e-Tech Land

Do you still pay for an anti-virus program?

2011-11-18T14:22:00.001+05:30

Technorati Tags: windows,microsoft,anitivirus,free

If you’re a Windows user and you’re still paying for an anti-virus program, then you need enlightenment. Because Microsoft have made their excellent antivirus program (called Microsoft Security Essentials) free.

It’s fast, light-weight, non-intrusive and effective. It offers the same features as several commercial antivirus programs (like Norton and McAfee) do, including:

Real-time protection
System scanning
System cleaning
Rootkit protection
and so on…

And if you think that a single antivirus is not good enough, then you can additionally install the excellent Avast Antivirus for home users for free.

Now stop paying for antivirus

Watch that Battery

2011-11-18T12:42:00.001+05:30

Technorati Tags: battey,battery level indicator,free,battery status,battery info

Some laptops (like the ones manufactured by Lenovo) come with a handy gadget that let’s you monitor the battery level in the Windows taskbar. Others (like the ones manufactured by Dell) do not.

Enter the free tool aptly called BatteryBar:

BatteryBar does everything that you need from a barebones battery monitor software, like:

Showing the battery level
Showing whether the battery is charging or discharging
Showing the battery wear and tear
Showing the approximately battery time remaining

The manufacturers of BatteryBar claim that they are able to accurately predict the battery time remaining because they save historical battery usage data. If you like the product and would like to support the developers, they even offer a paid version with support for fancy themes. Get BatteryBar free from here.

Why pay CuteFTP when FileZilla is Here

2011-11-17T18:57:00.001+05:30

Technorati Tags: ftp,filezilla,cuteftp,free,download

Most people need a FTP (File Transfer Protocol) client some time or the other. A lot of Windows users depend on CuteFTP as their FTP client due to the numerous ease-of-use features it provides, such as:

An intuitive user interface
Ability to queue multiple files for download/upload
Ability to download/upload from/to multiple servers simultaneously
Automatic file-type detection for switching between text and binary modes
Ability to retry failed transfers
Ability to set data-transfer speed limits
Ability to fallback to passive FTP whenever required (when the server does not support active FTP connections)
And so on and so forth

Now, the good news is that you do not need to buy CuteFTP to get all these (and several more) valuable features. Just browse to http://filezilla-project.org/ and download the FileZilla FTP client for free.

FileZilla provides all these features and more at no cost. Of course, if you like the product and would like to support the development, feel free to donate via Paypal. Stay happy!

How to Quickly Turn-off Your Screen

2011-11-17T18:44:00.001+05:30

With handheld devices getting more powerful every day, the problem we face is that the battery life of these devices keeps decreasing. So if your laptop is running on battery, sometimes you may feel the need to quickly turn off your screen without putting the system into sleep mode. This is where Dekisoft Monitor Off Utility comes handy:

This is a tiny stand-alone utility that does not need to be installed. Just download the EXE from http://www.dekisoft.com/ and set it to start with Windows automatically. The utility runs quietly in the system tray until you press the hotkey (Ctrl+Alt+L by default, but can be re-configured). As soon as you press the key, the utility turns off your screen. The screen can be turned on again simply by moving the mouse cursor, or by pressing any key on the keyboard. Simple, right? Then why not give it a try!

Another Opera Innovation

2010-11-04T19:38:00.001+05:30

The Find in Page feature in Opera seems to work better than other browsers like Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and even Google Chrome.

What happens in Opera when you press Ctrl+F is that Opera dims the entire page, and then highlights the text as you type in a cheerful, bright green color. Pressing F3 and Shift+F3 lets to navigate to the next and previous match, respectively.

Click on this link for a quick demonstration of the same.

Did you know about Hybrid Sleep?

2010-11-03T00:13:00.001+05:30

Perhaps “Sleep” or “Standby” is the one of the most useful computer features invented for home users. Sleep lets you put your laptop / computer into a low power state for some indefinite period of time, and then resume work quickly without the annoying wait involved in booting your computer from scratch.

Most laptop users boot their laptops only occasionally; normally we put our laptops to standby every night and resume work quickly in the morning. Sleep keeps all your running programs and even the operating system in the main memory, but shuts down as much of hardware as possible.

In order to keep programs in the main memory, your laptop consumes a small amount of power that drains your battery while it is in standby mode. This power consumption can be anywhere between 1 watt to 3 watts. Moreover, when the operating system (like Windows or Mac OS) detects that your laptop battery has reached a critical limit, it dumps the contents of your entire memory on the hard disk, and puts your machine to hibernate state. This helps preserve the state of your work, and lets the laptop enter the zero power consumption state. However, your laptop takes longer to resume from standby, since the contents of the main memory have to be read from the hard disk, which is much slower than the main memory.

However, did you know that Windows also supports something called Hybrid Sleep in addition to the default Sleep operation. What the Hybrid Sleep operation does is that in addition to putting your laptop in a low power mode, it also dumps the contents of the main memory to the hard disk every time you put your computer to Sleep.

Normally, the Hybrid Sleep option is turned off by default, but you can always turn it on in the advanced power settings. This is usually not required, unless your laptop battery is very old and discharges suddenly (without giving Windows enough time to respond to the low battery event). This option will also help you if you have a spare battery and you sometimes swap the batteries while your computer is in standby. In either cases, when you turn the power on, Windows will be able to resume your work and data from the copy of the main memory that resides on the disk.

Neat, isn’t it?

Amazing Opera 10.63!

2010-11-02T19:46:00.001+05:30

I have been a long time user of Google Chrome, but lately I downloaded Opera 10.63 on my Windows desktop and I have been amazed by it’s super-fast speed and ultra-cool looks. Take a look:

The above picture shows the Speed Dial feature of Opera that opens whenever you start a new tab.

