I can’t blame Myntra.com entirely. I chose to ignore the warning signs myself. What good can you expect from a company whose idea of promotion is spamming people all over the Web?

But I was desperate. I wanted to try my hand at designing a T-shirt. I looked online for options and found a few. Some of them did not work, others did but then had some problems of their own. I finally settled on Myntra, which even though had a workable interface, would still throw up errors for me. I had two images, simple text, to be printed on the front and the back of the shirt respectively. I uploaded them via the customization tool on the website. The image on the front was supposed to be large while the one on the back was small.

The image files that I uploaded were large and of good quality. With everything in place, I placed the order on the 17th of January, 2011. I instantly got a confirmation mail stating the expected date of shipping and delivery. The order was delivered to my house 10 days later on 27th of January, which I find surprising. I went back home from the hostel on 5th February and rushed to open the package.

I opened the package and it was like someone punched me in the eye. A raggy looking T-shirt lay within the package. I tried it on and it wouldn’t fit. I’m a guy with fat bulging out at all the wrong places but XXL T-shirts never fail me. I put this against the existing XL sized T-shirts I owned and it fell woefully short in length as well as width.

To add to the insult, the print quality was pathetic. Don’t be fooled by the images on display at their website. If you want graphic T-shirts and you’re bored with Tantra, well, tough luck. Myntra isn’t the right place. The print quality is pathetic and the shirt quality is even more atrocious. I speak not from the experience with my T-shirt but by also looking at another T-shirt which a friend had ordered.

As I flipped over the T-shirt, there was another gift that Myntra had sent me. The text which was to be printed small was HUGE and staring at my face! So, the T-shirt is lying in the cupboard and I intend to wear it on Holi and then dispose it off.

I admit that I have not contacted their customer support simply because I’m so put off by the shit they shipped me in the first place. The feedback link they sent me through email doesn’t load. So Myntra, here is the feedback – SCREW YOU! In my opinion, you sell low quality, export rejects to your customers. I’d rather walk around naked than wear a Myntra T-shirt again.

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Yesterday, I set out to do something which I had thought would be particularly easy. When Facebook had not opened up to the world, I had tried to register with them. Now, I do not remember how that attempt went but recently I started getting loads of emails from Facebook on the email address I had used. I already have another Facebook account associated with another email address. So, the logical step was to login and delete this profile altogether.

Simple, right? Wrong. I went to the Account Settings and found an option – “Deactivate”. I clicked on it and was greeted with a form asking me why I wanted to deactivate my account. I filled in the required options and proceeded to deactivate. The process was successful and I was informed that the profile was now deactivated and I could login again anytime to activate it. Hold on a second! I could activate this profile again? That means, my data would lie on the Facebook servers forever?

This did not sound too thrilling to me. I headed over to Google and searched. There was one website which stated that we needed to send an email to the Facebook staff to queue our account for deletion. This seemed tedious. Finally, I found a link which would let me accomplish the task I had set out to do.

Before visiting this link, make sure you are already logged in to your account otherwise you will be asked to enter an email address for correspondence.

Delete My Account

If you are logged in, you should simply see a confirmation asking you whether you want to permanently remove your profile from Facebook. Hit submit and you’re good. If you do not login to your Facebook account for the next two weeks / 14 days, the profile and all its related contents will be deleted from Facebook.

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This post is a follow-up to my previous post titled How to blog in your mother tongue. Since that time, a number of advancements have been made in this field. Typing in your own mother tongue has become even easier. Literally hundreds of tools are now available on the Internet that enable us to communicate in our own language. Further, there are now tools that enable the use of Indic scripts directly on your websites by the visitors. Below are some of the most popular tools :

