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Hold your phone right for a good selfie
The secret to a good selfie is holding it right, ensuring stability and minimise shacking. Proper lighting, good framing comes only next to proper holding. I finally learned the right way of holding the phone for a good selfie. Use your Index & Small finger to hold the phone stable. Middle fingers are placed behind the screen for back support. Keep the Thumb finger free for clicking. That’s it!
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Dial Up and Roaming
The rumours about Microsoft rebranding Skype WiFi Hotspots offering, which allows you to connect to paid WiFi hotspots around the world with your Skype credit, set me on a nostalgic path for few minutes. It was circa 1996 when I was using analogue phone lines & dial up modems to connect to the Internet through Government of India’s company VSNL. VSNL had a partnership with a company in USA called iPass, you can opt-in to, on additional charge to get enrolled into iPass service and then install iPass Dial-Up connection software in your PC (Windows/Mac laptop). With that in place, from many places around the world you could dial-in to…
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Microsoft Build 2015
Today the keynote of Microsoft Build 2015 conference was a wild ride, cool, far reaching, innovative – all words you won’t have associated with Microsoft for a long time. I will capture my take in the following ten highlights in honor of upcoming Windows 10. One of my favourite Microsoftie “Scott Guthrie” on his signature Red Shirt on stage announced for Azure Platform – Elastic Pool to pool SQL Azure databases resources and manage jobs across databases, Docker support in Azure. As a developer at heart, my favourite, launch of Visual Studio Code for Mac OS X, Linux & Windows. Microsoft calls it a Code Optimized Editor to highlight the fact…
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We won’t be using smartphones by 2025
Favourite this post in your browser, as I am daring to make predictions on the state of smartphones for next 10 years. Before I do that, I have no qualification or experience in designing or manufacturing or marketing Smartphones, and that is what makes me qualified to do the predictions as an user. 1.By 2020 phones will get smaller & smaller – reversing current trend When mobile phones were invented in 1973 at Motorola they weighed 2 Kilograms and were bulky. They continued to look more or less the same when they got commercially released after ten years in 1983. In the next 25 years when phone subscribers grew from…
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MS DOS for Mobile
It was last year on the same day (April 1) I recalled about a session I delivered many years back in 2000. It was the announcement of MSDOS.NET. After 15 years the marketing powers in Microsoft have used the idea to release a spoof app for Windows Phone that emulates MS-DOS. Seeing the announcement video it was clearly an April fools joke, which it was, but Microsoft surprised everyone by releasing an actual app in the Windows Phone store that works. The screenshots seen here are what I took in a Lumia 630 running Windows 10 build. What was more unexpected was the ability to type “Win” in command prompt…
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Lost without mobile for an hour
I dropped my wife & kid in front of the venue, told them I will park the car and call when I am inside the venue. They walked away, I had driven few metres, when I turned to pick my mobile phone, I couldn’t spot it. It was not in my pocket, not in the dashboard, not in the seat next to me. I looked around to see them, no sight of them, road was jam packed so I couldn’t stop the car and go after them. I began to panic! My mind was playing tens of options on what to do next. It’s not going to be a simple…
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Ubuntu Live for Surface Pro and MacBook Pro
Yes, I do love Windows & I love my Surface Pro device. Having got few gray hairs has thought me never to leave office with just one device or one set of cables especially when travelling. Irrespective of the device & OS, something can go wrong with OS or the App you are using just before a presentation. I am not as paranoid as the master Dr.Nitin Paranjape on this, but it’s a smart idea to carry an OS on the go for emergencies. This will help you boot your device, connect to wi-fi, browse a website at the minimum when your device or OS fails. To do this, the…
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Tamil keyboard app for Windows Phone 8
I have written earlier about Windows Phone 8 (~Nokia Lumia phones) supporting display of “Tamil” language texts. The support is not 100%, though you could read Tamil texts, you couldn’t type in Tamil (Tamil IME/Keyboard was missing). I am expecting Microsoft to release an IME for Tamil in their future updates (I am not privy to any release plans or dates). In the meanwhile I was finding it difficult to correspond in Tamil with friends using my Nokia Lumia 925. Tired of waiting, I had our mobile team at Vishwak Solutions write a basic app that allows Tamil text typing. The app is live and available for free download from…
