Satish | Technotip.org

3 Mobile Apps that I use and recommend

rw_nokia6630_keypadcloseup I am currently using Nokia 6630 and 3 applications that I most use on my cell phone are:

1. Opera mini — The fastest and the powerful browser for Symbian 60 serious.

3. Nimbuzz / free download — This is an ultimate software for mobile phones(which has internet connection). This software is an all in one package. You can stay connected to your friends using its Orkut, Facebook, yahoo! messenger, Skype, Windows live messenger, Gtalk, AIM, ICQ, Jabber etc. And you can call, chat from mobile to PC with anyone(who has this apps on PC) and anywhere. Its camera(webcam) feature is an ultimate thing I have seen so far, in a mobile software. If you have a mobile with internet connection, then do not miss installing this software. And happily it costs nothing. yes its a free to use software.

And I use some more common software like FileMan, SmartMoviePlayer, and very few games. And I am not a big fan of music players, as the music files work perfectly in my default player of Nokia 6630.

I will be online most of the times using my mobile, using Opera-mini. I usually visit many blogs and read articles regularly using my mobile. When I am in front of my Computer, I concentrate only on writing articles. And I visit and read a few, selective blogs from my computer.

These are some minimum things I use in my mobile.

I know that, there are people who make use of many applications in their mobiles. If you are one among them or if you know any application, that you think will be useful for others, if you share it here, then please share the information and the link to get the application in the comment section. It would be appreciable, if you also share, how you make use of those applications..

What is the perfect time to start any of your projects?

Technotip.org was started on 18th June 2008. And I had the plan of starting it from the end of 2007 itself, but I was not able to start working for it, as I had my exams, college farewell, parties etc. So I thought of postponing it to 2008. But in the beginning of 2008, usually we will be busy in our college project works and studies. In March, April and May, we will be having our practical, project and theory exams.

So I again postponed it and finally fixed a date. I wanted to start working for my blog after all our exams.

But while studying for the exams, I use to always think of building the blog, its design aspects, adverting etc and wasted hell lot of time. And when all our exams were finally finished, I wanted to have break. I wanted to go to some hilly region for refreshment and all my friends also forced me to join them(I also wanted to go).

But after the trip I realized that, I would never get a perfect time to start the blog. It was on that day, I gotup from my bed and started working for my blog. I had already registered my domain name and hosting from Yahoo!(which I later transferred to Doreo ).

Like this, I have many friends who also want to start a blog(after seeing my first cheque from Google AdSense), but they say that, their perfect time has not yet arrived! They want their exam results to be announced first. And then they want to goto seat selection of their new college for their master degree, after that they would be having time to start blog, and they say that, that’s the best time to start, as they will not be having any problems.

But I think, there will be no time in our life time, where we can predict a near future and say confidently that, on these days I will not be having any problems.

As I think, my friends will surly need some extra time to get settled in their new college. After that, they will be busy in impressing their new lecturers and classmates. And they need time to complete their college assignments, mini-projects, and they need time to flurt with their new friends, in the name of helping them in completing their assignments and projects. By the time, they remember about the blog, their College Internal exams starts. They get busy again, and after that they wait for the results again. After the results they think that, the score is too low, and they need to start studying hard from that day itself to score good marks in the next Internal exams(but for refreshment after the first internals, they go for a movie). Like this their final exams come closer and they will surly never find a perfect time to start the blog!

This is not only the case with students. This holds good even for people working at a factory or office. They will not start a blog, if they postpone(till they start getting a salary hike!).

And this also holds good, with things other than Blogging. Let it be your personal work…If you have a plan of taking your family out for a picnic, and keep waiting for a perfect time to arrive, then that time may go out of your hand.

I know that, we can’t do any work in a hurry. It needs a proper planning and smart execution. But postponing it, just because of some usual reason is not a good idea.

Adjust according to the available time, rather than waiting for the time to adjust with your schedule.

We can goto a trip on Sunday, rather than giving a bad reason like, “I am tired dear”, to your partner.

And I know that, for students, studies is more important than anything else. But if s/he is really interested in blogging, then they should move forward on any holiday orelse they many not get time in their life.

So what I think, is, in most of the cases, the perfect time is today. And we must take a step or two towards any of our set goals today itself. Let the step be slow, but keep moving, never stop, until the destiny is reached.

This holds good for all the goals that you set in your life and not only for blogging.

Hope you have heard the (in)famous saying, ” Slow and Steady Wins the Race “.

Invest atleast 30minutes or at the least 10 minutes to work for your personal goals daily. This would keep your inbuilt, hidden or hid talents alive.

In big companies like Google, they give their employees time to work on their personal projects.

