Waiting for an important mail from someone but do not want to be online waiting for it or when on the move do not want to switch on GPRS on your mobile every two minutes to check for the mail, then here is a simple solution for a way to get an SMS alert whenever a email hits your inbox (This will work only in India at the moment).

1. Point your browser to http://www.way2sms.com/.
2. Register for an account at this site.
3. Once registered login using the credentials sent as SMS to your number.
4. Click on the ‘Mail’ tab and create an email account at way2sms, remember the id which you have created as you would be needing this.
5. Login to your web based email service, I would use the example of Gmail, but it should be same for all providers.
6. Navigate to ‘Settings -> Filters’ and setup a new filter to forward all the emails coming for a particular id to the way2sms email id. For example if you want to receive SMS alerts when abc@gmail.com emails you, choose From: ‘abc@gmail.com’ and in the next screen forward to ‘yourmailid@way2sms.com’.
7. Once this is setup when ever you receive a new mail from abc@gmail.com it should come and fall in your way2sms mail box.
8. Now go back to way2sms.com and choose the ‘Mail Alerts’ option on the top right hand corner of the screen.
9. Select the ‘prefered days’ which is which days the alerts should be sent, I chose ‘all 7 days’, and for the preferred time I chose ’round the clock’. This ensures that whenever a new mail comes I will immediately get an SMS with the subject and from email id.
10. Click on ‘Activate’ and thats it you are done. But note that you would need to reactivate the ‘mail alerts’ in way2sms every 2 weeks as it gets deactivated after than.

Keep yourself updated on your mails using the sms alerts when on the move, do let me know if you know of any other way of achieving the same.

Cockroaches…Cockroaches….they just keep growing in number and there is nothing you can do about them…that was the past…things have changed now. Let me start with the situation a couple of years back when I moved into the room I am staying in there were none. For one year there was not problem, but as time passed a few started making their presence felt. And no matter how clean I kept my room and how many I killed they still kept on growing.

At the start of the year I was happy as there were only a couple of them at the max, but as the year progressed suddenly they became a menace. Time had come to take some action.

There are various products in the market which claim to solve the problem. But I was a bit skeptical of using such products especially the spray varieties even though they do seem to do their job, but keep on spraying here and there was not an option I was interested in.

Then one day my father told me he had bought a product which claims to solve the problem. I got the product to Bangalore about one month back when I had been to my home city.

The product is called ‘Lotus Cockroach Vanisher’ and is manufactured by Adinath Impex, Bangalore – 2. Its usage is simple you have to make small balls of it and place it in areas where the cockroaches frequent and it claims to effective for six months, for a product which costs Rs.60 for 100 grams its a tall claim to make.

I quickly made small balls of the product and placed it at a few places, and WOW!!! not even one minute had passed the cockroaches came running like it was some limited free meal, and I was truly amazed, it was like the product had an AXE effect on the cockroaches!!! See the pictures below if you do not believe (viewer discretion is advised, also note that the photos are not to scale and will make cockroaches appear larger than they are!!).

And what happened then? Well in the next four-five days I had to sweep out 20+ cockroaches of various sizes!! and that was the last I saw of them, it been a month now and no new visitor yet. I wanted to see if it really works as claimed hence waited for this long before posting this. Kudos to the manufactures for making such a good product.

Photos….Photos…and more Photos…..ever since I bought the digital camera I have been clicking photos of anything imaginable. I have been on a few trips as well, hence I thought of putting some of the good ones on the web and share it with a few friends, and the best solution for these for me turned out to be Picasa.

So off I went about putting together the photos I wanted to upload to Picasa Web, that is when I realised that I am in a bit of trouble. With each photo being 1.8MB, it was very obvious that I needed to resize the photo’s to a more web appropriate resolution of 1024×768 and at a lower image quality.

I did not directly recollect any software available in Linux which has batch resize options, hence I quickly did a google search and the results surprised me. The solution was a really simple one, that of making use of the package which is by default available in most Linux distro’s – “ImageMagick”, which provides the ‘convert’ command.

Here’s the simple script:
for k in $(ls *.JPG); do convert $k -resize 1024×768 -quality 100 re_$k; done

The working of the above script is simple, here is what it does:
1. Loops through all the JPG files in the current directory.
2. Then for each JPG file in the directory it calls the ‘convert’ command telling it to resize the images to the size 1024×768 and without an quality loss (i.e. 100, means no compression) and saves the resultant file with the prefix ‘re_’.
3. The done statement tells the script to end once all the JPG files are processed.

How is that for a simple and effective solution. Three cheers for command line….who needs bulky and resource hungry GUI programs…? And if you are waiting for the photos…sorry…that is available only to a few select friends and relatives…..but I have posted some of them at the following link http://flickr.com/photos/knithink.

Working primarily on Gnu/Linux and just moving to Windows occasionally, I felt a need to make the Windows XP desktop look like Gnome. There are two aspects to this, one is to change the icons and the other is to change the visual styles. Here is a step by step procedure for converting your desktop to Gnome.

Icons are an essential part of the GUI (Graphical User Interface) world. We will be using Tango Patcher, which currently includes implementations of the Tango icon theme, the Tangerine icon theme developed by the Ubuntu art team, Gnome-Icon-Theme2 and NLD10’s Industrial-Icon-Theme. Download the patcher and installing it just involves running the software.

The Patcher before installing gives you the option of the icon theme you want to install from the various ones mentioned above, I choose the default Tango Icon Theme, you can choose anything else. An option to change you Login Screen and BootUp screen is also available, choose it based on your liking. Then continue with the process, it will install and then reboot your system to be greeted with the new icons.

The next step is to change the visual styles, we will be using the clearlooks option, available as ClearLooks for Windows XP.

For visual styles to work we would generally need a software such as styleXP, but there exists an alternative to enable external themes support in WindowsXP, download and install Neowin UXTheme Multi-Patcher v4.0 (alternative link for download) (it applies a patch to the UXTheme.dll, to remove this just run the software again).

Next to install the Clearlooks themes head over ClearLooks for Windows XP or directly download by clicking here. Unzip the file and copy the folder to your themes folder, which is usually located at “C:\Windows\Resources\Themes\”.

Now go through your usual procedure which you use to change your Visual Styles (right click on desktop, choose appearance tab) and choose the ‘Clearlooks’ option. and Viola, now we have a desktop which closely resembles the Gnome environment. See a couple of screenshots below.

In today’s world, small kids don’t get to interact much with their busy parents who go to work. Grand parents live far and apart; visiting only occasionally, hence these kids don’t get to learn much about tradition and culture. Earlier children used to listen to stories from their grand parents in their own mother tongue, now it too is on a down side, and is being replaced by cartoon network and certain English story books.

Would it not be nice if children would have a opportunity to listen to stories in their own mother tongue. I came across one such effort last week. Mrs Asha Shenoy (known as AshaMai) has a website which contains many small stories narrated in South Canara style Konkani. The stories are just between 3 to 15 minutes each which is ideal for kids. In total there are 50 plus stories; all in Konkani. They are available as free download in MP3 format at http://ashamai.zenusinfotech.com/Stories.htm. If you have kids then you can play them one story per night as bed time story, or in case you don’t have kids then you can listen to it too. Overall it is a wonderful attempt to reach out to the future generation of amchigelle kids.

If you found this useful then please do leave a comment below.