The Correct Usage:

• It’s = it is or it has.
• Its = possessive pronoun meaning belonging to it.

Is the meaning lost?

These are 2 statements with the correct usage:

• It’s A Bird… It’s A Plane… No, It’s Superman!
• There is love of course. And then there’s life, its enemy.

The same 2 statements with the so-called incorrect usage:

• Its A Bird… Its A Plane… No, Its Superman!
• There is love of course. And then there’s life, it’s enemy.

Did the context change? Did the improper apostrophe placement suddenly throw you off in comprehending the meaning? Let’s take a more compelling case:

• Nope, Its antenna is fine… it’s a problem with the way you’re holding it.
• Nope, Its antenna is fine… its a problem with the way you’re holding it.

I’m pretty sure the intent of the statement remains intact. So in a world trying to embrace simplicity, why bother with the extra apostrophe when the meaning isn’t lost? Don’t get me wrong, I respect the rules of grammar and see the value in adhering to them, but when you have to make a conscious effort to remember when the apostrophe is put or not put (and it makes no difference), I think the purpose needs re-evaluation.

The grammar hounds I was referring to:

• The Craig Web Experience
• Word Detective

When an AT&T representative suggested to one of Jobs’ deputies that the Apple CEO wear a suit to meet with AT&T’s board of directors, he was told, “We’re Apple. We don’t wear suits. We don’t even own suits.”

- Apple

Courtesy: Daring Fireball

There’s a ton of resources and tips on improving your Wifi Connection. Here’s a consolidated list of links on the must dos for setting up Wifi. I’ve put them down here sequentially, so follow them in this order:

Essential guides for your Wifi router:

1. Upgrade your Wifi Router Firmware to dd-wrt or Tomato (check if your router is supported).
2. For security, make sure you change these 4 settings as recommended by Lifehacker.
3. Improve your Wifi signal by choosing a free-er Wifi channel for your router.

For the Wifi Ninjas:

• Turn your second Wifi Router into a Repeater
• Protect yourself when connecting to an outside Wifi network
• If you have the time, go through this comprehensive guide by labnol’s Amit on securing your Wireless Home Network. It also lists tools that can be used to hack Wifi connections.

Solution: The Auto-Type feature takes in wild cards :D.
So instead of:

• Auto-Type-Window: Twitter
• Auto-Type-Window: Twitter – Google Chrome

I can just have:

• Auto-Type-Window: Twitter*

Apple is the cool kid on the block. There is no arguing that. This point was pushed vigorously by Apple with the whole Get a Mac- ad campaign. To be very honest, I found it funny but mildly obnoxious. I felt they were cheap jabs by Apple at Microsoft (sort of like kicking the wimpering puppy). I stuck on to the PC deluding myself into thinking, the whole thing was just a brouhaha by loyal fanboys.

That is of course, until I got myself a Macbook Pro. My god, all these years…. wasted with a PC…. tragic TRAGIC! If i’ve not made it abundantly clear through my numerous tweets and status messages, you should know I’m absolutely in LOVE with my new Macbook Pro. It’s amazing how Apple has this instant power to transform buyers into fanboys. I’m trying to find more excuses now to spend time on my new Macbook (this coming from a geek who already spends unhealthy amounts of time in front of a computer).

I’m not doing the detailed tech-filled review for my first impressions post because the Apple experience is so much more. These guys make awesome stuff and rightly market the crap out of it.My final advice:

If you spend more than 6 hours in front of a computer, do yourself a favor and get a Mac, period.

I’m discovering new things everyday with my Mac. I’ll post tidbits and tips for the new converts like myself as I savor each part of this wonderful creation.

The best wallpapers: Solid Base

Amazing collection of wallpapers. Heavily filtered for quality.

The best screensaver: Fliqlo – Zen like Screensaver clock

Zen like Screensaver that shows the current time. Has this amazing Lost like feel.

Here’s how to get it setup (Follow the links for detailed instructrions from Google Calendar):

• Register for Google Calendar Services
• Make your first Calendar

• Register your Mobile service

  These are the list of supported mobile providers. Even if your provider isn’t listed give it a shot and enter your number. Zain for Kuwait wasn’t listed originally but still worked.

