beyond teck

‎A comprehensive review of the BlackBerry Z30

noreply@blogger.com (Rishi) — Thu, 13 Nov 2014 19:41:00 +0000

If you're thinking about buying a BlackBerry Z30 that's currently on sale, I'd recommend you read this first.

TL;DR version: Dear BlackBerry, please fix your phones!

The full version (note: all of this was typed on a Z30):

Everyone thinks I'm crazy for carrying a BlackBerry during the age of Androids and iPhones. According to a recent article written on the verge, they claim that there is no good reason for someone to buy a blackberry right now. While I'm trying my best to not pay attention to my friends and the verge, I can't help but notice the little things that BlackBerry can do to get back in the game.

If you are considering buying a blackberry right now, do read this article to get a better idea of what you are buying. Unlike the people at the verge, I've actually used the z30 for a long time, so I think I'm in a better position to write about a review the that is fair and uninfluenced by random opinions.

First off, I'd like to mention the good things:

- Their on screen keyboard is excellent, and of course the hardware keyboard is second to none. In particular, I love the feature that allows you to swipe up to choose the next word, because the word predictions are excellent! It also seems to learn the phrases that you use the most, so you can simply swipe out the whole text message or email. So for example if you teach it the word supercalifragilisticexpialidocious then typing it in the next time is a whole lot easier! Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!

But, try going to the home screen when the keyboard is active. You'll just end up swiping the space key on the keyboard instead, almost every time. I still do it after about two months of continuous use. This gets annoying pretty fast. It seems like BlackBerry are not using their own phones. It seems seems like they could have easily figured out a way to fix it through a software update. It is especially difficult to get out of chat apps like what's app and text messages.

I like the hub, because like Windows Phone, I find it convenient to see everything in one place.

The bad things:

I'm using a z30 right now, and although the screen is nice and big, it's actually a bit too big despite the fact that I have big hands! Given the trend of making big phone isn't going to slow down soon, it may in fact become the norm to have such phones. Nevertheless, the current UI that the OS has only makes it more difficult to use, especially if you are only using it with one hand. For example in many cases there is a cancel button at the very top end of the screen. You can imagine that reaching the top right corner of the screen when you're holding the 6" tall phone at the bottom (because you happen to be using the keyboard) is a rather challenging and frustrating. I would much rather prefer a phone that is the size of a z10 with the features of the z30 and only a slightly larger screen like 4.5". For the z30, the interface would have to be tweaked to allow a person to use the phone with one hand and not get a cramp or drop the phone.

Another problem is the inconsistency of the gesture based interface. For example you can use the swipe right feature for going back from a message to the main the hub, but you can't use the same gesture when you want to go back a page in the browser! Instead you need to hit a small back arrow. Also, swiping up form any app is supposed to push the current app up minimize the current app and put you into the multi-tasking active frames Window. But swiping up from the hub instead pushes the hub to the left and slides in the advice frames Window from the left. This gets annoying, and is almost impossible to get used especially when every other platform has a super consistent way of getting to the main apps screen.

A cool thing about the z30 and all other blackberry devices is their dedicated play/pause/voice control button between the volume up and down buttons. While this button allows you to quickly play and pause a song for example, it also has a pretty big flaw. Unlike iPhone buttons the force required to press the button is very small. As such, simply putting the phone in your pocket or removing it, or accidentally touching your pockets cam cause the play and pause button to be triggered. This is also a problem with the lock screen button. It's very easy to press accidentally. If you had the music player open because you were listening to a song earlier (or if you had a youtube video open in the browser), and you inadvertently depressed the play and pause button while your phone is in your pocket, music will start playing at full blast from the z30's pretty loud speakers (assuming you keep the speaker volume at high like I do) and you'll be forced to awkwardly remove the phone from your pocket and silence it! An possible fix for this is to make sure that the phone is fully unlocked before the play and pause buttons can be used, but who knows how long it is going to take blackberry to fix this?

Another thing that is rather frustrating is the half baked ability to use android apps. While many apps work, they often crash and are rather slow. BlackBerry definitely needs to do a better job of improving android app performance and "flow". For example a large bar with just a back button appears for every android app. Such bars don't appear for the same apps on android phones, so I'm not exactly sure why blackberry has hard coded these bars to appear in full screen apps such as game and Flipboard. Also, the inability to use apps from the google play store (or any apps that require a Google account) is rather disappointing. Other features like the voice control feature and the maps app just does not cut it in the world of Siri, Google Now and Google Maps. The alternatives from Apple and Google are leaps and bounds better. I'm not sure why BlackBerry was unable to strike out a deal with Google for Google Now and Maps for personal accounts, since I can understand that there would be concerns with privacy and such for corporate accounts. Furthermore, the android runtime that the upcoming version of the software is going to support (version 4.3) isn't the latest one released by Google (version 4.4) that was specifically optimized for low memory and faster execution. As such it doesn't look like running Android apps on a blackberry would make any sense until the near future. It seems to me that the only way BlackBerry can reach the "prosumer" market, as their new CEO John Chen puts it, is by making sure that their devices are equal to and better than the current devices on the market. If they are just different, and not markedly better, then I don't see why someone wouldn't just use android and iPhone devices all the time in a corporate environment, because after all the price for all devices seem to be the same.

One thing that bugs me is the small quirks the OS has. For example, sometimes it refuses to show the caller ID of a person who is in my contacts list, just because (seemingly) the number in my list did not have the country code. This is really unacceptable, because no other OS that I've used so far has this issue. If the number is in your contacts, you should know who's calling!

Also, if you had a message open in the hub, it takes you to the message you had open previously instead of the new message you got! This gets annoying really fast! You need to keep swiping back further and further to get back to the main hub. The phone seems to have some feature called the priority hub, but honestly, I'm not sure who decided to ship it, because the phone seems to thing that the most useless emails I've received are the most important. In either case, I think you should just let the user decide what's important. Another peeve I have about the hub is that if you happen to open text messages from the shortcut on the apps screen, you can "swipe right" repeatedly to reach the main hub, you need to select the main hub from a list of other message options.

Emails: while blackberries generally work well with email, on of the things that bother me is that even if I read an email on my phone it takes quite some time for it to update the server to say that the message was read. I've not experienced this issue with the iPhone, so I'm not sure why the blackberry seems to have this problem. Another feature that is sometimes useful but sometimes annoying is when drafts I'm working on show up as unread email messages in my hub. Yes, I know I'm working on a draft, no need to give me a new email notice! Perhaps this has something to do with my settings on Gmail, but no other platform I have used thus far has this problem. Also, there seems to be no way to archive an email in Gmail. Every other platform supports this feature, except BB10 apparently. I hope BlackBerry fixes these issues in the next release.

The browser, although plenty fast, keeps running out of memory for some reason, because if I have more than about 3 tabs open, going back to an older tab (or rather, a page that I had opened previously) it has to reload the page again. Furthermore, the flash player that the browser has is incapable of fluidly supporting many of the new flash video streaming technologies. For instance, I can't watch the world cup videos from CBC on my phone, live or otherwise. You might be saying that this is at least better than other platforms like the iPhone. But considering the fact that there was an app made for iOS that allows people to watch the games live on their iPhone. Of course, given BlackBerry's poor market share (even in its home country!), no such apps were made for BlackBerry 10. It is clear that iOS and android don't actually fare that poorly when it comes to live broadcasts of sporting events on mobile devices, despite the lack of Adobe flash support.

Similar to the case with Adobe flash, you may think that running Android apps on a Z30 at least should allow you to run a lot of apps. But again, this assumption is only true in theory. First off, you cannot run pretty much any app that relies on a Google account, and was made by Google. This includes Google Maps, Google Search, Gmail, Google Now and much more. With a recent OS update it is possible to download the installers for many of these apps, but the will complain about your Google account and won't allow you to use the app like you could on an Android phone. Furthermore, since all Android apps run on an Android virtual machine in the phone, the amount of system memory and processing power to run both the operating systems simultaneously just isn't enough. You'll only probably be able to run one or two android apps at a time, and if some app takes up a significant amount of memory, it will automatically be killed. As well, the apps take about 15 seconds to open, run really slowly and close themselves when you minimize the window or keep them in the background for so long. The TeamViewer from the Amazon app store for instance crashes quite often. Considering this, if you want to run android apps on your phone, just get a equivalently spec android phone instead! Most android phones have a better specifications than the blackberry phones out today, and more importantly also have a price that may be comparable.

