My Technophilic Musings

This is the last part in this series. So far we’ve seen how to select the gadget and how to get the best price for it. This time we’ll fill in the last remaining piece of the puzzle, the minor tit-bits that go a long way in preventing a lot of heart-burn. Don’t worry this is a short one.

This last piece is to make sure that the place that you decided upon to buy your gadget, is OK in all respects, i.e., is not a fraud and has good after-sales service. You don’t have to do much, basically you just need to go thorugh a few reviews. It’s recommended you check more than a couple of these sites for your research about the seller. The main sites for this are ResellerRatings, BBB, Yahoo Local, Froogle, and if nothing else, you can even ask questions on forums like FatWallet and Slickdeals for people’s prior experiences with your particular dealer.

I hope the series has been informative enough for you and maybe you were able to save a few bucks. Let me know if it was so, or if you have some tricks up your sleeve that you’d like to share with others.

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: BBB, deals, fatwallet, Froogle, Gadgets, ResellerRatings, slickdeals, Yahoo Local

Last time we discussed how to select the gadget that you want to buy. This time I’ll tell you some of the things that I do to find the best price for it.

• Use Price Comparison Engines: These engines will let you search for your desired products and provide a comparison of the costs at which they are available at different stores online as well as offline. Two of my favourites are Price Grabber and Froogle. Price Grabber has the added benefits of providing user reviews about the product as well.
• Deal Sites: Many sites across the web aggregate the latest deals. Some are run by the site owners, e.g., Deals2Buy, HotDealsClub etc, which are mostly almost same to each other. Some are run by the community, e.g. slickdeals, fatwallet, etc.These have an added advantage that the discussion that takes place on the original discussion adds a lot of value and insight in terms of how to stack on even better deals on top of it, provides comparison to other deals, rumours about coming deals in advance, and even deals local to your state, city or a particular store as well.
• Bargain Sites: These sites sell overstocked products at a cheap price. Some of the popular ones are Overstock, Smart Bargains, W00t, Stootsi, etc. W00t and Stootsi are a bit different in the sense that they have very limited number of products available at a time for sale (generally just 1).
• Coupon Codes Sites: Many sites aggregate coupon codes for various online and offline stores that you can use with your purchase to lower the price further. However, you need to go through the terms and conditions of the coupon to make sure that it applies to your purchase, and you might also need some convincing powers to use them in some cases . Some of the sites are Wow-Coupons and Current Codes. Continue reading »
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  Quote of the day: “When due process fails us, we really do live in a world of terror.” - JC Denton

  written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: cash back, deals, deals2buy, discount coupons, fatwallet, Gadgets, geeks, hotdealsclub, money, overstock, pricematch, slickdeals, smart bargains, stootsi, w00t
  

If you are a gadget freak like me and can’t resist the temptations to buy the newest toy on the shelves, then you’d obviously want to eek out the maximum you can from whatever budget you have. But while doing so you have to take care of a lot of things. Here is Part I of the few things that I do get the best deals out there while making sure I’m buying the right thing from the right place.

The first step to buying anything is obviously whether you are buying the right thing. The list of do’s and don’t and this regard are:

• Do not blindly go by the what the manufacturer’s site says. After all I’ll always say that I my product is the best.
• Do not just make the decision based on the feature set. More features mean more possible points of failure, so a device with fewer features but better reliability is obviously much better than the one that promises the moon but only the “once in a blue -“ kinds.
• Make sure to search for similar products from other manufacturers. Just because it comes from Apple’s stable doesn’t make it the best. (For the record, in general, I don’t like anything that comes from Cupertino)
• Look for the reviews. Search for the reviews for the product you have in mind, but a big problem with this has now arisen with the advent of “paid reviews”. But of course, you can always turn towards the community. Read through all the site-based single person reviews as well but also look for forums and other communities related to the type of gadget you have in mind. e.g. – For cameras, DPReview is a good place to go, for WM smart phones, XDA-Developers is the place to be, etc.
• Is the after-sales support good? You don’t want to be locked out with a product that you can’t do anything about if something goes wrong.
• Look also for the hidden costs of product. Many a times the base product is cheap but then it requires you to shell out a fortune in terms of required accessories to yield it’s full potential (e.g. Archos players).
• Maintenance costs:e.g. Most Apple products dont have easily replaceable parts and need to be sent back to factory for even things like a new battery.

Now, the list above seems small but when put into practice it isn’t. But obviously, a geek who can handle all the latest electronic gizmos can surely handle the irks that come while chosing one, and of course, within a short while, it will become second nature to you.

Are there any other things that you look for buying your new boy-toy? Do let me know. Next time, we will look at how to get the best deals for the stuff you crave.

