The Alarm Clock Xtreme for Android is of the geeky alarm app ever developed for android devices. The application is perfect to wake us up from any deep sleep. The app comes with option to solve math problems to turn off the alarm. Unless you solve the problem, the alarm doesn’t turn off. So this will prevent you from turning off accidentally. This way you can get your mind freshened and put into work. So unless you are not falling asleep even after turning off the alarm by solving the math problem, this app will do it’s job perfectly. All you need to do is get off the bed and start of with your daily rituals.

Here are couple of screenshots from the app:

The screenshots above show the options to select the alarm dismiss methods and setting up options. While on the bottom, you can see the mathematical problem solving method to disable the alarm. Also you get to select the math difficulty level, tougher you choose, better time you get to wake up!

Download the app from here or directly scan the QR code on your phone.

Apart from the math-solving feature, the app also sports several other features like shake to snooze, music alarms, timer, countdown and several other options. This app can be downloaded from the Android Market and weighs 670 KB.

So it is really necessary to monitor your site’s uptime and compare it with the promised uptime by your host. This is a must if you own a unmanaged VPS. Monitoring a site’s uptime is no big deal. You don’t need to sit in front your computer, there are several services out there just to do the job. And one of the best I would suggest others to use is the Pingdom.

Using pingdom service is very simple. All you need to do is create free account and it lets you monitor 1 website. If you want to monitor more sites, you can consider upgrading to pro-account or use multiple free accounts. I would suggest to use the IP address to monitor the uptime of a site instead of URL since DNS downtimes can also give false alarms.

Once added, you can set the interval between checks in “Check Interval” to 5 minutes which is I would recommend. Once everything in place, it starts to monitor your site’s uptime and you can also using options to get notification methods whenever the site goes down. And also the advantage of using Pingdom over other services is that it can also let you monitor uptime from their Android app. All you need to do is enable Android notifications.

In the above screenshot you see pingdom’s uptime report for a month of one of my VPS. The host guarantees 99% uptime and they live up to their promise with just 3 downtimes spanning around 15 minutes.

1. Adblock Plus

Adblock Plus is an extremely popular extension. Most of you know about Internet advertising and the abundance of ads on some websites (see – even we have some ). A lot of these advertisements are mostly harmless, however, it’s a good idea to block the ads for many reasons. First is obviously for security. No matter how many times you tell people not to click ads that look suspicious (winning lottery, hot girls waiting for you, you are the millionth customer, etc), they still do it. Almost all such ads contain some security threat – phishing, malware, spyware, viruses. They are not safe. Another reason is if you have kids – even the supposedly safe sites these days can pop-up with X rated advertisements. Having a protection against them is very important.

This is where Adblock Plus comes in. Simply put it will remove all advertising content from web pages and will deliver only pure content to you. It’s the best no-nonsense extension out there. Because the pages no longer load ads, the browsing speed improves quite a lot – especially if you use slow connections. We strongly recommend this add-on to all users of Firefox. The extension can be downloaded and installed from here.

2. Video Download Helper

We are often faced with situations where we want to download embedded content from websites. You tube videos for instance. Many people don’t know how to download such content. There are some dedicated websites that convert the URL into direct download links but where most of those services work on one or two sites, video download helper works on many.  It sits near the address bar in Firefox and whenever it detects embedded media – audio, video and images, it gets activated and you can see 3 spinning balls. Clicking on that icon will list all the embedded media available on the page, which you can now download without having to go look for any other website that converts the links. You can find the download link and more details here.

3. StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is a great tool if you have dried up on ideas. It’s a website where you can browse websites matching your interest. There are 500 topics to chose from and users like you tag the websites and pages with the topic. All you do is create an account, the toolbar (this add-on) has menus that you can use to chose a topic or a tag – click the stumble button and you’ll be browsing through the topics you chose. You can also browse through similar topics on the same website as well. It also gets better as you tag more websites and browse more. With over 25 million registered users and more than a billion stumbles per month, this is one of the best add-on for writers and researchers. It’s database it ever growing and is getting better every day. You can get it here.

