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It's been 3 years ...
Well looks like its been almost 3 years since my last post. That seems pretty long right? As Douglas Adams said - "Time is an illusion. Lunch time doubly so."
So what would I have loved to blog about in the past 3 years? Here's a short list of topics:
- The rise of Twitter and Facebook
- The iPad and the arrival of the tablet era
- The Wii and the revolution in game controllers
- Boxee and connected TVs
- Our leaking tubes - WikiLeaks
- WebKit, HTML5 and Google Chrome
- Google App Engine
- iPhone and iOS
But clinging to the past is not really my style and so onwards in to the future! I hope to share some more stuff with you all soon.
P.S. - The blog is now running on App Engine using micolog. It imported most of the content from Wordpress but not the comments (for unknown reasons) and I haven't gotten around to restoring those yet.
My iPhone lives!
I've been playing with my iPhone for about a week now, and let me just say this and get it over with. This is the best phone I have ever used. Also for those of you reading this in India, the iPhone works perfectly here. Unlocking it takes about 20 mins and a WiFi network connected to the Internet. It was a great relief to see "INA Airtel" on the screen for the first time! ..more
Read Write NTFS for Mac OS X
With Bootcamp and large hard drives, there is now a good chance that you need to access NTFS partitions on your Mac quite often. Now Mac OS does allow you to read files from NTFS partitions, but if you need to add, change or remove files, you're out of luck. Well thanks to some great open source projects, namely Fuse and NTFS-3G, we can now do all the writing we need.
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Mac OS X Leopard
It has been quite nice to upgrade to a new OS and see an increase in performance on the same hardware! I can't remember the last time I saw something like that. Leopard impresses right from the introduction video.
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Gmail now has free IMAP support!
Google's Gmail now supports the IMAP protocol -- for free! For more information on how to set it up, visit their help pages. For those who don't know what IMAP is, read the Wikipedia article. For those who think this is a really big thing (like me), scream out, "I am a geek!"
Basically, IMAP works like Microsoft's Exchange system, delivering e-mails instantly (push mail) and keeping your mail synchronized across different machines. With loads of e-mail space, the use of secure protocols (SSL), e-mails at your own domain name and now IMAP, this service is now very compelling for businesses.
Now if only it wouldn't take this long to sync all these e-mails.
Google SEO Sex iPhone Osama
Sorry about the stupid title, but this is exactly the kind of thing that excites search engines. Choosing the right title for a page can seriously impact the number of people hitting your site through Google. It can also however, seriously impact the quality of your site -- the title of this blog post serving as an example.
Read Alex Bosworth's post on the subject titled, "Google is destroying the web and you don't even know it" to get a better idea of this phenomenon.
The web advertising story
Well we all know how successful Google has been with their advertising models with majority of their revenue coming from their ad platform. While getting an AdSense account from Google for my blog, I decided to find out more about the way Pay-per-click and AdWords works.
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Desktop Tower Defense
I was surprised to find that a lot of my friends had not even heard of Tower Defense, let alone played it! Its a Flash game that runs within the browser itself, so there is no software to install. As you can probably guess, I've definitely been playing it for a while now.
If you've never played before, I recommend going through the quick start guide first. I mostly play the medium level and can beat the game most times now. The challenge is in getting the score up as much as possible! The game has a group score concept, so if you'd like to compare scores with me, try entering the group name "Gatuam", once you complete the game.
Be warned, the game is very addictive! Go ahead and waste a few hours. :-)
Maximizing your laptop battery life
Does your laptop give you low battery warnings after just a half hour of use? Took just 6-8 months of heavy use to get to this stage? Looks like you might need to calibrate your laptop battery!
Battery calibration is typically done to prolong the life of your battery. Eventually every battery will die and you will need to replace it with a new one. But while they are still alive, calibration can help your laptop batteries run to their full capacity for as long as possible.
Now, before we get into how to calibrate, a simple tip: "Don't keep your laptop connected to power all day long."
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