It surely is the ‘Touch Generation’ now. With most of the major cell phone players now in the touch screen market, you have a bundle of options when it comes to buying one.

I use one from the good old HTC Gene family, the P3400i, one of the cheapest products from the Pocket PC giant, HTC. Its based on Windows Mobile 5 platform. No Wi-Fi or 3G, but it pretty much does everything I need and fits perfectly for me when considering the price/performance ratio.

Now that you own one, making your gizmo productive is one tricky part. There are hundreds of apps available on the Web, but it’s rather difficult to find one that completely satisfies your needs. I mean, when you are happy with the performance, the looks bug you, or when the looks are good, you find that the app is eating away most of the internal memory.

Well, these are some of the apps that I feel can make your PPC come alive.

Videos

• When it comes to playing videos, the built-in ‘Windows Media Player’ in WM5 is a complete nuisance; it takes up longer time to load, can’t play the videos smoothly, and doesn’t really support a wide range of video formats that you really dig for.

I use the TCPMP. When it comes to video playback, this seems to be the best. Its super-fast, supports a wide range of video formats, has a completely free-license DivX Player, and the good part, it’s free! The latest Beta release is TCPMP 0.81 RC1. A more stable version, that I use is the 0.72 RC1. The 0.81 RC1 has additional support for WMV9 vidoes, and it looks slightly better than its predecessor.

You also need to install additional plugins for advanced functionality like playing flash videos, AMR, AC3, Matroska, HQ, Flac et cetera.

http://tamspalm.tamoggemon.com/2006/12/25/tcpmp-072rc1-incl-nearly-all-plugins/

Download and install the player first and then the plugins.

TCPMP should suffice your needs when it comes to portable video playback.

Music

• The Audio Manager in WM5 is pretty much what you need to listen to your favorite tunes. It doesn’t impress you, but it’s quite good at its functions. The Audio Booster functionality is pretty good with its clean equalizer and bass-boost effects. Only minus point is that it takes up quite a bit of memory. Now, you just listened to a song and you desperately want to make it your ring tone, what’ll you do? Well, the Audio Manager has a trimming functionality too. You can trim your songs instantly and make it as your ring tone or send it to your ring tones folder.

Personally, I use the Audio Manager, but if you consider using a third party software, I recommend the GS Player. It’s a basic mp3 playback software for PPC, and its free too. Get it here:

http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA032810/

Utilities

Clear Temp

• Clear Temp is all you need for clearing your temp, cache, cookies, history etc. It’s somewhat similar to the CCleaner, which is a PC App. It frees the internal memory and the Recent Program list. It’s a quite fast in its working and again a freeware.

http://cleartemp.en.softonic.com/pocketpc

Hide Folers

• Hide Folders is another good application that lets you do what the name suggests, “hide your folders”.

Hide your private stuffs with ease!

http://handheld.softpedia.com/get/System-Utilities/Enhancements/Hide-Folders-67768.shtml

WM5torage

• If you copy a lot of files back and forth between your PC and PPC, the ActiveSync might annoy you when copying very large files, like a MP4 movie for instance.

WM5torage lets your PC recognize your Storage Card as a Flash Drive. You activate this utility, plug in to your PC with the data cable, and there it is, ‘redemption’! Now, you can copy your files without using the ActiveSync. A good tool if you travel a lot, or visit the Internet Cafes in the city frequently.

Use your PPC as a Flash Drive.

http://wm5torage.en.softonic.com/windowsmobile

Internet

Opera Mobile

• Opera Mobile 9.5 Public Beta is the ultimate in browsing experience on a PPC. This version is built up on top of the rendering engine for Opera web browser, Presto. It tries to bring the real-time PC browsing experience to mobiles with its zoom, tabbed browsing and touch interface functionalities. You even could download files, videos, mp3s straight to you mobile with ease. This is a must use app for PPC users. Opera has release a new version of the browser, the 9.7 Beta Public, find the download link below.

A must-use app!

