Play Things

Tipping Mondays - 2

2008-05-08T05:46:00Z

I know it's a Wednesday (two-days to weekend!) but why fret over the day of the week when we have such spectacular things for you to do in the office for ~~utter criminal timepass~~ to enrich value in your organization. Well not entirely. This blog always to strives to dilute its fun quotient with some utility as well. "Just enough utility to satisfy the Deputy Editor" is the central moral tenet of this blog.

So first of all I am going to tell you how to easily handle that little conundrum when you want to take the screenshot of that website which you just HAVE to use in a presentation or report. But how to do it? That "Print Screen" function is messy and takes forever. You need to paste it in a document, then somehow extract the image in a format that is usable in your PPT or PDF. Well there is a solution at hand. First convince the IT guys in the office to let you install Firefox. "But it is just a harmless free browser you thick, dense fellow!" is a good way to convince them.

Then install the Screengrab addon. Once you do you will see a little icon in the bottom right corner of your browser window. Click on it and you can save the whole website, just the part you can see or even a little selection. Whatever works for you. And now with those IPL cheerleaders in the news Screengrabbing is a necessity for the modern office-goer.

The second service I am highly taken with of late is Slideshare. Slideshare lets you embed slideshows (duh) into your webpage, blogs and such like with just a few clicks. People are calling it the "Youtube of Powerpoint". (Which is some indication of the way the modern metaphor is deteriorating.)

Here is one I thought was all round good fun: Panipuri - An introduction to perfection in food design

And before closing I have help for all those people eager to learn a foreign language, communicate with foreign people and somehow convince them to go to Goa with you. If you have an ipod and have a rudimentary understanding of how podcasts works, then this link gives you a link to dozens of podcasts that will help you learn languages. Listen on the commute and in just a few weeks you will will be saying things like "Lady I like you, go Goa with me, hot lover I am." like any native speaker of Finnish who is terrible with the ladies.

And if you need any other help with techie and web-ish things in the office or at home drop a line and this blog will be happy to oblige!

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How to make friends, mix drinks and pass out

2008-04-30T05:37:00Z

I don't know about you, but a lot of people down here in Mumbai are loooking forward to the holiday tomorrow. Time to kick up those tired feet, load a Ram Varma Gopal ki Aag DVD and throw back a few mid-week cocktails.

But I am guessing that you've been tippling on those same old cocktails you learned to mix way back in college on that hostel terrace: 2 parts Marco Polo beer, 3 parts Romanov Vodka and a dash of whisky from that fellow who brews it fresh in his room. Throw in a pineapple wedge for class. A little AIRQUOTE seasoning AIRQUOTE on the side, Floyd on the speakers and you have a party on!

Thankfully your interpid blogger is not one to sit on his cocktail mixing laurels. Cuba Libres (Coke, Bacardi, Ice) may be easy as hell and kick-ful but nothing can beat a nice...

Blue Sky Cocktail

Chill cocktail glass. Prepare as follows:

Coat inside of cocktail glass with framboise liqueur. Moisten rim of glass with Dry Sack and coat with coconut snow.

In pre-chilled cocktail shaker combine

1½ oz Marsala
1 oz Rhum Negrita
½ oz lime sherbet
1 tsp. orange juice
1 tsp. Aperital
3 dashes Tia Maria

Shake with coarsely crushed ice to a rhumba beat.

Strain into chilled cocktail glass.

Now before you go around saying that I'm all pretentious and hoity-toity with my liquors let me gently point out that the Blue Sky cocktail was generated, just a few moments ago, by the online Mixilator - Random Cocktail Generator. Based on a simple online interface, a vast database of liquors and spirits and the guiding hand of David A. Embury, the Mixilator conjures up cocktails at your bidding. All served by a comely female robot who speaks with a somewhat philosphical digital voice.

(Embury authored the 1948 classic The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks that outline several fundamental principles of cocktail making. A very worthy and precious work if there was one.)

So next time you're waiting for guests to arrive and have absolutely no idea how to combine tequila, tabasco, beer and Kerala Palm Toddy into a classy concoction at least you can't blame this blog for not trying to help.

Happy mixing!

