Category Archives: technology

QIK is shutting down.

Qik a video sharing & live broadcasting mobile app from Skype is closing its service. & You have no choice but see your videos being deleted.
In past, I had tested this app for performance, quality & lag. I livestreamed it on qik.com and uploaded directly on youtube without editing. (Switch captions-ON if you dont understand my accent)
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiiE0Pw40xM&w=360&h=250]
As you can see in above video, it doesnt have any noticeable time-lag, also it never crash on me. It had many features & ‘was’ pretty stable app. The app is no more available in the app-store & the service will be terminated by 30th April 2014.
This is very disappointing to hear the news. I was a fan of QIK because I found the app quite useful broadcasting quick messages and announcements & because there’s no better alternative to such service… you cannot livestream/broadcast your video directly from mobile. The mobile app from livestream.com is ridiculous & is only made for consuming the content.

There’s no option to download on left side. nor you can upload the video on youtube.

Although they’ve suggested in FAQ, that you can download your files or upload to youtube directly. I do not see the option in my dashboard. I should download/move my video files before they discontinue the service. [click on the image for detailed view] There’s no download option nor share on ‘youtube’ option is active. Qik was acquired by Skype which is acquired by Microsoft. You can guess who to blame here. But must thank Skype as they brought qik on iOS app-store. But keeping all doors shut when house is burning is totally unfair. I wish I’m wrong, I should investigate further.

Win additional space on onedrive

As Microsoft’s new drive to promote their re-branded ~~Skydrive~~ cloud storage service OneDrive, they are offering 100GB of extra storage space for first users of OneDrive. Also you’d receive additional ‘camera roll bonus’ of 3GB & referral bonus of 0.5GB/user.

WindowsPhone 8 owners get 20GB more SkyDrive space

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The Windows Phone 8 owners have more to cheer for this Christmas. Today I received an email from Microsoft showing some love for me purchasing Windows Phone 8 device. They have offered 20GB extra space in SkyDrive storage for 1 year. *something similar you get if you’re an MS Office 365 home premium subscriber.

All WP8 device owners- claim additional 20GB SkyDrive storage space as Enthusiast bonus!

Unfortunately for me my Office 365 premium subscription neither gave me Skype world minutes nor 20GB+ SkyDrive space. The MS support rep suggested me to restart (cancel and start again) my 365 plan to rectify the error. Well, I didn’t restart my office 365 home premium service & stopped its service. To make it up, I got this email first thing in the morning! Thank you Microsoft. I hurried redeem the code & claimed the extra SkyDrive storage.
& what do I see? Oh yeah, baby! 45 GB of SKYDRIVE with 20GB as “Enthusiast bonus!” Now don’t be jealous, I’ve been a loyal member of SkyDrive & using it since 25GB era.

Moved

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We have moved our sites to a better server. Migrating to an un-managed private server is quite an experience, but you get to play with Linux distro of your choice and learn a lot in the process. Plus, you get freedom, root access, and can make partitions, clone the system, can build OS & webserver of your choice from scratch. Although WordPress doesnt need a lot of freedom or root access, simple LAMP stack with mod_rewrite enabled apache would be adequate. I chose Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS & Apache 2.2. I must admit that complexity or freedom was not the reason for this move. I’ve few complex wordpress sites running with multisite or buddypress/bbpress setup; & they’ve been running without trouble on shared hosting.

Linode Private Server, Japan datacenter

You should see significant performance improvement on our sites network now. I have been thinking of Amazon web services (AWS) & MediaTemple’s (+ve) hosting for couple of years. But then I found a better service & suitable servers. Name is Linode. Their servers are located all across the US, one in the UK & one in Japan. You get a choice of 6 locations & build your own CDN, setup load-balancing & make a highly scalable setup. You can increase RAM, disc space with a click of a button & get charged on a hourly basis. They’ve been doing cloud before cloud 😉 enough said.

[Update] Mobile office for Microsoft Office365 is now available for India

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Microsoft corrected their mistake and made available mobile office for most of the countries (including India) within a week of its release.
We noticed Microsoft office’s app on top 5 free apps in Indian app store.But unfortunately for me (& all those old iPhone owners.) the app is only available for iPhone 4 or later devices. The error message says that “This app is incompatible for this iPhone” & needs front facing camera.

