Myth-onology

Clearly, the explosive growth of the Internet has created a fair share of misunderstandings, fabricationand,myths . so, just to make you guys more comfortable and educated about the actual, definite facts about tech, and clear all related misconceptions  here are some rumors laid bare, and how they affect you.

1. Expensive HDMI cables are better than cheap ones: Don't be pressured by salespeople to buy marked-up HDMI cables in retail stores. Brent Shelton from Ebates.com agrees. Cables which you can buy online are much, much cheaper and they send exactly the same HDMI signal, which they are supposed to..uh..yeah!

The only thing cheap HDMI cables can't do, is pad the pockets of retailers with profits derived from products marked up hundred of times.

2. More the Megapixels, better is the camera: Now, this one has being doing rounds for quite sometime now. The truth is much more complicated. While, megapixels definitely affect quality, other factors, such as Color, sharpening, the lens type and quality are much more important. This goes same for Cameras on Smartphones  the most recent and the best example would be the camera on the HTC One. The camera is only 4MP, but captures pictures equivalent to a camera having 8MP. So, before you buy a new camera, be sure to consult a pro and read the consumer reviews rather than the MegaPixels.

3.Macs can't get viruses: HOLY CRAP ON A CRACKER!! what kind of people come up with such rumors? For the  one thing i am absolutely sure about the Hacking community is that they really enjoy challenges. However, the likelihood of an Apple Macintosh user getting a virus when compared to a Microsoft Windows user is very little to none. In fact, many of the Apple Macintosh users don't even run an antivirus protection program.   And, just so you guys know, half million Mac users were infected with a Trojan last year in April, with half the users being in the U.S.

           

4. Moore's law will always hold true: Moore's Law is generally taken to mean that the number of transistors on a chip -- and by extension, processing power -- doubles every two years. In reality, Gordon Moore, the computer scientist who originated Moore's Law in 1965, was talking about the economic costs of chip production and not the scientific achievements behind advances in chip design. 

One analyst has predicted that by 2014, transistors will be 20 nanometers in size but that any further reductions in chip size will be too expensive for mass production [source: Nuttall].

For comparison, as of summer 2009, only Samsung and Intel have invested in making 22-nanometer chips.

5. Unlimited Texting plan save you money: if you belong to a school of thought which actually believes in this ideology, please contact me, so that i can arrange a meet with you and indulge in a lot of public mockery. 

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Google Now Voice Commands

I've been intending to write this post for a while but couldn't find time (procrastination, you know :-P) . But here it is! Google Now is an intelligent personal assistant from Google and comes default with 4.1 Jelly Bean, a flavor of the android operating system. I've been amazed by this technology ever since it was demonstrated at the 2012 Google I/O. It answers questions, gets directions, sets alarms, makes recommendations and performs various actions by delegating requests to a set of web services. The interface is awesome, it depicts information with the help of cards. You'll be seeing their screenshots later in this post.

The main feature that makes Google Now awesome and better than it's competitors which include Siri and S-Voice is it's voice recognition and intuition. Yeah right, intuition. Google  Now takes out information like airport tickets from a person's Gmail account and generates a card showing the person's boarding pass! It generates a card from the person's search history. For  example you searched about a basketball team and you'll see a card which will allow you to buy tickets for a match in which that team plays again! Whenever you are away at work, it will generate a card showing you the shortest and less traffic infested route back to your house! i searched about Galaxy S4 on Google and bam! There was a card waiting for me in Google Now.

Specialized cards currently comprise of : 

• Activity Summary(Walking)
• Birthday
• Events
• Flights
• Movies 
• News
• Meetings
• Photo Spot nearby
• Package Tracking
• Places
• Public Alerts
• Public Transit
• Research Topics
• Sports 
• Stock
• Traffic Updates
• Attractions nearby while traveling
• Time Back Home
• Translate
• Weather

Phew! :-P

Last Sunday, I got my Nexus 4 and I've been playing with Google Now a lot! To start asking questions, you just have to tap on the mic icon shown in the image or say "Google"  after you've already opened Google Now after swiping up from the Home key.

