I had attended a Seagate event last month where they unfolded their new line of products and a new concept in external drives, GoFlex. GoFlex drives are different from existing external drives in that the drive and the connectors come as separate units, be it firewire, USB2.0 or USB3.0. (You can see a visual representation on the Seagate site. Click on accessories.) The logic behind this apparently was that the entire unit need not be wasted if there was a problem with the connectors. Instead, the faulty connector could now be replaced with a new connector with no harm done to the drive. Of course, the more probable result could well be more headaches since one would now have to keep track of the connector in addition to the drive. The connectors were quite expensive by themselves as well so I would think twice before going in for this drive. Another minus point that came up in the discussion was that while the drive itself had a warranty of 3 years, the connectors only had a warranty of ninety days. If I went in for an existing drive with integrated connectors, then, presumably the 3 year warranty would cover them as well.That said, Seagate has also come out with connectors which turn your external drive into devices ranging from HD media devices to net sharing devices when snapped on so this well might be the shape of things to come.

I was reminded of this whole Go-Flex concept when I came across the news yesterday that Seagate had come out with a humongous 3 Terrabyte drive. There was a time when I would have thought a 1TB drive would be sufficient to carry a lifetime’s worth of data. (Just by way of comparison, the contents of the entire Library of Congress comes to about 12 TB).  But, a day spent recording an outing with a camcorder and then watching with horror as my hard drive filled up with the video files (since the camcorder had to be elsewhere) has convinced me that even 3 terrabytes will seem insufficient before long. But, as the Crunchgear reviewer rhetorically asks, can I trust data, be it a lifetime of memories or important documentation to one drive?

Update: Just found out that while the drive retails for around $250(Rs. 11500) in the US, it costs a whopping Rs18,250 here in India.  Don’t think I’ll be rushing out to buy it any time soon

If this blog has been silent for a while, it’s because it came close to oblivion, and was then pulled back from the brink. I’d made up my mind to shut down the blog after I received a renewal notice from my webhosting providers Yahoo further raising charges by another Rs.1000 odd a year. This looked to be a recurring practice since they’d done exactly the same thing last year, and was economically unfeasible in the long run. I had the appetite to venture into unfamiliar territory and switch over to new hosting . What I didn’t have the appetite to do was to waste time on screwing things up and then fixing it, inevitable in a complex operation such as this.  But, I found a Man Friday in the web master in my office who agreed to help me out, and now all I had to do was to find a cheap webhosting provider. Tried out the usual suspects, Godaddy and the other but was kinda put off by the sales pitches on their websites, then looked closer to home, and found this provider called speedhost.in that was offering 50% off on the second year.   Checked around some more and even got a coupon that gave me another 10% off and I was good to go. Bought the webspace, called up their one-man customercare/billing/sales number for instructions on transferring domains and began the process. Got the domain transfer done in 5 days flat, probably because MelbourneIT were the previous registrars, and then started on the website migrating process. First tried the phpmyadmin route which turned out to be a complete disaster, and then did it in a jiffy thru the WordPress Import/Export Tool. WordPress rocks:-)

It’s too early in the day to pass judgement on how good speedhost.in is in the hosting department but I like what I have seen so far. They have an affiliate program so I thought I’d put a link here just because I can:-)

I download apps regularly based on reviews in various sites from lifehacker to freewaregenius. Most of them end up having one drawback or the other and end up being uninstalled equally regularly. The two apps that I have retained are A-PDF  INFO Changer from A-PDF and Mp3tag because both perform an enormously valuable service in optimising metatags, the additional info found on most files which can help with categorising and collating.

Mp3tag has come in useful after I bought my Nokia 5800 (more about it here) and started filling it up with sundry podcasts from sites like UChannel and BBC World Service. After a while I realised that if I optimised the metatags on the files I downloaded, I would have an altogether different listening experience. That’s because, most of the files I downloaded either didn’t have any metatags on them, or were meta tagged wrongly. For instance, if my file was tagged anything other than “Podcast” (they were most often tagged as talks), then I lost out on a lot of useful facilities my 5800 offered with regard to podcasts. These included the facility of restarting any file from the point at which I had stopped listening even if I had listened to other files after listening to the first. I could also classify episodes according to source and give titles to the podcasts other than the cryptic system generated titles often found on these files.