The below screenshot shows the omni-bar feature of Opera (as soon as you start typing something in the address bar):

I am going to try Opera for a few days and see how it stands up to Google Chrome.

Nightly Tester Tools :: Firefox Add-ons

2009-02-15T17:26:00.001+05:30

Being an agile blogger that I am, I found an installed a nifty extension for Windows Live Writer named Blog This today. Blog This extension for Windows Live Writer adds a button to Firefox which starts a new Windows Live Writer blog post pre-populated with content and title from the current web page. That way, one can blog the whole page, or just selected snippets.

(Click on the image to view full size)

However, on restarting my browser, I was disappointed to see that the Blog This Extension in Firefox was marked disabled because it was found to be incompatible with Firefox version 3.0.6. Now this can happen sometimes because the developer of the extension did not update the extension after testing it with the latest Firefox update.

(Click on the image to view full size)

Desperate to make good use of this extension, I found the Nightly Tester Tools extension for Firefox, that lets you enable incompatible extensions (among other things), of course at your own risk.

After installing Nightly Tester Tools I was able to see a new option appear when I right-clicked the disabled add-on that would let me override the compatibility check in Firefox. There was another new button in the add-ons dialog that lets you override this for all Firefox add-ons at once:

Get the Nightly Tester Tools Firefox Add-on from here.

The difference between IMAP and POP

2009-02-15T16:26:00.001+05:30

IMAP and POP are two most common ways to access your web-based e-mail offline, from multiple devices. Most web-based e-mail providers allow you to configure your desktop based e-mail programs such as Mozilla Thunderbird and Microsoft Outlook to read your e-mail. This includes Gmail, Hotmail and even Yahoo! Mail.

So now the question arises that what exactly is the difference between POP and IMAP, and which is better of the two.

What's the difference between IMAP and POP?

Unlike POP, IMAP offers two-way communication between your online e-mail account and your email clients. This means when you log in to online e-mail account using a web browser, actions you perform on e-mail clients and mobile devices (e.g. moving an e-mail message to the 'Friends' folder) will instantly and automatically appear in your online e-mail account (i.e. it will already have a 'Friends' folder on the next time you sign in).

IMAP also provides a better method to access your mail from multiple devices. If you check your email at work, on your mobile phone, and again at home, IMAP ensures that new mail is accessible from any device at any given time.

Finally, IMAP offers a more stable experience overall. Whereas POP is prone to losing messages or downloading the same messages multiple times, IMAP avoids this through two-way syncing capabilities between your mail clients and your web e-mail account.

(Click the image for a full size version)

If you're trying to decide between using POP and using IMAP, go with IMAP as your first choice. Note that since POP is a simpler protocol to implement, you are more likely to find support for POP than for IMAP.

Cloudo Web Desktop

2009-02-11T11:42:00.001+05:30

What's a web desktop? Put simply, a web desktop is a desktop environment hosted on a remote server that you can access through your web-browser over an Internet connection.

To quote Wikipedia:

A web desktop or webtop is a desktop environment embedded in a web browser or similar client application. A webtop integrates web applications, web services, client-server applications, application servers, and applications on the local client into a desktop environment using the desktop metaphor. Web desktops provide an environment similar to that of Windows, Mac, or a graphical user interface on Unix and Linux systems. It is a virtual desktop running in a web browser. In a webtop the applications, data, files, configuration, settings, and access privileges reside remotely over the network. Much of the computing takes place remotely. The browser is primarily used for display and input purposes.

I recently did a comparison of some free to use Web Desktops available on the Internet, and came to rank Cloudo Web Desktop at the top. My ranking can be summarized as:

The ranking is purely based on how closely the desktop resembles the "real thing" and how polished it feels to look at and to use.

I recommend that you try all three and choose your personal favorite. I was most impressed by Cloudo and couldn't stop raving about how beautiful it looked with different skins:

(Click on the screenshot to view full size)

It was very easy and intuitive to switch the look and feel to resemble Windows XP, Windows Vista, Mac OS X, Ubuntu or even Windows 3.1 (if you were around when it existed). You won't believe what you'll see in your browser. Click here to try it out straightaway.

Bug in Windows Vista Search

2009-01-18T19:36:00.001+05:30

I am an avid fan of Windows Vista - someone who goes out of my way to convince my friends and family that Windows Vista ain't as bad as it is made out to be by the media. 4 out of 5 laptops at my home are running Windows Vista (the fifth laptop and my desktop run Windows XP).

Therefore it really hurts me whenever I discover a glaring bug in Vista that out to have been caught by the Windows Quality Engineering team long back. Today I discovered one such bug that has significantly dented my perception of Vista and has caused me tremendous pain.

It all started when I decided to do something about a major annoyance that I had been facing with the Windows Search on my primary office laptop. Despite adding some of my custom folders to the Indexing Options, files from these folders would never show up in my search results. So I decided to tweak my search preferences (i.e. Indexing Options) and see if I could fix this longstanding problem of mine.

I started by typing "Indexing" in the snazzy Vista Start menu, and smiled on seeing Windows Search bring up what I wanted right on top:

I clicked on "Indexing Options", leading to the list of my indexed locations, and clicked on "Advanced":

This brought up another dialog (the one that I was really looking for):

The first thing that I tried doing with this dialog was to click the "Restore Defaults" button, hoping to start on a fresh slate. However, doing so brought up this horrendous looking dialog warning me that all hell would break lose if I proceeded with my actions:

Now one thing that I always wish I had more of in this life is time. Not wanting to spend hours waiting for Windows to re-index everything on my disk, including zillions of files and e-mails, I hurriedly clicked "Cancel", and went back to what I was doing -- replying to my 6000+ unread e-mails in Outlook.

