Recent Blog Posts

If you are a smartphone user, you’d probably agree to it – SMS is dead. You might be still getting your ticket booking and pizza delivery notifications via SMS but apart from such grandly mentionable uses, chances are thin that you use SMS for messaging in real. SMS is slow, you don’t get to know if the other fellow has read it or not and it can be costly if the other guy lives on the other side of the world.

Those are only some of the reasons why WhatsApp, Viber, Facebook messenger and iMessage are popular. Add to that the increasing need to share images, watching your buddy live and a dozen or so ‘I need more’ requirements and you get to know why messaging apps are swarming up. But what is the best messenger of the lot? We think, it’s Skype and we are going to give you reasons for that:

History books say that India was liberated from the hands of British on August 15, 1947. They are right. However, the time is near when India will once again note a noteworthy date in its history books. Date is not yet predictable, or perhaps it has already crossed by. Now, I cannot tell you the date but I can surely tell the event. The event is – India is soon to become one of the states of USA. I am not sure whether it will be declared as a territory because it is far away from the mainland of USA. So, when did it happen?

This was a long process and involved mutual consent of both Indian and USA government. And it was probably one of the rarest events in history of mankind that not only the governments but the people too cooperated to turn this dream into reality. The process was slow and very few people took notice of the progress but as a matter of fact (and surprise), the process is about to complete quite soon. It all began with Talent Acquisition.

Talent Acquisition

More than a decade ago, the PM of India, the then Financial Minister of India opened gates of Indian borders for foreign countries. United States, being one of the biggest helpers of all under-developed and developing countries came ahead and started pouring its funds. It not only convinced India that they will be helping the country get their technology right but also allowed its cash rich companies to bring the super idiotic people from India to elevate them above poverty line.

America also allowed these downtrodden, poor, starving-to-death idiotic people to reach high positions in major tech companies. Since Indian companies in both public and private sector were short of cash, America offered peanuts to the Indian idiots (henceforth referred to as ‘monkeys’) so that the monkeys did not starve to death; after all something is better than nothing. This encouraged all the monkeys in India to open their mouth and run to America. America being one of the most generous and peace-seeking countries the world has ever seen let them in. I know that the subheading ‘Talent Acquisition’ does not really fit the scene because all US took from India were some monkeys who love peanuts. India the most non-violent country (keeping aside rapes, murders, thievery, riots and economical instability) offered the best it could – monkeys who love peanuts. Hence, US gained the best talented monkeys India had to offer.

Today India is very proud to have helped America by sending monkeys. As a matter of fact, the people of India feel proud and brag about the fact that their monkeys are serving a large part of government agencies and super-rich companies of the most peace-seeking country in the world, the country which is so much into the belief of peace that it can attack any country if the peace is challenged. This was stage one of the merger which is going to bring tears in the Indian eyes, including mine.

Long, long back the human race was not able to record sound. Music was a luxury limited to the royals and the super-rich. Since then, we have come a long way. An average user with a laptop or desktop would have tens of GBs of music stored. Purchasing or downloading music has become easier than ever and iPods and Walkmans are a common sight. With options like these and the quantity of music available, management of our ever swelling music libraries has become really difficult. Leawo Tunes Cleaner solves the problem, with elegance and smoothness.

Installation, UI and Ease of Use

Installing the program is simple. You follow the wizard, the program gets installed. Once installed, you can get the software up and running in no time. If you want to register, click on the down-arrow button on title bar of the main window interface.

The UI is average. To an extent, it tries to copy the interface of Mac and can get confusing when you want to move the window. If you try to just drag the window using any blue part, it might not work. You have to drag the window using the title bar (which is not clearly visible). The buttons look all 3D (skeumorphic design) and are kind-of attractive. Functionally, the UI is perfect, though we did not like the shade the blue Leawo imposes on us – it hits the eye a little. We just wish Leawo had taken a little more care of the UI. Except this minor concern, Tunes Cleaner is just a perfect piece of work.

The software is pretty easy to use. The home screen offers 4 simple options:

1. Start to Clean iTunes: This option will launch iTunes and read the library. Once the scan is complete, it illustrates the report of the music library.
2. Open Music Files: This is same as the first option but instead of launching iTunes and reading the library, this option lets you select a folder containing your music. Handy in case you don’t have iTunes or if you want to scan a folder not yet included in the iTunes library.
3. Clean-up Duplicates: This is an amazing option which removes duplicate songs from your library (or the folder you wanted Tunes Cleaner to scan in).
4. Load Saved Result: This will allow you to load a half-run project. You can pause the operation at any time and save the progress in a project file. This is a great option for the times when power is down or your laptop battery is running low and the operation is going to take long.