Working on your personal projects(goals) will really enhance your abilities over time and you can become more confident about your ability.

So invest your precious time towards your personal goals, and better to start working for it from today, rather than to wait for your lucky day(or the perfect day) to come.

Success is what time can decide, but I am sure that, no success will come unless you start.

This is what I felt like, when some of my friends told me about their desire to start a blog and are not having time to do so(in their entire holiday!). And this was also my personal experience, once upon a time. But you may have a different story to tell. Please share all your thoughts and experiences in the comment section..

Get SMS alerts of your schedules from Google Calendar

We can’t be infront of our computer all the time to see our Google Calendar, for our next schedule. So Google has implemented SMS alert feature to its Google Calendar service. The SMS supports 38 languages so far.

Setting up the SMS alert is very easy. You should have your cell phone in your hand while you setup the alert, as you need to verify you mobile number.

Here are some self explanatory screen shots to setup Google Calendar SMS alert…

Make use of this Google Service without fail. This can help a lot. If you don’t have any near important schedule, then, keep a schedule of your loved ones birthday and an important date in your life and Google Calendar will remind you through SMS.

25 Reasons to start a Blog

Here is a list of advantages of having a blog..

blogging-late-night 1. Share personal opinions more openly, with more freedom. We can learn to express ourselves freely.

2. Everyone’s voice has value.

3. We can share our knowledge.

4. Blogs…as its name suggests (logs), can be used to store the information that will be useful for yourself and others in the future.

For Example:-

We do lot of research while writing some of the articles. And as human nature, we may forget the things. So writing an article about whatever research we have down, will be accessible to ourselves and our readers any time. And this will also help for the further research works.

And sharing our research and results with our readers and getting their comments(interaction) and feed back will also help in improving the further research works.

5. We can also make money out of our blogs, to cover the hosting and other expenses. And if taken seriously, with dedication and consistency you can also make more money. The advantage is, you make money by doing what you love doing(blogging).

6. We can build good relationship with other people of similar interest.

7. We should keep in mind that…“Exchange one dollar, we both have one dollar each. Exchange one idea, and we will be having two ideas each.”

8. Our writing skills are improved very much after we indulge in blogging for atleast 6 months or 1 year. You can observe it yourself.

9. Thinking capacity will be high.

10. Knowledge in a wide variety of topics. Even though you may be blogging in a particular niche, but still you will surly be reading some of the posts of your favorite bloggers, which are totally about someother niche.

11. Ability to thinking about the pros and cons. Normally people think in one way, but the bloggers always think about both pros and cons. This may sometimes, be an advantage in your personal life also.

12. Willingness to help others. Before starting this blog, I was wondering, why would people be so eager to help others(in forums, blogs, social networking sites etc), by investing their time for no money in return!

13. You can learn different marketing strategies.

14. Having a blog, sometimes, makes us to be more active in forums, social networking sites etc. And more importantly, we will try to be more polite and more helpful. And we will become more interactive.

15. Having a blog makes us get hooked to internet more. And all most all of us will get inspired to think innovatively. And all most all the bloggers have some goals set for their life(outside blogging life also).

16. As our blog grows and as we start acquiring more and more feedburner readers, we will be having some more responsibility, as our articles will be read approximately by this much people. So we start acting and thinking more responsibly and professionally. This would also improve our social life.

17. Respecting others thoughts.

18. As time goes by, we will learn a lot of technical things about the internet, to maintain our blog, to troubleshoot some small problems ourselves.

19. Increases confidence about our opinion, when we see positive comments from others.

20. We can learn to take the negative feedback from our readers positively. This will help a lot in our daily life.

21. To go along the line of a blog can land you a job opportunity, especially if it attracts a wide readership and you become recognized as an expert in your niche.

22. We can learn more about ourselves. As we keep blogging, we can learn about our interests. Our point of view. And we can also realize, what we like and what we hate. Until starting a blog, many people even don’t have time to think about themselves, their interests etc. Now, while blogging, you do your job(blogging), and still you will be able to know all the thinks about yourself(over time).

23. And the amazing part is, we can get trustworthy friends from all over the world.

24. You can be busy always. You might have heard that, “Empty mind, is devils workshop”.

By starting a blog, I think you can be busy all the time, in a constructive work(blogging).

25. You will turn into a personal consultant for your friends and family.

Bloggers keep reading things in their RSS reader and emails newsletters, they will be helping people and getting help from others. In the journey they will accumulate lot of ability to take decision. Friends and family can notice that, by seeing the changes in your behaviour(you may not notice it). And finally they start calling you for some advice in buying something or to ask some solution for their problems or atleast to tell you their problems(as they think, you are the only one person on this earth, who will surly listen to their problem without interrupting them!).