• Customize your event notifications-Now for any particular event/calendar you can add “SMS” Reminders.

A pretty nifty feature, if you want to make sure you never miss an appointment.

So I recently made the move to a Mac. While I’ll follow with a first impressions post, I thought i’ll make my customary recommended list of software.

Must have Tools

• Google Chrome I keep two browsers, Safari (comes default) and Google Chrome (which happens to be my primary browser). I remain a Google junkie.
• KeePassX I store all my passwords in KeePass. I’ve heard 1Password is good, but I use Keepass on Windows and on my Android phone. So I prefer the cross-platform ubiquity.
• Dropbox Online File Syncing. Actually Dropbox is so much more. Detailed post on this later.
• Fraise While the default notepad is pretty darn good for the Mac, for html/php other languages, I think a slightly more advanced text-pad editor would be required. I used to love Editplus 3 in the Windows days. Pity they don’t have a Mac equivalent. Trying out Fraise for now..
• Cyberduck FTP This is apparently the mother of all FTP software.
• AppCleaner Really good application for doing clean uninstalls.
• Utorrent For all your torrent downloading needs. I’ve heard a lot about Transmission, but sticking with familiar territory for now.
• VLC media player One Stop solution for Playing all your videos.
• Unarchiver WinZip/Winrar/7Zip equivalent for the Mac. Apparently supports more number of formats than the native BOMArchiveHelper app of the Mac.
• Flickr Uploadr If you use Flickr extensivley, this tool comes in Handy for mass uploading and tagging.
• Growl Mac users seem to rave about this tool. Installing this to see what all the fuss is about.
• Google Notifier Half my existance depends on Google. It pays to have convenient alerts. The Google+Growl Plugin comes in handy as well, if you’re particular about maintaining consistency.
• Quicksilver Application launcher for Mac. While Spotlight can achive the same, I like the fact that QuickSilver learns your behaviour pattersn and offers better suggestions.In the XP days I used Launchy.
• BackBlaze for Mac paid tool- After some research I’ve found this to be the best off-site backup tool. If you want an on-site option (like on an external Hard disk), you can use the Mac’s built in Time Machine.
• Burn This is the one-stop solution for all your DVD Burning needs. Nero/ImgBurn equivalent for the Mac.
• ExifRenamer All those pesky DSCXXXX, IMGXXXXX, PIC0000 can now be sensibly renamed.

One time Handy Tools

• Monolingual This Software helps delete unused language packs on your Mac. Removing the unwanted languages apparently can save up to 2 GB. Make sure you read the README and know what you’re doing.You can mess things up if you’re not too sure.
• Carbon Copy Cloner This is a cloning tool (little different from backup). Assuming you want to install a SSD on your Macbook, and move your OS to this drive, you would need a tool to make an exact copy or clone of your existing HDD (as against restoring data from a backup).

Android Specific

• Android SDK If you have an Andoid phone, it makes a lot of sense to have the latest Android SDK installed. This also installs necessary Usb driver/adb interface etc. I’m writing a detailed guide on getting the Android phone synced up with Apple. Haven’t found too many detailed posts on this.
• doubleTwist iTunes for an Android phone. Takes care of all your Android needs.

Development Tools

• Sequel Pro Great client for accessing MySql Databases.

The beauty with Apple’s OS X is that by default it comes with some really good utilities. Head on to this link to check out some of the awesome apps that come default with the Mac.

The trusty IBM thinkpad T41 I used to own is now ancient. After having served me relentlessly through college (4 unforgiving years) and 4 more after that, it’s now time to finally put her to rest. After years of having been a loyal right-clicka, I’ve succumb and made the move. Treating myself to the new 15″ Macbook pro (referred just as Mac for the rest of this post).