After working for 10 minutes and noticing that my laptop's hard disk was spinning endlessly, I noticed something that shook me completely. Despite clicking "Cancel" on the previous dialog (where Windows warned me that by going ahead, my entire index would be re-built from scratch), my index was still being re-built from scratch. Duh!

It has been three hours and I am still waiting for the index to be re-built. Every time I search for any e-mail in Outlook, this is what I get:

This index re-building has completely blocked me from doing my office work effectively -- which is mostly done on Microsoft Outlook -- as I wait endlessly for Windows to re-index everything that I had saved on this laptop in the past six months.

As I type this blog, I am thinking of the careless developer and the equally callous test engineer at Microsoft Redmond, whose joint oversight causes such loss of reputation to great companies like Microsoft.

I hope they fix this in Windows 7.

Want a light-weight alternative to iTunes?

2009-01-02T21:42:00.001+05:30

When I purchased an iTunes-enabled mobile phone in 2006, little did I know that in order to be able to maintain my music library on the phone, I'd have to use the crappy combination of iTunes+QuickTime on my primary computer.

Not only are iTunes and QuickTime unnecessarily large, they leave a lot of crap on the system every time you update to the latest version, and they unnecessarily slow down the system by installing numerous services that need to be enabled just in order to add or remove songs to your iPod.

Luckily, I discovered Floola (a free, light-weight alternative to iTunes), which satisfies the following criteria of any good software:

Stable (does not crash)
Cross platform (available on Windows, Linux and Mac)
Portable (does not require installation)

What's more, Floola is:

Compatible with iTunes (in terms of functionality)
Even recognizes iTunes-enabled Motorola mobile phones
Can manage Music, Videos, Podcasts and Photos
Can repair corrupt iPod databases
Automatically converts incompatible audio and video format files to iPod-compatible format
Highly configurable, with a host of options that you can tweak (see the screen-shot below)

Floola can be downloaded here. If you like Floola, do not forget to donate.

Unfriendly online movie booking websites

2008-12-31T19:38:00.001+05:30

In India you do not get a wide variety of websites for booking your movie tickets online.

Here are the most common ones that I can remember from the top of my head:

Of these, the last one (SatyamCineplexes.com) is the most pathetic website ever created by mankind. For the past five years, I have been unsuccessful in ever getting this site to work. Most of the links and graphics on this site are broken perpetually, and you cannot seem to get anywhere from the homepage. Just this month, I noticed that they've repaired the website so that it is now browseable. However, you can't still book a ticket online. All this is despite the fact that Satyam Cineplexes never fail to advertise this website during the intermission in each show (remember the tagline "SatyamCineplexes.com: The best place to book your movie tickets"?). Shame on Satyam.

My second-best website that rewrote the concept of online booking of movie tickets in India happens to be BookMyShow.com. The site is very well designed, is always up and running, and is easy to use. However, they have tied up with a very limited number of cinema theatres, thereby limiting the customer's choice to a handful of places. The most prominent cinema theatre chains that are accessible for online booking through this website include Wave Cinemas, Fun Cinemas, M2K, G3S etc. Of these, people have posted really bad reviews on Fun Cinemas and M2K all over the Internet, so it is just our bad luck that a perfectly good website is more or less useless for most customers. I sometimes use BookMyShow.com to book tickets for Wave Cinemas, which are pretty decent (though not as good as PVR).

Which brings me to my favorite online movie ticket booking website of all times -- PVRCinemas.com. I love this website because I have almost never faced any issues with this website over the last 3 years since I created my account on it. PVR is a very well managed chain of movie theatres in India, which says a lot about the capability of its management in general, and the one man behind its success -- Ajay Bijli.

However a couple of days ago a very interesting incident happened with me, when I tried booking movie tickets for Ghajini -- the latest Aamir Khan blockbuster -- through PVRCinemas.com website. I first tried to book tickets for Ghajini on Wednesday, 24th December 2008 (the first day the bookings of this movie were opened). However, the website was down the entire day. I tried again a few days later, on Monday, 29th December. This time, the entire website was functional, except the part where you need to login before you can make the payment to book your tickets. For some wierd reason, the website kept on denying my login credentials, saying that the "User ID does not exist." I created a brand new account -- successfully -- and tried logging in with my new account. Ditto. The same error message. Perhaps a small bug by a useless programmer somewhere was costing PVR millions in revenue.

I immediately wrote to the website administrator, notifying them of this problem (click the image for a larger picture):

After sending this message, I checked my mail every half an hour, expecting to find an acknowledgement of the issue, and an ETA for resolving my problem. Nothing happened. Finally, after about 4 hours, I gave up. I went to BookMyShow.com and booked the tickets for the same movie at Wave Cinemas (my second preference).

Before going back to sleep that night I checked the PVR website again, and found to my utter horror that the problem had been fixed, without as much as acknowledging my message, let alone notifying me / thanking me / sending me a bouquet for saving PVR several millions of lost business :(

Then I figured out the reason behind this -- obviously PVR have outsourced the maintenance of this website to a small time IT services company in India, which did not want to let the PVR management know about this service disruption and the loss that it would have caused to PVR. I sincerely hope that someone in the PVR management reads this blog and takes the IT company responsible for the downtime on their website (and on top of it, hiding it) to task.

Attention: Crunchies Finalist Voting Now Open

2008-12-31T14:56:00.001+05:30

Voting for the 2008 Crunchies winners is now open. If you are a startup or individual in the finals, you can get a badge to promote votes here. Voting ends at end of day on January 5.