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I am a Guitar Hero

2008-04-22T06:03:00Z

The missus recently brought home that Guitar Hero 2 game for the PS2. It costs some 5000 bucks for the whole set, little guitar and game DVD, and is completely NOT the sort of thing she'd buy in the regular course of affairs. But, as regular readers are no doubt aware, the birthday is around the corner. And that is as good a time as any for some good natured largesse.

A few days later we're both staying up till midnight playing Anthrax, Primus and such heavy duty rock bands on the guitar.

GH2 sold over 3 million copies worldwide mainly by being deceptively simple to learn and extremely addictive even to gaming newbies. The game comes with a little toy guitar with five coloured buttons on the fret board and a little white bar for you to strum on. You plug it to the PS2 and then choose a song to play. (Most of the tracks are popular numbers. To rock fans at least.)

As the song plays you are expected to hit the right coloured notes (displayed on screen) and strum at the right time in order to keep up. Sounds completely juvenile and pointless right? But give it a go yourself. It is, to put it mildly, freaking awesome dude. By the time you play up the hardness levels and start to play some hard core music the skill required is simply insane. But enough gabbing, check out this Youtube vide of an expert GH2 player cracking a tough track on the expert hardness level.

Also observe how excessive gaming can turn you into a complete moron. Play till the end to see his flourish. The guitar owner's reaction is priceless.

I present someone called Freddie playing the rock instrumental "YYZ" as made famous by Rush in the 1981 album Moving Pictures:

(Can't embed. Don't know why. Pshaw!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ua3hZXfNZOE

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Wifi hacker tera mooh kaala

2008-04-18T05:29:00Z

What hot-blooded youth with a bent for technology has not wished a wireless network for himself at home? Exactly. All of us. Including me.

So almost a year ago, after much research and development, I decided to install one of those cute little Netgear wirless modems at home. (They look white and nice. Exactly like set dosas when you order them by parcel and they get all lumpy in the banana leaf.)

Setting it up took another week or so. (It was a saga. You can read about it on my other blog here.) And then it seemed to work well enough for a few months.

Till the greedy neighbours got wind of things. Now every night when I go back home someone has tried to hack into the router and get on to the internet. I need to reset the router and set up the broadband connection all over again. It's driving me insane. I don't mean to over-react or anything. But I want to walk into their homes ane eliminate them. Fire bombs come to mind.

Though if you're using a wifi network at home here are a few tips to keep it secure:

1. Always change the default admin and password. As soon as you can.

2. Rename your network SSID to something besides the default entry. When vile neigbours see default labels anywhere they assume you are a newbie and begin attack. Use something hifi instead, something exudes techie sophistication. Example: Hyperthread Large Hadron Collider Inter-network Architecture. Or something.

3. Enable MAC level access on the router. Your PC wifi card has a unique identifier called a MAC label. Tell your router to only let computers with that MAC to get hooked up.

4. Enable security settings on the router and demand a password for hookup. It may sound redundant if you have MAC control. But still don't take chances. My neighbours stop at nothing.

5. Switch it off when you're not at home.

Okay, now off I go to google up "firebomb".

p.s. If you don't understand any of the terms here, then you don't have a wifi network. So chill.

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This day that year... look here

2008-04-17T10:19:00Z

Ok I am not trying to put what they call in Mumbai "ganda senti" or anything. But we all must remember that in just two weeks an event of epic proportions will unfold: my birthday.

Not that birthdays have ever been particularly awesome for me. I always get some form of tummy upset or the other and once in a while I forget that its my birthday altogether. This year, however, it will not happen. I have put a reminder in my Google Calendar. (I know this makes me sounds all rought and tough and rugged. Its true. I am.)

Anyhow today's post is about a very important question we all think about come birthday time... Which song was top of the charts the day I was born? In the US? In UK? Stupid question? Not for me.

Ever heard of a band called "Peaches N Herb"? No? Well they clearly had few hits like "Reunited" which topped the US charts in 1979. Blondie is a much more popular band name. So little wonder that they topped the Aussie charts on the same day with the track "Heart of Glass". (Which incidentally went back on the charts in January this year after being used in a Gucci ad!)

Art Garfunkel, who needs no introduction, (the non-Simon half of Simon and Garfunkel) topped the Brit charts on the same day with the super hit "Bright Eyes".