1. Google Indic Transliteration :
   This is a transliteration tool from the search engine giant Google. Since the day this tool was released, Google has enable support for Indian languages across most of its web properties like Gmail and Blogger enabling users to type emails and blog posts in Indian Languages.Further, if you head over to the homepage of Google Indic Transliteration, Google gives you an easy tool to type in Hindi and other popular languages. You type what you want in English and it gets converted to Hindi. You are also given suitable suggestions. You are also provided an option of adding a Bookmarklet to your browser that will enable the user to type in Indian languages on any website!
2. Lipikaar :
   Next in line is Lipikaar. This is an extremely robust tool that supports over 17 languages! Lipikaar is like the Swiss Army Knife of transliteration tools and comes in three different avatars. The first is the Lipikaar Desktop Software which is available for all flavours of Microsoft Windows. It allows for the usage of Indic scripts offline in all programs, such as Office, on your PC. The second is the Lipikaar FireFox Extension. Since, it is a FireFox add-on, it is cross-platform and can be used on Windows, Linux, OSX etc. and whichever operating system that supports FireFox. It is enabled from within FireFox and allows the user to type in the language of their choice on the websites that they visit. This is probably the easiest way to get started! The last is the Lipikaar Website Enabler. It makes your website / blog transliteration enabled. Your users may interact with you and others on your website in Indian languages.
3. Quillpad :
   Quillpad is a free, famous online Hindi typing tool. Apart from Hindi, it supports 9 other Indian languages. It also offers a Free API that enables the use of Quillpad on your websites. Whatever you type is converted automatically to Devanagari etc.
4. Webdunia Editor :
   The Webdunia Editor is another robust online tool that not only allows for easy typing in Hindi but also converts what you write in English to the best possible match in Hindi while giving you suggestions along with that.
5. HindiKalam :
   HindiKalam is another web-based Hindi editor. What you type in Hindi using the English alphabets is automatically converted to Devanagari. It is similar to some of the previously mentioned tools.
6. Hinkhoj :
   Hinkhoj is basically a Hindi language search engine. But similar to Quillpad and Lipikaar, it provides for an API that allows developers to enable Indian Language content on their websites.

   SOFTWARE SPECIFIC TOOLS
   

7. tinyMCE :
   TinyMCE is a platform independent web based Javascript HTML WYSIWYG editor control. This editor is used in a variety of software applications. An Indic plugin, akIndicPlugin has been created by Amit Kumar Singh which will enable the use on Indian languages in tinyMCE. There is another plugin by Vishal Monpara.
8. FCKEditor :
   Vishal Monpara has an Indian languages plugin for the widely used FCKEditor.
9. Drupal :
   Abhishek Nagar lists some excellent methods on his website for integrating Indic scripts within your Drupal installation. Check here and here. Gamabhana, is a set of tools that enable the use of Indic Scripts with a variety of CMS’s as well as on its own. Modules for Drupal are available on the Gamabhana website. Here is another Indic Script module for use with your Drupal installation.
10. WordPress :
    The simplicity of WordPress allows developers to create plugins for the platform. If you wish to blog in your mother tongue, you may use any of the previously mentioned resources or one of the below mentioned plugins. The Indic plugin is based on Gamabhana. MonuSoft also provides for a set of plugins to be used with WordPress enabling the use of WordPress in 8 different languages. Vishal Monpara also has an Indic IME plugin for WordPress on his website. WPGoogleLangTransliteration is a WordPress plugin based on Google Indic Transliteration.
11. Joomla :
    Amit Kumar Singh, the author of the previously mentioned akIndicPlugin has written a guide for the integration of his plugin with Joomla.

This is not the definitive guide to writing in Indic languages such as Hindi etc. A quick search on Google yields hundreds and hundreds of results. Use this guide that I’ve prepared as a reference but do a quick research yourself as well. The above list should enable you to type in Indian Languages on your computer. Now, freely type, post, chat, blog and communicate in your mother tongue!! The list of uses is infinite.

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I was seriously thinking of doing away with my Facebook account after I read about the latest update to the Terms of Service on Facebook. Facebook claimed ownership of my data, even if I deleted my account.

Logged in just now to see this message :

Facebook reverts back to earlier ToS

Its good Mark Zuckerberg to revert back to their previous position as it had justifiably angered a lot of users. I just hope that Facebook doesn’t come up with any other senseless clauses. Reputation damaged can be very hard to restore.

