Tech

When Google Calendar was launched in 2006, I didn't find anything unique except the "Quick Add" feature. I might not have spent too much time exploring the powerful features of Google calendar then, but I am sure that most of them would agree that there was no single compelling feature in Google Calendar. At that time, my usage of Calendar was also pretty limited; However age is catching up with me and I really had to start using a calendar to keep track of my day to day events. (I am not going to write in detail about these events, but these were the ones which made me realize that I was getting old :) ) When I ...

The demonstration of WorldWide Telescope made Scoble cry and in his follow up post he did explain as to what made him cry.  I didn't cry (not to prove that I am stronger than Scoble :) ) , but was definitely impressed after seeing the following video.

(Note: It's a lengthy video and the streaming isn't that fast)

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You might also like reading this paper from Jim Gray which triggered the worldwide telescope project.

Moneycontrol.com which boasts itself as an end-to-end business and financial portal is a perfect example of showing how you can screw up a web site by putting too many ads.

When you first type in the URL in the browser, you have a full page Ad with the link to "continue to Moneycontrol". Once you continue, this is what you see: (Click on the image for a bigger picture :) )

I agree that the page is well designed and at first sight, the page layout might actually look cool, but if you inspect the page more deeply, its just filled with ads; There are Google Ads, sponsored ads, flash ads, budget

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In my last post, I had mentioned about the new 8Mbps plan being introduced by Airtel. I opted for the 1299 (4GB download limit) plan and the same got activated yesterday.

Activation would have been happened much earlier if I wasn't on the commercial segment ! To activate the 1299 plan, I had to rollback to the home segment !

I just did a couple of test downloads and saw the blazing download speed of more than 1MB/second ! Exactly "8" years ago, I had bought a 56kbps D-Link Modem and was downloading at 200bits/sec and gradually saw it increasing to 1-2kbps. We have come a long way since

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Airtel has now introduced 8mpbs plans in India. Airtel happens to be the first operator offering this speed for resedential segment.

Even though the news of this plan has been doing rounds from the past few weeks, nothing was put up on the official web site till now.

Here is the list of plans available on 8mpbs

I might try out the 1299 plan for a month and see how it goes. Meanwhile I am hoping to see some good plans to be introduced under 2mpbs speeds !

How many of you are already on 8mpbs plan ?

Anybody buying this ?

More information on Kindle here !

Just got myself a new printer : HP Photosmart C6188

By the way its not just a printer, its also a copier,scanner and a fax machine !  The scanner and copier is definitely of some use; not sure how extensively I would use the fax feature, but I did manage to get it up and running ! (with my existing DSL setup)

I did spend considerable amount of time researching the printers available in India before finalizing on HP C6188 !

And currently I am spending more time to get "all" the features of "all in one" printer working on Vista :( (There are issues when I switch

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PayPal, the e-commerce site which allows payments and money transfers to be made through the Internet has got a  new look and also has added some new features which might be of interest for users in India. For one, PayPal has introduced new hosted payment buttons. Specific buttons receiving the refresh include: Buy Now, Pay Now, Add to Cart, Donate, Buy Gift Certificate and Subscribe. If you are using any of the above buttons, you might have already noticed the change. The button does look a lot better compared to the old dull looking button. Now I hope more people will notice the "Donate" button on my weblog :D The official PayPal ...

GMail, the most popular (and my favorite) Email service from Google has added IMAP support in addition to the existing POP3 support. One of the advantages of IMAP is that you can sync your mail from multiple clients. With POP3, even if you read a mail from one client, it isn't reflected on the other client and you have to re-read the E-Mails.

IMAP helps in synching the client operations to the server and this feature is one of the major reasons for the popularity of Microsoft Exchange Server.

You can enable IMAP Access in GMail via the Settings -> Forwarding and POP/IMAP link.

Setup Instructions for most of the popular IMAP Clients can be found

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Live photo gallery was one of the recent applications which got added to my favorite application list. In my previous post on Live Photo Gallery I had wished that the application provided integration with Flickr.

The Photo gallery team headed by Michael Palermiti has heard to this wish and the latest update of Live photo gallery now supports a powerful Flickr Integration.

Rather than going into the details of the feature, I will just embed the video created by Michael.

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