RSS Made Easy

Never heard of RSS? Watch this video and you will thank me!

When there are a lot of RSS readers available I still see people using Firefox Live Feeds (bookmarks) or iGoogle. Well, those are OK if you are just following a few feeds! But if you are like me who keeps subscribing to any interesting website you come across, then you need a more powerful reader!

Google Reader

Reasons why I use Google Reader:

1. Getting started and subscribing to feed is very easy
2. Mark items for future reference
3. Share interesting items with friends. My shared items can be accessed by anyone from here.
4. Its online – access from anywhere
5. Its from Google
6. Its FREE!

You will learn how to use Google Reader within minutes but just in case if need more assistance, video tutorials are available here.

FeedDemon (Windows Only):

1. Subscribe to Intranet feeds – There are a lot of feeds which I follow within my company’s firewall and Google Reader doesn’t support that.
2. Sync’s seamlessly with Google Reader – Link your google reader account with FeedDemon and you can sync your feeds.
3. Its FREE!

NetNewsWire (Mac Only):

1. Its from the same company which owns FeedDemon
2. Subscribe to Intranet feeds
3. Sync’s seamlessly with Google Reader
4. Mac client – At home I use my MacBook and not my offical windows laptop.
5. Its FREE!

Note:  In the current Beta version you can only use either 2 or 3. The Final version which is scheduled for this month end will have both the features.

Comment if you have any questions or suggestions! Esp if you use a better RSS reader 😉

Addiction

(Two Weeks back…)
Friend: Machi… my parents are watching mega serials the whole evening and I don’t get to see IPL!
Me: Tell me about it!!!! All the parents are the same!!!But I am happy at least our generation is much better 😉
Friend: Ha… look who is talking about that!
Me: I don’t watch stupid mega serials.
Friend: Then what is that you watch on your laptop all the time? I’m sure its not a movie, I see the same cast all the time.
Me: Wellllll…. thats different…. Its interesting and definelty not like the serials they air on our Indian Channels.
Friend: But… forget it..
(I never let my friends win any argument! 😉 )

And that’s when I realized “WTF, I am just another hypocrite!”

It all started in May 2007. One of my friends in my earlier organization gave me the whole FRIENDS series and compelled me to watch it. I just copied that stuff to my HDD because my sister used to watch FRIENDS and thought she might be interested in burning them to DVDs. Later when I moved to Hyderabad, I dint have much work to do in my new company and I started watching movies all the time. One fine evening when I ran out of movies in my HDD, I thought I will give FRIENDS a try. I started with S01E01 and ended up watching the entire season back to back the whole night. And finished the whole series in 2 weeks!

After a couple of weeks, during a Java training session, few guys were discussing about Prison Break. And I had no clue what was Prison Break. I managed to get the first two seasons and finished it in 2 weeks. It was too interesting I started downloading the rest of the episodes as soon as they were aired.

And that’s how I ended up following these TV Shows:

1. FRIENDS
2. Prison Break
3. South Park
4. LOST
5. Scrubs
6. How I met your mother
7. Heroes
8. 30 Rock
9. Californication
10. House M.D

So I decided to break this habit and I was serial free for the past one week. (The main reason being none of the above were aired last week 😀 )

Last Friday when I was over the phone with my friend, we were discussing about the characters in HIMYM esp. Barney Stinson and I ended up watching the HIMYM Season 1-4 again that weekend!!!

Somebody SAVE ME from this addiction!!!!

Ghajini Vs Ghajini

I watched Aamir’s Ghajini on 25th December at Bangalore and Surya’s Ghajini(Tamil Version) a couple of years back in Chennai. Though Ghajini was inspired from Memento I request no one to compare it with the original. Memento is an excellent movie with an extra-ordinary screenplay. Whereas Ghajini is a Masala movie to entertain Indian audience.

Though the Hindi version is a remake of the Tamil I found a lot of difference between the two.

+ Though the songs by Harrish Jeyaraj in Tamil were super dooper hits I prefer A.R.Rahman’s tunes. And if I am not wrong ‘Sutrum Vizhi Sudare’ was the song of the year but Guzarish is much better.
+ Tamil Ghajini’s Climax sucked big time!
+ Kaise Mujhe song was not there in the Tamil version. Music and Lyrics were too good. The cinematography was excellent and nothing to comment about Aamir’s ace acting.
– Makeup was not that good in the Hindi version. There wasn’t much difference between the two Aamirs'(before and after the incident). He should have gained weight only after shooting the Flash back sequences(like Mani Ratnam’s Nayagan or Guru).
– The title Ghajini doesn’t suit the movie. It would have been better if the villian’s name was not Ghajini like in the Tamil version. Its actually the Hero who is like Ghajini Mohammed.
– BGM sucked big time in both the versions.

Hope – A curse in disguise

It would be incorrect if I say I don’t believe in HOPE rather I usually don’t hope for anything and to be honest I don’t know why. One potential reason could be that I am scared to face disappointments. Be it exam scores, promotions, salary hike, birthday gifts or surprise parties I never look forward to it like the majority of the world does.

Said all these, there was this period in my life when I actually hoped for something to happen and kept dreaming about it all the time. A couple of months back I realized that its not going to happen which tore me apart  but still there was this .1% of hope left unflushed. What I observed in the recent days is, that small amount of  hope never clears out though it appears as if it is diminishing which is not quiet true. But as the days pass by, I have to draw a line to it but I couldn’t. The hope has started haunting me. All the good dreams I had now seems like nightmares. Maybe its time to give up and surrender but not sure how.

I regret that I hoped and I am prepared to live with it for the rest of my life! The dream of pursuing a masters degree in computer science will rest in peace within me!