The final issue with BlackBerry phones is their price. Considering the fact that a Nexus 5 is cheaper than a BlackBerry Z30 (if you buy a Z30 at full price), but has better specs in almost every department except battery life and call/audio quality and cellular reception connectivity. Plus, you get to use Google apps, and can access content from providers like the CBC. Unfortunately, unless you are an enterprise customer, or you can get a Blackberry on an employee discount, it isn't worth it to buy one at this point, unless they can come up with a product that is markedly superior.

Flash video flickering red and green after some time

noreply@blogger.com (Rishi) — Thu, 26 Jun 2014 16:32:00 +0000

So I've been watching a lot of world cup football/soccer game on the CBC website recently, and I realized that whenever I tried to watch two games concurrently, the screen would start to flicker red and green after some time. Turns out, the problem according to a forum post was hardware acceleration.

To fix the flickering issue (on any website that is playing the flash video):

1. Right click on the video and click Settings
2. Uncheck the box for "Enable hardware acceleration" in the Display tab (should be the first tab) like so:

3. Refresh the page

This should fix the problem!

Okay, back to watching the world cup!

WeTransfer Job Ad

noreply@blogger.com (Rishi) — Sun, 13 Oct 2013 19:20:00 +0000

I like using WeTransfer to transfer things that don't fit in emails, mainly because the site is fast, has a large upload limit (2GB!) and is easy to use (no registrations required!). It seems like their main business model involves showing advertisements in the background picture of the page. This spot makes a lot of sense due to the fact that people are likely going to keep the page open for at least a few seconds as they upload/download things.

However, a particular advertisement that I saw recently caught my eye (click on the image to make it bigger):

Pretty clever way of getting people to apply I must say!

iPhone Searching... No Service/No Reception Problem

noreply@blogger.com (Rishi) — Thu, 10 Oct 2013 04:50:00 +0000

Short answer: Turn of iMessages and try sending a text message to yourself to see if you get your network connection back.

Explanation:
This problem was so frustrating that I just had to make a post about how I managed to fix it. Today evening, all of a sudden someone iMessaged me and told me that they were unable to call me. I looked at my phone and saw that my phone said "No Service". I still had a wifi connection though. Peculiar.

My first reaction was to go to settings and put the phone in Airplane mode and turn on the radios back again. However, that didn't do much. I then went to Cellular settings and turned 3G on and Off. That too didn't do anything, still it said Searching... No service.

I then rebooted my phone, several times, and that too yielded no result. I then tried Resetting my network options and rebooted my phone again to see if I got my network connection back. Nope. I really didn't want to spend the time restoring my phone!

Finally, I remembered that the last message that I got from someone was a text message. So I figured that I should probably turn off my iMessage and try sending a text message to myself and see if that works. Somehow, as though it was magic, the iPhone got full reception and I started receiving text messages that were sent to me hours ago. All seems to be working well now.

Review of ActualMultipleMonitors from Actual Tools in Windows 8

noreply@blogger.com (Rishi) — Mon, 12 Aug 2013 01:04:00 +0000

I was recently contacted by Actual Tools and they asked me to try out their newest version of Actual Multiple Monitors. It is a tool that provides you with taskbars on all of your monitors, ability to move windows around between monitors quickly and ability to customize the wallpapers and settings for each monitor individually. Being a fan of multiple monitors, and actually having used AMM in the past, I couldn't resist the urge to try it out on Windows 8.

Let me start off by saying that multiple monitors are pretty essential if you tend to spend a lot of time on your computer creating content and reading a lot of content. For instance, if you're coding something you can have your text editor on one monitor and the running application on another. Or, you may prefer to have one screen dedicated to just emails and another one for writing. Either way, you'll be able to look at more content without having to minimize, maximize or move windows around as much, saving precious time and effort.

One little problem with previous versions of windows (every version before Windows 8) was that it did not come with any built in tools to manage more than one monitor. If you wanted to have a taskbar on your secondary monitor, you would have to resort to a third party application. This was probably the main reason tools like Actual Multiple Monitor were created, because having a taskbar on every monitor and ability to assign a shortcut to move windows to another monitor makes things so much easier. With the Windows 8 desktop mode, however, you get a taskbar on each monitor by default.

Here's what my desktop looked like before Actual Multiple Monitors (you may notice that I have 3 monitors currently connected, all of different resolution):

Also, in the above screenshot you may notice a start button on the taskbar for the middle monitor. This is provided by the application Pokki, which I highly recommend if you miss the start button like I do.

Here's what my desktop looks like after installing Actual Multiple Monitors:

I'd like to point out that I usually have way more windows open :)

A few things you will probably notice right away are:

There are windows start buttons, the windows clock on each taskbar for each monitor
Each taskbar only shows the applications that are open on that monitor
There are buttons on the title bar of each window to move the window around

There are some tweaks you could do to your setup with AMM such as:

Changing the wallpaper (or desktop background colour) of each monitor individually. I don't know of a way to do this by in Windows 8 without using an app like AMM, although Windodws 8 seems to be able to choose a different wallpaper for each monitor randomly from a bunch of wallpapers
Replace the main taskbar (on the main monitor) to only show the apps open on the main monitor

So it looks like this:

I would like to see a more "metro" oriented look for AMM's start button though, and the ability to have a third party launcher like Pokki for the center screen. But I don't mind using AMM's classic start menu (putting the windows 8 start screen for the start button doesn't workout for me), although its search feature does not have the ability to search through files on the computer or the web.

Conclusions

After using AMM for quite a bit, I really liked its ability to keep the applications that are not on that particular monitor hidden. If you're like me and have more than 20 windows open at any given moment in 10 different applications you'll find this feature quite indispensable. It's not so much the fact that you can find a minimized application on a particular monitor faster, but the fact that you can find it without having to stop thinking about something and search for an application icon. This feature alone would make you much more productive. Also, I like the shortcut for moving windows around. I've disabled the title bar buttons because they sometimes interfere with applications like chrome, where having more than 6 tabs open when the application is maximized is sure to cause some problems. See below:

I just prefer to use Windows Key + / shortcut instead to move windows around to different monitors and using Windows + Up/Right/Down/Left Arrows to maximize, minimize and snap windows to one side.

Finally, having a start button on each monitor is also great. You don't have to keep going to the center monitor all the time just to open a new app.

I'm not too fussy about changing the wallpaper, icons and other visual aspects for each of the monitors, but it would be a nice feature to have in case you like tweaking and personalizing your wallpapers.

There are also other features in AMM like desktop divider that allows you to set a grid for particular applications, and a wide array of other shortcuts that allow you to move things around any which way you like.

I highly recommend that you give the trial version on Actual Tool's website a go. If you feel like it has boosted your productivity then you can buy the full version for about $25. This may be a steep price if you're a student like me, but if your full time job involves staring at a computer for a long time, it may be worthwhile to consider grabbing a copy or getting your employer to buy you a license.

Free up some more hard drive space on your Windows 8 installation

noreply@blogger.com (Rishi) — Sun, 11 Aug 2013 18:49:00 +0000

I've been using Windows on my mac quite often recently, and although I had budgeted 65 GB of my precious SSD space to windows, it seems like Windows has already managed to consume 90% of that space! So, I wanted to figure out a way to reduce the hard drive space without deleting too much of my personal "my documents" content. Naturally, a good way of doing this was to delete unused system files. Although this installation is fairly new (about 5 months or so) there will still some old files remaining on the hard drive.