Make sure you cast your vote before the deadline :)

Windows Live Writer: Now Even Better

2008-04-11T18:57:00.001+05:30

Today I was pleasantly surprised to get an updated version of Windows Live Writer through the Microsoft Update on my Windows XP based notebook.

I am an avid user and fan of Windows Live Writer, and I must confess that my blogging activity has really gone up by a order of magnitude ever since I started using Windows Live Writer to author my blog postings.

Even though Windows Live Writer integrates nicely with so many online blogging services such as Windows Live Spaces, as well as SharePoint, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, WordPress, and Community Server besides several others, there are a few minor edges here and there that show up sometimes.

Since I do almost all my blogging on Blogger.com (I tried WordPress some time back but was horrified to discover that they do not support AdSense-backed ads, so I dumped it pretty soon), I was most concerned with a unique annoyance that I used to face every time I used to embed an image in my blog posting.

When you insert an image in you blog posting, you typically do not want to insert the entire picture (since it can be big). What people typically do is to insert a small thumbnail of the picture, which the user can click in order to view the full-size (i.e. hi-res) image. Even though Live Writer supports this idiom, the problem happened that when someone clicked on the image thumbnail on you blog posting, then instead of opening the image in the browser (which is the preferred behavior), you got a browser dialog (shown alongside) that prompted them to save the image or open it with an external application.

With the recent patch, this problem seems to have been addressed, even though a new bug seems to have replaced it. Try clicking the image of the dialog on the left and you'll notice that it no longer prompts you with another identical dialog. Instead it opens a hi-res (oops a low-res) version of this image in the same browser window. I am hoping that after reading this posting, someone from Microsoft will patch it pretty soon.

To compare with the effect that you would've got before this was patched in Live Writer, visit this older blog post of mine.

Besides this annoyance, a few other problems (mostly related to Blogger.com) have also been addressed with this patch, such as the problem of being unable to add images to your blog postings after you've reached the magical figure of 500 images in all your previous postings combined. Sooner or later everybody would've faced this problem:

File Upload Failed: The remote server returned an error: (500) Internal Server Error.

But what caused this error in the first place? Well as it happens, all the images that you add to your blog on Blogger.com (whether you use Live Writer or not does not matter) end up being uploaded to the Picasa's online image hosting service inside an unlisted album (which is visible to you, but not to others). As it happens, Google has placed a limit of allowing only up to 500 images per album in Picasa. Because of this limit, Live Writer used to return a failure when it tried to upload the 501^st image to the unlisted album using the Picasa APIs.

This problem now seems to have been addressed by the Live Writer development team, and in my case, I am fortunate enough to have got the fix before the problem hit me.

There are a few other fixes in this update that you can get details in the Microsoft support knowledge base article. However there are still a number of things on my wishlist that I am hoping Microsoft will soon address in the next major update of Live Writer. Some of these shortcomings are:

Lack of full WYSIWYG HTML editing support. If you do not know HTML, you'll not be able to do a number of things such as specifying horizontal alignment of tables with respect to the surrounding content, specifying superscripts or subscripts (such as 501^st), specifying background colors in tables rows, columns, cells, or paragraphs, specifying HTML 4.0.1 / CSS based layout and so on. If you are familiar with HTML, you can press Shift+F11 and type the required HTML tags manually.
The ability to embed arbitrary objects (like Java Applets or Flash animations) in your blog posts also requires that you manually edit the HTML source of your posting (by pressing Shift+F11).
There is no built-in spell checker.

Fortunately, Windows Live Writer has excellent support for plug-ins that can be used to extend the functionality of the application. You can check out some of the freely downloadable plug-ins for Windows Live Writer at Windows Live Gallery. For example, there is a plug-in that provides better support for specifying table-related properties when inserting a new table in the blog posting.

After you apply this update, you should be able to verify the build number of Windows Live Writer to be 12.0.1370.325.

Update: After feedback from Microsoft Windows Live Writer developer Charles, an update to this posting is now available here. Thanks for your feedback, Charles.

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How to secure your home wireless network

2008-04-09T19:08:00.001+05:30

If you are even one bit tech savvy, you must have one or more desktop or laptop computers at home. And if you have one more more computers at home, you might have realized the immense joy of being online without being bound by wires.

But did you know that your home wireless network is suspect to a number of security threats -- from neighbors playing peeping toms and using your wireless network to spy on the data that you download from the Internet, to piggy-banking on your airwaves and surfing net for free -- at your cost actually.

There are some very easy and straight-forward steps that you can follow to ensure that your network remains secure, and private -- for your use only. In the examples below I will use some illustrations from my Cisco Linksys WAG200G wireless router's web-based admin console, but the same options are applicable to routers manufactured by other vendors such as D-Link and NetGear.

Change the Default Name (or Network SSID)

The first and foremost step to safeguard your home wireless network is to change the default name (i.e. network SSID) of your network to something else. Each wireless router manufacturer hardcodes the default network SSID to something particular (for example, Linksys hardcode their network SSID name to linksys), making it easy for intruders to discover the esistence of your network. Choose a name that you think might be least likely to conflict with other wireless networks in your neighborhood, but make sure that the network SSID does not contain confidential information like your SSN or PAN number.

Change the Default Admin Password for Your Router

Most routers come with a factory setting for the default administration password. For example, a very typical administrative password used by several router vendors is admin or password. Anybody who has access to your wireless network and the administration password has the ability to remotely connect to your router and modify any settings on it, including, but not limited to, locking you out completely. Therefore, your network is only as secure as the strength of your administration password.