Let us discuss about some of the voice actions which I came across!

1. Open an App
   
   You can say "Open [app]" to open an app. For example, "Open Camera" opens the camera app.
   
                                              
2. Set an Alarm
   
   To quickly set an alarm, say "Set an alarm for [time]" or "Set an alarm for [time] from now". You can also add a label For example "Alarm for 6 Hours Wake Up."
   
                                              
3. Make a note
   
   To make a note, say "Note to self" and continue talking to add words to your note. It will create a note both in audio and text which will be emailed to your Gmail account, so that you can listen to the exact words you said !
   
                                              
4. Create a Calendar Event
   
   You can just say "Create a calendar event : Lunch in New Delhi, Monday at noon"
   
                                              
5. Send an Email
   
   Voice actions can be used to send an entire email. For example, you could say that "Send email to Vinayak Mehta, subject, Test email, message, Testing Google Voice actions"
   
6. Send a Message
   
   Voice actions can send text messages in the same way it can send emails! For example. you could say "Send SMS to Pranu Sarna, message, Hey"
7. Make a Phone Call
   
   To make a phone call, just say "Call" followed by the phone number or the name of the contact.
   
                                            
8. Scan a Barcode
   
   You don't need a third party barcode scanner app on your phone, whenever you want to scan a barcode or a QR code you just gotta say "Scan a Barcode"  and boom! Google will give you a barcode scanner.
   
                                             

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Learn to code like a Boss

Buying the latest iPhone, and keeping up to date with the latest gossip in the tech industry, is all fine and good. But, if you don't know how to code, you ain't no kind of techie. As the tech industry expands at the current exponential speed, you have the choice to become a consumer of tech or someone who understands it.

'Programming Literacy is going to be an incredibly important skill in the next few years' says Codecademy founder Zach Sims. Startups like Codecademy and the TheNewBoston are making it easy to learn coding online, specially for school children. Intense programs such as bloc aim at making you seasoned programmers from complete noobs within 12 weeks. Nice.

so, if you think coding is only for some math geniuses and geeks, think again. In Estonia, all children in public schools are taught programming. Recently, the mayor of New York City, Mike Bloomberg signed up for a course on codecademy. :')

Most people will be intimidated by the endless lines of numbers and characters which is difficult to decipher than most of Hieroglyphics. well, it can be a bit difficult in the starting. That is why i suggest, beginners start with a Graphical Programming language called scratch. Scratch is  phenomenally good in laying the basics of programming, which i think are the most important for a good programmer.

Here are some facts about coding, and yeah i strongly promote female invasion of the programming field. Please, God!      

                                                               (click on the image to enlarge)

"The programmers of tomorrow are the wizards of the future. You’re going to look like you have magic powers compared to everybody else." -Gabe Newell, Founder and President, Valve 

  

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Windows Tweak #2 : Disabling the Aero Theme on Win 7

Windows 8 has arrived but it is not as popular among PC users as compared to it's predecessor Windows 7. In fact, it is still occupies the most area in the pie chart of most used operating systems!

Windows 7 is an operating system produced by Microsoft, which was released in July 22, 2009. I was introduced to this OS at around mid 2010. But immediately after using it, my first impression was that it was faster and more efficient than Windows XP. I cannot forget the awesomely new and completely redesigned Windows Aero UI that was the successor of Windows XP's "Luna" theme. It has that glass theme and many more effects that require a decent graphic card. Otherwise, the UI tends to get sloppy.

Let me tell you the minimum hardware requirements for Windows 7. 

• 1 GHz Processor (32 or 64 Bit)
• 1 GB of RAM
• 16 GB of available disk space
• Support for DX 9 Graphics with 128 MB of Graphic Card (for Aero UI)
• A DVD-R/W Drive (of course :P) 

Unfortunately, I didn't have a graphic card installed on my PC at that time and the RAM was only 512 MB (:P), so I decided to use a basic theme which don't use the Aero interface. The Aero UI certainly adds some floss to Windows 7 but it requires a decent hardware to run smoothly. So why don't we just avoid the it if what we care about more in Windows 7 is speed and performance. How to disable the Aero Theme on Windows 7 :

• First, right click on the desktop and choose Personalize from the menu.

