sid’s hacks

With my trusty old computer reaching the end of its life, I’ve been planning to upgrade this for some time now. Building a quality rig ensures that you have a system that’s built to last, and the old one’s given me 5 years of trouble free operation with just one video card upgrade a couple of years back. It still works great, but the time’s come for a hardware refresh. This time around, I decided to not only build a rig that is as top of the line as possible (without breaking the bank), but would also run Mac OSX Snow Leopard. Why, you ask? Couple of reasons – the machine I’m building will be used heavily for music production and remixing, and while I have been a Cubase user on the PC, I also wanted to have a dedicated Logic Pro based setup, which unfortunately has become a Mac only product.

While a lot of Mactards scream from the rooftop about the stability of a Mac and how great it is for music and video production as well as graphic design, having used both Macs and PCs extensively, I would like to point out that if you are a power user and you know how to work a PC, you could do as much with a well built PC as you could with a Mac. That being said, I’ve also taken it up as a challenge to build a better Mac Pro at around half the price, and then extend that to a dual boot setup to get the best of both worlds.

This first part covers the component selection, not only to ensure I get the best bang for the buck, but also select components that are least likely to cause issues with an OSX install. Read on.

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[EDIT: Image removed on request of Airtel] If you’ve been an Airtel Broadband user for as long as I have, you probably at some time have contemplated throwing your modem out the window. While the quality of the connection provided is great, with excellent uptime and consistent speeds, the constant policy changes and ridiculous bandwidth caps make this one of the worst ISPs in the country for power users. Their Fair Usage Policy or FUP (also fondly referred to as F@#k Users Policy by its fans) makes sure you never really get to enjoy your so-called ‘broadband’ connection. Their 4 Mbps plan is rightly called ‘Impatience’, because once you exceed 25GB of bandwidth, your speed is dropped to an insane 16x slower speed of 256 Kbps, making you impatiently wait for your downloads to finish. What Airtel and some other ISPs don’t realize is that people who sign up for higher speed plans usually do so because they are high bandwidth users, and placing ridiculously low bandwidth caps defeat the purpose of signing up for a high speed plan. With a 4 Mbps connection, you have a theoretical max transfer rate of 512 KBps, and at that speed, you could transfer 1.75GB per hour. This means that you could run through your bandwidth cap of 25GB in just over 14 hours. If you like watching video, listening to internet radio stations, playing games online, downloading movies, music and podcasts, then you would probably enjoy a week of the promised speed before the cut kicks in.

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Hello folks. As you two regular visitors may have noticed, this blog has not been updated in some time. For the others who land up via Google, some of the posts may continue to be useful to you. Enjoy. For those of you who land up via Bing please GTFO.

For various reasons, I have been unable to keep this blog fresh. Those reasons have been listed below (along with one not so true reason)

• I’ve moved to a new job and have been focusing on that
• I’m putting in more time into my music production and DJing
• I’m making an effort to get back into competitive Snooker
• I’ve been dating Angelina Jolie and she is quite high maintenance, leaving me with little time for this blog

Yes – as you guessed, I have not yet started with my Snooker practice, but I plan to quite soon.

So to make a long story short, I’m taking a break for a couple of months and will get back to regular blogging soon.

In the meantime, follow my nonsense on Twitter

I was off Facebook for a couple of days and wanted to check the birthdays I missed so I could wish these people, and realized that the new Facebook layout only shows past events and not birthdays. This is a bit annoying, and I’m sure this is something that will be addressed in a future release, but until then, here’s a quick hack to let you find out the birthdays you’ve missed!

More after the break…

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I’ve been using my Blackberry for around a year now and am still amazed at the features this phone has, and keep discovering new things every day. When I just bought this phone, I kept searching the internet for tips and tricks and found a wealth of information. I find a lot of friends with BBs are still surprised when I throw out a tip or two, so to make things easy, I’ve compiled a comprehensive guide to Blackberry keyboard shortcuts so you don’t need to do the searching! Knowing most of these shortcuts enables you to make the most out of your phone, and as a power user, you will find you are able to perform the most routine tasks much faster.

Note that many of the shortcuts will only work on BBs with full QWERTY keyboards, and some of them may not work on all phones, so the best way to find out if it works for your phone model is to just try it!