Download the new Opera Mobile 9.7 Public Beta here.http://www.opera.com/mobile/download/

YouTube for WM

• Mobile video streaming is simply the best thing to happen, ever! Playing YouTube videos on your mobile just got funkier with the release of the new YouTube for Windows Mobile streaming app. It’s a stunner! It’s fast and neatly designed for the average PPC user and the interface never looked so good. Find your videos on the search box, click play and the app will play the video nice and fast in the landscape mode. But be sure you have a good data plan it will give you a run for your money because of YouTube, as usual, will chew up a hell lot of data. For installation visit http://m.youtube.com with your device and follow the instructions.

Google Maps Mobile

• Determine your current location with our without GPS, get driving and transit directions, get phone numbers and addresses for local business; that’s what google maps lets you do, but only this time it’s on your mobile.

http://www.google.com/mobile/products/maps.html#p=default

I think this should do it. These are just the essential, the basics, when it comes to your PPC. Try these out today and know the difference..;-)

Profile

Age: 24

Height: 5′ 10″

Weight: 95Kg

Body Mass Index: 30Kg/m2

Wondering whose profile is it? Well, its mine. Today, I bumped upon the ‘much rejected’ BMI Calculator page in Men’s Health India. After some seconds, I figured out I’d give it a go. After a couple of clicks, I found out that I was overweight, or obese to be more precise. May be that’s why I’m so uncomfortable traveling in a bus, I thought the seats were pretty small.

I’m really struggling with the greatest menace of all time, “weight”. I do know that burning the calories is the only option for me this time, but how. I don’t live a normal man’s life. I work in night shifts, which honestly till now I’ve not been able to adapt. I don’t have a proper sleeping time, a proper routine as my shift timings fluctuate very rapidly. More than finding a time for exercising, it’s the initial laziness that’s killing me. It takes 20 days for an errand to become a habit or routine, and I’m bad at it, and I mean really bad.

They say, 12.1% people in India are either obese or overweight. It really is good to be a member of a club, which I was not for a very long time until now, but joining the “Indian Obese/Overweight Club” was a little too much for me, considering the pile load of troubles that I caused due to my negligence.

The good thing I did in these days is that I quit smoking. Yup, I did it! It’s been more than a month. I don’t think I’ll smoke that nic-stick again. That too was a reason for me being overweight. I’m 25 now and it’s time to be serious in life, I don’t know why am I scribbling this in my blog. Honestly, I don’t have any thing else to write … ha !

To add to my delight, I found out that I’m suffering from a condition called Alopecia Areata. I’m losing hair in circles. What a damn world. My immune system is identifying my hair follicles are foreign and it’s attacking them, shedding them to baldness. It can be worse, I could lose all of my hair on my body if it becomes worse. And there’s more, there is possibly no cure for it. Isn’t it a delight? God !!! WHY DO BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE?

Parents separated, not even a bachelor degree in hand, overweight, losing hair, single n lonely, away from home, no identity to prove my nationality; no driver’s license, PAN card, passport … This is me … and being me is a bit difficult … at least that’s what I want to believe ! God Help Me !

As usual, life’s so dull these days. May be its the weather in CBE, life seems so slow and creepy for me. Its been quite some time that I had a feeling that I’m missing something vital in my life. I feel like a loser, may be I am one. Love, money, health; I’ve lost it all, or don’t have much of it rather! So I thought it’s high-time for damage control! And may be I should start with something that is in my hand, something that is under my control. The first thing that came to my mind was “Smoking”.

I’ve been trying to quit smoking for sometime now, but all my attempts went in vain. The max I could control was for a week and a half. For me it was not a lot about controlling, cos i knew deep inside that I could quit, it was easy cos I believed it was easy. I googled for a bit and bumped on a piece of article published in indiatimes.com. I think its really cool and really useful for people who are trying to quit. Here is the extract.

Here are 12 techniques that will help you quit the habit.
Remember – you can do it!

1. Deep Breathing Perhaps The Single Most Powerful And Important Technique: Every time you want a cigarette, do the following. Do it three times.

Inhale the deepest lung-full of air you can, and then, very slowly, exhale. Purse your lips so that the air must come out slowly. As you exhale, close your eyes, and let your chin gradually sink over onto your chest. Visualize all the tension leaving your body, slowly draining out of your fingers and toes, just flowing on out.

This is a variation of a yoga technique and is very relaxing. If you practice this, you’ll be able to use it for any future stressful situation you find yourself in. And it will be your greatest weapon during the strong cravings sure to assault you over the first few days.

