there have decided to forget that there was a year 2007 and are moving on!

Most people though don’t seem to be very comfortable with the thought of slapping on ATI graphics cards and I don’t blame them. We’re still to see the fantastic synergies that the AMD takeover of ATI was supposed to herald. Maybe AMD should also acquire a high-end motherboard company and sell pre-packaged combos instead of getting people to opt for trial and error?

Coincidentally, I bought my first graphics card today. I’ve always messed around on test PCs and somehow never got around to buying a card for myself. The task was complicated by the fact that I have a slim cabinet which can only mount half-size metal plates. I scouted Lamington Road in Mumbai and was met by puzzled looks! Finally Gulbir of Prime ABGB gave us the right street lingo, asking his guys to rustle up a “low-profile card”. The highest-end low-profile they could muster was an XFX 8400 GS with 512 MB.

Some commenters warned me that I could be violating the Google AdSense terms of service with the first ever “contest” post on this blog.

However, I felt otherwise and emailed AdSense support for some guidance. I got an unhelpful automated response and decided to leave it at that. Today though, I received an email from them threatening to shut down my account:

Publishers are not permitted to encourage users to click on Google ads or bring excessive attention to ad units. (Full email here.)

Here is my email response:

from Abhimanyu Radhakrishnan mail {at} techtonic {dot} info
to adsense-support@google.com,
date Wed, Apr 9, 2008 at 3:51 AM
subject Re: Issue # 372209 Google AdSense

Dear AdSense Support,

Firstly, I’d like to remind you that I voluntarily brought this to your notice through query #258677301 some days ago.

Secondly, I have decided NOT to change the content of my post because in no way does it (in my opinion) violate the spirit of the ToS. It is clearly a sarcastic statement in a humourous context, clearly related to the content of that particular post: (http://www.techtonic.info/2008/03/01/march-08-contest/).

It is blindingly obvious to anyone who reads the post that there is no malicious intention to direct readers to clicking the ads. Nowhere else on the site, is there any attempt to encourage readers to click ads. My site has all original content and is not in the SEO business. I have no intention of changing the content and will gladly face the consequences.

Best Wishes
Abhimanyu

Agree with my stance? Disagree? Comments?

Here’s the Featured Thread of the Week from the Tech Tonic community on Orkut.com

Dell XPS series laptops seem to be the overwhelming favorites. Great customizing options on the dell.co.in website, occasional offers in the newspaper for discounts, great customer service (especially in the metros) and most importantly, support for an XP-downgrade!

The PDA-phone market is going to be a two-way race in 2008 as Apple’s iPhone takes RIM’s Blackberry head-on both in the corporate-IT and in the consumer tech space. Surprisingly the pioneers of both the PDA and the mobile phone - Palm and Motorola respectively, are struggling since neither managed to merge the two categories together as succesfully as the (relative) newcomers.

However, earlier this week, two PDA-phones from these fallen legends landed on my desk for review. One was the Moto Q8 and the other the Palm Centro. The first thing that struck me even before I opened the boxes was the price. Both these full-keyboard phones are priced at around Rs.14,000! That’s a good 10k less than the (hacked) iPhone or the Blackberry Curve. After exactly, half an hour of probing each device, it suddenly struck me: “Oh My God! Palm and Motorola should.. like …totally merge dude!”

I’m no investment banker and am barely familiar with the financials of either company. I have no clue about valuations, strategic fit, anti-trust implications, blah blah. I’m just a long-time fan of both companies’ products and as a consumer I would LOVE to see ‘MotoPalm’ emerge as the third player, who according to the “Rule of Three” management mantra, will shake-up the market in style!

