Vinay's Tech Stuff

With their latest announcement to host any type of files on Google Docs, Google is foraying into the arena of "your data in the cloud, access, organize, share - anytime from anywhere" business that we have been envisioning from a long time (over 4 years now!). What's interesting is the approach that google has taken. Instead of traditional approach of building all the features that are geared towards providing this product vision from ground up and releasing the end product, Google has built seemingly independent product and tested the waters first. And once the users have accepted each of those individual pieces reasonably well, they are integrating them all to provide a powerful experience. (Privacy conspiracy theorist may say this is much like boiling a frog in the water slowly!). Interestingly enough, Google's price of storage per GB seems to be the cheapest at the moment at $0.25/GB/year. But their initial free offering is just 1 GB with 250MB file size limi

One thing I realized with my last Macbook (White) is that putting your macbook to sleep all the time and never shutting it down (especially overnight) is not good for your battery. By doing that I've had consumed more battery cycles and now the battery discharge time has come down to just over 2 hours. Last week I got a new macbook pro. And this time I figured out how to make it hibernate (not sleep) upon closing the lid. With that, I've managed to do only 3 cycles of battery recharge in last one week. Here's how to put your macbook to deep-sleep (hibernate): Put these two lines in your ~/.bash_profile: alias hibernateoff='sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0' alias hibernateon='sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 5' And whenever you are about to close your lid (like before you go to bed), just turn hibernate on by invoking hibernateon in terminal. At other times, when you don't want it to go to deep-sleep, just turn hibernate off. This is useful when you close y

For my work e-mail, I've used Microsoft Outlook with Exchange server for 2 years and I liked it a lot. Especially the global address book integration, expanding distribution lists, calendar/meeting scheduling features are awesome. In my current workplace, we don't have Exchange. And I'm on a macbook. So I've a choice of Apple Mail or Thunderbird or Microsoft Entourage. Tried Microsoft Entourage - didn't like it - it's nothing like outlook and it's UI is as if it's been resurrected from 1970s. And without exchange server to connect with, it doesn't have much advantage compared to others. I tried Apple mail also for a couple of months. Didn't like it either. Although it looks great compared to entourage or thunderbird, it isn't great for handling lots of e-mails in lots of IMAP folders. It's search is also lacking in speed. Then I tried Thunderbird. I've been a big fan of Mozilla for a long time. And being a supporter of open-sourc