This blog has moved (..again)!

This time, I hope it is a permanent residence. The CMS is Drupal based. I have made it less cluttered and easier to read.

If you are one among the handful (feedburner indeed shows a few) who have subscribed to this feed, please take some time to update your feed reader. The new one is here.

This time around, I promise to keep it updated regularly. The content is not going to be just technical. My other interests like Photography, Music and Books too will find a place in this blog. (Thus, I have more stuff to write about!)

Thanks to WordPress folks who have hosted this blog for more than a year!

Radio is dead. Long live the radio

With the advent of internet and satellite radio, it is not a surprise that conventional terrestrial radio is finding its way out. Ofcom, Britain’s telecom regulatory authority is now mulling over shutting down the terrestrial AM and FM radios and allocating the spectrum for new digital services like Mobile TV.

    This makes a lot of sense – with satellite radios like XM and Worldspace available for cars and in much smaller packages as portables, the need for a terrestrial services is slowly waning away. The only advantage that conventional radios have over internet or satellite radios is the bouquet of local information like weather, traffic updates etc., which are provided in between programs.

Re-allocating the FM/AM band for new services is a great move, as it opens up a whole new spectrum, hitherto unused for IP services. This is probably the only band across the world, which the militaries do not have a control over. So the new standards can easily get adopted in different countries without worrying about manufacturing the devices for a different band. This will also help in keeping the cost of the equipment to a minimum.

Back home, local radio from broadcasters like All India Radio are already available via satellite through DTH networks. You will not miss your Vividh Bharathi, even if TRAI decides to re-allocate AM/FM channels to mobile operators!

BSNL DNS Problems and how to solve it

If you are a BSNL dataone user, chances are that you are facing DNS issues for the last few weeks or so. Their DNS servers are just unresponsive. The lookup takes a long duration and many times just time out. The solution? Use third party DNS servers or run your own one like djbdns.

The easiest options is to use OpenDNS. Just reconfigure your network to use the following DNS servers:

208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220

Detailed instructions specific to your router are available in the OpenDNS website itself. After I reconfigured my Linksys router to use the above 2 IP addresses, my DNS problems just vanished! Other ‘freebies’ that come with OpenDNS are phishing filters and automatic URL correction. Even if your service provider’s DNS servers are working fine, you can still use OpenDNS just for these two special features.

How nerdy are you?

Ok, very similar to the test that I took some time back. Here is my nerdy score:

Newsgator Alternatives?

As I noted in a previous post, I was happily using the newsgator web front-end/Netnewswire and their pocket pc client for my RSS reading purposes. ‘Newsgator Go’ recently came out of beta and the trial version that I installed on my Pocket PC is about to expire in a few days. I have no intentions of buying ‘Newsgator Go’ as it is heavily over priced at about $30. I personally feel that a simple RSS reader like Newsgator Go does not demand such premium. I will be surprised if anyone pays that much money for this piece of Software which can be written by a school student in a week’s time. Moreover, NG can hardly be called a feature-rich client as freeware alternatives like pRSSReader (my previous favorite) can beat NG handsdown in any side-by-side comparision.

My only reason for using NG was its ability to sync with Newsgator Online. It helped me to keep my feeds ‘in Sync’ irrespective of where I am at a given time.

So what are the alternatives? Create a new feedreader from scratch that can sync with bloglines/Google Reader? Well, I am too lazy to do that. Can some one suggest some good alternatives? I am not too keen to use the bloglines mobile interface as it is slow. I would like to cache the content on my PDA and then read it, rather than clicking on a link and then wait for the page to load.

The perfect RSS reader?

Chrono Cracker at Chronotron has an interesting post on the features that he expects from a good RSS reader.

I agree with most of his points. My problem is little different. I read RSS feed at Office(Oh, Yah, during lunch breaks), at Home and on my Pocket PC phone, while commuting. The biggest pain I had was to keep track of the posts that I have read/not read. While some web based readers provide a mobile interface, it is a pain to read using them. Also, while I am sitting in front of my desktop I would rather read posts using an RSS reader client than a web browser. Then I found that Newsgator, the popular web based RSS reader service provides a synchronization feature across all your RSS reader installations. So now I use newsgator in the following way:

– Newsgatoronline at Work

– Netnewswire Lite at home [free version of NetnewsWire]
– Newsgator Mobile on my Pocket PC [currently in beta].

And the interesting part is all of this sevice comes for free, including Netnewswire Lite and Newsgator Mobile. Newsgator Mobile is a nice and fully featured RSS reader for your Pocket PC and synchronizes with your newgator feeds automatically. These three make an ideal trio in enhancing your RSS feed reading experience.

htcfans.com launched!

(ShamelessSelfPromotion:begin)

Here is my new ‘semi-professional’ blog: htcfans.com! Much of the Windows Mobile content that I am writing very irregularly at My Two Cents will now move to htcfans.com and will be featured regularly. The site will be regularly updated with Articles and news on Windows Mobile devices.

So come, register in the forums and join the fun!

(ShamelessSelfPromotion:end)

More niceties from WordPress

WordPress just rocks. Probably one of the best decisions I made in the recent times was to switch from Blogger to WordPress. While Blogger is dull and un-exciting, WordPress is always bubbling with new features almost everyday. Blogger, as most Google products are – is closed source, while WordPress is Open Source with a very active promoters and community. If you are using Blogger, do yourself a favor and switch to WordPress. You won’t lose anything – it can import every one of your old posts along with the comments. It is even better to get a hosting service on your own – you will have more control over your content and presentation. For example, JavaScript is not allowed within WordPress.com, but if you have your own hosting you can do whatever you want with your wordpress installation. Apart from that, there are a whole lot of plugins available for wordpress, which can be used if you have your own hosting.

The recently introduced “Tag Surfer” is a great new feature. At a single glance, I can find out what other people with same interests as me are blogging about. Great way to make friends and learn too. I was surprised to see that there are so many people who are using the tag ‘Me!’.

My favorite firefox extensions

I try to keep the number of installed extensions on my firefox as less as possible, since many of them have memory leaks which add to the already heavy RAM usage that FF is infamous for. Here is a list of my favorite extensions:

Del.icio.us – This is one thing I can’t live without. I use delicious for all my bookmarking needs and this is a great add-on, which adds two buttons on your firefox toolbar for easy access to your bookmarks.

DownloadThemAll – Great download tool which integrates well with the browser. Provides almost similar functionality to flashgot without the need for an additional download manager.

IE Tab – Many websites still strictly allow only IE browser – like most sites on my corporate intranet. In order to keep the number of open windows under control, you can use this extension. The latest version even allows you to automagically switch to the IE rendering engine for a set of pre-defined websites. This extension works only on Windows since it needs the IE browser.

Time Tracker – Very useful extension if you have the habit of browsing heavily at work. Check your internet usage at the end of the day, for a real surprise!

Google Notebook – Great plug-in to capture notes and store them online.

That’s it. Thought it is a short list, these little applets greatly improve the functionality of the browser.