2. Taking In Fluids:
The first few days, drink LOTS of water and fluids to help flush out the nicotine and other poisons from your body.

Remember that the urge to smoke only lasts a few minutes, and will then pass. The urges gradually become farther and farther apart as the days go by.

3. Stay Away From Alcohol, Sugar And Coffee
Do your very best to stay away from alcohol, sugar and coffee the first week or longer, as these tend to stimulate the desire for a cigarette. Avoid fatty foods, as your metabolism will slow down a bit without the nicotine, and you may gain weight even if you eat the same amount as before quitting. So discipline about diet is extra important now. No one ever said acquiring new habits would be easy!

Nibble on low calorie foods like celery, apples and carrots. Chew gum or suck on cinnamon sticks.

Stretch out your meals; eat slowly and wait a bit between bites.

After dinner, instead of a cigarette, treat yourself to a cup of mint tea or a peppermint candy.

4. Taking an Oral Substitute
In one study, about 25% of quitters found that an oral substitute was invaluable. Another 25% didn’t like the idea at all – they wanted a clean break with cigarettes. The rest weren’t certain.

One can use cinnamon sticks, chewing gum or artificial cigarettes as a substitute. You will mostly find that after the first week of being a non smoker, you wouldn’t even need these.

5. Get Exercising
Go to a gym, sit in the steam, exercise. Change your normal routine – take time to walk or even jog around the block or in the local park.

6.Pamper Yourself
Go ahead and join a yoga class or maybe reiki – they’re great! Get a one hour massage, take a long bath – pamper yourself. Get yourself involved in a hobby.

7. Ask For Support
Ask for support from co-workers, friends and family members. Ask for their tolerance. Let them know you’re quitting, and that you might be edgy or grumpy for a few days. If you don’t ask for support, you certainly won’t get any. If you do, you’ll be surprised how much it can help. Take a chance – try it and see!

Ask friends and family members not to smoke in your presence. Don’t be afraid to ask. This is more important than you may realize.

8. Destroy All Your Cigarettes
On your quit day, hide all ashtrays and destroy all your cigarettes, preferably with water, so no part of them is smokeable.

9. Write It Down
Write down ten good things about being a nonsmoker – and then write out ten bad things about smoking. Do it. It really helps.

10. Don’t Pretend
Don’t pretend smoking wasn’t enjoyable – it was. This is like losing a good friend – and it’s okay to grieve the loss. Feel that grief, don’t worry, it’s okay. Feel, and you heal. Stay with it – you can do it!

11. Affirm Yourself
Several times a day, quietly repeat to yourself the affirmation, “I am a nonsmoker.” Many quitters see themselves as smokers who are just not smoking for the moment. They have a self-image as smokers who still want a cigarette.

Silently repeating the affirmation “I am a nonsmoker” will help you change your view of yourself, and, even if it may seem silly to you, this is actually useful. Use it!

12. Holding Out
Here is perhaps the most valuable information among these points. In Phase 2, the period which begins a few weeks after quitting, the urges to smoke will subside considerably.

However, it’s vital to understand that from time to time, you will still be suddenly overwhelmed with a desire for “just one cigarette.” This will happen unexpectedly, during moments of stress, whether negative stress or positive (at a party, or on vacation). If you are unprepared to resist, succumbing to that “one cigarette” will lead you directly back to smoking.

Remember the following secret: in these surprise attacks during Phase 2 – and they will definitely come – do your deep breathing, and hold on for five minutes, and the urge will pass.

In conclusion
Remember that if you quit you will live longer and feel better. Quitting will lower your chances of having a heart attack, stroke, or cancer. The people you live with, especially children, will be healthier. If you are pregnant, you will improve your chances of having a healthy baby. And you will have extra money to spend on things other than cigarettes.

So get the information and support you need to make the stopping process a little easier. Seek the help of family and friends, and most important decide you want to do it and visualize yourself as a non-smoker.

Courtesy:indiatimes.com

G1 is the latest in the offering from the Smartphone company giant HTC (High Tech Computer). G1 is one of the most anticipated Google phones and it seems that they plan to roll out the product in Indian markets by the end of the year. The G1 has features similar to the Apple iPhone and RIM’s Blackberry, so the G1 should be taking on the iPhone in the Indian markets.