Here's how I went about gaining some more space:

Step 1: Run Disk Cleanup - the usual place you should start for reclaiming some hard drive space (you'll need admin access for this of course)

1. From the Start screen type in "Control Panel" and go to the control panel

2. Type in disk clean up in the "Search" bar at the top right hand corner

3. Click on "Free up disk space by deleting unused files"

4. Select your hard drive and click OK

4.5 If you feel like your system has been running fine for the past few weeks, you can also delete back up "system restore" files by clicking on "Clean up system files button", then clicking on the More options tab that appears and clicking "Clean up" under System Restore and Shadow Copies, then go back to the disk cleanup tab

5. Check all the files that you think you don't need and click OK

Step 2: Run Windirstat to check for large files that you can delete

Step 3: I noticed a folder called WinSxS that was really large (about 12 GB),

and looked it up to see if I could delete it. As expected, it was back up copies of all the updates that were installed, and links to other files so it would be catastrophic if anyone were to delete the installation. However, I found a little tip online that you can try to remove system files that have been superseeded if you had installed the latest service pack.

From the start screen type "Command Prompt", right click on the app, and click "Run as Administrator" on the bar that pops-up below. Then copy and paste the following into the window and hit enter:

DISM /online /cleanup-Image /spsuperseded

This will remove any old and unused files from the previous service pack and hopefully save some space on your hard drive.

How to dim your monitor brightness more than what your monitor allows

noreply@blogger.com (Rishi) — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 02:14:00 +0000

So I recently got a new monitor (will post a review about it later) but I found that the LED monitor was a bit too bright for my eyes, especially when I'm reading a white page in a dark room. I tried using the monitor hardware to turn down the brightness, but it was still too bright.

Enter Dimmer! Dimmer is a light weight free windows application that adds another layer of "darkness" on top of all the windows on your screen and makes all the white pages less brighter.

Try it out, and I'm sure it should help make your monitor less bright!

Choosing between Android, iPhone, Windows Phone and Blackberry

noreply@blogger.com (Rishi) — Sun, 23 Dec 2012 23:22:00 +0000

One of the things that I tend to use most everyday is my smartphone. I almost always carry it with me everywhere I go, and also have it close by when I'm at home. Needless to say, if there was one piece of technology I wouldn't give up it would probably be my smartphone. However, with so many different types of phones and smartphone operating systems out there, it can be somewhat of a hassle to determine the right type of smartphone for your needs. As such, I have put together here a little guide that may help you select the right type of phone. Most of what I have mentioned here comes from my own personal experience, with all these operating systems.

Top 3 reasons for choosing an Android Phone:

1. Price: A quick comparison between android phones and other smartphones will quickly reveal that android phones are in general a little less expensive than other varieties. This may be either due to lower specs, lower build quality or less features so always be sure to check some reviews online before going for an android phone that looks too good to be true. The top tier android phones, however, may be just as pricey as other competitors though, depending on how the smartphone market is when the phones are launched.
2. Freedom: One good thing about the android OS is that most manufacturers give you the option of installing any application that you want on your phone. It doesn't necessarily have to be downloaded from Google play (Android's app store). Often times, you can download it from the creators website (or forums such as XDA developers) and install it directly. Also, if you're even just a bit tech savvy, you can download custom roms and with technical some know-how "flash" it to your phones. Also, did I mention that you can play flash videos/games on android (you'll have to download a custom APK, but it's possible)?
3. Features: Big screen, small screen, high res, loud speakers, keyboards... there are all sorts of hardware features that you can find in android phones. If you're looking for an AWS spectrum phone (some providers like Wind/Mobility in Canada, and T-mobile in the US us the AWS spectrum for their services) then you can find plenty of android phones that may meet your needs

Top 3 reasons for choosing iPhone
1. Top of the line hardware: Apart from minor antenna problems with the iPhone 4, the latest lines of iPhones have every piece of great hardware you'd want in a phone: 8MP camera, thin and light, high res display, adequate hardware noise cancelling and most of all a hardware silent/vibrate button (which is indispensable if you go to a lot of meetings and only realize that you forgot to turn off your phone after someone else's phone rings, and you don't really want to remove your phone out of your pocket)! One thing that I would have liked to see was some kind of a notification light, so I don't have to repeatedly turn the phone on to see if I have a message or email.
2. A wide selection of apps: iPhone still has more apps by number. Also, since Apple has been around the smartphone market for a while and the App store gets higher revenue than Android/Windows Phone/Blackberry stores many developers usually chose to release their apps for the iPhone first.
3. Reliability: iPhones on average have less software/hardware problems than Android phones. I've usually never had my iPhone never refuse to connect to the network after coming out of the subway for example, where as other platforms have sometimes given me some trouble.

Top 3 reasons for choosing Windows Phone
1. Fresh: Windows phones arguably have one of the funkiest looking hardware around. This is pretty cool when you want to differentiate yourself from the other iPhone users out there. Also, the Windows phone UI is pretty fun to use and Microsoft has done a good job of showing the most critical information to the user upfront without having them jump to apps and screens.
2. Nice hardware: Many windows phone hardware partners (Nokia, HTC in particular) are putting out some of the best camera phones and high res displays out there.
3. Sufficient apps: While the Windows phone app store may not be as big as iPhone or Android, it does have a large variety of apps (especially those built using the "Metro" design platform) that will most likely take care of most things you would want to do with your phone.

Top 3 reasons for choosing Blackberry
1. Reliability: Blackberries have some of the best reception and voice quality (along with a few Nokias and Motorolas) that you can possibly find in a smart phone.
2. Keyboard: The Bold 9000/Bold 9900 probably has the best keyboard my thumbs have ever typed on. However, unlike touch screen based phones, there's no way to switch to a "number only" key pad when you want to make calls for example. Other Blackberries also have formidable keyboards that make it easier to type out those quick emails and texts.
3. Business features/BBM: Blackberry Enterprise Services/Blackberry Internet Service ensure that you get your emails in a secure and timely manner. Also, I've found BBM to be more reliable and faster than Apple's iMessage and even text messaging at times. It is also more secure.

Top 6 Gmail Tips

noreply@blogger.com (Rishi) — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 00:09:00 +0000

Gmail is probably one of the best free webmail services out there given the enormous number of features it has. Plus, chances are good that if you're reading this blog, you're a gmail user! As such, I've put together a short list of my top 6 tips that I use all the time on Gmail's web interface. Although I do use Apple Mail quite a bit, I've been drawn to the web interface more so than a desktop email reader because it's easier to use from any computer, and works great without any setting up or delays thanks to Gmail's speedy interface.

My Top 6 Tips for Gmail:

Use keyboard shortcuts to quickly process your emails. This is especially handy when you have a lot of mail to process. Simply hit:

N to move to newer conversation
P to more to previous conversation
C to compose
! to report spam
F to move forward
R to reply
And there's more.. you can find the whole list of shortcuts here
To enable this feature head over to the settings page by clicking the "Gear" button on the top right hand side of your gmail window, and pick "Settings" from the menu. The keyboard shortcuts option should be under the General tab.

Undo send - Have you ever been in the situation where you clicked send and only after you clicked it did you realize that you had made a mistake. Well worry no more, because Gmail's undo send feature "fakes" the process of sending out emails by giving you a 5 seconds to cancel sending your email once you click send. You can turn this feature on from the settings page under the general tab.
Automatically process your emails by using filters (on top of Priority Inbox): With the filters feature you can set rules for incoming mail such as newsletters or notifications and sort them, mark them as read, delete them and so on. The easiest way to set this up is to click on the "More" button at the top of an email when you are viewing an email and click "Filter messages like this". Gmail will then ask you a bunch of questions and you can have your filter set up in no time.
Read email from other email accounts through your Gmail Account. If you have multiple email accounts like I do, then it may be best to use the multiple sign on feature that google has started offering recently. If you click on your username on the top right hand side of the page, you can click the "Add account" button to link to or more accounts to one account so that you can easily switch back and forth between these accounts. Just one thing you may want to remembers is being in the correct email account before sending out emails.
Allow others to send email from your account: A recently added feature in Gmail is the ability to grant access to others so that they can send emails on your behalf! You can find this option in the "Accounts and Import" field on the Gmail settings page.
Multiple Inboxes: A great labs feature that I like is to have folders or labels displayed on the main page so that you can quickly see what's up. This is great if you set up Gmail to fetch email from several accounts, as you can have several different inboxes on the main page to browse through. You can find the multiple inboxes lab in "Settings", under the "Labs" tab (just search for multiple inboxes). Once you enable this lab, you'll have a multiple inboxes tab where you can configure additional options.