Fly on the broom

Starting off is easy if you have iTunes installed. Just select the first option “Start to Clean iTunes” and it will launch iTunes, read the library and commence scan of the files in there. The process takes a little bit of time depending on how plump your library has grown into. Once done, it would generate a report stating the number of tracks with missing album art, artist info, album info and files which cannot be fixed/overwritten by Tunes Cleaner.

Dropbox was first. It was not Google this time which spearheaded the ‘sync your files on the cloud’ industry though they are one of the best in the field. But they, by no single inch are behind in popularity or functionality. But is cloud behaving the way we want it to?

Cloud storage – the problem

Ever since we had Drive, we have always wanted a Drive client for Linux. There are costlier products like InSync and then there are hack-together products like Grive. InSync is paid and it seems no one is in mood to get that running on their systems just for syncing files. Grive has to be run manually and that is not how cloud needs to work for us. Let us first see the limitations of Google Drive or Dropbox; the pioneer first:

1. Dropbox:
   1. Smaller storage space (up to 5 GB on free accounts)
   2. Multiple accounts not supported by client.
   3. Cannot edit documents and spreadsheets in the web interface.
   4. Control over sharing is broken in certain ways
2. Google Drive:
   1. No Linux client
   2. Multiple accounts not supported by client.
   3. Sharing can be done only with those who have a Google account and the control is not granular enough.

In addition, all these storage solutions are controlled by third parties. While Google and Dropbox will swear to protect your data, we have heard enough about NSA, haven’t we? So the one weak point about them is – they both belong to a country where the government is voracious for all kinds of data. Do we have a solution, if at all? Yes, and the answer is – have a cloud storage of your own.

Your very ownCloud

So what is so great about this thing anyway, you might enquire!We’ve got a lot to tell and don’t know where to begin. Let us begin with the first word ‘own’.

Ownership: So, ownCloud runs on your hardware, which means that if you want ownCloud, you have to have your own web server. That said, if you host any site, ownCloud can run on that. Now, it will not run via your blogger or wordpress account; you do need your own server. That also means – your privacy depends on your hosting provider’s terms. If you have a server which you completely own, ownCloud will make it yours! Combined with a service like that of DynDNS, you can host your ownCloud instance even on your laptop!

Space restrictions: You are limited by space only by choice. If you install ownCloud on a hard disk with 2 TB of free space – that is the storage space you get. If you want ‘a hell lot more’, well, there are a lot of techniques to combine hard disks and mount the cumulative storage as one mountpoint (LVM?) so your space limitations are determined by your choices. Your choices and no one is there to impose anything on you.

Some people hate reading something descriptive. No issues, at times we all do. But it is a matter of fact that details are what play the ‘extra’ in extraordinary. This post is about an app named ‘Write’ which does one utterly simple job – lets you take notes. So in case you wanted to know the gist of what I am about to say, here it is – Write is the most awesome tool for taking notes I have encountered so far. It gets the job done the way it was meant to be.

So what’s special?

The special thing about Write is that it fits right in between a complicated note-taking app like Evernote which is stuffed with features which overdo the note-taking task and Apple’s own Notes app which is the complete vanilla version of note-taking and locked down to Apple. Write opens the gates in all directions and lets you save notes exactly where you want. You are not locked to any one cloud provider, be it Apple, Dropbox, Google Drive or Facebook (Okay, Facebook is not a cloud service but you can save your notes there).

Omen for a good journey ahead

It is often said that a good start is an omen. It indicates a happy and successful journey. When you start off with Write app, you would get another reason to believe that the saying was true. The first launch will ask you a wise question which determines some of your ‘sync’ experience for later – select your preferred cloud – iCloud or Dropbox. Personal suggestion – if you don’t have a Macbook or an Apple desktop, go for Dropbox. Once you have selected Dropbox, you have to authenticate the app from your Dropbox account (you just need to login to Dropbox) and then assign a folder where Write will save your notes. In case you selected iCloud, you just have to allow Write app the access to iCloud and things will set up for you. Simple to setup! If you want to link Facebook (you can publish your notes into your Facebook account) or Google Drive or Sync your notes with the Elephant-ish Evernote, you have those in the settings menu (click on the options icon on the left side on the folder-listing view of the Write app).

Sophistication can be simple too

Da Vinci said “simplicity is the best sophistication”. He forgot to say that sophistication can be utterly simple too. Apple has been producing amazingly sophisticated but utterly simple products to prove the unsaid. Write app carries the idea forward.