Monthly Archives: May 2007

Switch to Airtel is a good Idea

I have moved to Airtel as it offers me one “Value Added Service” that Idea never did – I can sit in my room AND have a functional mobile at the same time!

I am looking forward to not running out of the room in half asleep state when I get a call early in the morning. I am looking forward to people not complaining about how they had been trying to reach me for the past half hour only to be greeted by “the Idea mobile you are trying to call is out of coverage area” – damn right, I was out of coverage area you jerks, that area is my room in the heart of the city.

I am looking forward to no “cross connections” – believe it or not – which had become a common occurrence on Idea recently – imagine hearing random conversations during the middle of your own. I am looking forward to my mobile not dictating the choice of room I sit in – I guess I should sit in the living room as I am expecting a call.

I am looking forward to getting my life back.

PS – My new no. is mentioned at the foot of this page (for website readers only).

[tags]Mobile, GSM, India, Airtel, Idea[/tags]

Software for switchers

I know there have been plenty of such posts/ articles all over recently, but this is more of a personal post in the public domain. Amitabh is the latest “switcher“, thanks, atleast partially, to yours truly (doses of “Come on dude, get a Mac already” twice a day, thank you very much). He finally bit the bullet and is the proud owner of a shiny new, white Macbook. He asked me for software recommendations and I promised him I’ll do a blog post so that everyone can benefit from the gyaan.

So here it goes. In alphabetic order of categories.

Backup
SuperDuper! (Shareware).
Carbon Copy Cloner (Free).

Blogging
Journler – A lot more than just a blogging tool (Free).
Ecto (Shareware).
Marsedit (Shareware).

Browsers
Safari is good enough for most things (Free).
Camino is Firefox for Mac users (Free).
OmniWeb (Shareware).

Burning CDs etc.
Toast (Shareware).
Disco (Shareware).

FTP
Cyberduck (Free).
Transmit (Shareware).

IM/ Chat
Adium – One Duck to rule them all (Free).
Colloquy – IRC Client (Free).

Media Editors
Audacity – Free audio editor.
AddMovie – Join ’em movies (Shareware).

Media Players
VLC – The only thing you’ll ever need (Free).
Perian – Play DivX videos in QuickTime (Free).
Flip4Mac – Play WMV videos in QuickTime (Free).

RSS
NetNewsWire (Free + Shareware, both versions).
Vienna – Open Source RSS reader.

Text Editors
TextWrangler – Amazing that it’s free.
Textmate – The best text editor ever? (Shareware).

Torrents/ P2P
Azureus – The most popular cross-platform torrent client (Free).
X-Torrent – Torrents, Mac style (Shareware).
Poisoned – Connect to multiple P2P networks (Free).

Virtualization – Intel Macs
aka run Windows on Mac (but why?!!).
Parallels (Shareware).
VMware (Beta).
Boot Camp – Not Virtualization but multi-boot (Free).

Virtualization – PPC Macs
Q (Freeware).
Virtual PC (Not free, no longer in development).

Miscellaneous
Quicksilver – Possibly the best. software. ever. (Free).
Pukka – del.icio.us client (Shareware).

That should be more than enough to get you started dude. I’ll (perhaps!) cover some of the more “exotic” categories/ picks in a follow up post.

Welcome, from darkness, to light.

[tags]Apple, Mac, Shareware, Freeware, Software, Tools, Utilities, Switch, Switcher, GetAMac, Macbook[/tags]