Bonus: Get yourself a Gmail pet hamster!

The best ways to increase iPhone Battery Life

noreply@blogger.com (Rishi) — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 01:41:00 +0000

One thing that Apple has always paid attention to is the battery life in their devices. Most of them, particularly their laptops, far surpass the industry average when it comes to giving you lots of juice. In this post, I will mention some of the ways I, and many others, have managed to get more life out of their iPhones devices.

If you've used your iPhone for a few days, you may have noticed that the battery life is not as good as it was when you first got it. There are many reasons for this and the main culprits include:

Misbehaving apps that keep turning location services on or waking up your phone, trying to tell you something
Changed screen brightness and email sync settings - a brighter screen and syncing more often
Your phone trying Low reception areas
Syncing of large files (pictures, books, data etc.) from your phone to the "cloud"

All of these things use battery life. All of these things are also what makes your smartphone "smart".

If you feel that your battery life is more important to you, then the best way you can get it back is by effectively disabling all the syncing, brightnesses changes and bad settings that have been pushed onto your phone by rogue apps.

Doing so is simple (although perhaps tedious):

Uninstall any apps you may have recently installed. In particular you can save a lot of juice by uninstalling data hungry apps that you don't really need/use such as:

VOIP Apps (Viber, Dell Voice etc.)
Apps that upload your pics to the internet (this include iCloud syncing, calendar syncing etc.)

Disable "notification" settings for apps that you don't really need notifications from using: SETTINGS > NOTIFICATIONS
Make your phone dumber: Turn off services that you don't need. Things that you can turn off from SETTINGS include: Location services (no GPS if you do this!), Siri (if you happen to have it, I don't use this much anyway)
Prevent uploading of "Documents and Data" to iCloud when you're using cellular data: Do so from SETTINGS > ICLOUD > DOCUMENTS & DATA > turn off USE CELLULAR
Prevent applications like Skype from signing you automatically from SETTINGS > SKYPE > SIGN IN AUTOMATICALLY

If you want to do all of the above, then you can try resetting all your settings from: SETTINGS > GENERAL > RESET ALL SETTINGS and this will maintain all you apps, but delete all the settings for the apps (this includes Mail, Google Calendar/Contact Syncing etc.). So next time you open an app it'll ask you if you wan't to use location services, notifications etc., and you can only allow a select few to access things like location services.

As far as I know, disabling things and resetting are the only ways of improving battery life on the iPhones (apart from draining the battery fully and recharging it again). Let me know of any other methods you come up with.

Choosing a good pair of headphones/in-ear headphones

noreply@blogger.com (Rishi) — Thu, 03 May 2012 02:49:00 +0000

So, you want to buy headphones huh?

I think headphones these days are actually becoming more of a fashion statement than a device that helps you listen to audio. Being a commuter on the TTC (also known as "The Rocket") for the past 7 years, I have observed a marked increase in the use of headphones, ear phones and a bunch of other things. One thing that strikes me though is the large amount of people wearing those "beats" by (dr.) Dre headphones. Those may be great for the bass, but for people who wish to buy some "quality" headphones, here are some of my thoughts regarding a few technical aspects you can look at before purchasing a pair of headphones. While nothing beats trying out the headphones, this guide may be of help for people who wish to buy things online.

You can generally find the specs I've described below on the manufacturer's website or by simply by doing a quick search for it on google. Headphones.com is also a great resource for looking up some specs.

Headphone Impedance

One of the things you have to keep in mind about a headphone is that, effectively, it's just like a resistor (something that burns up energy). It takes the energy from the device that powers it and causes some membrane to vibrate in order to produce sound. The lower the resistance, the louder the sound produced by the headphones for the same amount of power. This is a key factor that you have to consider when buying headphones because if you plan to use a handheld device like an iPhone or a mp3 player to listen to music, you're generally going to want a lower resistance, somewhere between 8Ω - 16Ω (Ω = Ohms, a theoretical measure of the resistance). If the resistance is any higher, you'll likely have to resort to using a headphone amplifier that use batteries to get higher noise levels from your headphones. Not that there's anything wrong with using an amplifier, but it's just an extra inconvenience you may have to deal with in order to listen to some music.

Frequency Response

Here's were things start to get a little subjective, but I'm only going to mention the tech details.

So you probably know that headphones work by vibrating a little membrane like thing (called the "driver"), back and forth. However, the ability of that membrane to vibrate really fast or slow depends on what kind. A whistle sound for example, has a high frequency. A drum beat, however, has a low frequency. While listening to music though you want your headphones to produce both sounds equally well. However, that is not always possible to do. Some headphones can produce lower frequency sounds better, while others can produce higher frequency sounds better. The best types are good at both. As such, each headphone type has it's own "frequency response curve". The "flatter" the curve is, generally means that the headphone can produce more frequencies at the same sound level, and therefore produce more sounds.

X-axis is frequency (how fast the speaker is vibrating), Y-axis is gain (how much potential sound the speaker can produce at that frequency)

In the pictures above, the graph at the top is of a headphone that costs $19.99. To the bottom is a headphone that costs $1,945! (yeah, two thousand bucks!). The main difference is that the cheaper headphones can't produce the lower frequencies as well (like drum beats and such), hence the dip in the curve on the left hand side (which means you can barely hear those sounds). The really expensive ones can handle the bass very easily so it's like a "flat line", hence the price!

This spec of the headphone is what allows the headphone to handle the "lows", "mids" and "highs" that audiophiles often talk about. If you're into base, you want the left hand side of the frequency graph to be flat, and above 0 for the y-axis.

Active Noise Cancelling Headphones

Another type of headphones that are catching on these days are ones that work by playing "antisound" (1/2 wavelength out of phase sound waves, if that means anything to you...) so that it cancels out sound from the outside. These are especially handy if you plan to travel on planes or trains, since it's really easy to generate antisound for the low hum of airplane or subway engines. However a couple of caveats you'll need to keep in mind:

Not all sounds are actually cancelled. It won't cancel out the sound of babies crying beside you, or people talking loudly, since it's very difficult to generate antisound for these sounds
They'll often require batteries, and some may not even work without batteries. Buying new batteries every week/recharging them may become a hassle really fast
These headphones are usually very expensive!

Some things you can check for such headphones are their "noise isolation"/elimination curves.

For example, if you are considering the Bose QC15 headphones, you can google for the noise isolation graph for the headphones, and it'll show something like this:

In this case, you want the frequency curve to be as low as possible for all frequencies, as opposed to the frequency response graphs in the previous two pictures above because want to cancel out/block the noise. Noise from airplane engines are somewhere around 70-100 Hz frequency, and the Bose QC15 do a nice job of cancelling it out by dropping the sound level of the engine noise by ~20dB. That's about the same reduction as reducing the sound of car traffic to the level of sound of an average conversation with a friend (yeah, it's hard to picture sound...).

So with noise cancelling/isolating (noise isolating headphones just block out the noise by covering your ears...) headphones, you'll want to check out these curves and try to find the ones that block out the most noise.

One thing you have to remember is that a side effect of this antisound business is that the actual sound that you want to hear will get a little distorted, changing the frequency response curve of the headphones. As such, it's always a trade off, and it's up to you to decide if noise cancellation is more important than you being able to hear a particular part of a song.

Fit and Finish

One final thing that's pretty obvious is how the headphones fit on you. This is something that you'll likely just have to experience on your own by visiting a store or something, and is highly subjective. As well, you probably want it to look cool.

I, however, don't really mind how it looks as long as it sounds good!