Knowing all of which is completely pointless. Except to remind you that the world is a very different place today than it was the day you emerged pure and fresh.

And how do I know all this? Of course I have an encyclopedic knowledge of music. Sigh. No. I actually went to this site here and did some quality timepass in the office. You should too.

Quick... before the weekend is upon is and we have no illegitimate reason to goof off.

p.s. Surely you can work out my birthday now. Send money. That is always the best gift.

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Espionage for dummies

2008-04-10T07:01:00Z

Today we will depart a little from our usual agenda, unproductive timepass in the office, and instead look at how to keep a tab on all those pesky co-workers you have sitting around you making your life fairly painful.

Now let's, first of all, face a few facts. Coworkers, even if some of them are harmless, ultimately are a threat to our career development in our workplace. They may look all nice and sweet and helpful, but never forget that one day, as you move up that ever-narrowing org. structure, they will compete with you for the same position. But by then it maybe too late to manage things through blackmail and character assasination.

So start early.

One thing you must do in order to maintain this continuous supervision is to know what they are talking about behind your back. Perhaps they maybe discussing office gossip. Sometime it may involve you. Or maybe they are sucking up to the boss in the office. There is only one way to find out, electronic espionage.

And you don't need to be a genius to do it. Let me give you a simple method:

1. Obtain a cellphone that has an auto answer-feature. As in it will automatically pick up after three rings or so. Nokia has a few models.

2. Place the phone on complete silence. No lights, music or even vibration. This is critical.

3. Place said phone in the proximity of the subject of your surveillance. On their desk, near their cubicle, behind their computer. Somewhere like that. Not too far away. Not too conspicuous.

4. Now when you are away from the office, all you need to do is dial in to this phone from your mobile or landline. It will quietly ring thrice and then pick up your call.

5. Now, without a soul in the world knowing, you can check up on what your colleague is doing. The phone will pick up everything that is being spoken around it and transmit it clearly to you. Now you know what's really happening when that other deputy features editor is staying back late in the office.

Manipulate this information ruthlessly and voila! Career growth! Success! Fame!

Manage to get one of your spy phones into the HR department and you've hit the big leagues.

Best of luck. And, by the way, I absolve all legal responsibility for what may occur.

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Tipping Mondays - 1

2008-04-07T04:24:00Z

What better way to start off the week than with a couple of tips that could save you a lot of time, bewilderment and general workplace headaches...

1. WHAT IN GOD'S NAME IS A DOCX FILE? WHY ARE PEOPLE SENDING THEM TO ME!

Ans. Chill. If I had one dollar for every time someone asked me how to open a .docx file I'd have a lot of rapidly devaluing currency propped up on neo-con geopolitics heading towards certain recession. But the only reason people send you this mysterious format is because they have shiny new MS Vista enabled computers and use Microsoft Word to prepare their documents. Microsoft now uses an XML based standard for making files (blah blah blah) which means latest versions of Office save docs in this new Docx file. Docx open up neither in your old MS Word application nor on Gmail (if you do that useful click to view in HTML option).

So what to do? Besides panicking in the office? Simplicity. Go to Zamzar.com and convert it into a regular Word Document! Ta da! (No more screaming across the cubicle farm for help from someone.)

2. Why do nice, sensible people, send pictures pasted in word documents instead of just mailing the freaking images to you?

Ans. Because they are idiots. Maybe even neo-cons. But fret not. There is a simple enough way to get past that problem. (I've tried this in Word Documents and PPTs.) Open the file, admire the image and then "Save As..." the document. Not save. Save as. Save it as a Web Page. On your desktop so you can find it later. Voila! You should have a webpage (html file) there with a folder named just like it.

Open the folder and there is that image you want. There will be a PNG and a JPEG version of the image. Choose whatever that works.

Have a great week.

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Quit cribbing

2008-04-04T07:38:00Z

Finally I've done it. I've succumbed to all the Apple iMarketing pressure and bought myself an iPod. Both the missus and I still hold great love for Creative and all their products, but spending just a few moments with a shiny new iPod makes you wonder how you lived without it in the first place.

Podcasts! My life is so much more meaningful with them!

