Prakash Advani's Blog

I wrote an article titled If I could re-write Linux for Newsforge. The response was overwhelming, over a 100 comments and most of them negative! Rather than being critical, I would have appreciated if people said how they would re-write if they had too.

I have been considering buying a portable DVD player and I came across the BenQ DVDGem. What I like about it is:

- Its small and portable, so can be lugged around.
- It can be used as a stand alone DVD player, so it can hook up to a TV directly.
- It can also be used as a DVD ROM drive, through USB so can be used with the PC.
- It doubles up as an MP3 player so if I put all my MP3′s on a DVD-R thats about 1000 songs!

Now how do you get this in India? since it is not available in the market.

I recently enabled GPRS connection on my new phone. Its just Rs. 99 per month by Orange if I don’t want to connect it to a PC. Speed isn’t anything spectacular but its a good way to catchup on reading while traveling or look up important things.

But all websites are not WAP enabled, however there are ways around.

- Use google, to search for the site, and google will convert that to WAP though their wap proxy and display it to you. That works reasonably well, you can read all the text but the graphics is lost.

- Info Aggregrator which is developed by Netcore, where I work can convert my RSS feeds to WAP. I talked the developers into doing it and they got pretty excited about it. So now I can get any RSS feed converted to WAP.

Happy Wapping if you are like me

My older Sendo phone which I got for free under a plan from Orange, gave me lots of problems. It just gets hung at times and the battery dies abruptly. So I decided to go back to a Nokia.

I got my self Nokia 3100. Here is my brief overview.

The features I liked:
- Easy to use. Like all the Nokia phones I have used in the past, this too is very easy to use.
-Small and Light. That makes it easy to handle but chances of loosing it a small size phone is higher.
- Color Display. This is restricted to 4000 colors which is a limitation of all Nokia Phones currently available. It Looks good but not as sharp as some of the 65,000 color display phones.
- GPRS – How much that will be of use, I am doubtful since now I have cable Internet at home! May be while traveling I could make some use of it. I am anyways getting it enabled and will test it out.
- MMS – Multimedia Messaging, not many people use it now but could get popular at some point of time.
- Polyphonic ring tones – I really like this features, sounds a lot better than a normal ring tone.
- Tri-band – Wonder when I am going to use that but a nice feature to have. Now need to travel to the US to test it
- Java – Have to yet test this.
- Speaker Phone – This is nice to use and better that using a hands free kit.
- Flashing Light – The screen, keypad flash when the phone rings. This works nicely with polyphonic ring tones, it dances to the tune! I wonder how long I would fancy this but right now its cool
- xHTML browser – it has a newer brower, have to check this out.

What I dislike
The phone gets hot if you speak for a long time! If the speaker phone wouldn’t be there to save my ears! either I would have had fried them by now or dumped the phone!

I guess this is a problem with a few of the new small nokia phones which are high on features. Eg. 6610.

Now I need to find a data cable for the phone so I can dump some of my favourite Midi/Kar files to the phone