5 Internet Radio services outside the US

noreply@blogger.com (Rishi) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 04:39:00 +0000

To be honest I'm not much of a music junkie. If I feel like listening to something, well, I don't really have a collection of 50,000 songs that can just "turn on". Instead, I depend on online radio stations to feed me with the latest music there is. Of course, it's even better when I can choose the type of music that I want to listen to, instead of just listening to whatever my local radio station is playing.

So, without further ado, here's a list of radio websites that I've started liking. Please feel free to share you own. Also, you may probably notice that there's no mention of Pandora here, because Pandora (and Spotify for that matter) doesn't quite work outside the US yet.

Jango

A cool radio station that allows you to choose the artist that you'd like to listen to, and suggests similar songs from quite a large list of popular songs. What I also like about Jango is their app for Android (and iPhone, Blackberry as well) because, unlike the next service I've mentioned (Grooveshark), they seem to be giving it away for free. And, you don't even nee to sign up! What puzzles me is that these people don't even have ads on their radio station (yet, but seems like they're working on it, judging by their advertising page). One thing that does bug me though is that the website will constantly nag you if you don't sign up for a Jango account if you're listening to music online. This sort of makes skipping a song a bit harder. But I suppose it does make sense to sign up though, because that's how the service keeps track of what songs you like and what songs you don't. Another great thing about Jango is it's ability to choose between a wide variety of songs, vs sticking to one artist only - which is a nice touch, although I really don't mind either setting.

Grooveshark

I must admit that Grooveshark does look quite a bit fancier than Jango (and doesn't nag you to sign up as much), and it great if you're only listening to stuff on your computer. It has the features that are similar to Jango, but it doesn't really allow you to chose your "variety" settings. Nevertheless, it also seems to have a huge repertoire of songs that you can listen to. One thing about Grooveshark is that their smartphone service is not free, so if you plan to create your play lists on Grooveshark, you will have to pay a small fee to listen to it on your phone.

Live365
Feels like the usual internet radio station where you choose a Genre to listen to, and tune into a channel. It does have quite a few ads here and there though. Also seems like they make you sign up for an account...

Shoutcast
Comes with WinAmp too, so if you happen to have it on your computer then simply open it up and browse to your desired radio channel.

iTunes
Simply switch to the Radio tab on the left hand sidebar to check out a wide selection of radio channels. This is great if you don't want to open a bunch of websites and just need to listen to some music. I usually don't like installing iTunes on Windows computers due to its tardiness, however, it is definitely my choice of music player on OS X.

A Brief Review of Windows Phone 7

noreply@blogger.com (Rishi) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 03:28:00 +0000

Windows Phone 7 is probably one of the coolest smartphone OS's you've never used. It's nothing like Windows, and very different from iOS as well as Android. I really like the smooth transition effects, and the general snappyness of the phone.

Some reasons why you'll actually like a Windows Phone:

Simple and easy to use (for the most part). Don't quite agree with this commercial though, some things are a little more difficult actually (see my WP7 wishlist below!)
Excellent Facebook, Linked in and Twitter Integration. In particular I like the integration of Facebook and Windows Live chat with text messaging so you can quickly switch back and forth
Fancy transition effects.
You can edit Microsoft Office documents!
In built music recognition feature (like Shazam) that works quite well

One bad thing about Windows Phone, however, is that the hardware is not standardized. This means that using one phone may not give you the same experiences as using another, since one design may be more prone to accidental clicks than another. Or, one design may have a larger screen resulting in lower battery life but better ability to type. Not being able to really try out the phone at a store and it's cool transition effects is also a downside.

Some things in WP7 I'd like to see worked out in future versions (dear Microsoft, I hope you are reading this wishlist) that you may not like about WP as well:
1. They actually made some things a little more difficult while trying to make things easier. A good example of this is making and receiving calls. In order to make a call, you click on the "Phone" live-tile on the live tiles screen. This actually takes you to a list that shows the history of calls... instead of taking you to the dial pad. Unless may be you just had a missed call, in which case going to the missed calls list directly would be more convenient, there's no reason to tuck away the dialpad under some menu. Another problem is answering calls. To answer calls you actually need to perform two steps! First you need to "Swipe Down", and then click the "answer" button again to take the call! I personally think that this is just silly. Swiping down should automatically trigger the answer call response. I've missed a few calls thinking that swiping down would answer the call. Also, I think that Microsoft should do something to allow people to access their messages and emails right from the lockscreen.

2.5 Basic apps: While the lack of apps for the platform is no big surprise since most developers seem to be developing for other more prominent and potentially lucrative platforms, Microsoft really needs to do some thinking about default apps. A fresh windows phone ships actually without a stopwatch and timer app (it does have Microsoft Office though...). Even my 8 year old flip phone has that (and a flashlight app)! Sure, you can download a few apps, most of which don't work all too well, but this is something that any new phone should come with. In-built music recognition and QR code readers are great, but please stick to providing some basic apps that every other platform out there has.

2. Internet Explorer: Any smartphone in today's market needs to have great web browsing capabilities. IE, for some reason, has a lot of difficulty handling large divs, and handling iframes properly. A good example is visiting xda-developers.com. If you scroll left or right, the text in the div gets cut off! Apart from the browser's incapability to support web-kit like styling elements and divs it also has very poor "tabbing" capabilities. If you need to switch to a tab, you need to drag out the menu from the bottom, tap tabs, and then tap the tab of interest.

4. Adding contacts/searching: Too much jumping around to do. To add someone to my contacts list, I first need to click name, add their name, click save, then click phone, add their phone and click back. Why not put all of these fields on one page like every other mobile OS out there? Also, searching for contacts is kinda tough even though you can click on a letter and it shows you contacts with a particular letter, you can't go one level further and sort by Letter-Vowel combinations like iPhone and Android (just a thought).

5. Live-tile and app screen: While having live-tiles is great, having only 6 of them visible in one viewing is not all that great. I really wish there was some way to make some tiles 1/4th the size of the current ones, so 4 tiles could be squeezed in the same place to avoid scrolling. Also, scrolling up and down the app screen is somewhat of a pain if you happen to have a lot of apps.

6. Scrolling: The only way to get to the bottom of a very long page is to keep scrolling for a day and a half! May be they could allow people to move the scroll bar?

7. No tethering! Yes, my carrier actually allows me to tether, and I've done so successfully (and rather easily) on my android. Not sure why Microsoft doesn't want to bother adding this.

While Windows Phone 7 may not be as fully featured as other systems, I'd say that it's definitely getting there.

Giving your Windows Computer a Tune-up

noreply@blogger.com (Rishi) — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 03:27:00 +0000

Has your Windows 7 computer been running slower lately? Do you think that it's not running as fast as it was when you just got it? Here are some tips to make it run a little faster, and to help you tweak your system so that you can get the best performance out of it.

1. Delete or move any unused large files and applications, particularly if you're running out of disk space: You can also use Disk Cleanup or CCleaner to help with deleting old temporary files, and remove old applications by searching for Uninstall a Program in the start menu. One thing that happens when you use your computer a lot is that you tend to load more and more files on it, particularly if you like taking videos and listen to a lot of music. It's good practice to store such files on a hard drive that is not your main 'C:' system hard drive so that the operating system has enough room for system files like the page file which is used by your system to store temporary information while your computer is running.
2. Defragment your hard drive (skip this if you have a SSD, since it probably won't make much of a difference: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Improve-performance-by-defragmenting-your-hard-disk. You can also use third party programs like Degraggler that accomplish the same thing.
3. Run the Windows Troubleshooter to check if all is well with your computer. Simply search for Troubleshoot in the start menu
4. Keep your computer up to date. Run Windows Update from the start menu once in a while at least to make sure that you have the latest performance fixes. Performance updates for application suites like the Windows Live Suite (messenger, live mail and so on) and Microsoft Office are also often pushed through Windows Updates
5. Make sure that your computer is not infected with malware. Reducing your computer's speed is one of the features of most viruses and worms out there, so it would be a good idea to run Malwarebytes, Spybot or even just Microsoft's Security Essentials suite if you don't already have any anti-virus installed or use one of those antivirus programs from your ISP. This step is especially necessary if you happen to use some of those nasty file sharing programs, or may be even happen to plug in a USB from some who uses such programs.