Enable MAC Address-Based Filtering

Most wireless routers manufactured by reputed vendors provide you the ability to configure their device to allow only a fixed, pre-determined list of devices to connect to the wireless network. This ability is provided on the basis of a unique series of numbers and letters assigned to each network enabled device, known as MAC (Media Address Control) address. When you enable MAC address-based filtering in your wireless router, you can supply a list of MAC addresses corresponding to each computer in your home that you would like to be allowed to connect to the wireless network. Keep in mind that this technique is not foolproof, since special software can be downloaded from the Internet and installed on a computer to fool it to assume any MAC address of the hacker's choice.

Clicking the Edit MAC Address Access List button on my Linksys WAG200G wireless router brings up another screen that lets you configure upto 20 unique MAC address that will be allowed to connect to your wireless network.

Enable Data Encyprion

Encryption protects data transmitted over a wireless network. Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA/WPA2) and Wired Equivalency Privacy (WEP) offer different levels of security for wireless communication.

A network encrypted with WPA2/WPA is more secure than a network encrypted with WEP, because WPA2/WPA uses dynamic key encryption. To protect the information as it passes over the airwaves, you should enable the highest level of encryption supported by your network equipment.

WEP is an older encryption standard and may be the only option available on some older devices that do not support WPA.

Besides what has already been told, here are a few more best practices that will help you keep your network secure.

Keep wireless routers, access points, or gateways away
from exterior walls and windows.
Turn wireless routers, access points, or gateways
off when they are not being used (at night, during
vacations).
Use strong passphrases that are at least eight characters
in length. Combine letters and numbers to avoid using
standard words that can be found in the dictionary.

Enjoy the freedom from wires!

Crave for power? Protect your Li-ion battery

2008-03-16T16:06:00.001+05:30

Almost all modern electronic gadgets come with batteries. Right from your notebook computer to a mobile phone, a digital camera to an iPod -- all derive their power from a battery. This makes our digital lives so very dependent on these power-packed devices.

How many times have you gone out shopping for a new battery for one of your devices hoping for a longer backup time, only to see it fall short of your expectations within a few months of use?

Welcome to the club. Almost all of us have faced this situation one time or the other. Whether it is a mobile phone or a laptop, I have almost found myself cursing the battery manufacturers for screwing our lives so royally. After 6 to 12 months of constant use, the life of the battery falls down to such pathetic levels, that continuing to use them any more becomes a nightmare. Eventually they need to be replaced.

Lately I started wondering what is the root cause of this problem and if there is a way I can try to prolong the life of my Lithiom-ion batteries. As it turned out, there is a way. To understand that, you first have to know a little bit of technical detail of how a Lithium-ion battery works.

Lithium-ion batteries (sometimes abbreviated Li-ion batteries) are a type of rechargeable battery in which a lithium ion moves between the anode and cathode. The lithium ion moves from the anode to the cathode during discharge and from the cathode to the anode when charging.

Lithium ion batteries are currently one of the most popular types of battery for portable electronics, with one of the best energy-to-weight ratios, no memory effect, and a slow loss of charge when not in use. Certain kinds of mistreatment may cause Li-ion batteries to explode. Although originally intended for consumer electronics, lithium-ion batteries are growing in popularity for defense, automotive, and aerospace applications due to their high energy density.

Lithium-ion batteries can be formed into a wide variety of shapes and sizes so as to efficiently fill available space in the devices they power. Li-ion batteries are lighter than other equivalent secondary batteries—often much lighter. Li-ion batteries do not suffer from the memory effect. They also have a low self-discharge rate of approximately 5% per month, compared with over 30% per month in common nickel metal hydride batteries.

However, despite all the advantages outlined above, the Li-ion batteries also have quite a lot of disadvantages. A unique drawback of the Li-ion battery is that its life span is dependent upon aging from time of manufacturing (shelf life) regardless of whether it was charged, and not just on the number of charge/discharge cycles. Under certain temperature conditions, the batteries have a tendency to become damaged and can sometimes never fully recharge again. As batteries age, their internal resistance rises. This causes the voltage at the terminals to drop under load, reducing the maximum current that can be drawn from them. Eventually they reach a point at which the battery can no longer operate the equipment it is installed in for an adequate period.

Li-ion batteries can even go into a state that is known as deep discharge. At this point, the battery may take a very long time to recharge. For example, a laptop battery that normally charges fully in 3 hours may take up to 42 hours to recharge. Or the deep discharge state may be so severe that the battery will never come back to life. Deep discharging only takes place when products with rechargeable batteries are left unused for extended periods of time (often 2 or more years) or when they are fully discharged so often that they can no longer hold a charge. This makes Li-ion batteries unsuitable for back-up applications where they may become completely discharged.

A stand-alone Li-ion cell must never be discharged below a certain voltage to avoid irreversible damage. Therefore all Li-ion battery systems are equipped with a circuit that shuts down the system when the battery is discharged below the predefined threshold. It should thus be impossible to "deep discharge" the battery in a properly designed system during normal use. This is also one of the reasons Li-ion cells are rarely sold as such to consumers, but only as finished batteries designed to fit a particular system.

Given that Liuim ion batteries have so many problems, there are a few guidelines that you can follow to prolong the life of your batteries. Some of these guidelines might be too impractical to follow in everyday life, but they still serve as an advisory towards some practices that are a complete no-no for Li-ion battery users.