HTC’s new cutie is based on the Android platform, a mobile-based operating system powered by Linux Kernel, initially developed by Google and later by the Open Handset Alliance, which includes HTC, Intel, Motorola, Google, and Samsung. HTC has not yet finalized how it’s going to launch its geek-puller in India. It’s expected that HTC will launch the product with a mutual tie-up with one of the leading service providers in the country and also through independent retail channels. The HTC G1 Android phone is likely to be available in three colors: black, brown, and white.

Features

• 3.2-inch TFT-LCD flat touch-sensitive screen with HVGA (320 X 480 pixel) resolution.
• Full 5-row QWERTY keyboard.
• One-Touch Google Search.
• Customizable Home screen with instant Email, text message and IM notifications.
• Instant access to mobile Internet services (Gmail, YouTube, Google Maps, Google Talk, Google Calendar).
• High-speed 3.5G network connection.
• Wi-Fi technology with seamless transition to open networks.
• Android Market with access to variety of software and media downloads. (some fees may apply)
• 3.2 megapixel color camera with auto focus.
• microSD (SD 2.0 compatible) expansion slot for all your storage needs.

The G1 comes with a Qualcomm MSM7201A, 528 MHz processor running an Android OS. It comes with a built-in memory of 256mb and 192mb of RAM. The 3.2-inch TFT-LCD flat display is neat with touch-sensitive screen. It supports a resolution of 320 x 480 (HVGA). The network supports HSPA, WCDMA, GSM, GPRS, EDGE although band frequency, HSUPA availability, and data speeds are operator dependent. The device has a trackball with a enter key for navigation. Battery back up is quite normal. It has a Rechargeable Lithium-ion battery with a capacity of 1150 mAh and holds up a talk time of up to 350 minutes for WCDMA and up to 406 minutes for GSM, and standby time of up to 402 hours for WCDMA and up to 319 hours for GSM. It has a microSD memory card slot (SD 2.0 compatible). Apart from the features mentioned above, HTC has incorporated Digital Compass and Motion Sensor into the new G1.

The price of the HTC G1 Android in India is still uncertain and is likely to cost over Rs20, 000, which is much more than US debut price of $179.

Ever since I heard about the word recession in news, I was a little concerned and a bit sad about the people who were fired before they knew what was going on. I was just wondering if there was any possibility that I was going to be one among them. I didn’t even stop wondering and boom, it came and took all of us by storm and left us all with nothing but agony, agony that what we were doing for the past one year all went in vain. All the management said was, “as part of cost-cutting measure the client is winding our project down and shifting from India to Philippines”.
I just was thinking how can they ever do that? Didn’t they sign any kind of contract with our company? The answer was no and the whole crowd was told to leave. God! It was a moment to always remember by. I did have thoughts about the stability of our company, but the name of the client did put a relief to my heart. I must say the client was Spinvox, and the project we were working on was Spinvox V2T. Yes, Spinvox Voice to Text.
If you hit the ‘how it works’ section of the Spinvox website, you’ll see something like this:

“Spinvox has a job to understand everyone.
But it’s the one job it’s very good at. How does it do it? It captures spoken words and feeds them into a Voice Message Conversion System, known as ‘D2′ (the Brain), and spits them out as text content.
So D2’s pretty smart. It’s bound to be, as D2’s a combination of artificial intelligence, voice recognition and natural linguistics. But it also knows what it doesn’t know and is able to call on human experts for assistance. It learns all the time about how we speak, and what we say, from the mundane to the ridiculous and so is able to convert what you mean to say.
Over the past four years D2 has been chomping through our words, learning thousands of new words every week and converting millions of messages from millions of different voices and accents, in English, French, Spanish and German. But now it’s onto the main course and wants to feast on your words to become bigger and stronger .”

That’s a bunch of rubbish they’ve published. As far as I know there is nothing as such as ‘D2′ (The Brain). The Voice-to-Text conversion is done by people sitting in Spinvox-outsourced companies all around the world and they do it on a software called Tenzing. The people who convert the audio are referred to as agents and they sit 8 hours in front of the computer working with not a minute to spare. Well, that’s how it works!!! Though I got placed in another company, I got really sulked into the issue totally as one of my colleagues committed suicide recently. I didn’t know the actual cause, but I do think it was related to the job. As for me I’ve to join on 1st of July. Again an outsourced job, same risk, same process, but I got a decent hike in my pay. The markets are slowly picking up it seems and I hope the whole economic slowdown paces up soon. But as of now, I am what I am, jobless (and I’m single too, did I mention that? Never mind!).