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: Apple, cupertino, deals, Gadgets, geeks, reviews, stuff

Just a small tip. If you want to view a pdf and you don’t have adobe acrobat (or any other pdf reader) installed, e.g., you are sitting in a cyber cage or at a friend’s place, you can still view it.
Only thing you have to do is, just prefix the url to the online pdf with “http://www.scribd.com/vacuum?url=” and you’ll see a nice web interface rendering your pdf without having to install anything on your PC.

e.g.: url to pdf: http://abc.com/readme.pdf

So final url: “http://www.scribd.com/vacuum?url=http://abc.com/readme.pdf“

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: Adobe Acrobat, online PDF reader, PDF, scribd, tips

For the past many years, I’ve seen a trend that has been on a meteoric rise. Whatever new service you sign on for on the internet (especially the web2.0–oh-so-cool-you-have-to-tell-everyone-about-it ones), it gives you an option to fill in your e-mail ID and password and makes a generous offer of letting all your friends know about your new avatar and let them all join in the fun. Most of the people around me, it seems, don’t think twice before gladly accepting the offer, as is made apparent from the increasing amount of automated mails I’m getting with subjects like “Hey, don’t be left out! Join me on X” or “Hi SG, Why don’t you follow me on Y”.

I just wanted to “remind” you all (because you already know it) how important your password is. You keep it safe from everyone, suspect even your friends of trying to hack into your e-mail, and then you give it away to an “unknown” entity with so much of ease, laying so much trust onto it that you won’t even put in your biological parents.

While many of these services are genuine, but many might not be. I’m certainly against handing out your passwords to a third-party web service until it is something like google that won’t just sell you off one fine day and run off somewhere you can’t find it. But if you are compelled to do so because of some reason, I’d recommend atleast checking out what it has to say about the data it’s collecting.

Let me take an example of a new IM service that I recently came across. It’s called IMO (or imo or whatever) and is apparently quite popular because of its multiple IM service connections through a single interface. I thought of checking out its terms etc and making a mental image of how respectable / trustworthy I found it. I had listed the following things on the blog where I had found about this site. Listing them here again for you.

Following are the nuggets I found:

1. They have a blogspot blog. It takes hardly a few minutes to host ur own blog on ur own domain. Maybe they have some existing google connection but yet to discover it.(I read somewhere that some of these people worked at google in the past but that’s no reason to keep your blog on such a platform)

2. Shady privacy agreement.
2a They mention that not only will they save ur username and pwd but may also save ur chats/messages etc.
2b They might also share info with 3rd parties (written in a manner that they can do it on their own will)
2c Transparency: They might not even tell u whats going on if they so decide.

Please don’t mention about the eliteness of their “advisor panel”. This is the biggest marketing gimmick that everyone pulls off. Many times the “advisors” don’t even know the “advised” company exists.

IMP: If a site doesn’t say anything or says all goody things in its terms, that doesn’t make it clean, but if you find suspiciousness in the terms, that definitely makes a negative mark. In Short, when your password is concerned, treat everyone guilty until proven innocent.

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: e-mail, hacking, IM, Internet, password, privacy, security, web, web 2.0

Worried about someone breaking into your house in your absence? Or just need to keep a tab on who enters your room while you are away? Well, all you need is a webcam, a linux PC/laptop and a twitter account. And you are set for real time updates through twitter about all that goes on at your abode behind your back (can even receive a text message/sms on your phone). Keep reading for the very simple setup you need.

1.) Download and install "motion" on your computer. For ubuntu users, this is as simple as running

2.) Setup your motion configuration file. (Usually at /etc/motion/motion.conf). There are quite a lot of options available. You might want to tweak it a lot according to ur needs later on but the most important ones that you can begin with are (leave the rest untouched for now):

2a.) Add/edit the option "target_dir" to point to the directory where you want to save the images of the event when motion is detected.

2b.) Add/edit the option "locate" and set it to "on" so that you get a nice square box around the detected moving object/person.

2c.) Add/edit the option "webcam_port" and set it to, say, "8000". Motion includes a mini http server so now, you can use it to view the actual images of the happening when you get the update and check for false alarms.

3.) Now, comes the most important part, about getting the update. Continue reading »

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: fun, linux, motion, motion detection, real time updates, sms, thieves, Twitter, ubuntu, webcam

Did you know that instead of installing special software to view your webcam video, you can simply use mplayer for the same purpose, and with a lot of fine control. e.g. try running the following command with your webcam attached to your computer.

And you can use mencoder to capture and encode video from your webcam:

Have fun playing with the huge number of options available. You could even cat the test.avi file into a folder of your web server and have instant streaming video .

