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Bought a new Canon PowerShot S5 IS

Published Jul 25, 2008 | In Photography

Today, I gave in to my temptation and bought a new Canon PowerShot S5 IS, which is making Yuvi envy. 😉 I have already started taking some snaps and it looks really awesome.

It is less than two years back that I bought a new Olympus cam. But during my last Photowalk, I realized that I have hit the limitations of the cam. Since then I was looking to buy a new cam. Initially I was looking to buy a DSLR but the price factor kept it away from my reach. I was looking for other options and Yuvi suggested S5. I read some reviews and then immediately I made up my mind.

The following are the specifications

  • 8.0 MegaPixels
  • 12X Optical Zoom
  • 2.5 Inch LCD
  • 6.0-72.0 mm focal length
  • f/2.7-3.5 Aperture
  • Variable Aperture and Shutter speed.

You can read the full specification in the official page.

In addition to the Cam, I also bought two 2 GB cards and two sets of rechargeable batteries (again Yuvi’s recommendation)

PS: Leaving to Ooty for a small vacation over the weekend and hoping to be back with some real good photos.

Image Credit dpreview.com

Posted in Photography | Tagged , , , , | 8 Comments

Dropbox Invites available

Published Jul 13, 2008 | In Random/Personal

I was searching for some good online backup solutions to store my documents, ever since I found that DocSyncer was dead. I came across a wonderful service called DropBox, which I am currently testing to find out whether it will suit my requirements or not.

DropBox is currently in private beta and I have some invites left. If you need an invite just drop a comment here with your email address. Thanks Jigar for the invites.

Posted in Random/Personal | Tagged , , | 18 Comments

List of FriendFeed users who talk about WordPress

Published Jul 1, 2008 | In WordPress

The nice folks at WPCandy have come up with a great idea to dedicate a day to thank everyone behind WordPress and also to encourage WordPress fans to blog about WordPress and share their favorite tips and tricks.

Today (July 1st ) is known as the unofficial WordPress day, where fans from all over the world can thank the people behind WordPress and also can express their love for WordPress. They are also running an event and have some nice giveaways. All you have to do is to let everyone know why you love WordPress by leaving a comment at WPCandy or write a blog post about WordPress.

So instead of writing a post explaining why and how I love WordPress (which I have already done), I thought of sharing some information which will be useful for people who are interested in WordPress. So here we go.. 🙂

Sometime ago Weblog Tools Collection published a list of Twitter users whom you can follow to get updated information about WordPress.

Nowdays I use FriendFeed more than Twitter (I have to confess this sometime). So I tried to find their corresponding FriendFeed usernames so that I can subscribe to them. The following is the list with their real names first, followed by their Twitter user names and then followed by their FriendFeed usernames.

The following are some of my additions to the list which was not originally published by Weblog Tools Collection.

I will try to keep the list updated and let me know if you feel I need to add someone else to this list. Till then happy FriendFeeding and my heart felt thanks to Matt and the team for an excellent product without which this site may never exist 🙂

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

DocSyncer is dead, can you trust your data with beta services

Published Jun 27, 2008 | In Random/Personal

DocSyncer, the service that allowed users to sync their documents with Google Docs have shut down their doors since they couldn’t find a viable business model.

The way in which they have shut down has shocked me more than the fact that they have shut down the service. 🙁

Don’t get me wrong. I am not here to criticize or accuse them for shutting down. After all they were still in beta, (which means, use at your own risk). But I was rather annoyed that they didn’t even bother to send an email to the users, so that they can be prepared. It seems that they have posted a message in their website, but the users will visit the website only when they have to recover some documents which were already synced. The majority of the work was done by the desktop client and it is still running in my system tray, without giving any clue that the service was already shutdown.

I was one of the early adopters of the service and was so pleased with the service that I even wrote some tutorials about it. I have some critical documents which I update on daily basics. I wanted a simple solution to backup these documents and retrieve them based on date. DocSyncer was the perfect solution for me. I installed and pointed it to the directory in which I kept these documents and the client automatically backed up the documents to my Google Docs account.

A couple of day’s back I wanted to retrieve the document and tried to access the DocSyncer website but found that it was down. After a quick search in Google, I found that DocSyncer was dead. Last time I received an email from them was on April 22nd, when they announced pro account. This is not the first time I was affected because a service which I was using shutdown its doors, but I would have really appreciated if they could have sent a simple email saying that the service is going to be shut down.

