I’m Just Being Manan

When I reviewed Windows’ Live services a long time back, I said that Web 2.0 is here and Microsoft is making it’s presence felt. Here is just part of what one can expect of things to come.
First Look [Part 1] of Live Mesh showed how Mesh looks and what are the basic categories of Mesh, now let’s get down to some how it does what it is supposed to do.
Let’s try creating a new folder. Double click on the ‘Create new folder’ icon, yes double click like you do on your desktop. You will be greeted by a screen [...] Continue Reading…

Live Mesh is my new tool to pass time and play around. Recently, there was an article that allowed you to sync your IE Favorites with Live Mesh, but unfortunately I use Firefox and wanted to sync my bookmarks with Live Mesh for obvious reasons. Doing this in Firefox 3 is not as simple as it is in IE. We need to use a couple of tools to do this. Firefox 3 by default DOES NOT store the bookmarks in a bookmarks.html file but uses a database approach. So how do we enable Firefox to automatically export the bookmarks [...] Continue Reading…

Ah! The iPhone, the device that has made people go bonkers. Keeping my thoughts on the device aside, one of the biggest complaints against the iPhone is the crippled bluetooth support it has. The fact that it cannot send files over bluetooth is considered as one of the major flaws for a cellular device in 2008. I too think so, I hate the fact that a ~22k (gray market) device does not allow me to share pictures I take from my phone to the other phone and vice-versa.
I was reading the newspaper today, Mumbai Mirror to be specific. The [...] Continue Reading…

Today morning I came across a thread on a forum where someone was able to access classified data on a PC. The guy who’s data was accessed was freaked out. Totally! It was more so his fault because he failed to take some basic and I mean really basic steps to make sure anyone & everyone does not have access to that data. Here are some tips to make sure people with even basic computing skills don’t get access to your data in your absence. What all should you take care of:

Disable Recent Docs
Folder Access
Parental Control
Disable Media Player History
Clear [...] Continue Reading…

Been some time since I wrote about any Live product. Been actually lazy, these things are getting so many features, every product is being updated pretty quickly. Anyway,  I recently got my Live Mesh account activated and damn you I love the interface. That’s not all, I am pretty optimistic of what Ray Ozzie has actually set out to achieve. Microsoft is behind in the race of ruling the cloud, but if they were to somehow integrate all their Live services with Windows then it is going to become a formidable force. The integration part is left for another [...] Continue Reading…

I was talking to my friend Aditya at Vignetting Life, that I don’t exactly see myself shifting full time to the cloud anytime soon. But, but, but! I think that was the past. I guess I am gonna shift full time to the cloud pretty soon. Mesh is Live! Yay! The last time I was excited about some online technology being launched was when Skydrive was launched.
Liveside reported that US residents have access to Live Mesh which in simple terms means that the whole world has access, all you need to do is change the country settings to US [...] Continue Reading…

My friend showed me something that made me go WTF! Is this free? And he gleemingly said, yes! E-mail on the go is something most of want. It is handy. The phone is in the hand and so when the mail comes on the phone it becomes ‘handy’. Sorry for the crappy joke.
Anyways, Mobile service providers in India have Push E-mail facilities for their customers, some give it for free, while others charge a bomb. Needless to say, the services which aren’t widely used give it for free and the ones that are famous and most commonly used charge [...] Continue Reading…

It was a year back when serial blasts ripped through the mass transit Local Railway - the backbone of Bombay. Since then security has been beefed up at the railway stations. You will now see benches where police personals are supposed to sit, normally you will find 1 or 2 constable sitting. But, I can assure you that they are sitting there just because they have been told to. That’s it. Monitoring people coming in is not one of their tasks it seems. They seem quite busy amongst themselves.
That’s not it. Dadar station, the busiest local railway station has [...] Continue Reading…

Volume 1 spoke about how these college professors use their authority as privileges and thereby harass students and it also show-cased the inherent problem in the education system. This one is actually quite different from the previous one, but, still is worth sharing ’cause it again shows how these inflated egos will not miss the smallest opportunity to show themselves as powerful or great.
Background:
We had this professor, a senior college professor who taught us Television. He had a habit of using the ‘Projector & Slide’ method of teaching. Off course if for a moment you thought this guy was [...] Continue Reading…

Trying out new software is something that has become much of a hobby for me. Having a hackint0sh gives you the ability to try out and get used to the Mac platform, something that works quite differently as compared to Windows. Microsoft Office 2007 is a great product, after a ‘not so well received’ Vista, Office 2007 in sharp contrast did a splendid job. Office for Mac had to deliver too, else MS would have had to deal with a huge PR disaster online. But, they delivered, Office 2008 for Mac has been well received and having a hackint0sh, [...] Continue Reading…