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: fun, linux, mencoder, mplayer, stream, video, webcam

I have an old noname cheapo webcam, that I dusted out of my junk (why? More on that in a post coming soon). I hoped that it would work in my Ubuntu setup out of the box like most of my other hardware. I connected it to my laptop's usb port. dmesg gave the following output:

[21328.211333] usb 1-1: new full speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 2
[21328.319698] usb 1-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[21328.439705] Linux video capture interface: v2.00
[21328.458509] zc0301: V4L2 driver for ZC0301[P] Image Processor and Control Chip v1:1.05
[21328.459113] usb 1-1: ZC0301[P] Image Processor and Control Chip detected (vid/pid 0x0AC8/0x301B)
[21328.520576] usb 1-1: PB-0330 image sensor detected
[21328.870287] usb 1-1: Initialization succeeded
[21328.870919] usb 1-1: V4L2 device registered as /dev/video0
[21328.871001] usbcore: registered new interface driver zc0301
[21328.913737] usbcore: registered new interface driver gspca
[21328.913811] ubuntu/media/gspcav1/gspca_core.c: gspca driver 01.00.12 registered

Great! Everything set up, I thought. But running various programs, camorama, camE, kopete, everything gave weird errors like "Connection could not be made", "device not ready" or just showed a blank screen. But soon, after  few trial and errors, I found the solution. Basically the "zc0301" module is the culprit and all you have to do to get your camera working is prevent it from loading. So, this is what I did:

And voila! the webcam started working like magic. Of course, this tip is only for webcams that use this particular chip. And if you want to make this change permanent so that you don't have to run these commands everytime you want to use your webcam, all you have to do is add the following line to your /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist file

blacklist zc0301

This would prevent the module from loading whenever you connect your webcam to your computer. Let me know if this worked for you or if you have some of your own tips/tricks/hacks to get this or other webcams working on linux.

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: blacklist, camera, dmesg, gspca, linux, modprobe, ubuntu, webcam, zc0301

Everyone wants to make a name for himself. Everyone wants to do something new and extra-ordinary. People like me (read software engineers) want to develop “something” cool. BUT, the stage where most of them go wrong is the very first one. Most of them think that the road to develop something cool starts from a particular “language” or a tool. But I beg to differ. I say the first stage is “The Idea”.

Most of my friends and others around me think that having a particular skill set is very important to develop something the world hasn’t seen till now. And for this they end up reading through piles of books, which claim to make them a master in C, C++, PHP, Python, Web 2.0 and what not. This is all OK, but the problem is, when they have gone through the books, done all the exercises, made all the samle projects, then they have a question in their minds “Now What”?

What I think is that this question should have been asked in the very beginning of the journey. And it should have been answered by the occurrence of a new idea.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for reading books, developing skill sets, learning new technologies, etc. But the only point I want to make is that all this is a “means” to give your “idea” a shape. They are not where your story begins. What if you spent a lot of time acquiring perl skills and then when (and if) you get your brilliant idea, you find out that the best way to implement it would be using C. Are you back to square one? No. Skills acquired are never a waste. “Concepts” developed can easily be applied to the new tool that you have to use.

But one more thing, its again not a hard rule that now you should just sit in your chair all day long and keep thinking. I bet its much harder to get the idea stream flowing that way. Ideas don’t have a pattern that they follow while coming into your mind. They may come to you any place unexpected (I get most of mine while bathing ).

But there is something you can do to ensure that your brain gets accustomed to recognize an idea when you do get it. So, while you are reading through that book on C programming, don’t just get engrossed in typing out the exact source code that’s fed to you. “Think” about whether is that enough? Can you make some modification to it so that it becomes more efficient? Can you tweak it a bit to do more than its already doing?

Keep your eyes open when you go around your daily chores. Think when you open your door whether wouldn’t it be nice if the door could recognize you are there and open itself. There’s your idea. And while you are at it, think wouldn’t it be even nicer if your home would have poured you a cool drink itself when you enter it?

Now, tell me whether you would like to wait to think about these ideas till you read the book’s epilogue, or do you want to start thinking now?

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: concepts, idea, languages, Programming, tip

If you have ever needed to share files between your Linux and Windows computers, you have obviously used Samba, and have been quite happy with the way it seamlessly provides access to and from shared folders/files from Windows and Linux. However, many people complain that although their smb/Samba shares are accessible from Windows, they are not able to do the same with their Windows Mobile devices. e.g., using a tool called “Resco Explorer” on Windows Mobile, all they get while searching for their linux based Samba shares is the following screenshot:

Well, there is no big magic trick to get an access to those shares, as they are already accessibly. You just need to do one more teeny little step to access them.

Continue reading »

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: Access Shared folders from Windows Mobile, CIFS, linux, Resco Explorer, Samba, shared folders, SMB, Total Commander, windows, Windows Mobile, Windows Mobile File Explorer, WM5, WM6