But I know loads of people who refuse to lust after any of those Apple products. "Over-priced!", "All shine, no substance!", "Too rigid and close-courced..." and "Too popular to be cool anymore" are some of the cribs I get to hear. This also means that a lot of people LURVE to crib about Apple products as soon as they are launched.

Pogue, that NYTimes tech blogger of extreme fundooness, has a great post on the product-bitching tendencies of tech naysayers:

It was that way with the iPhone, in the time after it was announced but before it was available. “This will be the biggest flop since the Cube,” went the critics. “No removable battery? Nobody will touch this thing.” Etc.

The blogs were full of this stuff.

As it turns out, they were massively, humiliatingly wrong. Four million iPhones were sold in the first 200 days. Its sales surpassed Treos, Windows Mobile phones — everybody but BlackBerry.

Check his blog here -> Can Blogger-Bashers Predict the Success of a Product? Unlikely.

Scrolling down through the comments I came through this gem of a link. Its an online forum, seven years old, with reactions to the initial launch of the iPod. The messages are, in hindisight, pathetically hilarious.

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Click comfort

2008-04-03T12:27:00Z

It's almost half past six in the office here, as I blog away, and people are beginning to gently slip into snooze mode. Phone calls are soft mumbles and you need to stand up and look over the padded partitions we have here to see if the neighbour is awake.

So basically nobody around here cares what I am doing. Excellent. Editor is seated in the diametrically opposite direction busy with what looks like much work. Superb!

Time to fire up one of them flash games for some rest and recreation.

Now before you point fingers and call me a work shirker, let me point you to some relevant research. A few weekends ago we published a story in Lounge about how simple flash games may actually help you work better and be more productive:

“As scientists,” he said, “we know there is a cascade of beneficial biochemical and hormonal effects in people when they are engaged in an activity they perceive as fun. What we’re seeing here is that some video games fit into that mould and that some games can have a positive health effect on people.”

And what can be better than employees who are experiencing positive health effects. (Answer: Employees who are experiencing positive salary effects.)

Flash games are ideal for play in the office. You dont need to install anything, the games start in a flash and, with a little practise, no one will know you're having fun.

If you're new to flash gaming you might want to check one of these three supercool online repositories of flash gaming joy:

1. BBC Sports Fun and Games: Lots of little sports themed games. Added benefit of being on an otherwise business-like site in case the boss pop along.

2. Good Experience Games: GE is a blog dedicated to design and user experience. They have a regularly updated list of simple, addictive flash games. I highly recommend Excit, a game based on spreadsheets.

3. The ever dependable Cricinfo Slog-out game. The new version is awesome fun to play. Leave open in a window on the desktop and use it to relieve stress all day.

Ok now I need to get back to work. Bye.

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Docs Gears up to go

2008-04-02T07:34:00Z

How many times have you settled into an airplane seat, powered up your laptop and clicked up that Word document only to find that you have the sucky old version without that clever Paris Hilton joke and dynamite closing paragraph?

Well maybe not in that exact fashion. But it has happened to you yes? Version control is one of the great pains of having multiple computers and working both offline and online.

Well this latest announcement from Google will provide some relief. They've managed to hook up Google Docs to Google Gears and this lets you maintain a fully synced, globally accessible document database at no cost at all.

Here's how it works. First you download and install Google Gears on all the computers you use. (Gears is the little piece of software magic that sits in the background and does your dirty work for you.) Then when you access Google Docs it gives you an option to activate the Online version. Now you are all set.

Edit your document online and the exact replica is stored both online and on the offline version of Google Docs you now have thanks to Gears. Step out of the office, catch a cab and you can still work on the latest version on your laptop. Land at home, hook up and Gears will sync both versions again automatically. That's all there's to it. And now, even when you don't have access to your laptop or work computer, Google Docs online has the updated version waiting for you.

Great stuff if you're a blogger on the move or just don't like lugging that laptop around. You can always rush to the nearest internet cafe to access your updated documents.

The only problem, there always is one, is that some offices won't let you download and install Google Gears. (If you're wondering: Gears won't work with proxies that need authentication.)

Still it sure sounds like a cool thing to try out.

How do you manage version control yourself? Pen drive? Proprietary software? Brute cut-and-paste strength? Or do you just throw up your hands and sob softly on the plane. Leave a comment.

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