Doing the above steps (mostly steps 1 - 4) every month end or so should make sure that your computer is fast enough.

Bonus: If you'd like to add a little more speed to your computer, you can try plugging a USB drive and setting a ready boost volume on it. Simply right click the USB drive on My Computer, click properties, and browse to the ReadyBoost tab to use the device for ready boost.

How to make OS X Snow Leopard look and feel like Lion

noreply@blogger.com (Rishi) — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 23:28:00 +0000

To be honest, I don't intend on upgrading to Lion until it works seamlessly with my current setup. From what I can tell for now, with a visit to roaringapps.com, it seems like there quite a few kinks to iron out with third party apps. I'm sure many things work, but why take the chance when most of the 250 new things seem to be UI elements and other "frivolous things". Don't get me wrong, I think Lion is cool, but there's nothing exceptional it has to offer when I compare it with Snow Leopard, which is probably why Apple decided on the $29.99 price tag (although I reckon that they could have priced it at $99.99, and I'm sure people would have still bought it...). So, I figured, why not make my Snow Leopard install look a little like Lion, while I wait for things to get a little more stable. As it turns out, it's not too hard to put some lion skin on a leopard for some temporary coolness.

Step 1: Skin the UI and Grab the Wallpapers

To make the the Leopard's skin look like a Lion, all you need to do is grab a copy of ThemePark, and install a Lion theme (like this one) from deviant art. This will change the default widgets (buttons, progress bars, dropdown menus etc. to make it more lion like). One thing you'll notice though is that the scrollbars may look a little out of place, since they can't really be "hidden".

Also, you can find a ton of OS X lion wallpapers on the net. Grab one that you like, and set it as your wallpaper, if you really want to copy the default look of Lion.

Step 2: Tweak the apps

Apple Mail
One of the newly touted features in Apple Mail is the (dare I say "Outlook" like) column on the left hand side. You can somewhat emulate this using Dane Harnett's Widemail plugin.

Also, you can turn on message threading (View > Organize by thread) which also groups together messages that have the same subject lines, although not quite as elegantly as the new mail.

Finally, if you want something that looks a little more like the new mail and you tend to mainly use IMAP, you may want to give Sparrow a try.

Step 3: Mouse/Multitouch and Keyboard Settings
Who says Snow Leopard can't have the Multitouch pizzazz of Lion? Just grab BetterTouchTool and you'll find that it's powerful enough to emulate quite a few features like going back and forth in Safari, activating Expose or Spaces and much more (you can even do things like Play/Pause!). Yes, there is quite a bit of configuration to do, but just follow Apple's footsteps on the actions they've mapped to certain gestures and I'm sure you'll have most of the multitouch features down in no time. As an added bonus, you can also turn on Windows Snap like features, which is quite awesome IMHO.

Also, one of the "new" (if not cool) things about Lion is that up is down, and down is up, when it comes to scrolling, when you compare it to the usual way of scrolling anyway. You can emulate this using Scroll Reverser. While this works great with the iPhone and iPad because there is a "direct relationship" between the content and your finger, I don't think it works all too well when you're using a mouse/trackpad mainly because most people have associated scrolling with scrollbars. When you scroll down, the content goes up. But since Apple has hidden the scrollbars in Lion, it's probably easier to switch your normal ways. I haven't figured out how to make them disappear on Snow Leopard though, so you can only switch scroll directions for now. However, by the looks of it Google Chrome does seem to have this trick up it's sleeve, because when I try to use the new blogger UI, it show me scroll bars that look much like Lion's. Interesting.

3 things to give your Mac a Tune-up

noreply@blogger.com (Rishi) — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 18:29:00 +0000

One of the great things I like about having Macs is the fact that you rarely have to worry as much about system slowdowns as long as you have adequate RAM and enough processing power to do what you need. But sometimes it does help to reclaim some hard drive space, delete some system files and tweak you system settings to make you Mac feel like new. Here are somethings you can do to give your Mac a quick tune-up.

Note: While many people will probably be switching to OS X Lion right now, I for one am not going to be switching for at least a few more months, mainly because I'm absolutely positive that a lot of application makers are still scrambling to make their apps compatible with lion. And of course, if you do an upgrade, you'll still be left with some cruft from the older system, so these tips may still be helpful (provided the apps below are compatible with Lion ;)

Delete Unused Apps with AppCleaner

While you can easily delete unused apps by dragging the apps from your applications folder to the trash, the apps often leave behind preference files and other system files all around your system. To get rid of these files, you're better off using an app called AppCleaner, which seems to be a free version of AppZapper that does the job quite well. Especially if you tend to install a lot of apps, this should help you reclaim some valuable disk space.

Delete Unused Logs and Change System Preferences To Your Liking with Onyx

While your Mac does its job, it often stores a lot of files and logs that may be helpful for reporting and so on. Such logs may take up valuable space. Furthermore, the cached information on your mac's system cache as well as the permissions for the files on your mac may be out of date, so it may be helpful to run a tool called Onyx to sort things out. Finally, I think that it's a good idea to make sure that the permissions and such are all fine on your hard drive so the necessary files can be accessed by your system.

Organize Your Files with the terminal

One of the great things about a new computer that it's not as cluttered. It's sort of like the "tabula rasa", if you will. If you're anything like me, then chances are that within a few days of use, you'll have files all over the place, but also will have customized a ton of settings. If you reinstall from scratch, you'll be losing all these settings, so it's best to just reorganize your files instead.

While you could just drag and drop things, I find that the terminal is a much more powerful tool (located in Applications > Terminal) that allows you to do things like wildcard moves and other fun stuff.

For example, let's say that I have to move all the PDF's from my download folder that are work related to my documents folder. I could command click each of these PDF's individually, and drag and drop them. Except, with the terminal, there's an easier command:

mv Downloads/WORK*.pdf Documents/Work/

Which essentially says move (that's the mv) anything from the downloads folder that starts with WORK has whatever (that's the *), and ends with a pdf to the documents/Work folder. You'll need to do some more reading on how to use these commands if you're not sure about them, but once you master these, you'll find that dragging and dropping is just a big pain. Here's a cool command line tutorial to get you started.

You may also find it rather helpful to search for those large files on your hard drive and delete them to reclaim some hard drive space.

And this is all I usually use on a regular basis. I don't every defrag my mac, because I've never found the need to (and also because I'm on a SSD...), and, of course, I don't use any fancy registry cleaners because macs don't have a registry.

Make your caps lock key do something useful

noreply@blogger.com (Rishi) — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 16:38:00 +0000

I think that I use the the capslock key about 3 times a year - accidently that is. Having it on my keyboard all the time is just taking up valuable home-row space that can be used for something else. I'm certainly not the first to propose the idea of repurposing the key for a better use, but after seeing Google's chromebook notebook without a caps lock key (well, without a capslock key by default it seems) really motivated me to do something similar.

Here's how you can remap that key to something more useful on a Mac:

Click the Apple icon on the menubar at the top left hand side of your screen
System Preferences
Click the Keyboard icon
Modifier Keys...
Map the capslock key to something more useful using the dropdown menu!

On Windows, follow the instructions here: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/map-any-key-to-any-key-on-windows-xp-vista/

If you're using GNU/Linux, your best bet would probably be: http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2007/08/02/remapping-the-caps-lock-key/

Now that you've remapped that key to something else, you have no excuse to "accidentally use it" anymore!

Enable "Instant Search" like behaviour for websites in Google Chrome

noreply@blogger.com (Rishi) — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 16:29:00 +0000

When I was snooping around under the hood of chrome, I noticed this cool setting that pretty much enables "instant" for websites.

That's right. Instead of typing in the whole URL, all you need to is type in a few letters of the URL and chrome will automatically load the website. This works amazingly well (although there are a few times when it loads the wrong website, and may not be great when you're doing demos), and does a great job of loading websites even before you press the enter button.