4. Greasemonkey

Getting annoyed by the Facebook ticker that was added recently? Use Greasemonkey. Greasemonkey allows you to use scripts that allow on-the-fly changes to web pages. There are plenty of scripts available that you can use to make changes, there is no need to worry if you don’t know how to write the scripts. The best thing is, Greasemonkey remembers these changes and will execute them every time you load the page. It’s as if the website has changed – just for you. There are, as I said, a lot of user scripts available on userscripts.org. You can also roll out your own scripts, look at the wiki for information on how to do this and finally you can get the add-on here.

5. Feedly

Feedly is the overall best start-page add-on I have ever seen. Remember iGoogle? It tried to organize all your content on one page which you can put as your default start page for your browser. Feedly is similar to that but much better. Feedly is magazine-like start page based on the best content of your favorite websites. Powered by Google Reader and Twitter. When installed Feedly will present you with a starting page that has news from a variety of topics such as Android, Photography and World News. You can customize all of this, add sites you want to follow and also read your Google reader feeds right here. You can also log-in to your twitter and Facebook feeds to check them from Feedly. It also comes with a link to this article telling you 9 ways to personalize your Feedly page. You can download the add-on here.

The command used to modify file permissions is chmod, short for change mode of a file. You can also use Nautilus file browser to change the file permissions. I will cover the details after a little background on the file permissions. To find the permission settings for a file, issue the following command int he terminal from the directory where your file is.

ls -l
cmd output

As you can see, the first column in the output has some strange looking character sets. This set is the file permissions for that file (directory). The third column is the owner of the file (directory) and the fourth column is the default group of the file (directory). We can ignore all the other columns at this point.

In the first column, each set would be 10 character wide. The very first character is a d for a directory or just a - (hyphen) for files. After that, the next three characters are the permissions for the owners account. The order is read-write-execute. If the superuser can read the file it would display r otherwise just a -. Similarly for write and execute w and x would be displayed. The next three characters are permissions for all the other users belonging to the file group (from the fourth column in the output above). Final three characters are the permissions for everyone not part of the group. Superusers (root accounts) can always override all the settings mentioned here and none of the permissions apply to them.

Changing Permissions – The Easy Way

The easiest way, as I said, is to just change the file permissions using Nautilus but it’s time consuming if you want to change the permissions of a lot of files. Command line way may seem tedious to begin with but it’s the faster way once you know your way around. To change the permissions in Nautilus, right click on any file (directory). Go to properties and then to permissions. Change the permissions and click ok. That’s it.

Changing Permissions – The Faster Way

To change file permissions via the terminal, you can use the chmod command. To change permissions of a file, enter the following command in the terminal.

chmod ABC path/to/file

Here, ABC is a 3 digit number which is the decimal representation of the file permissions. For example, r-x means 101 in binary which translates to 5 in decimal. So, if you want everyone to have just read and execute access to files and only the owner has the write access to files then the permissions are rwx,r-x,r-x which is 111,101,101. That translates to 7,5,5 (comma is only given for clarity here). So, the command would now be,

chmod 755 path/to/file

Don’t worry if you don’t know how binary works, you will get used to it. Easiest way is add 4 for read, 2 for write and 1 for execute. So, considering the examples above, rwx = 4 + 2 + 1 = 7 and r-x = 4 + 0 + 1 = 5. You’ll get used to this. There is another way to to this, the text method (which I don’t prefer).

chmod who=permissions filename

Where Who is any from a range of letters, and each signifies who you are going to give the permission to. They are as follows:

u - The user that own the file.
g - The group the file belongs to.
o - The other users i.e. everyone else.
a - all of the above - use this instead of having to type ugo.

And then you can directly write rwx in front of the equal sign. For example,

chmod g=rx

Next post will cover setting default permissions to files you create using umasks.

Traditional way of learning math might be helpful for most, but for me it is a big no-no. I started discovering new ways to understand and learn math. I purchased many math reference books, started browsing through the web for best tutorials, made use of wolfram|alpha etc. But this just didn’t help me out to my expectations.