The second app is something I use with another app mentioned earlier on this blog, Mendeley. As with mp3 files, metadata is a value addition for pdf files as well, especially when used with sorting software such as Mendeley. It goes without saying that unless the metadata attached to the files is relevant, the sorting will end up being less than accurate.

Enter PDF Info changer which allows me to change the metadata on the file, from the title of the file, to author and keywords. Of course, it goes without saying that if only the producers of the content took the few additional minutes needed to do these  minor housekeeping work before releasing it to the world, a lot of the time and effort expended on my part would be saved. That remains wishful thinking for now

Having used the Nokia 5800 for over two months no, I thought it’s time for an update to balance out my initial impressions. It’s still a great phone with some good software coming through in bits and pieces. However, the apps fade in comparison to what’s available for the Iphone and in the Android store:-( The OS is somewhat buggy resulting in crashes every once in a while. The fixes can vary and therefore require a fair amount of googling before one stumbles upon the right solution. (Thankfully, Nokia itself has an online  forum for discussing such issues) Most recently, the Music Player on the phone refused to update the songs in the library and I had to try more than one fix to get it right. Once that was done, then the music software on the PC also crashed and this required even more googling. Of course the two crashes were related   since the song database has got corrupted at both ends but the solution involved deleting files which can be a heart in the mouth experience on a mobile phone. In this regard, Symbian is starting to resemble Windows:-)

Some of the more interesting apps I’ve downloaded include Snaptu which is a kind of portmanteau app enabling one to use a host of services available on the net from Twitter to Cricinfo. I’ve also had to uninstall a few like the Evernote app for Symbian since it kep crashing, not surprising that, tho since it’s still in pre-Alpha mode:-). I’ve also had to do some trial and error in order to get uploading snaps to Twitter right but it’s been well worth the effort:-)

The tweet is automatically geotagged so my followers can also see where the pic was taken. I was also looking around for a Twitter client that could geotag my tweets and I finally ended up with Twibble. Like many of the other apps, it is yet to be optimised for Symbian s60v5  but it still does get the job done.

When it came to video, I had to figure out how to convert from the phone’s mp4 format to something that could be uploaded to Youtube.  I finally found a nerdy software (as evident from the name:-) called mp4cam2avi on sourceforge which could do the needful.

So, it’s been a fun ride so far, and I’m not too sure how long it will last given the way I’m putting it through its paces. The corollary to that is that I’m starting to get worried about my eyesight since a lot of my reading has shifted to mobile!!!

So, to sum it all up, Nokia sucks at software but has some great VFM hardware:-) There are enough third party apps for symbian floating around but not all of them are optimised for touchscreen.  In other words, there’s plenty to keep one occupied either installing apps or fixing them. Just keeping my fingers crossed that all this experimentation doesn’t screw up the OS:-|

I was all set to blog about Qik, an app that once you download to your mobile, can then be used to to stream video directly from your phone’s camera onto the web when along came furtiv, another useful piece of software that essentially overcomes one of the shortcomings of the 5800(where do they get these names???).

First, a quick word about Qik(excuse the pun:-).  Qik lets you stream video live from your camera phone directly onto a website where it can be used by others. Either a 3G connection or a wifi connection are of course required for it to work properly. The phone also stores a copy of what’s been streamed so once the live stream is done, you then have the option of uploading your content onto the qik website and setting it either for private or public view.

There are a few other bells and whistles such as being able to chat with your friends in real time while streaming content and also informing your friends via twitter and sms  while streaming video. You can also post video direct to your wall on Facebook if you re the type to let it all hang out. All in all, this is a nifty bit of software that adds functionality to the video recording capabilities of your phone. Of course, the lack of 3G here limits its usage and you can’t really play citizen journalist yet.

Furtiv, the other goodie,  overcomes a shortcoming of the phone that I mentioned in my earlier post, which is the lack of onetouch access to sites such as Picasa. All you have to do now is to download some settings(not even an app) from the furtiv site and you are good to go with sites ranging from youtube to picasa. furtiv is still in beta so its too early to tlak about bells and whistles though a lot more is being promised in the final product. Once the settings have been downloaded and you follow the instructions and allow furtive access to your picasa or youtube account, then an option to upload your photos/videos to these services becomes available in the upload option when you go to the media that you want to upload. Might sound complicated but it’s very simple since there’s no app to download. There are some screenshots on the furtiv website that should give you a better idea of how to go about being furtiv(excuse the meaningless pun again:-)