To enable this, all you need to do is click on the wrench icon, and click preferences.

Under, search, you need to Enable Instant for searching and browsing.

That's it.

Switch to 2G mode on your Samsung Galaxy S/Captivate/Vibrant

noreply@blogger.com (Rishi) — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 01:32:00 +0000

So apart from switching to HSDPA to 3G mode, you can actually go another step down to EDGE (or 2G) only mode on your Samsung Galaxy S phone.

Unlike other phones, however, the switch to 2G mode is somewhat sneaky on Samsung's phone, and I decided to make a note about it here.

To switch to 2G (well 2.5G theoretically) only mode for data do the following:

Press Menu Button on home screen
Settings
Wireless and Network
Mobile Networks
Network Mode
Choose GSM Only (i.e. only use Edge Speeds... without using HSPA (3G)).

This tweak will slow down your data connection a lot (making web browsing almost useless, and you can forget about using that flash player on the phone), but you may be able to almost double the standby battery life of your phone even when auto-sync is turned on.

Hope this helps the Galaxy S users out there!

Quick Tip: Creating Equations faster in Microsoft Word

noreply@blogger.com (Rishi) — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 00:06:00 +0000

While Microsoft Word wasn't really built to write equations (if you really want to do equations, look up LaTeX (not to be confused with latex)), recent editions of Word for windows have added features from LaTeX to help write up equations more easily.

If you're on Windows, and have Word 2007 or 2010, then try this:
Press Alt and = to quickly place an equation the document.

Then start typing your equations. If you have a greek letter to put in there type it like this: \alpha or \beta or \gamma. Also, you can create fractions by simply putting in equations in the right brackets like (\alpha + \beta)/(\gamma).

Also you can use ^ to do a superscript, like x^2 to make x². To do a subscript use _ like x_0 to make x₀.

As far as I know, there's no way of making this work as well on Microsoft Word for mac, but if someone has any tips on how to do this, I'm all ears.

Make your android phone's battery life better!

noreply@blogger.com (Rishi) — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 23:56:00 +0000

While many iPhone users will brag that their phone has better life than (most) android devices, if you own a 'droid phone, you'll agree that there is some truth to the statement. Android has a lot of features that, when enabled, will eat up your battery life quickly. A quick search on the web will lead you to a lot of articles (like the one from the HowtoGeek for example) that will tell you how you can get more battery life. Some of these tips are good to know but I've found that they do very little to actually save your battery.

Here's what probably won't help you much:

Switching to a black background for your main app screen - Doesn't help much unless of course you plan on staring only at the app screen all day. Turning off live wallpapers may actually help (very little though), as it'll prevent the unnecessary CPU usage required to run them.
Task killers - This is probably if you have a ton of apps running and want to kill them all once in a while, but running them too often, or having them set to autokill may probably not help much. YMMV on this one, but you most probably won't be seeing a ton of increase in the battery life.
Turning off your phone - This tip actually works, but you probably won't be able to make any phone calls :(

Here's what most likely will have some effect (I've tested this mostly on the Samsung Captivate -- may be this guide should be called How to improve battery life on the "Samsung Captivate", but I'm sure there are ways of doing the same on other phones as well):

Switching to 3G only instead of HSDPA or LTE or 4G etc.. Many phones have the feature to disable HSPDA or 4G and run purely on 3G only. Here's how you can do this for the Samsung Galaxy S/Captivate/Vibrant etc.. The downside to this is, of course, the fact that you probably won't be getting the fast access to data that your phone is capable off. On the other hand you'll certainly get a better battery life. As an added bonus, you can also simply disable data altogether (a quick google search for your phone should tell you how) if you know for sure that you're not going to need it. In the case of my phone, it's simply doing a long press on the power button and disabling data. For example, if you're going in an hour long meeting, or about to begin an hour long phone call, just turn of the data before you do so. You'll still get texts and such, but your email won't be synced, and you obviously won't be able to browse the net.
Turn off stuff that you don't need (Bluetooth, GPS, Wi-fi etc.) as - Obvious tip here, but I do admit that I'm sometimes guilty of keeping bluetooth/wifi/GPS on even after I've finished using it. This is more of a habit thing really, so I'm not too big on this tip. I do turn off stuff that I don't need though, but I'm sure my phone is smart enough not to use the GPS radio when I clearly don't need it. Also, I should probably add that turning off your phone, or at least putting it in airplane mode when you're in the subway/airplane/boat etc.would certainly help as well. Just sayin'
Turning off the wireless radio when your screen is off - Apps like JuiceDefender or Green Energy out there will do just this. They usually work on a schedule basis, where the phone turns on every x minutes to sync any email, and then will only turn on if your screen is on. Having this app running in the background will have some energy cost, but you'll save a lot by keeping your data radio disabled for 80% of the day (if you sync every 1 in five minutes).
Turn off auto sync for push email. This definitely works because your data radio doesn't ping the mail server every 2 minutes to keep the push connection alive. However, the battery savings most definitely are not worth it considering the fact that you may think that you have no new email (but in reality you just forgot to refresh the email manually) and miss a lot of important email. This has happened to me on several occasions, since I've gotten used to the BlackBerry delivering all the mail to me right when it arrives.
If you're like me and don't want to turn off auto sync: Don't use polling, but use push email instead (particularly if you have a Gmail account) as much as possible - Interestingly enough, I've found in my completely random and unscientific tests that if you use the default email client that comes in your phone and most likely support polling intervals of 5 mins, 10 minutes etc. that if you have it set to something like 10 minutes even, you will use about the same battery as using push email that probably gets any new email within a minute. Particularly, if you have something like 5 emails being polled even at the times of something like 30 minutes, then you may even experience a larger battery drain. Of course, you need to check your exchange account or something then you'll have to use an app that has exchange support, but may not have push. Also, people have commented that if you use the Gmail app for all your Gmail accounts, it'll maintain only 1 connection with the server even if you have several accounts, thus saving battery life. Not too sure about that one though.
Use Wireless-Fidelity instead of 3G - If you know you're in a wi-fi spot (at work or home or something) and have a relatively good connection, then turn on your wifi radio instead of keeping data on. Wi-fi is a much shorter range communication protocol, and as such requires less energy to process, so you may save up to 25% by not using 3G/Data (that number is just a rough guesstimate though... this is clearly not AnandTech where benchmarks are done with up to the millisecond results). Of course, you should turn off wireless when you're outside a Wi-Fi zone, because you're phone will probably die searching for a wi-fi connection. If you have an app like JuiceDefender ultimate then such apps will automatically switch to wifi for you when there is a connection available. Also, you may want to set you Wi-fi sleep policy to never (google should help with this)
Lower the haptic feedback - If you have that motor buzzing a lot every time you type a letter, then you're definitely going to kill your battery writing up a blog post as long as this one. I do like the haptic feedback though, but I keep it down to the lowest level so that I can still feel it, but not a lot. If you're phone comes with Swype, then you should probably use that too... doesn't save battery life or anything, but at least it looks cool ;)
Underclock/Undervolt your processor - If you're savvy enough (or have a lot of time on your hands), or just really need the battery life, you should look into this. The XDA forums will most likely have ~847 articles describing how you can do this. Doing so often requires you to install a custom rom and do a whole bunch of other things, but the process is usually documented quite well. I personally haven't bothered to get into this business because I don't really want to invest a lot of time into this just for getting an extra hour or so of battery life.

Bonus: If your phone has an AMOLED display then try out ScreenFilter. It'll reduce the brightness of your screen more so than the lowest brightness setting on your screen, saving some battery life. Also, if you're reading and replying to emails in the middle of the night, you won't be blinded by your flashlight like cell screen.

Ultimately though, although it doesn't seem like it, we all have to accept the fact that battery technology has still come a long way to power the computers/radios in our pocket. Transporting that data through the air isn't cheap when it comes to energy costs (or monetary costs for that matter). Even though you probably won't be able to last a week without recharging, you'll most likely make it through the day, which is probably good enough for most people, myself included.