Without too much drama, my reasons for shifting to a Mac:

• Superior build : Apple takes special care to see these babies are built with utmost care. Hardware is of the spank-me-silly quality.
• Sound-Engineering/Sound-Recording: A Windows 7 powered laptop just doesn’t have the juice to function as a DAW without alarming amounts of lag and crashing. Every time I had to record for small gigs, I had to chug my whole freaking desktop. I’ve read Macbook Pros can handle this. This single reason was almost enough for me to make the change. Here’s another link.
• Security: Owing to loyal fanboys and generally lesser hatred, Apple isn’t plagued with as many threats and virus attacks as the PC. Even Google seems to think so.
• UX or User Experience Design: Apple is the undisputed king of UI. I accepted this even when I was loyal to my PC ways. These guys simply get it. When you’re a designer these things seem to suddenly matter a whole lot.
• The Pros use a Mac: Check The Setup, a cool site that catalogues the setups which most pros/programmers/geeks/nerds etc. use. Almost all of them swear by their Macs. You can also check the links at the bottom of this post.

Basic Requirements for any new laptop purchase:

• Mobile Workstation: I intend to travel a lot more in the future. I can no longer depend on a clunky desktop as a workstation. That being said, I need something powerful enough to handle my needs. The new 15inch Macbook pro seems like the perfect balance between portability and power.
• Ports : The more the merrier, always. The cool thing is that the Mac has an in-built firewire port (think external sound-card support). This made up for the fact that it has only 2 usb ports (both USB 2.0 thankfully). Always make sure you have the RJ45 LAN port, and an external video port (like the new HDMI or the older VGA port). The Mac comes with a “Mini DisplayPort” that has appropriate convertors to all other forms.
• Battery Life: No worries here. Macbook Pros advertise 8-9 hours. That is WAY WAY more than any laptop i have ever owned has given me.
• Wifi: I wanted to make sure my new laptop has the latest protocol specification for Wifi (802.11n).
• Decent Sound Card: Macs are said to have the best on-board soundcards.
• Hard disk: I wanted to go for the new Solid State Drives (SSD Hardisks). They dramatically boost performance but unfortunately come with heavy price tags. Will wait for sometime and then upgrade. I hear it’s definitely worth it.

Intersting Mac Users and Stories

You just have to see this list to get converted:

• A.R.Rahman- My favorite Music Composer uses a Mac
• The Dalai Lama uses a Mac!
• Hans Zimmer -Legendary Hollywood Music Composer uses a Mac
• Joel and Ethan Coen – My favorite Hollywood Directors use a Mac
• Stephen Fry and Mac love – My favorite Brit uses a Mac
• Pearl Jam uses Mac
• TV show Scrubs is made with Macs
• WWE (World Wresting Entertainment)
• SouthPark goes Apple :P
• Mark Cuban – Once you go Mac
• David Alison- Nice blog tracing the conversion of a devout PC user to Mac

Sometimes the very first result Google shows, is in a nice formatted stand out type of box called OneBox. For e.g. try “1KWD to USD”. Google instantly gives you the conversion of 1 Kuwaiti Dinar to US dollars. Other similar uses include finding the local time: “time kuwait” gives this OneBox result :

A new option of Google OneBox that has been doing the rounds now, is finding the time of Sunrise and Sunset of your location. For e.g check the screenshots I took for Sunrise and Sunset times in Chennai:

I live in Kuwait and so tried “Sunrise Kuwait”, unfortunately the option didn’t seem to work. But a little more digging and trial-error resulted in this:

Google OneBox stands most relevant for the State/City rather than the Country. Kuwait is a pretty small country and doesn’t have very clearly defined “states/cities”. But the capital of Kuwait is supposed to be “Kuwait City” which is basically like an area, hence the mild confusion. So try your Google OneBox searches against the City/State rather than the country.

What am I going to do knowing the timing of Sunrise and Sunset :P ?

• Planning for Camping,hiking,outdoor activities.
• Photography-knowing sunrise/sunset timings is critical for planning a good photo-shoot.
• Astrological Calculations in Hinduism (Horais) are calculated based on this
• Prayer timing for Muslims – Salah

Other Cool Google OneBox queries

• pizza in kuwait city – Notice you have to put city/state here again
• weather kuwait
• time delhi
• time india

The Google Operating System blog has a comprehensive post on some of the other useful Google OneBox searches.