Unlike Ni-Cd batteries, lithium-ion batteries should be charged early and often. However, if they are not used for a long time, they should be brought to a charge level of around 40% - 60%. Lithium-ion batteries should not be frequently fully discharged and recharged ("deep-cycled") like Ni-Cd batteries, but this is necessary after about every 30th recharge to recalibrate any external electronic "fuel gauge" (e.g. State Of Charge meter). This prevents the fuel gauge from showing an incorrect battery charge.
Lithium-ion batteries should never be depleted to below their minimum voltage, 2.4v to 3.0v per cell. Most of your devices will handle this automatically. Even the finished batteries that you buy from authentic dealers will have an internal cutoff to prevent a complete discharge.
Li-ion batteries should be kept cool. Ideally they are stored in a refrigerator. Aging will take its toll much faster at high temperatures. The high temperatures found in cars cause lithium-ion batteries to degrade rapidly. However, do not freeze the batteries.
Li-ion batteries should be bought only when needed, because the aging process begins as soon as the battery is manufactured.
When using a notebook computer running from fixed line power over extended periods, the battery should be removed, and stored in a cool place so that it is not affected by the heat produced by the computer.
There is some benefits to fully discharging your lithium battery periodically, for laptops this can be especially important. If you start to notice your battery meter is becoming more and more inaccurate, it may be time for some battery calibration. By allowing your lithium battery to fully drain, this will help the battery recalibrate allowing for more accurate measurements of battery life. This should be done once every 30 charges or when you notice battery readings are off.

Following even some of these recommendations will help you derive the longest possible life out of your batteries and also help you save some money to spend on buying the latest new electronic gadgets.

Amazing RocketDock

2008-03-11T14:28:00.001+05:30

To be truthful, I am a Windows / Linux guy. The last time I worked on Mac OS X was about 5 years ago, when I worked as a developer on Adobe InDesign 2.0.

The one thing that really fascinated me on Mac OS X was the Dock. The Dock is Apple's answer to the Start menu in Windows, albeit only a little more stylish.

When I moved to a different product in Adobe, I started missing the Dock that I had so got used to liking on my Mac. And I started searching for a replacement of the Dock on Windows.

That was when I stumbled upon RocketDock. RocketDock is free implementation of the Apple Dock for Windows users, only much, much better. Here's how RocketDock looks like.

The RocketDock team describes their product as: The single greatest piece of software. Ever. I am not sure if that is 100% accurate, but it's pretty close. Being an engineer myself, I know the kind of technical maturity and sophistication that goes in to build an application like RocketDock.

Here's a small video that shows RocketDock in action:

As you can make out from the video, RocketDock is as good as any paid dock implementation for Windows (such as ObjectDock). Heck, maybe it is even better.

It has multiple features like different screen placement options, minimize to dock functionality, live window previews (in Windows Vista), transparency adjustment, running application indicators, multiple hover and click effects, autohide functionality, hundreds of skins to choose from, and a lot more.

I highly recommend you to try out RocketDock on your Windows-based computers. To know more about RocketDock, click here.

Discover Personas for Firefox

2008-03-08T17:53:00.001+05:30

Today I discovered upon the most wonderful extension for Firefox that I always wanted but never thought I would get. It's called Personas for Firefox and it has been developed by Mozilla Labs.

What's unique about this extension is that it adds light-weight theming support to Firefox -- which means that it lets you switch between a number of nice looking themes in Firefox without having to restart the browser -- as is the case with the usual themes that you install in Firefox.

The way this extension works is that you get a small icon in the browser's status-bar, which you can click to choose from a number of themes that are categorized by popularity as well as by the type of the theme (click the screenshot to enlarge).

What's more, you even get to set your theme selection to a random choice from any category of your preference, which means Firefox will use a random theme each time it restarts! I am wondering how much better can this get?

I highly recommend this extension to every Firefox fan. This is something you might have been waiting all along :-)

To know more about Personas, and to install the extension, click here.

Buying a Laptop from Dell

2008-02-19T12:18:00.001+05:30

I recently ordered a laptop from Dell India.

I found a number of problems with the billing, invoicing and delivery of the order in Dell India, which left me very dissatisfied.

1. There was no way to place my order online directly without getting a sales representative involved.

2. Once my order was successfully placed, the sales representative stopped taking my calls and stopped answering my e-mails.

3. The sales representative did not provide me any way to track the status of my order.

4. The expected date of delivery (15 days) was communicated only verbally, not in written.

5. The credit card payment had to be made over the phone. There was no payment gateway however. I was supposed to hand over my credit card details to the Sales Representative verbally. This is a highly unsafe and therefore an unacceptable practice.

6. After making the payment, I was not provided any written record (hard copy / soft copy) as a receipt for the payment.

7. My notebook computer was delivered to me after a long delay (one month after placing the order and making the payment). Such delays are unacceptable, and must be compensated for, if unavoidable due to any reason.

For these reasons, I would never recommend Dell to any friend, relative or colleague in India.

Review: Windows Live Writer

2007-11-19T02:16:00.001+05:30

I am using Microsoft's cool new blog-editing tool named Windows Live Writer to post this entry.

I downloaded Windows Live Writer a few moments ago and configured it to connect to all 4 of my Blogger.com accounts, including this one.

The user interface of Windows Live Writer is quite slick, and some screenshots of it that I saw online prompted me to try it out. Here's how the user interface of the tool looks like on my Windows XP Professional box:

This is my first post using this tool, and going by the kind of publicity Microsoft is giving to this tool, I was expecting it to be really bubbling with features.

As of now, I have already tried performing a few basic tasks with this tool, which are:

Setting up my blogs hosted at Blogger.com
Creating a new blog post
Inserting images in my new blog post

Let me discuss how well this tool has fared with respect to doing the above three tasks.

Setting up my blogs

Microsoft claims that besides supporting Windows Live Spaces and SharePoint weblog, which are Microsoft's own blogging services, Windows Live Writer is very well integrated with a number of other third-party blogging services providers, including (but not limited to) WordPress, Blogger, Atom, TypePad, LiveJournal and Movable Type.

The screenshot below shows the full list of providers supported by Windows Live Writer:

However, going by my experience, the support for third-party blogging service providers is only half baked, and incomplete, to say the least.