I wanted something that is a blend of both tradition as well as modern way of learning math and I was lucky enough to hit the sweet spot and found “Khan Academy“ through one of my friend on Google+

Khan Academy is free, non-profit, one man initiative with over 2400 educational videos teaching math, science, finance, history and test exercises. It is founded by Salman Khan who holds multiple bachelor’s degree from MIT and is very generous to help reach the knowledge to the mass. His teaching method is brilliant and uses good examples when needed just like in normal classes. The best advantage of this sort of learning is that you can pause, rewind and or forward the lecture if boring. This way you can learn at your own pace. Even Salman quotes this in most of his speeches. Also the ability to download the videos with click of a button is added bonus to share with people having no access to internet. To encourage visitors watch more videos, the academy also has included a pointing system where you get more points for watching videos and analyze the stats.

His collection of videos and his teaching is so good that it has attracted eyes many biggies like Bill Gates and co-founders of Google. Bill Gates himself has made a statement that Salman Khan is his favorite teacher and uses those videos to train his children. Recently Google funded Khan Academy with $2 Million to encourage making new tutorials.

Here’s what I got recently stating to update one of my site:

Wordpress update notification from Google.

It is always good to keep updated since insecure versions of wordpress are vulnerable to attacks. Newer versions come with possible solutions to patch those vulnerability until new loopholes are found.

The moment I received this notification, I was bit in doubt since I had never heard of Google sending such mails to its webmaster users suggesting to update the wordpress and the formatting of mail was not good! I even thought this might be fake, but after looking at the details of the mail, the sender ID was google’s official webmaster tools address. Later I did a search on internet and was confirmed that it is official after reading Matt Cutts’s update on twitter.

You don’t need to enable any option to get such notification in webmaster tools. It’s great to see google sending such update notification to wordpress users. Hope this will make people who often tend to be lazy updating their installation. All it takes is just a click to update the wordpress to latest version.

1. Google Sky Maps

If you are an astro buff and love to gaze at beautiful night sky, this is the must install app. It is so cool that it syncs to the direction using the inbuilt compass & accelerometer and displays all the celestial objects on it as you tilt the phone. And when you see above, you see the exact object and constellations. Google Sky Map turns your Android-powered mobile phone into a window on the night sky.

2. Widgetsoid

If you are not satisfied with the widgets that came with your phone or don’t like its look and feel, you must install widgetsoid to create custom widgets. Widgetsoid lets you create your own widgets like toggle buttons, indicators like wifi, battery etc, shortcuts and even system related functions like rebooting and unmounting SD etc. Widgetsoid is the only app which has custom color for icons and indicator!

3. Pulse News

Meet Pulse. A beautiful application that makes browsing news from websites and social networks fun and engaging. Pulse takes your favorite websites (including Facebook) and transforms them into a colorful and interactive mosaic. Tap on an article, and you will see a clean and elegant view of the story. Sharing a story via Facebook, Twitter or email is as easy as two taps.

4. Google Goggles

This app enables you to search the real world by taking a picture. Goggles uses image recognition technology to recognize objects and return relevant search results. Identifies products by scanning barcode, famous landmarks, storefronts, artwork, and popular images found online. Goggles can translate words in English, French, Italian, German & Spanish. Goggles can extract contact information from business cards. Oh well, it can even solve your Sudoku. Watch this video to get a clear picture.

5. Titanium Backup

There are times when you will need to backup all your installed apps like when you want to move them to your new phone or if your apps are installed on SD card, you may need to move to new SD card. This app needs your phone to be rooted, if done it lets you backup and restore all your Apps, Market Links. It can also remove unwanted bloatwares from your phone.

6. Dropbox

Dropbox is a free service that lets you bring all your photos, docs, and videos anywhere. After you install Dropbox on your computer, any file you save to your Dropbox will automatically save to all your computers, your Android device, and even the Dropbox website! With the Dropbox app, you can take everything that matters to you on the go.

7. ASTRO File Manager

You might have wondered where is the file manager / browser in your android phone. It is because majority of android phones come without file manager. To any user, a file manager is a must have utility. This is where the ASTRO File Manager app comes to the rescue. This app lets you browse, backup, rename, delete, move, search, compress files etc. It also comes with a inbuilt image viewer and many other features.