• Then you can simply scroll the themes down until you see the Basic themes.

If you have a high end hardware configuration on your PC, then you wouldn't notice any monumental change in the way you use the OS but if you have that configuration like some of my friends at college then you would experience a more snappy experience of Windows 7 after disabling the Aero.

If you have any doubts or want to learn more about any keyword in this post, then do post that in our comments below. Till then, wait for our future posts in the Windows Tweaks Series!

                                           

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Know Your Droid

Quickly jumping to your settings, knowing the weather right from your lock screen, setting up an app dock for quick launch - these might be the some mind=blown features of the Android OS for mobile devices. But, the one feature for which i would probably kiss the Android team at Google ( including females) would be, how open source the whole OS is.

Now, if you are thinking what the heck open source is then remember how different are the UIs of different android devices available in the market. for eg- a Samsung device would have a UI which is quite different from the stock android version. How is this possible? Ans.- Open source. Open source actually means that the code of the program is actually editable and thus highly customizable. Hence most companies would  tweak the stock android version on their devices. The HTC Sense range has been quite successful at it. But the best part about open source is that an advanced user can tweak his android device. No, I wouldn't dive into the code alteration, however you can do that if you are a programming veteran. You can also customize the OS by downloading some free apps right from the play store, so here goes. By the way the device I'm using here is the Micromax A90.

1. ADW launcher-  It is my personal favorite free launcher in the play store mostly because it offers us the vanilla android UI or the stock android UI as some would call it. It offers such great features in the lite version. Plus it gives you the awesome gestures. swipe up, left, right, on your home screen to launch a desired app. BOSS! Play around the settings a bit, and find yourself the most suitable one. Here is what i am using right now.

                                                   

Swipe Pad - Swipe in from any of the edges of your screen, and enter your recent apps. It is so much cooler than the stock recent apps launcher because there is this circular selector which revolves in real time. all you have to do is let go of the selector on the desired app. So cool!

                                                    

So, yeah,.. try downloading and trying the above apps, they are pretty cool if you are bored of the user interface on your android phone. Drop in your comments, if you like the apps (or hate them), and if you are using some other, let us know as well.             

                                                                Hail Open Source.

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Windows Tweak #1 : Speeding Up Boot Time

  

Remember, when you bought your new PC and got amazed with how fast it booted up. But now, after your Need for Speed  and Call of Duty series, has whammed the processor for good, its boot time has increased exponentially. Here exponentially stands for the time taken by me to watch an entire episode of Game of Thrones, and gulp down a whole double chicken roll.

Here are some possible reasons for your windows PC to lag:

1. When you first purchased your PC its cache memories were empty. After some use it stored addresses and applications, which you used to  run frequently.

2. It stored the program registry into the memory which you installed since windows load up.

So is there a way to decrease boot time without getting into hyper registry editing. Voila! Read up, uh-err Read down, i meant. 

So when windows starts it uses a single core in the processor to load all the programs and reserves all other core for  applications like games and software editing.

1.Press (Windows key) + r.

2. Type msconfig and run it.

3.Go to Boot tab

4.Click on Advanced options...

5.Check No of processors.

6.Set to max.2-8 (depends upon your processor . How many logical processor does your pc have.)

7. Click ok and restart.

You should experience a monumental decrease in your boot time, if not, wait for our future posts in this Windows Tweaks Series!

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Windows Tweak Series

Hello people, sorry for the delay in posts. But, as I said we are a couple of engineering undergrads, and engineering has mid semester exams, something i don't like to talk about much. *a moment of silence*. So, we are back with a bang and a new series of blogs which would aim at making better your windows P.C experience by some minimalistic tweaks and hacks. you don't need to a be dedicated hacker to make them run and you will be amazed how responsive your PC would be after you are done. All you need to do is Read, follow and comment about any problems you come along. We would be glad to help.

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