The first time I realized this when I tried setting up my Blogger.com account inside Windows Live Writer.

Here's what happened:

The first dialog gives you a choice to setup either a Windows Live Spaces account, or a SharePoint weblog account, or a third-party account:

I wanted to setup my Blogger.com account, so I chose the third radio button, named Another weblog service and clicked Next.

Then I was presented with this confusing screen:

I was thoroughly confused with this screen, since I was expecting to see a drop-down of all supported blogging service providers.

However, since that list was not available, I typed in http://www.blogger.com/ in the URL field and also provided my username and password:

And then I clicked Next:

Cool. I was expecting Windows Live Writer to connect to my Blogger.com account, and retrieve a listing of all the (multiple) blogs that host on their website, and then enable me to select the blogs that would like to manage using the software.

However, to my dismay, this is what followed:

Alright. No problem. Let me choose my weblog service provider. Perhaps this should have been the first dialog to be shown anyways. I selected Blogger in the drop-down, and saw that the text field below got populated automatically:

The <feed-id> field looked cryptic. I connected to the Blogger website and went over their help and FAQ to try and understand what I should set my feed-id to. When I found nothing, I decided to go ahead and try my luck anyways, and pressed Next. Sure enough, I was immediately presented with a dialog asking me to set <feed-id> to something.

Alright, I clicked the Back button, and replaced <feed-id> with the ID of my blog: etechland (my blog can be accessed at http://etechland.blogspot.com/):

Then I pressed Next again. Then something nice happened:

So I was actually getting onto something now. Hopes raised, I typed in the characters "tocon" into the text field and clicked OK. I was immediately rewarded with this:

This dialog looked quite similar to one of the early dialogs that I had presented with, before meeting with failure. This made me suspicious. However this time I started seeing further progress than I had made with my first attempt:

And then finally this:

Hurray. So finally Windows Live Writer was able to detect all my blogs hosted on Blogger. That's simply amazing. But why the hell does it want me to choose only one of these blogs? I would have liked to bring in all 4 blogs to be managed with Live Writer. Anyways, I selected the first one (e-Tech Land) and clicked Next again. Here's what I saw:

All right. At least I have one of my blogs inside of Windows Live Writer now. How about others? As I soon discovered, to my utter disappointment, there was no way I could re-use all the effort that I had already put in to import the remaining blogs that I own. For each of my remaining blogs, I was forced to repeat the entire damn process. What a waste of time...

Creating a new Blog Post

Anyways, I finally decided to try and post a new entry to my primary blog (e-Tech Land) to see how my editing experience with Windows Live Writer turned out.

This is what I did. I clicked on the button named Weblog on the toolbar, and chose e-Tech Land from the list of blogs shown:

I was immediately presented with a new blank document where I could start typing my fresh blog entry. Wait a minute. I want to check the previous blog entries that I had made on my blog using the Blogger.com website's lousy, buggy WYSIWYG editor. Also, I want to see if I am able to edit and/or publish any of my draft posts that are saved online. Alas! Windows Live Writer fails me. There is absolutely no way that Live Writer would let me manage my previous entries that have already been published, or are saved as drafts. Thus, in my very first moments working with Live Writer, I have discovered a very important functionality that is missing, that will force me to visit the Blogger.com website periodically instead of enjoying my Live Writer software. That's sad. Really sad.

Anyways, I start typing out into my new blog entry inside the ravishing Windows Live application. Since I chose to share my experiences with all my readers, I am obliged to start taking screenshots and embed them in my blog entry as and when required.

Inserting images in my new blog post

To capture the screenshot in the Windows clipboard, I select my Windows Live Writer application main window and press Alt+Print Screen keys. Now I click on the Insert Picture link on the toolbox shown in the right hand side of the application:

And this is the dialog that I am presented with:

Hmm... so either I can choose an image that is already saved on the dsik, or I can insert a URL of an image that is already hosted online:

That's all right dude, but how about the clipboard? What do I need to do to insert an image that exists in the Windows clipboard? A screenshot that I captured just a moment back using Alt+Print Screen?

Nothing. Another major disappointment. I know while writing this port, I will be taking hundreds of screenshots and embedding them in my blog, however it looks like each time I have to embed a screenshot in my post, I would need to first use MS Paint to save the screenshot to disk, and then import it into Live Writer. What a shame!

Anyways, if that is the case, then so be it. I am prepared to give this cool-looking application a chance.

So I launch MS Paint, paste the contents of my clipboard in it, save the result as a PNG file to My Pictures, switch back to Live Writer, click on the Insert Picture link again, choose the same image that I just saved to My Pictures, and get it in my blog entry:

There are several nice things that I immediately notice about this feature. The first is the presence of image resizing handles on the image preview. These handles let me resize the image exactly the way I want it to, maintaining the aspect ratio.

Then if you notice the toolbax, it has now started showing image properties, letting me choose how I want to wrap text around the image, apply margins or borders (like a drop shadow) to the image. There is even a drop-down that lets me specify if my image preview icon should link to the original image, a custom URL, or nothing. Nice. One thumbs up.

Next, I switch tabs in the Image toolbox and switch to the Effects tab.

Here I am shown a list of special effects that I can apply to the image, and see it being transformed in real time. Effects include Black and White, Sepia, Gaussian Blur and several more.

Nice. I immediately try out the Black and White transformation, followed by the Gaussian Blur effect and here's what I get:

Cool. Next, I try removing some effects selectively but leaving in some others. I try removing the Black and White effect. The Gaussian Blur now appears on the colored image. Great! Another thumbs up.

Hey, it has been quite a while since I have been typing, so I should save my work. I see a button labeled Save Draft on the toolbar.