Cool browser extensions that you've gotta have!

noreply@blogger.com (Rishi) — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 17:33:00 +0000

I remember the days when Firefox was pretty much the only browser that had this thing called "extensions" only about 4 years ago. But now it seems like every browser out there -- Chrome, Safari, IE, Opera (the list goes on), all of them have extensions. So I decided that I should write a post about the cool addons I've found for many of the browsers out there that save time and make web browsing a cooler experience. Here are the top extensions that I currently use on my browsers (Note: I haven't provided a link to download the extensions since they'll differ from browser to browser, but a quick search would help with that):

1. Mouse Gestures: If you don't have this installed then you should certainly give this a try. I only use it to right click on my mouse and swipe backwards. It already saves me a ton of time by not having to right click and click again to go back! I also use it to reload the page and switch tabs. You might think that not moving your mouse to the back button is lazy, but trust me, you'll love the efficiency you'll get.

2. A password manager: There are billions of websites out there and it seems like 98% of those websites require to register just so that you can view their "about us" page! If I'd generate a new password for these websites every time, I honestly wouldn't remember them all. Okay, may be I would, but I'd rather not bother myself with remembering unnecessary passwords. The solution: LastPass. While I would most certainly recommend that you don't store any "precious" passwords on there, it works like a charm for forums and other websites that often require to register.

3. Session saver: While most browsers automatically save your browser session when they crash, sometimes you may just want to save a session intentionally so that you can go back to it later. I usually do this when I'm doing research and want to get back to the 786 tabs I opened after a system update. On Safari you can go to Windows > Reopen windows from last session and it'll restore the windows from the previous session, but it's only good for one session, so you're better off with a browser that has an extension which ca save multiple sessions.

4. FlashBlock - While many savvy users may use things like AdBlock Plus to disable every single ad out there on the internet, I think this is a bad idea because some of the ads out there may actually be relevant. However, more often than not, the flash ads are just annoying. So what I usually do is disable the flash ads, and keep the other text-based/image ads on.

5. A tasks plugin - Many who will be reading this (that's you!) most certainly will be spending a lot of time in a browser (admit it!), so why not have a tasks list that will remind you what you actually need to do, may be you'll stop wasting your time browsing youtube and facebook?

6. A dictionary/Spell check - No matter which browser you are using, you should certainly enable spell check. Or esle teh wrods mya get a litttle mesed up. Many browsers also have a dictionary add-on that you can use to find the right word (particularly if you're on Windows where you don't have the advantage of a dictionary application like Mac and GNU/Linux users do)

7. Email count checker - While Chrome actually has a email notifier for Gmail, having a little icon that'll tell you your email count is always handy on any browser. If you use a mail client though, this may not be particularly helpful. But I know many people who exclusively use webmail for all email communications.

That's all I have for now, but I'm sure this list will grow as people create more cool extensions for their favourite browsers! What extensions do you use on a regular basis?

Unlock your Galaxy S Phone for free?

noreply@blogger.com (Rishi) — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 22:22:00 +0000

Warning: Check with your service provider and manufacturer before you unlock your phone. Unlocking your phone will most certainly void your warranty, and may lead to connection problems with your original service provider or your new service provider.

Note: Sometimes, asking your cell phone provider for an unlock code may work as well, so you should certainly look this up and see what your provider tells you.

With that said, if you're out of warranty, or want a quick way to unlock (and relock too!) your Samsung Galaxy S (has to be a Galaxy S phone (so it'll work on Captivate, Vibrant and so on)... as I've not tried this on any other phone. Chances are good that it may not work), here's what you can do:

First, root your phone. Here's an app: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=803682 to do so if you haven't already. Follow the instructions on the page, and you should be able to root your phone in a few clicks. Again, this will void your warranty, may kill your phone etc.

Second, install the Galaxy S Unlock App from http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=906255. And try to follow the instructions (first try Step 1, then Step 2 etc.) on the Unlock Tab (namely Step 2, where a configuration file gets overwritten to disable network lock..) to unlock your phone. Note that if you do step 2, the phone may appear to be unresponsive for quite a few seconds before it reboots to freedom.

That was easy. And free too (you should definitely donate to those people though!).

If you're having any trouble, don't post comments here (no one will likely read them). Head on over to the XDA forums linked above, and try searching for answers. If that doesn't work then make a quick post there and someone will definitely reply.

How to find the biggest files on Mac or Windows

noreply@blogger.com (Rishi) — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 15:09:00 +0000

After a large amount of time, chances are that your hard drive will be cluttered with large files that you don't really need or use anymore. Or, it may just be the case that you need some extra hard/ss (solid state) drive space. Often times people use applications to find out which files are taking up the most space on your computer so that you can delete them. However, here are some tricks that you can use on the fly (sort of) to find the biggest files that are taking up the most space on your computer and delete them.

How to find big files on a Mac:

The trick on a mac is to use the command line application called find, in conjunction with the sort application to sort the largest files on your hard drive.

First, open Terminal (Applications > Utilities > Terminal)
Type in the following command (note, change 10 to the number of largest files you wish to see, changing it to a smaller number may give faster results depending on how much stuff you have on your hard/ssd drive)

find . -type f -exec du {} \; | sort -nr | head -10

Wait for a few minutes while your Mac scours your hard drive for large files

After a while, the terminal window will display the largest files on your mac.

On Windows, the trick that you can use is to search (Start Butt for files that are of a large size in your personal folders (My Documents, My Music, My Pictures and so on). Just select the size option to search for the largest files on your computer like so:

Hope this helps!

4 Ways to Collaborate Online on Group Documents

noreply@blogger.com (Rishi) — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 05:40:00 +0000

One of the great things about writing group documents today, as opposed to writing group documents 5 years ago is the advent of online "colloborative editing environments". Instead of sending files back and forth through email, here are few services you can take advantage of to make collaboration with your team on written documents much easier.
1. Google Docs

If you haven't heard of Google Docs yet, then you've probably been living under a rock for the last few years. But if you have heard of google docs and still resort to using email to send files back and forth, then you should really think about using a better system. Simply create a document on Google docs and share it with all your friends.

Some great features that Google Docs offers are:

True colloborative editing - Multiple people can edit the file at the same time
Version control - You can view multiple versions of the document
Works for Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents, but doesn't really support things like captions, references and so on.
No registration required if you make the document public.

Some disadvantages:

No support for editing documents offline
Support for .docx/.xlsx/.pptx files is sketchy and features such as table of contents, captions and bibliographies are not available
Doesn't have as many features as Microsoft Office, or even iWork and some other competitors like SlideRocket

2. Microsoft Office Live Sky Drive

This alternative is great if you are planning on using Microsoft Word to write up your report or document. While Sky Drive acts as a great way to store you're documents to avoid emailing it every time there is an update, it doesn't work so well for collaborating in real time.
Advantages:

Can upload .docx type newer file formats, and save features such as references, table captions and so on.
Can do some basic editing in browser, but open it up in Word/Excel/PowerPoint to do more editing
Supports versioning and ability to share files

Disadvantages:

Need to have a windows live account to use the service
Can't edit the document at the same time. In fact, only one person can edit the document at the same time, so if one of your team members have the document open, you'll have to tell them to close the document.

3. Git

While Git is really meant for programmers, I think that it works great if you plan on using it to keep track of text based documents like LaTeX documents or plain old text files. While getting used to Git may take a while as it is built mostly for programmers who deal with tons of code and like to stare at terminal windows, it should provide a great way of keeping track of progress and merging changes to text based documents.

4. Dropbox

While Dropbox may not be the best alternative if a lot of editing is required, it can be a great way to share files between teams as long as only one person works on the file at one time. If two people upload changes to the same file, Dropbox will just create two versions of the file, which will then have to be merged manually. Nevertheless, Dropbox has some great versioning features, is easy to use and provides quite a bit of storage for free. Plus, it's great for sharing files that won't be edited like pictures and videos, and syncs with the latest versions of the folders automatically instead of you having to get the content yourself.