Parallel Universe

Time travel has been one of the fascniating subjects that I’ve ever come to know yet. When I think of Time Travel the first thing that comes to my mind is Terminator 1, the very first movie that made me familiar with the concept. The concept of time itself is something that is very hard for me to understand and comprehend.

Time Travel is a concept in which one moves between different moments in time i.e. traveling to ones future or past. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had a chance to go back in time and correct all the mistakes we did? Or go into the future to see how our world looks? Yeah yeah, I got inspired by “Heroes”, so what? Time Travel is not a reality yet but it is proven that it is possible at least on paper. Time Dilation is a concept that explains that time travel is indeed possible and it is derived from Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.

Now, nobody has ever known how did the time originate? Or is there an end to time? What do we understand by Present, Past and Future? What we call our present is not even lasting for a moment. Each letter I am typing in this blog entry is continuously converted into my Past. As I said earlier Time itself is a very hard subject for me to understand.

Heroes Has It All

We know time as something that we measure in seconds, minutes or hour. But there is another face to the concept of ‘Time’. It’s also defined as the fourth dimension of our universe. The other three dimensions are of space, the usual stuff that we learned in our 10th grade, the XYZ axes. Time cannot exist without space and vice versa. This relationship of time and space is defined as ‘Spacetime Continuum’. What it essentially means is that any event in the universe involves both space and time.

Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity states that time slows as an object approaches the speed of light. This leads to the conclusion that traveling faster than the speed of light could open up the possibility of time travel to the past as well as to the future. Now here is the problem. Speed of light is believed to be the highest speed at which something can travel and as an object nears the speed of light, its relativistic mass increases until, at the speed of light, it becomes infinite. Accelerating an infinite mass any faster than that is impossible, or at least it seems to be right now.

That’s not the end of it mates! Time Travel is supposed to happen in a very natural way as Hiro Nakamora does it elegantly in the hit series Heroes. Scientists believe that the existance of Black Holes is the key to Time Travel. When stars more than four times the mass of our sun reach the end of their life, they would have burned up all of their fuel and they would collapse under the pressure of their own weight. This implosion creates “Black Holes,” which have gravitational fields so strong that even light cannot escape it’s gravity. Anything that comes in contact with a black hole’s event horizon will be sucked in.

Enter White Holes

If ‘Black Holes’ exists it might be possible to pass through them and come out of a ‘White Hole’. A ‘White Hole’ would have the reverse action of a black hole i.e. instead of pulling everything into its gravitational force, it’ll push everything out and away from it. These white holes would be the way to enter other times or other worlds. This is just one theory. There are two more, the Wormholes and the Cosmic Strings. I know you probably didn’t understand anything, neither did I. Just scribbling fellas !

“Hardcore, well-trained and highly motivated”. This was the description given by an army officer who was amazed by the tactics of the terror squad that hit the heart of Mumbai in November. There had been 19 or more terrorist attacks on India since the 1993 Mumbai Serial Blasts. It was interesting to note that this time they used the sea as their transport medium. It is the first time any terrorist group have used an Indian coastline as an infiltration point, and it ’s shocking that our Coastguard was not potent enough to nab them or at least prevent them from doing what they did.

Now India, which is supposed to be a Nuclear-Superpower every time acts as if it had been attacked for the first time. First it condemns the attack, then mourns, and then blames Pakistan for everything rather taking stringent actions to avoid a recurrence of this sort. The same episode is repeated over and over again every time India is torn apart. But a lot of us felt that this incident was getting much attention and publicity. Ha, it was not just a feeling, it indeed was the truth, the unfortunate deaths of foreign citizens being the reason behind it. Usually when an Indian dies in India nobody bothers, but this time Government had a tough time answering questions.