This was posted on Daring Fireball. Seriously what is that color! Kind of reminds me of the first Android prototypes back in 2007 (which are also hideous come to think of it). Gruber says Android’s design today, is what it is, only because of the iPhone. I say, thank god for the iPhone.. I’m still with Android thank you.

Google Reader: If you’re interested in reading the stuff, I find interesting, here’s my Google Reader Shared link. I’m not polluting other areas like facebook, Buzz etc with this anymore.
If you already use Google reader, friend me so I can also read the stuff you read online. If you don’t know what a feed reader is, shoot me a mail and I’ll open your eyes to a new world of information.

Twitter: I’m not as active as I’d like to be on twitter, but if you’re on twitter, send me a tweet.
Since tom, dick, harry and their mothers are on twitter, I’m sort of forced to have an account.Twitter is where I get in touch with folks on the interwebs that I haven’t met in person. Hello Oprah, Obama, Fry!.

Facebook: Facebook is for friends and folk who i’ve met and would like to keep in touch with. Add me as a friend if you’re on facebook.

That’s it. Anything more is too much for me to handle and probably not worth the time. If you find anything posted in the above mentioned, it’s because I really really wanted you to see it. No more of the annoying cross-posting BS.

Studies shows we humans require a minimum of 7 hours to function at our prime (brain gets all swooshy and muddled without 7hours of quality shut-eye). My work starts at 7:00am and it takes me about 15 minutes to get to work. This essentially means I NEED to sleep by 11:00 pm and be up by 6:30am. The latter tends to be a problem since i’m not very diligent about the former. So I had to find the perfect alarm system for waking up in the morning.

I prefer to use my phone for the Alarms because a) It’s portable and b) it isn’t another device i have to chug along when travelling. But most default alarm bell tones are as good as silent to me when I’m in REM mode. I researched the net and found the “perfect alarm ringtone”. One that’s loud enough to wake the bejesus out of you while at the same time just keeps you clear of the Cardiac Emergency Room (can’t guarantee latter). Download the Ultimate Alarm Bell Ringtone here. I also use the Stock Buzzer Alarm that comes default with the Nexus one. I set two alarms to make sure I don’t snooze my way to sleep-dom.

• Morning Alarm 1 (Wakey Wakey) [6:00 am] – Buzzer Tone (comes default with the Nexus 1)
• Morning Alarm 2 (Fire Fire!) [6:30 am] – Ultimate Alarm Bell (this is the shit bro!)

Having two alarms help because, let’s face it, everyone needs those precious 5 more minutes of bliss. It’s critical for me though that the two alarms have different ringtones. This indicates the time without having to take a look at my phone (not to mention finding those darn spectacles). So even if i snooze of Alarm 1 and don’t realize it, when snoozing or switching off Alarm 2 i know i’ve reached my limit.

Discalimer: Use the Ultimate Alarm Bell at your own risk. Seriously people it is “alarming” and not for the weak hearts (better wake up late than in a hospital).

Any suggestions?

I’ll try to build this from ground up. So we’ll start with the pretty basic stuff and move up from there. I primarily use Adobe Audition (previously Cool Edit Pro) for all my digital editing/recording. so most of my tips will pertain to Audition. Here’s to Good Sound Stuff!

In the good old days I had an excel file where I listed all the TV shows that I watched with an auto date-updater. I was thinking of writing a program but never got around to it. That’s when I discovered next-epdisode.net. I was relieved of my primitive excel ways. Then technology took a leap: enter RSS feeds. A service called showRSS was pretty cool and also conveniently provided Torrent Links (not that I used any of these illegal torrents. No sir, I simply waited until they aired on a legally subscribed dish channel :P). It seems there are some who are determined to make it even easier to download TV Torrents. Gentlepersons I present to you TED: Torrent Episode Downloader.

Coupled with a bittorrent client like utorrent, you don’t have to do anything. Seriously, you don’t…. Once setup, it automatically downloads the Torrent files and if you allow utorrent to download the files directly, even that part is taken care of. You just go about doing your normal do da and will find your downloads folder updated with the latest TV episodes. Simply brilliant stuff.

so to recap my creepy TV following ways: Excel > Next-episode.net > showRSS > TED.