Clicking on the button saves my draft post locally on my system. Hmm... I would have wanted to save my draft online, so that I could have continued working on it from my office machine tomorrow. Is there a way? As it turns out, there is. Clicking on the small down arrow next to the Save Draft button reveals my choices:

Besides the Post Draft to Weblog, I also see a third choice, labeled Post Draft and Edit Online. Since it is disabled, I am guessing that it only works for Windows Live Spaces, but not for third-party (i.e. non-Microsoft) weblog service providers.

Anyways, whatever I have seen of Windows Live Writer still makes me feel that this is a tool that is nice to have. My overall experience of creating this blog posting, editing it locally on my laptop in offline mode, and then publishing it online after making a lot of formatting corrections and other changes using Windows Live Writer was much better than just typing this blog entry online using Blogger.com's online WYSIWYDG (what-you-see-is-what-you-don't-get) editor.

Hats off to Microsoft for making this tool available freely (you can download it from http://get.live.com/) and I am looking forward to drastic improvements in the next few versions of this tool. Meanwhile, let me click the Publish button to enable all of you to start reading this entry online:

Blazing Fast MTNL Broadband

2007-10-07T14:53:00.000+05:30

Perhaps you are aware that the year 2007 has been termed as the Year of the Broadband by the Ministry of Telecommunications, Government of India.

As a part of this initiative, the Government has decided to upgrade all existing (state-owned) MTNL and BSNL broadband customers with 256 kbps plans to a whopping 2 Mbps at no additional cost beyond what they have been paying for their connection at present.

Presently I have two Broadband connections at my home -- one from the privately held company Airtel, and the other (my fall-back connection) from the state-owned MTNL.

Airtel are known across India for their super efficient customer-care system and their non-interrupted connectivity. In fact, Airtel has become a benchmark for other companies to measure their consumer satisfaction and their broadband up-time.

On the other hand, MTNL are known across New Delhi and Mumbai for their super-lazy staff, completely non-existent customer care, and pathetic up-time. However MTNL is the only other company in New Delhi, that, besides Airtel, offers DSL (or ADSL) based broadband connectivity.

Of course we also have companies like Tata Indicom and Sify Broadband that offer cable based broadband; however, their uptime is so poor (about 25% to 50% up-time, depending on your luck), that they don't count in this discussion.

Therefore, when going for a broadband solution, I went with Airtel as my primary broadband service provider, and MTNL as a fall-back connection for situations when my Airtel connection was out of order and I had business critical work to accomplish.

From Airtel, I chose a monthly plan of Rs. 999 (+ taxes), which promises speeds up to 256 kbps and no limits on the amount of data that can be downloaded or uploaded. From MTNL, I chose their cheapest monthly plan of Rs 199 (+ taxes), which promised me a minimum speed of 256 kbps, and a monthly data limit of 400 MB.

I was using both these connections optimally for the past few months, when suddenly, one day, my MTNL connection stopped working (thanks to one of the MTNL employees, who did something weird with my in-house wiring the last time he visited us to help us get rid of noise in our land line telephone).

After that, it took me countless phone calls, countless minutes of waiting, and countless number of times of getting humiliated by the state-owned MTNL staff (from linemen to their high-ranking officers, who are not even interested in speaking to customers) to get my broadband connection working again. Almost one month had passed between the time when my MTNL broadband worked the last time around.

However, imagine my surprise when I noticed that this time, MTNL have upgraded all their 256 kbps connections to 2 Mbps. On Airtel, 256 kbps is the maximum speed that I could ever hope to get for Rs 999 per month. However, on MTNL, I am now getting 2 Mbps speeds by paying as little as Rs 199 a month.

Look at the screenshot of my laptop that I took today. It clearly shows a download speed of about 200+ KB/s on my MTNL broadband connection.

(Click on the image to enlarge)

Now imagine my dilemma -- I am now stuck with two incomplete broadband service providers:

One, that promises excellent uptime and great customer service (Airtel), but are unwilling to lower their price or increase the average broadband speed beyond 128 kbps (yes, that's the average speed of their 256 kbps plan).

Second, which offers a pathetic, almost non-existent customer-care, a very highly unreliable connection, but blazing fast speeds at a very affordable price (MTNL).

Perhaps the Airtel guys are aware that they have an upper hand over the state-owned MTNL because of the better reliability and customer-care that they offer, because of which people who wish to use a broadband connection for their business critical needs will never opt in for MTNL as their primary broadband provider. As long as this condition remains, Airtel have little reason to lower their prices or to offer better download speeds at existing tariffs.

What would you do if you were in my situation? As for me, I am just praying to God to help me see a day in my lifetime when I can get a combination of the best from both the worlds in a single broadband connection.

Till then, let's enjoy the Year of the Broadband :-)

Time to Boycott Yahoo! Messenger India?

2007-08-27T20:56:00.000+05:30

Funny that I noticed it, but Yahoo! seem to have got rid of the voice-chat feature in the Indian version of their Instant Messenger program. Here's the features list of the Yahoo! Messenger (U.S. version):

(Click on the image to enlarge)

Notice how the PC-to-PC voice-call feature is prominently mentioned. Now look at a similar screen-shot of the features list of the Yahoo! Messenger (India version):

(Click on the image to enlarge)

Viola! The PC-to-PC voice-call feature is simply missing here. Nice piece of magic there, Yahoo!

Can someone from Yahoo! India please explain why this feature does not exist in the Indian version of their IM? Since PC-to-PC voice calls do not fall under the category of VoIP, I am sure no legal issues are causing this discrimination. Both Google Talk as well as Skype seem to offer this feature regardless of the country of origin of the user.

So Yahoo! Messenger (India) users, isn't this enough to give a boot to Yahoo! Messenger and switch to Google Talk / Skype?