India as a country has too many internal problems to tackle, which never gets any attention or publicity. For example, India is the breeding grounds of the so called the Hindu Fundamentalists, the Jehadi equivalent of India. 28th August 2008 was more than a date to remember for Eastern Orissa as mobs ransacked a church and clashed with Christian villagers and the authorities struggled to control spiralling religious violence in the region. Even though Police deployed more than 3,000 personnel in the streets, they could not stop the ransacking of at least one church. Where was all the media and the much needed Government security? About 2.5 per cent of Indians are Christians. But around the Kandhamal area, which is home to around 650,000 people, more than 20% of the mainly tribal inhabitants are Christian converts and the Hindu’s and constantly fighting over these conversions. And the sad part is nobody knows who all died or were set on fire in these incidents.

Lets take another major menace that India had faced in 2008, Malnutrition. The World Bank said that malnutrition affects huge numbers of people in India, especially women and children. It’s really shocking to know that half of all children under four are malnourished and 60% of our women are anaemic. Sadly, more children in India die from pneumonia, diarrhoea, measles, malaria, and malnutrition than in any other country in the world. And it’s equally shocking to know that these deseases are entirely preventable. Why didn’t this incident get the much needed publicity? And did we take any measures to curb this menace, and if yes why are the results zeroed out?

And recently what had caught international attention is  obviously the Satyam Scam. The International Community now looks at India as a ‘Fraud Nation’ and the most affected by this scam was as usual,  the Indian Middle-Class, who invested their hard-earned money and trust into the company. My dad, who currently has 2000 plus shares of Satyam has invested an amount of almost 3 lacs just to see the price falling like a piece of dead meat. Its a matter of life and death for him obviously. And the fun part is still the CEO says, “Satyam is India’s pride”. Now ladies and gentleman, this is India. Now I don’t know how the stock market works but from what I’ve read all these days, it’s been found out that some of the IT Majors are following malpractices in the stock market.

“Malpractices”

1. Borrowing money from the BSE (IPO).

2. Distributing the money to sister companies or subsidiaries at a 0% interest rates.

3. These companies again going back to the BSE and purchasing the stocks of the parent company and hence causing the rise and fall in share value.

India is suckered in once more pals!!!

2008 just passed by like a lightening leaving some moment of happiness and some moments when tears just rolled by our eyes, and most importantly it left some moments just to remember by. Although I am late as usual, but at this moment of time I wish everybody a very blessfull 2009 to come and more moments to remember by in our hearts.

Dr. Duncan MacDougall, an early 20thcentury physician tried to measure the mass purportedly lost by a human body when the soul departed the body upon death. He put forward a hypothesis that soul had mass, and when the soul departed the body, so did this mass. He conducted expereiments on humans and animals alike and came with a weird theory that human soul had mass and it weighed approx. 21grams. In March 1907, accounts of MacDougall’s experiments were published in the New York Times and the medical journal American Medicine. His findings are regarded either as meaningless or considered to have little scientific merit due to shaky methods and small sample size.

He believed that if personal continuity after death of the body is a fact, if the psychic functions continue to exist as a separate personality after the death of brain and body, then such personality can only exit as a space occupying body.

One of his first test subject was a man dying of tuberculosis, who was under observation for three hours and forty minutes before death, lying on a bed arranged on a light framework built upon very delicately balanced platform beam scales. He lost weight slowly at the rate of one ounce per hour due to evaporation of moisture in respiration and evaporation of sweat. During all three hours and forty minutes the beam end was placed slightly above balance near the upper limiting bar in order to make the test more decisive if it should come. At the end of three hours and forty minutes he expired and suddenly coincident with death the beam end dropped with an audible stroke hitting against the lower limiting bar and remaining there with no rebound. The loss was ascertained to be three-fourths of an ounce. He continued to weigh 6 dying patients in an attempt to prove that the soul was material and measurable.

MacDougall's experiments in NYT

He wrote, “I am aware that a large number of experiments would require to be made before the matter can be proved beyond any possibility of error, but if further and sufficient experimentation proves that there is a loss of substance occurring at death and not accounted for by known channels of loss, the establishment of such a truth cannot fail to be of the utmost importance.”

In the year 1854 Rudolph Wagner, the physiologist, at the Gottingen Congress of Physiologists, proposed a discussion of a “Special Soul Substance.” The challenge was accepted, but no discussion followed and among the 500 voices present not one was raised in defense of a spiritualistic philosophy.