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If you are using peoples names, birth dates or common English words for your passwords, you are at a high risk of it getting cracked. Besides this, some very common password bloopers including using the word password, numbers in sequence (12345678 etc) or familiar letter sequences such as qwertyuiop or zxcvbnm (yes, admit it, you’ve used one of these at some time or the other).

For a password to be effective and secure, you need to use a random sequence of numbers, letters (in both lower and upper case) and punctuation and make sure that your passwords are different for different accounts. A common mistake is using the same password across multiple accounts just because it’s easy to remember – this will only make it easier for someone to get into multiple accounts with just one password. We’re going to look at a simple online (and offline) tool that will help you out.

Remember that the consequences of using a weak password could range from someone breaking into your email account and sending spam or viruses to logging into your bank or credit card online account and stealing from you. As 4Chan’s recent attack on Facebook accounts shows, much embarrassment can also ensue if you are on the receiving end (or fun if you are not!).

More after the break…

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Let’s face it – I’m a media addict. I love my movies, TV shows, music, photos, but there’s only so much of it I can watch sitting in front of a computer monitor. I’ve got a 46″ Full HD TV in my living room and I’d rather be curled up on a couch in front of this. Getting your media files from your PC to your TV has always been a bit flaky and there are several options, each of which has its benefits and downside.

1. Media Center PC – A separate PC that’s hooked up to your TV offers the most flexible option but is also the most expensive. If you are going to be playing HD videos, you will need to have a good processor and graphics card – but if you do, this will support the most number of formats. It also means you need a second computer.
2. DVD Players – Most new DVD players offer USB drives that allow you to copy your media and plug it in. Besides playing DVDs, most of them playback DivX / XviD files and some of them offer decent upscaling as well as subtitle support but no HD Video support. They also do not support media storage.
3. Game Consoles / Media Extenders – Games consoles like the XBox 360 and PS3 and other Media Extenders allow you to wirelessly (or wired in some cases) extend your PC to your TV. While native support for various formats is high, support for MKV files is missing in most cases and subtitle support is also mediocre (non existent on the PS3). This also requires your PC to be turned on while the console / extender is in use.

Now Western Digital brings us a device that can pretty much play any media format you throw at it and eats 1080p video for breakfast…I like! Let’s look at it in detail after the break!

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IVR (Interactive Voice Response) Menus have become pretty commonplace now, and you will frequently find yourself listening to a strangely enthusiastic recorded voice asking you to press insane number combinations to get to the feature you require or to speak to an operator. This can quickly become frustrating if you need to do this often. If you frequently use conference bridges, this is another place where you will be asked to enter a conference code followed by a hash (#) key to confirm. This also happens when you need to retrieve your voice mail or call an office number and access an extension.

Most mobile phones allows you to store these combinations of phone numbers and keypad inputs so that you will never have to manually enter these again. This little known trick can save you tons of time and may also save you a couple of phones by not having to throw them against a wall in frustration.

Find out how after the break!

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Many iTunes users frequently forget that there’s more to iTunes than just managing and playing back your music. One of those overlooked features is the ability to subscribe to a podcast. By Wikipedia’s definition, a podcast is a series of digital media files, usually digital audio or video, that is made available for download via web syndication. In simple terms this means that you can subscribe to a podcast, which then gets delivered to your iTunes at regular intervals.

Most podcasts are free and there are thousands of quality podcasts over several genres including Music, Arts, Education, Comedy, Health, News & Politics and more. Podcasts are available in both Audio and Video formats, and can be synched to your iPod to take with you on the move. I subscribe to several podcasts and sync them to my iPod in the mornings before I head out to work. If you have a longer commute like I do, you will find that podcasts offer a fresh way to make that commute seem shorter.

Let’s take a look at how you can find and subscribe to podcasts using iTunes after the break …

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I’ve been using the 3G iPod shuffle for a couple of weeks now and can’t seem to understand what the negative buzz on the interweb is all about. It’s my belief that Apple is headed in the right direction with this. Here’s my thoughts why.

First up, the negative buzz – common complaints include a lack of a display and no controls on the device (which have been shifted to the the headphone unit) that renders the use of third party headphones useless (for now, until an external dongle that enables this is soon available).

My counter arguments and full review (and some tips & tricks) after the break…

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