My Nokia 6600, which I’d bought for the princely sum of Rs 8,900 all of three years ago suddenly refused to switch on one morning about three weeks back. Did a survey on the Net for a new phone, was sufficently intrigued by the new touch phones from the Nokia stable (5230 and 5530) to check them out but finally zoomed in on the 5800 Xpressmusic  once I realised that I couldn’t do without 3G, Wi-fi and GPS. The newer phones had only any 2 out of these three. So, off it was to the shops to feel and touch, and to do a comparative price survey. The price quoted was between 16K and 18K…Nokia had dropped prices from 21k a month before after removing accessories such as the TV out cable, stand and leather cover.  Then it was off to the ATM to withdraw the moolah. Being an SBI ATM, after a lot of whirring and clicking and the sound of money being furiously counted, I got a slip with the message “unable to process”. (I later checked my bank balance and almost had a heart attack when I found the money had been debited from my account nevertheless, but that’s another story) Anyways, that turned out for the good, because the next day, Nokia dropped prices by another 3.5K, to Rs.13,500. Now that I’ve used it for a couple of weeks, I can say with certainty, that  for that price, it’s a STEAL.

What the Tube has done is to liberate me from the desktop.. I can check emails and surf the Net over GPRS and WiFi with ease using either the built-in browser or Opera, chat on gmail or any of the other IMs or make skype calls using  fring, and do a whole host of other things on the move that I used to use a desktop or laptop for before. For instance, I can take snaps and upload them on the move to my photoblog at  vella.vox.com. Why at vox and not to my WordPress blog, I hear you ask? Well, that’s because, while Nokia excels in hardware, it really sucks providing associated services. So, while it provides one touch access to mobile blogging on flickr, youtube and other sites in many parts of the world, in India, the only site you can access is vox and the Nokia M-blog site which seems to be defunct. Similarly, both the Nokia Music Store and its Ovi store are a royal pain to use, scoring a giant zero on both navigation and usability fronts. The  Ovi software that downloaded to my phone, for instance, gave up the ghost after a few uses, and now simply returns the message “initialisation script failed” whenever I try to fire it up.

That said, there’s quite a bit of free stuff in the Ovi Store that adds value and utility to the Tube. The software I’ve downloaded include the Nokia Photo Browser, a Hindi language pack for the dictionary, and widgets from Rediff Moneywiz and CNBC TV18..

Even before all that, the first thing I downloaded was Google maps for Mobile which i find to be much better than Nokia Maps…I was desperate to download Nokia Sports Tracker but to my dismay found that there was no version available for this phone yet. But, of course, nature abhors a vacuum, and after some digging around, I found a similar software and service on Ovi called Endomondo. Endomondo keeps track of my sporting activities with the software on the phone uploading data to the website which I can later access to find out details varying from distance run, or cycled or swum, time taken, and calories burned.

My contributions to Google Mapmaker have also jumped thanks to the A-GPS which makes it that much more easier to pinpoint locations. I have also downloaded GPSed, a trip tracking software that uploads my GPS traces to its site where it can be converted to gpx or kml files. Once I get the hang of it, I intend to start contributing to OpenStreetMap where basic info about Delhi is still missing.

I had an initial gripe about the battery uptime since I had to recharge it almost on a daily basis, but after trawling through the many 5800 help fora, I got a tip about switching off the 3G radio and after doing that the battery is draining at a much slower pace. The 5800 also has a habit of hanging once in a while, especially if any service is active when a call comes in, but I guess, that goes with the territory. The fact that there are nearly 8 million users of the phone, will, I hope, guarantee continued support to the phone by Nokia, and regular updates of the firmware. Other users have been crying out for   kinetic scrolling and whatnot, and I have gone along and signed the petition but I can live without that. The only thing that I have on my wishlist is that Airtel, my mobile provider comes out with a unlimited data plan for GPRS at a reasonable cost.

Finally, the 5800 does come with a camera with Carl Zeiss lens and built-in flash, but the indoor snaps are terrible.

That said, the photographs are geo-tagged and once uploaded on, say, Picasa, give viewers an idea of where exactly the pictures were taken. You can see it for yourself how that works by clicking here

One of the things that I have always struggled with is keeping my desktop free of clutter…I am a compulsive downloader and everything I download invariably lands on my desktop. So, at any given point, and particularly  near deadlines, I might have as many as a hundred files on my desktop. Once the deadline passes, then I do the usual spring-cleaning and put them into various folders.