Anyways, thank you Cliff Shaw and DocSyncer team for an excellent service which I was using for the past couple of months and my best wishes for your next startup.

If anyone from DocSyncer is reading this, then can you please let me know whether it is possible to opensource DocSyncer, at least the client alone? 😉

Meanwhile my search for an online backup system continues and I am planning to have a look at Windows Mesh and Dropbox. If anyone knows a better solution, then do let me know.

Posted in Random/Personal | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

The Chennai Photowalk

Published Jun 15, 2008 | In Events/Conferences, Photography

It’s time to clean my camera, which has been idle for quite some time now. I am going to take part in the Chennai Photowalk on June 15th.

This is the eighth edition of the Chennai Photowalk which is going to be on both June 15th and 22nd. We will start at Panagal Park in T.Nagar and proceed in an easterly direction down Thyagaraya road, and end the walk at Residency towers. The initiative is by Chandrachoodan Gopalakrishnan and you can get more information from his blog. You can also browse photos of the previous photowalks in Flickr.

For me, this is the first time to be part of a photowalk and so I am really excited. If you are in Chennai and ready to sacrifice a Sunday evening, then please do come. You don’t need to have an expensive camera; there are people who are going to shoot using their mobile cameras itself. 😉

Update: You can find the photos which I took during the PhotoWalk in Flickr. There are lot of teddies out there 😉

Posted in Events/Conferences, Photography | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

First Indian on the Techmeme Leaderboard

Published Jun 6, 2008 | In Random/Personal

Yvui, my 17-year-old-wannabe-geek cousin has achieved something really admirable. He has become the first Indian to be on the Techmeme Leaderboard.

His stat’s blog – thestatbot which he started last month is currently at position 76 in the Techmeme Leaderboard (as I am writing this blog entry) and has already been mentioned by TechCrunch. It is a remarkable achievement for a blog which is less than 2 months old. Congrats Yuvi 🙂 and all the best with thestatbot.

Posted in Random/Personal | Leave a comment

Happy Birthday, WordPress

Published May 27, 2008 | In WordPress

Today WordPress (the blogging software which I love) has turned 5. I have been running this site on WordPress for nearly two and a half years now. Thanks to Matt and the other developers for a wonderful product.

PS: Frequent readers of my blog would have noticed that I am not very active these days; things are going fast in my personal life and the posting frequency will soon be normal. 🙂

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , | 5 Comments

Changing the default config editor in Ubuntu

Published Apr 25, 2008 | In Unix/Server Stuff

If you are following the articles at Slicehost, then you may notice that PickledOnion uses nano as the default editor. I somehow like vi more than nano (not ready for a debate 😉 ) and was looking for a way to make vi the default config editor. After some googling, I found how to do it.

I am writing it down here so that all I have to remember is that I just need to search my blog if I need to do it again in future.

Okay the command you have to use is (I am assuming that you are not logged in as root, which is the recommended approach)

sudo update-alternatives --config editor

And then press the number corresponding to the editor which you want to use. Below is the screenshot of how it looked in my slice.

Changing default config editor in Ubuntu

Posted in Unix/Server Stuff | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Time to strip down again

Published Apr 8, 2008 | In Events/Conferences

Like 2006 and 2007, I am going to participate in this year’s CSS Naked day too. This year the date has been changed to April 9th.

If you are wondering what is CSS Naked day, then this is the definition from the official site

The idea behind this event is to promote Web Standards. Plain and simple. This includes proper use of (x)html, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure, and of course, a good ‘ol play on words. It’s time to show off your <body>.

If even you want to participate then register your site in the official site and then strip the CSS from your site. If you are on WordPress then you can use this plugin.

Happy stripping 😉

Posted in Events/Conferences | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

WordPress 2.5 is out

Published Mar 29, 2008 | In WordPress

The wait is finally over. 🙂 The most waited version of WordPress, Version 2.5 is out. WordPress 2.5 was in the making for nearly 6 months now and it has lot of new features and most importantly, changes to the admin screen. You can also view the screencast discussing the new admin pages from the WordPress development blog.

I am going to update my installation now and this blog might appear clunky while I am doing that. I have installed WordPress using svn so it is just a single shell command for me to update. Thanks to Joost, I converted my installation into a svn installation when WordPress 2.2.2 was released.

By the way this will be my last post using the old admin screens, I will post my experience with the new admin screens in a couple of days. Meanwhile if you have a self-hosted WordPress blog, then I highly recommend you to update to WordPress 2.5. Happy upgrading 😉

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , | 7 Comments