25th point is my personal experience and this may be with wrong or quite opposite for many of you.

And all these depends on the niche and the reason for which you have started a blog.

These are my personal opinion and experiences. Please share some of your views and experiences in the comment section, and let all of us know, how blogging has influenced your life.

Gmail feature, to track login sessions and some more details

Want to know, the timeings of your last login(like in your AdSense account) ?

Are you afraid or have doubt that, somebody else at office is accessing your Gmail ?

Want to know the Browser, mobile, POP3, etc and the timings and the Ip address of your previous logins ?

Gmail has all these features in one click….Most of us have surly missed to notice this very important security feature of Gmail.

Many of you have seen all the options present in Gmail Settings tab. And you might be thinking, where the hell could this option be present?

You might have missed this because, this option is at the end of the Gmail page(footer).

Here are the screen shots…
last-login-gmail-detail

When you click on the “Detail” link…you can see the details of the last 5 login sessions. And you can also see, if the same email account is being used at the same time in some other places. And importantly, you can “Signout all other login sessions”.
Sessiona-gmail-Ip-log-login

How to use this data

If you’re concerned about unauthorized access to your mail, you’ll be able to use this data to find out if and when someone gained access. Does the Access Type column show any unusual access? If you don’t use POP to collect your mail, but your Recent activity table is showing some POP access, it may be a sign that your account has been compromised.

The IP address column is also useful. If you always or most often sign in to Gmail using a single computer, your IP address should be the same, or start with the same two sets of numbers (for example, 172.16.xx.xx). If you’re seeing an IP address that differs greatly from your usual IP address, it could either mean that you’ve recently accessed your mail from a different location, or that someone has accessed your mail. Your current IP address is displayed below the Recent activity table.

Concurrent sessions

If your mail is currently being accessed from another location, it would be listed in the Concurrent session information table. This could mean that you simply have another browser window open with Gmail loaded, or that your home computer is logged in to Gmail while you’re accessing your mail from work. If you’re concerned about any concurrent access, you can sign out all sessions other than your current session by clicking Sign out all other sessions.

If you think your account has been accessed by someone illegally
You’ll need to change your password and your security question. The first step is to read our suggestions on choosing a good password to make sure that your new password is secure. Then, follow the instructions in How do I change my password? to update your password.
disable-gmail-chat
In the first screen shot, you can also spot another small link “Gmail view: standard | turn off chat | “. You can click on the “turn off chat” link to sign out of chat inside your Gmail. But this can be done at the chat box window itself(so, its not an important, must have option).

How to Change Permalink Structure in wordpress

I know this is a small thing to many people out there, but I am writing about this for the beginners. I had also faced lot of problem in changing the permalink, when this blog was hosted in Yahoo! server.

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as categories and other lists of weblog postings. A permalink is what another weblogger will use to link to your article (or section), or how you might send a link to your story in an e-mail message. The URL to each post should be permanent, and never change — hence permalink.

To change the permalink structure, first you need to grant permission, to access the .htaccess file(It should be in writable mod). To do that, log into your hosting account using any FTP software...we recommend using "FileZilla". As it is a FREE software and a good featured one and yet so simple to use.

FileZilla-server-name-user-name-passowrd-field
Ask for the host name to your hosting support team or search in their blog. Username and password will usually be the same as the username and password of your hosting account cpanel.

After logging into your Hosting account through “FileZilla”, goto the folder, where you have installed your wordpress theme, select .htaccess and index.php files and then right click and select “File Attributes”..Now change the Numeric value from 644 to 666. This would grant the writing mode to those two files.

And there is a .[dot] in the beginning of the file name .htacess, that file many not be visible. In this case change the settings to show all the files. or you can ask about it to your web host support team.

FileZilla-index.php-file-attributes

Now you can simply log into your wordpress account and then click on the “settings” tab, and then click on the Permalinks tab.
permalinks-wordpress-setting

There choose which ever format you want your permalink to be.

If you don’t like any of those, then select the “Custom Structure”, as shown in the above image. Now specify whatever structure you want…

Make sure to end your permalink structure with either %post_id% or %postname% (e.g. /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/) so that each permalink points to an individual post.

%year%: The year of the post, four digits, for example 2004
%monthnum%: Month of the year, for example 05
%day%: Day of the month, for example 28
%hour%: Hour of the day, for example 15
%minute%: Minute of the hour, for example 43
%second%: Second of the minute, for example 33
%postname%: Shows only the post name after your blog URL.
%post_id%: The unique ID # of the post, for example 423
%category%: A sanitized version of the category name (category slug field on New/Edit Category panel). Nested sub-categories appear as nested directories in the URI.
%author%: A sanitized version of the author name.

