Author Archives: Kunal

Lost me phone

I have officially joined the ranks of careless jerks who manage to lose their phone. Yes, I’ve lost my Nokia 6021 and more importantly the data on it. While I should (might?) have a backup of the phonebook somewhere, around half-a-dozen sent mails and some other private notes are now gone. Forever. How I hate when that happens. It hasn’t been a particularly lucky phone when I think about it – I lost a bunch of messages that I would have liked to keep when I was transferring the phone book from the previous phone to the 6021. It might have been my fault, but Nokia software should be more explicit in stating if you restore the backup of one phone onto another, it will erase everything that’s already present in the target phone!! Aargh.

Anyways, I had long come to terms with that loss and had recently been thinking of switching to the Treo 700p ((yes, i am not as averse to the idea of having a camera in my phone as I was before)) (when the GSM version comes out) or the rumoured iPhone that is now almost certain to come out by the end of the year, unless his Steviness has a change of heart, even though the Nokia I had was less than an year old. Treo 650 was another option, especially as I thought I could get it at a much better price than the other two. Maybe the Nokia got wind of my idea, even though I was careful not to discuss this when it was around, and decided to run off with someone who it thought would be more appreciative. Oh come back my phone, I’ll take better care of you I promise and not cast lusty looks at the Palms and the Apples (or not!).

So in the rare case that you’ve been trying to get in touch with me for the past few days, this is the reason why. And yes, I’m in no rush to get a replacement, so if you want to get in touch with me, email or IM is the only way (just as I like!). It’ll be nice to go back to the time, albeit for a few days/ weeks, when you didn’t have to have one (phone) on you all the time.

And yes, I almost forgot, drop in your latest contact details please will ya – I think the backup of my phonebook (if one exists) is on the PC back home which I have no access to at the moment. Cheers.

Music lovers of the world unite

I have been playing around for the past couple of days with last.fm and it’s nothing like other online music/ radio services that I have used. It’s ad-free, features multi-platform clients and learns about your musical tastes as you go along.

It allows you to tune in to specific genres/ artists using tag based channels or listen to artists that sound similar to your favourite as categorized by other users. You can “love”, “hate”, recommend (to friends) tracks/ artists and/ or associate them with tags (think genres, mostly) for your own as well as the community’s benefit, all with a single click. It also offers the facility to “scrobble” tracks you’re listening locally (via, say, iTunes) onto your last.fm profile.

All this increases the probability of hearing the kind of music you’ll like, which makes it a great way of discovering new artists as well as getting your daily does of all time favourites. The last.fm catalogue contains both mainstream as well as other artists and isn’t restricted to English music – for hindi music, for example, try tags bollywood or ghazal.

If you like to shout from the rooftops about your musical tastes, point people to your last.fm homepage or use one of the many personalized RSS feeds. Check out the tools section for many other goodies.

There are many other features (like free music downloads) and since this isn’t meant to be an exhaustive review but an attempt to nudge you in the right direction, I’ll stop right here and allow you to explore. Get started by downloading the player for your OS and signing up at their website. The quality of the streams is second to none and, best of all, the service is free.

How can they afford it? Well so far they seem to be surviving thanks to a mix of VC funding, advertising revenue and affiliate income by pointing people interested in buying music to online retailers like Amazon.

You can see what I have been listening to lately at this page and perhaps add me as a friend once you’ve signed up so we can exchange recommendations – optional 😉

PS – I’ve recently learnt about Pandora, a similar site/ service. Maybe next week, I’ll review nudge you towards that once I’ve had a chance to play with it.