The process of setting up TED is drop dead simple:

• Install TED from here
• Click the First button “Add Show” and you’re done.
• Some additional settings: Extra > Preferences > Configure where torrent files are saved e.g: E:\Downloads\Torrents.
• Make sure to check “Open it in your default bittorent client”. That’s the sizzler that makes this application a beauty.

TED is still maturing so prepare for some mild wonkiness. The only painful process is for some reason you format your pc or something crashes, you have to manually add all the shows again, which can be a real back-biter. To make it even simpler (if you share the same viewing choices as me) download this .ted file to your PC. Open TED, click File > Import Shows and point it to this downloaded file. yup that simple!

For unobstructed Torrent downloading and viewing goodness, change the following settings in Utorrent under Options > Preferences > UI Settings, Ensure:

• “Don’t start the download automatically” is UNCHECKED
• “Activate the Program window” is UNCHECKED
• “Show a window that displays the file inside the torrent” is UNCHECKED

Prepare for some unobtrusive TV viewing Goodness!

You’re welcome ;)

Watch this advertisement first:

Now read this really interesting article by Eric. A lot of what I have to say below, is lifted from the article.

Why major airlines hate carrying your baggage:

• In today’s world it only makes business sense to link up with airlines on other routes. This implies there will be frequent aircraft changing. If a passenger travels from A > B > C > D, they are going to want to check their bags in only once (A > D. Period.Thank you). But assuming route C > D is handled by a regional airlines using a non-Boeing 737 aircraft, the airlines is going to have baggage transfer problems. If they say “travel with all the baggage you want”, there will be more baggage than the regional feeder aircraft(presumably smaller) can accommodate, and lost/undelivered baggage is probably reason 1 for passengers to start a hate-airlines movement.
• They don’t want the liability for tracking and reuniting you with a bag left behind because of network mismatch (all the more a probability when you handle routes A>B>C>D>…X ).

Why it works for SWA:

Clearly, South West Airlines (SWA) have an agenda with this. Ok, maybe nothing malicious or diabolical but definitely something they wish to work for their favor. The whole “please check your bags” mantra boils down to Time saving. The “Time is Money” concept cannot be more truer in the Airline industry. Time spent on the ground means time not in the air. Airlines only make money when the jet is flying. Check baggages… Turn flights faster… Create more profit!

• Airlines get most of their revenue from quick business travelers who anyway travel light. So the marketing campaign by SWA adds good will at almost no additional cost.
• Checking in bags is faster for the airlines i.e faster for them to load & unload baggages than for passengers to carry and store in overhead bins. Think 5000 checkpoints for cabin bags, not to mention the “Ah C’mon that’s just 10ml more liquid than the 100ml limit! I ain’t carrying any explosive gelly yo, just some hand moisturizer!”.
• SWA are pros in Fuel Hedging (see below for definition). So checking in bags saves time and saving time by turning aircrafts faster means more revenue for the fuel already purchased.
• They operate only Boeing 737s. baggage capacity consistent with passenger load. They can get their baggage handling streamlined and know what to expect. Consistency => Reliability => Understanding what to expect.
• They operate specialized and focused routes – SWA’s successful business model involves flying multiple short, quick trips into the secondary (more efficient and less costly) airports of major markets (No question of A>B>C>D).

Other interesting stuff:

• Fuel Hedging – Basically advance purchases of fuel, at a fixed price, for future delivery.
• SWA hedged 70% of fuel requirements in 2008 (I repeat 70% ) and here’s the kicker they saved approximately $3.5 billion doing it.
• Many a time passengers think the airlines lost their luggage. In actuality, the airline couldn’t accommodate it so they chose to pay a premium to deliver it to you later (often at the cost of your loyalty and future business).

I agree with Eric’s article on the tracking technology thing. This isn’t as difficult as it sounds. But the “pay the passenger to check bags” idea, I’m still doubtful. Why this campaign will tragically tragically fail in India :)