Now choose any one of these or the combination’s of these and put it in the “Custom Structure”, and make sure to end your structure with either %post_id% or %postname% .

Ex:-

/%day%/%postname%/

Now press “Save Changes” button. Thats it. You have setup the permalink structure of your choice. Congrates!

And now don’t forget to change the file permission of .htaccess and index.php files to 644 again, for security purpose.

If you still face any problem with this, then it would be better to contact your hosting provoider.

And you may also feel this plugin interesting to redirect the older permalink structure to the new one’s without any hassle.

For more details about this click here.

You could also be interested in reading Permalink contribution for duplicate content.

Send and receive Orkut Scraps on your SMS enabled mobile phones[India&Brazil Only]

Orkut is a very famous Social networking site in Brazil and India. I have heard that, in Brazil, if 20 are in a cyber, 18 of them will be accessing Orkut. Hope this is not the case in India, but still Orkut is a popular site to get in touch with friends and family.

But its difficult to be in front of computer all the time to get in touch with friends and family. So Orkut had introduced a separate version of Orkut for mobile internet users. But as we all know, most of the service providers charge high rates for providing mobile internet.

So now Google’s popular social networking site Orkut has introduced yet another cool feature, by which we can use Orkut from our cell phones without internet connection. Yes, I am talking about the SMS feature. Orkut had introduced SMS feature in Brazil long back. If you are from Brazil, then click here to learn more.

So I was expecting Orkut to release the same kind of feature in India too. And the day came soon, and now we can use orkut’s new SMS feature, to scrap our friends, look up their contact information and receive scrap notifications.

I always had a thought that Google may merge its Orkut and dodgeball.com to give us a great social networking site. Now Orkut SMS service would look more similar to dodgeball.com( by Google ) service.

To get started click here. There you will see option to specify your mobile number to receive notifications. You will have to verify your mobile number first to start using this service.

When I first saw the list of service providers, I felt like, I am missing something. And suddenly I could realize that, Big players like Airtel and Vodafone where missing from the list! Hope they include them as soon as possible, orelse they will be loosing many customers, before acquiring them.

I use Spice SIM in my Nokia 6630(“3G enabled iPhone will be released on Aug 18th and Aug 22nd by Vodafone and Airtel respectively, in India”. And I will be purchaing iPhone with Airtel soon..).

Spice charges 2Rs for sending mobile verification SMS.

Though I used my Spice number to signup for this service and sent the verification code to the correct number, still this service is not yet activated to my number. I received no confirmation message from Orkut either.

And surprisingly I spotted another aspect….which I have not shown in the above video. When I click on the link “Having Problem?” It shows the following message

Currently orkut SMS works only in Brazil. If you are still not able to register your mobile number visit the SMS help page.

Here is the screen shot…

What should we call this…an error or is this SMS feature still in pre-launch mode in India or is it a pre-registration or whatelse ?

Is this Me alone or everyone else having the same problem with registering their mobile number?

Google Ad Manager BETA, with some improvements

Google Ad Manager Release Notes

Google Ad Manager is a Service, using which we can handle our private advertisers..
Ad Manager offers a wealth of features to help you with:

Google Ad Manager Release Notes

Google Ad Manager is a Service, using which we can handle our private advertisers..

Ad Manager offers a wealth of features to help you with:

Google-Ad-Manager-infographic

Inventory management

Yield optimization
Ad targeting
Trafficking, ad delivery, and order booking
Creatives and rich media management
Reporting
User interface navigation
Account administration
Google Ad Manager delivers all of your directly-sold and network-based inventory

On August 1st 2008, Google Added some features into its AdManager…Here is a small list:

Creative preview on your site – You can now preview a creative on your site to test the creative before the campaign starts. Learn more here.
New look and feel – Google has changed the style and overall appearance of the product. While most things remain in the same place, it may take a few moments to adjust to the new look.
Additional languages – Ad Manager is now available in three new languages: French, Italian, and Ukrainian.
Unlimited flight dates – Originally you could only set unlimited flight dates for ad network orders. Now you can set unlimited flight dates on any Exclusive, Remnant, or House order that has an unlimited impression goal.

If you have any additional questions about this release, Google encourage you to visit the Ad Manager Help Center, and for complete resource for all Ad Manager topics. Also, feel free to join the Ad Manager Help Forum to share any questions, comments, and best practices you have with other Ad Manager users.

Remember, Google Ad Manager is still in BETA and if your website is designed to have direct ad sales, then you can apply for it here. But Google only selects certain websites for its BETA testing. We are happy that, our blog ( Technotip.org) has been approved for this BETA testing long before, and its been nice to use the Free service to get maximum benefit from each ad spot.