8. Swype

Tired of typing on your default keyboard on your screen? Especially if your android phone comes with smaller display, you will feel the heat while typing longer messages or mails. Swype will replace your default keyboard with it’s very own which can be used to input text by just swiping across the screen. It traces out your fingers motion and inputs the word.

9. Twitter

The official Twitter app is a must install app to every twitter user. This app lets you do almost everything that you do on the twitter web interface. It includes features like: Browse interests, Find & follow friends, Tweet, Retweet, Favorite, Direct Message privately with your followers, share photos, videos and web pages, real-time search, view maps, trends, and follow.

10. Angry Birds

Now that you have many essential apps installed, you will need something that is really addictive to kill time when you bored. The survival of the Angry Birds is at stake. Dish out revenge on the greedy pigs who stole their eggs. Use the unique powers of each bird to destroy the pigs’ fortresses. Angry Birds features challenging physics-based gameplay and hours of replay value. Each of the 240 levels requires logic, skill, and force to solve.

EOS 600D comes with a 18 Mega Pixel CMOS image sensor, powered by new improved 14-bit DIGIC 4 image processor, a 3 inch Vari-angle Clear View TFT display with 1040K dots which is now making some buzz in Canon DSLRs, the ISO sensitivity ranges 100-6400 and can be extended till 12800, continuous shooting remains same at 3.7 FPS on burst with 34 JPEG images & 6 images RAW limit, shutter speed can be set from 30 – 1/4000 sec, 63-zone focus points, wide-area 9-point auto focus, capable of recording full HD videos (1920 x 1080) and more features.

The EOS 600D also comes with Scene Intelligent Auto mode which lets camera to choose appropriate scene mode automatically, Basic+ and Creative Filters, Built-in wireless flash control, the camera can house all EF and EF-S lenses etc. You can view the complete specification of the camera over here.

The Canon EOS 600D can be pre-ordered with 3 options:

With EF-S 18-135mm Lens at Rs. 59499 (buy from flipkart)

With EF-S 18-55mm kit lens at Rs.44699 (buy from flipkart)

And body-only at Rs. 41199

One of the great features of Facebook is the birthday reminders. Let’s face it – there are many of us who aren’t very good at remembering birthdays. This habit of forgetting can be dangerous (especially if you have a girlfriend/wife). To avoid any injuries, mental stress and a lot of mess – Facebook has given us this extremely important feature of birthday reminders.

However, there is a problem that many people don’t want to reveal their birthday (me for example) mainly because of identity theft issues. This makes things a little difficult since you don’t get all the notifications at the same place now. A solution? Use google calendar or iCal or any other application where you can add birthdays and get reminders (you have to know the date of course).

I began using Google Calendar to keep track of birthdays even before Facebook. At that time I used to manually enter every birthday. This makes things a bit time consuming, especially if you have multiple hundred friends. The solution? Use the export feature in Facebook. Here’s how,

Click on the events tab on the left panel.

Events List

Now on the center pane you would get a list of all the birthdays. Scroll to the bottom of the page where you will see an Export Birthdays link. It would open a dialog that looks like this,

Export Birthdays

Copy this link, now open Google calendar and click on the Add by URL,

Add By URL

This will add a new calendar to your Google calendar. You’re done except for one part. You need to set the reminders for the calendar. To do that go to settings ? calendar settings ? calendars ? Friend’s Birthdays. Click on notifications and set the type of notifications.

You’re done. You can do this for any other application that supports iCal format calendars also. Now there’s an application which might just save you from a breakup

To change the hostname in Ubuntu, follow these simple steps:

1. Find out your existing hostname by entering this command in terminal:

hostname

So on my computer, the hostname is “santhosh-desktop”

2. Change the hostname by editing:

sudo nano /etc/hostname

You will see the existing hostname. Change it to whatever new hostname you want and save it by hitting Ctrl + O

In this tutorial, I change it to

gigacore-desktop

3. Now edit the hosts:

sudo nano /etc/hosts

Here change the ::1 and 127.0.1.1 to the new hostname you chose.

::1 gigacore-desktop localhost6.localdomain6 localhost6
127.0.1.1 gigacore-desktop

3. Restart the hostname service.

sudo /etc/init.d/hostname restart

Now check the hostname by following the step 1 and you should see the new hostname.