God knows, why MS Office needs front facing camera! Even Skype the premier VoIP service doesn’t have such obscure requirement for its mobile app.

Productivity boost: Rotate the monitor to portrait mode

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One of the best productivity hack, I’m fond of is rotating the widescreen monitor into portrait mode.
I highly recommend this on your workstation/ production computer. For media consumption such as watching movies, pictures etc widescreen horizontal display is suited. But if you use the computer for work and content creation (blogs, forums, word, excel, emails/outlook etc) portrait mode would benefit you a lot. Just try it on your regular monitor and see the difference. Let me know about your experience. At first it may be bit awkward but later, I’m sure you’ll find increase in productivity. 🙂

Portrait mode of monitors

Buying Dell’s (swivel, tilt, & pivot/rotation enabled) ultrasharp monitors has been in my wishlist for years. But c’mon! It’s twice the price of regular LCD widescreen. So if you dont want to shell out extra for the flexible stand, you can literally rotate your monitor by 90 deg.

Microsoft Office 365 for iOS not available outside USA

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Microsoft has released ‘Office Mobile’ for iOS. It’s linked with Office 365 subscription model ( Home Premium $99/ year, per user for upto 5 devices). I’ve been waiting for the native and official MS office app for iOS for long and this is just what the doctor ordered. Of course it’d not be as comprehensive as fully featured desktop software or mobile app that we have on WP8 (office app for Windows Phone 8 has more features obviously). The “office mobile” is not optimised for iPad and not made for android devices yet. But (I don’t have those devices so I care less) I eagerly clicked on the link as I read Office blog from my iPhone only to find that the ‘Item is not available‘
The Office app is free to download but is only listed in US app store for iOS.

The item you’ve requested is not currently available in the Indian Store; but it is available n the US Store. Tap Change Store to view this item.

That’s the pop-up message I received.
This is so not fair and so ironic when you promote cloud computing and sell on-demand, go-anywhere, access-anytime, software-as-a-service (saas-based) office 365 subscription service.
Do we have Office 365 subscribers from India? What’s your take on this?

How to copy nokia phonebook contacts into iphone without ovi suite

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Apple’s iPhone and Nokia mobile devices are undoubtedly one of the most popular smartphones/ cellphones in the world; and transferring its contacts, phonebook and other data shouldn’t be the problem. Apparently, if you don’t have enough tools or what they call it ‘common software’, there’s no straight and easy way out. At least that’s what I thought initially, this question bugged me for almost a week until I found the solution. I think it’s worth sharing with internet via screencast & writing a how-to article for it.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAOHUWgRY6g]
Things you need:

Nokia mobile phone with memory card
Computer with iTunes.
iPhone

First On Nokia phone

Nokia: Go to contacts/ phonebook
Nokia: Select all contacts
Nokia: Option> save contacts
Nokia: Select destination as memory card
Plug in your nokia phone to computer in data transfer mode.
Browse through your Nokia memory card and open /Others/ folder
Open ‘contacts’ folder placed in memory card/Others/contact
Select All contacts and copy-paste them in ‘windows contact’.
Windows contacts, (known as windows Address Book in Windows XP) can be found in C:\Users\Logged-in-user\Contacts\ or you can click win logo or press win key and type ‘contacts’ in search slot windows start.
Plug in iPhone to the computer.
Open iTunes, if it doesn’t pop up automatically.
Select iPhone in iTunes and open ‘info’ tab
check/ mark/tick ‘sync contacts with ‘windows contacts’ (choose from dropdown menu)
press ‘sync’ button.
Done.

[iCloud Update] Apple introduced the iCloud feature to automatically sync your iPhone contacts after this tutorial is written. To copy/sync contacts (from step#11) you should disable iCloud sync for the first time you migrate your addressbook. Once the manual transfer is done using above steps, you may continue using iCloud sync afterwards)
PS: In case of newer Nokia phones such as Nokia E5-00, X2-01 menu of contact is bit different. In Contact Menu > Mark All > Create backup > Phone to memory card. I tested this on iPhone 3GS, however it works on any old or new iPad, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S as well as new iPhone 5.