Just hear me out on this. The Palm Centro is the most compact smartphone with a full QWERTY keyboard that I have ever seen. It’s not particularly slim, but neither is it a brick. My first thought on seeing the tightly packed keys was, “No way my fingers are going to handle this.” Surprisingly, not only are the keys beautifully beveled, they also provide the softest, yet most tactile feel on any phone keyboard in the market. There are lots of nice touches that can only come from a company that knows its users well. Let me give you two quick examples. The biggest problem I face when using touchscreen phones is that my earlobes keep pressing on the screen and often end up deleting contacts or setting off alarms - its eerie! Sure, in some phones, you can turn the screen off just after dialing or taking a call but thats painful. The Centro has a simple setting that allows you to lock the screen whenever you’re in a call. Next, I work in television so I’m often rushing into a studio and fumbling last minute to silence my phone, lest it ring during a live recording. “Unlock keyboard.. whats the key combo?? drat! ok, find ‘profiles’ in the menu, activate ’silent’ … woops in a hurry I pressed “loud” … too late .. cameras rolling… I’m done for!” Palm pioneered the physical silent-switch on the outside that just puts all sound off with one slide of a button. I love it - no wonder Apple copied it on the iPhone!

The Moto Q8 on the other hand is the slimmest Windows Mobile ever. In spite of having a full keyboard it’s way thinner than nearly all Windows phones that don’t have keyboards! Do you see what I’m getting at? The Centro’s keyboard on the Q’s ultra-thin body with a silent-switch thrown in could be the ultimate smartphone!

What software will this as yet mythical phone run? Palm’s hived-off software division was acquired by a company called Access which has turned the once proprietary Operating System (OS) into a Linux-based open-source platform. The Centro is among the first phones to use this new Linux-based OS. Motorola has thrown everything and the kitchen sink at its phones as far as software is concerned. It has made phones running its own OS, Palm, Symbian, Windows and pioneered mainstream mobile Linux resulting in current models such as the MotoMING. It also acquired a company called Good which is basically makes messaging software that competes with Blackberry, and from what I’ve heard, is superior if not as good in most aspects. With both companies having great Linux-on-smartphone experience, they’re best positioned to use Google’s upcoming Android mobile OS that promises to liberate phones and make them more like PCs.

Anyway, while “researching” some facts for this column, I was dismayed to learn that my brilliant merger idea was not original by a long shot! Half the corporate world seems to be clamouring for Motorola to acquire Palm. As of writing this piece, no such thing has happened though by the time you see this in print, MotoPalm may be for real. However, if you see a Centro-Q running Android in the near future, please do contact me and volunteer your services as a court witness when I sue the new entity for royalty.

Tech sites in general and Google products in particular seem to be take April Fools Day pretty seriously (nice roundup of 2008 gags here). Tech2.com had its own line-up for the big day; in fact the update at the end of the top story was added after NASSCOM called to say that reporters were calling them for quotes!

However, I seriously thought that this was an early Apr 01 joke from Google India though I doubted that AirTel was cool enough to pull off something like that. India’s biggest telco’s ISP landing page AirTelLive.com is nothing but a google partnerpage which anyone with a domain name can build absolutely free of cost.

Google India, on request helpfully pointed me to a page which has info on a special partner program for ISPs though details on pricing etc. seem to be skimpy. However, the newest version of Google Apps seems to have dropped the ISP Partner section altogether and all the features are available to everybody! I remember trying out Google Apps when it was first launched and it took me exactly 5 minutes to configure something like this.

Contentsutra.com shares the same sentiment, though its pretty obvious that the comments are being seeded by Airtel PR (see comments 2 & 3).

I mean, the least that they can do is basic URL masking so that airtellive.com is all that users get to see instead of partnerpages.google.com…  The “Register” link in the ‘My Account’ gadget at the bottom of the left column is broken. I know that Bharti has pioneered outsourcing of all non-core business (to IBM, Nortel, Ericsson etc.) but c’mon, this is totally pushing it!

Anyway, I have two questions:

1) Does anyone really want an email ID @your_isp.com when all these services are available for free on gmail or your own domain?

2) Why did so many news outfits actually take this seriously and carry it verbatim???

PS: This isn’t the first time Google and AirTel have collaborated! The last time they did, the consequences were pretty disastrous!