So, thanks to the drivel you read here, I got offered a sort of gig to write a few pieces for the Hindustan Times’ Mumbai Supplement called ‘HT Café’ and I took them up on the offer. The first piece came out today and I’d have linked to it but HT’s online version (or epaper) requires a (free) user account to view. I know most people can’t be bothered to go through the hassle of setting this up (I wouldn’t) so I’m posting the article right here, after the jump. To the powers at HT please get with the program and remove the login requirements for your epaper. Even The Times of India dropped their login for the epaper sometime last year. Imagine that!  Welcome to the year Two Thousand and Nine.

The piece I wrote was about Gmail Offline, a new Google labs feature available in your Gmail account. The article is refreshingly free of cuss words and snarky euphemisms (mostly) for those who’s fragile sensibilities are offended by such stuff. If HT’s readers like the piece (and more importantly, if HT ‘shows me the money!’ I’ll probably do this occasionally) Read on..

Read more…

Random, Tech apple, Gmail Offline, Google, Google Chrome, Google Gears, Hindustan Times, Mac OS X, Microsoft, Safari, Steve Ballmer, The Times Of India

Yeah.. Vista’s bad reputation is totally unjustified. The thing about Windows is that I have mixed emotions about it, as most true geeks probably do. My first computer had windows and back then I used to enjoy the little tingle of anticipation I felt every time I pressed the power button on my AT tower and wondered whether the drivers for my Yamaha sound card would load and when they didn’t (very often) I enjoyed the tinkering involved. Also back then you couldn’t just look on ‘teh internets’ for the answer. I wouldn’t get my first 33.6  kbps modem for another couple of years, so when you fixed stuff you were actually figuring things out and learning and expanding your brain.

Those were fun days, days when a driver update for your 1 MB PCI graphics card would make a huge difference. How huge ? Well one update I will always remember took mpeg videos on my PC from a sequence of tiny blocks with a soundtrack to an actual video where I could make out people dancing. This was, for someone like myself, the closest thing to an epiphany (The religious kind, not the Chaka Khan compilation) But even so, that shit got old fast and in a few years I just wanted a computer that worked. That, for me was/is the problem with Windows. You seem to spend more time actually taking care of the system (Update the virus definitions, install drivers, scan for Trojans, etc) than you actually spend getting on with what you really want to do on it. That and bloat, make it faster and lighter, more of a Lotus and less of a Buick. But that never happened and that is why Microsoft has this huge flaming turd of an OS now.

Steve Ballmer, eat my shorts.

Rants, Tech mac switcher, Steve Ballmer, Vista, Windows