Fences, this new piece of software that I found listed in Forty-Three of The Best Free Windows Enhancements That You Should Know About on freeware genius has come as a godsend. Simply put, it “fences off the desktop in such a way that you can group your files together in any way you feel like. My desktop ended up looking like this after I used the autofence function in Fences:

Creating new fences is a breeze, and as far as I can see, the app uses little to no resources at all. This is despite have some very nifty graphical effects built into it. The only downside is that the present release is an  alpha version which will expire on the 31st of August, 2009. Hopefully, the final version will also remain free. There is talk of a Pro version on the website, so I’m expecting this to be the case.

After all the hype over Cuil being a Google killer, it turned out to be such a damp squib, so the once bitten twice shy syndrome manifested itself and it’s only now that I’ve taken Wolfram Alpha out for a spin. Wolfram is not exactly a Google clone- it calls itself a “computational knowledge engine” and you really need to try it out yourself to figure out what it’s all about. It’s still in a very early stage of development, hence the “alpha” tag, but the “alpha” could also be taken to mean that it’s a knowledge provider on steroids:-)

Like nearly everything else on the Internet, you can use it either for productive or unproductive work- of course there’s very little separating the two, nowadays. Wolfram can produce the most amazing bits of trivia for a whole host of subjects, such as the ones given below:

Among the downsides of Wolfram are that there is a bias towards the US and the West since most of that data fed into Wolfram is from Western sources. Nonetheless, I found plenty of interesting facts, when for instance, I fed Indian cities and towns to the Wolf.

I also ended up with Wolframs equivalent of a 404 whenever I tried something that was not in Wolfram’s database, or because I strayed too far from Wolfram’s rather rigid syntax.

Before you take Wolfram out for a spin yourself, it would be useful to take a look at the faqs and the tips, some of which are given below:

Wolfram comes in many different flavours including toolbars and addons for your browser of choice. It can also be embedded on websites, like so. Enjoy!

There are any number of programs, widgets, bookmarklets and add-ons that I install, and almost instantly uninstall because they come up short, one way or the other. It could be that they hog too much resources, or they have a clunky interface or simply end up complicating things.

A simple bookmarklet that does none of the above is called simply Readability and it’s  made a world of difference to my online experience. What it does is to strip away all the excess from a webpage leaving you to concentrate on the content that you have come for. As the developers put it, “Reading anything on the Internet has become a full-on nightmare. As media outlets attempt to eke out as much advertising revenue as possible, we’re left trying to put blinders on to mask away all the insanity that surrounds the content we’re trying to read.”

This is all the more true with Indian websites which are pretty badly designed to begin with, with the advertising making things worse. A good example that I visit frequently is Mouthshut.com which is a consumer review site. The reviews that I have put up for the public interest are barely readable, thanks to the advertisement blocks that surround the content and literally squeeze it out.

A click on the Readability bookmarklet and hey presto, sanity is restored to my screen. The same content is now available without the screaming advertisements or the other distractions fore and aft.

The developers warn that it doesn’t work for every site but my experience has been that it works for 99% of sites.  You can set how you want the modified page to appear in terms of style(Newspaper, novel, ebook, terminal), font size and margin. These tweaks enable you to arrive at a page that suits you best. Readability has been an enormous relief for my sore eyes and is highly recommended. You can get the full funda here.

I found an invite to be a beta tester for Wikirank in my mailbox this morning and promptly took it out for a spin. It’s a service similar to Google Trends, showing what people are reading on Wikipedia though it is no way affiliated with Wikipedia. Like Google Trends, it also lets you compare topics to see which is more popular.

I did a comparison of top Indian political leaders and this is how Wikirank ranked them. Manmohan Singh got the bump-up on the 20th of January since that’s when he was admitted for heart surgery. Even without the boost, he was still the most popular of the lot on Wikipedia with Sonia Gandhi coming behind with 73,000 page views in 90 days.

As you can see in the above screenshot, there are links to Wikipedia, Google News, Twitter and the New York Times next to each article. Each link takes you straight to the search  page on those respective properties. I have suggested that a link to Google Trends be also given since that would explain the spikes much better than Google News.

Wikirank is quite addictive to say, the least, and will be even more so once additional options such as embeddable charts go live. Wikirank is currently in beta, invite only, and you can sign up at wikirank.com.