Must have FireFox Add-ons

The following are the FireFox addons that I use and recommend everyone to have a look atleast. Yesterday I had to reinstall firefox and without these add-ons installed I felt lost. Only after installing them again I consider firefox installation as complete.

Foxmarks – Bookmarks Synchronizer

At work I use a Windows PC and a Linux box. At home I use my  MacBook. I want the bookmarks to be in sync across all these systems regardless of where I add a bookmark. My friend advised me to use Google toolbar which uploads your bookmarks to Google Notebook and you can either access it using Google Notebook or Google Toolbar with your google id. But for some reason I dint like the User Experience in Google Toolbar. And I definitely dint want another toolbar in my browser. Then I started using Google Browser Sync which worked perfectly but it doesn’t support FireFox 3 and hence my search for an add-on resumed. Then came Foxmarks in my life 😉 – The best way to sync your bookmarks. They also have a web version where you can login and access your bookmarks which is the best feature. Now I can access my bookmarks from anywhere.

Fire Gestures

This add-on has increased my productivity(atleast while browsing ;)) It will recognize mouse gestures and execute various browser commands such as closing a tab, opening a link in a new tab, unclosing a recently closed tab(which I do all the time). Almost everyone who saw me using this add-on asked me about it and they are also using it now. I strongly recommend this add-on.

Quick Proxy

A status bar button using which you can quickly switch between proxies. There are better proxy switching add-ons which provide more functionalities but this one is just perfect for me.

Fox Clocks

My manager is in US and one of my colleague is in UK. And I am very bad at mathematics esp. with calculating the time at various time zones. This little add-on which sits in the status bar will show the current time in various time zones.

Sxipper

This is not exactly a password management tool(I use KeePass and 1Password to manage my passwords). It sits on top of the Firefox’s password manager and helps you in filling the login forms. Its pretty fast and handles multiple accounts easily.

Evernote Web Clipper

Evernote is like OneNote provided by MicroSoft. This firefox add-on helps in adding notes to evernote quickly from my browser.

Twitterfox

Though I am very new to Twitter I like to tweet via Twitterfox. I tried a no of tools to access twitter from my desktop and browser but none was as good and neat as TwitterFox. Just in case if you want to follow me on twitter click here.

Cooliris

Its an amazing firefox add-on which allows you to browser through images and videos in a beautiful way. You have to use it to experience the magic. Let it be Google’s image search, picasa or youtube I only use cooliris to browse.

Google Gears

Provides offline support to services such as Remember the Milk, Google Reader, Google Docs, Zoho mail etc. And I usually use it for adding tasks to Remember the Milk offline and sync later with the server when I go online.

FireBug

Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.

FireFTP

FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers. I prefer  FileZilla on Windows and Cyberduck on Mac over this addon but I like to have a light weight ftp addon to my browser just in case if I feel lazy to open the tool to upload/download only a single file.

If you are using any other interesting or useful firefox addon please mention it in the comments section so that I can give it a try.

The Journey

If I am not wrong it was in 1992 when I first saw a computer. My uncle bought it to manage his business(by just using Tally I guess). It was running Windows 3.1x and had a 5-1/4″ Floppy drive. I dont remember the rest of the configuration. He secured the system with a bios level password, so I dont get to play in it without his presence. PAC MAN was the first game which I played. Then moved to Dangerous Dave and Prince of Persia.

Later in 1995 he replaced the old pc with a better one which was running Windows 95. I couldnt sleep for whole week and just wanted to look at the START menu poping up.

In 1998 when I was in my 8th class my parents bought a pc for my brother who was in college. It was an Intel pentium machine with 2GB HDD(now I have a 16GB pen drive!), 64MB RAM, a CD-ROM and was running Windows 98SE(The best Windows OS so far IMHO!). Duke Nukem 3D was my fav game and I have completed it more than 50 times(Yes, I was insane!). Whenever I tried installing a Jedi game the computer would go mute and the volume controlled disappears from the taskbar resulting in a World War with my brother. And we used to carry the CPU to the person who assembled the system to get it fixed. Only after a few years I came to know that it was only the sound drive which gets uninstalled 😀 . Entering cheatcodes in Cricket 97 game was like hacking to me and made me feel like a geek.

In 2000, I finally got rid of the old pc and got a AMD powered machine which was ultra fast. This was the year when I also got an opportunity to work on iMac G3 which my other uncle had in his office. I just hate it because I dint find the Start button and only very few games were available on it.

In 2002, I myself assembled a system which is still there in my home but hardly works. I also got a CD BURNER using which I could burn my own CDs which was really cool 😉 I also upgrated to Windows XP just for the sake of making my friends feel jealous.

In 2006, my brother bought me a HP Pavillion Laptop from US. It has a sexy 17″ glossy display with a full size keyboard. I was powered by a AMD 64bit processor and was running a genuine copy of Windows XP 😉 It was my best buddy till May 2008.

I was bored upgrading the hardware and Windows OS for the past 8 years. So thought of making a big move to Apple’s Mac 🙂 Though I have worked on an iMac for 2-3 hours I really had no clue about the OS and the Hardware. After a lot of research on net and seeing some videos on Youtube(Esp the Keynotes by Steve Jobs) I made my mind. I gave the HP laptop to my dad and bought myself a Macbook with 2.4Ghz intel core 2 duo processor, 250GB HDD, 2GB RAM, 13.3″ widescreen display and best of all Leopard OS X 10.5.

Its really unbelievable looking at the technologies growth. Hope after 10 years the Macbook that I own now would be like my uncle’s first computer which had a 5-1/4″ Floppy drive!