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Yesterday, I voiced my concern regarding the website facebook.in which appeared a little suspicious to me. I contacted the folks over at Facebook and got a response from them today. Here’s what they had to say :

Hi Rahul,

We appreciate your concern. “http://www.facebook.in” is a secure Facebook login page. Please let us know if you have further questions or concerns or see anything else that is suspicious on the site. We apologize for any confusion.

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

Emma
User Operations
Facebook

So, Emma from Facebook basically confirmed that http://www.facebook.in/ is a legit Facebook website and a property of Facebook. Thus, we can safely conclude that facebook.in is Facebook’s entry into India and probably will be the website to which the Indian users will get redirected in the near future. Facebook India is still broken and doesn’t work properly so I guess it is still more of a placeholder than a proper Indian version for Facebook.

A similar step was taken by MySpace (http://in.myspace.com/), Orkut (http://www.orkut.co.in/) and YouTube (http://in.youtube.com/) recently. Facebook will compete with Orkut, which is the leader in the Social Networking segment in India.

There is a kind of rush to get into the Indian market which is still in its nascent stage but has a whole lot of potential keeping in view the fact that majority of the Indian population is young and broadband penetration is increasing as every day passes.

Well, I’m a relieved man, now that it has been confirmed by Facebook that it wasn’t any scam.

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I use AirTel as my ISP. Sometimes, I forget to add the domain suffix and prefix and just simply enter the name of the website. The AirTel DNS is intelligent and redirects me to the required website.

But something unusual happened today. I keyed in “facebook” in the address bar of my Opera browser and hit enter. I was redirected to facebook.in. At first, I didn’t notice anything strange and didn’t even look at the URL in the address bar. I simply put in my username and password and proceeded to login. But the login took forever.

I refreshed the page and this time I noticed something different. The username and password fields did not have their usual yellow borders, which show that you have the credentials stored in the Opera Wand password manager. This time I decided to look at the address bar and saw that I was on http://www.facebook.in and not on facebook.com

I did a quick whois for the domain. The information seemed pretty fake to me but the server it points to seems to be a legit facebook server. It shows up results when you search for friends but everything else on the website is broken. The results also seem to have been fetched from Facebook as the original Facebook uses “s.php” for fetching results whereas facebook.in uses “srch.php“.

So, I am not sure if this is a fake website or a legit one which is yet to be launched. As a precaution, I logged into Facebook and changed my password. I’ve emailed Facebook, lets see what they have to say about this. This intelligent feature of my ISP turned out to be a big security risk for me!

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So, during my exams, when I really didn’t want to study, I hopped on over to wikimapia. I located my house and my college. The images are pretty dated. I guess the next update would set things straight because lots of things are currently missing.

• My house
• My College

Kinda freaks me out you know. Anybody, anywhere can just log on to the Internet and spy on anyone. Crazy.

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A couple of days ago (May 22nd to be precise), I logged into my facebook account. As I was going through the News Feed on the home page, I noticed this :

Look carefully at the news in the red box. It tells me that a guy named Vishal Kharbanda has accepted my invitation to join Facebook. Now this set my alarm bells ringing. Why? Because I don’t know any Vishal Kharbanda and have never invited anybody by this name.

So, just to investigate further, I clicked on the guys name. A box popped up.

Had the dude been my friend, his profile would’ve opened up instead of this box. I saw that we had one friend in common. I clicked on “1 mutual friend” and it revealed the thumbnail of one of my friend. So, my friend had invited Mr. Vishal but Facebook incorrectly shows me that I have invited the guy.

The conclusion: Facebook is already messed up with thousands of useless apps and now they post incorrect information to your news feed. Way to go.

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I know I’m a bit late on this but I just found out that Symbian v9.2 has been hacked. Yes… God does exist!!! The hack is available for pre Feature Pack 1 phones (N73) and Feature Pack 1(N95, N82) but does not correctly work on all firmware versions of N93.

I was in two minds recently on whether to buy a Windows Mobile based smartphone or a Symbian based phone. Ever since Symbian Signed forced all users out of their system, it had become a pain to install any application on your Symbian smartphone. I had begun to hate Symbian as it behaved liked a stupid locked system.

While the buzz was around with every second person hacking into the iPhone, it seemed that Symbian had been completely ignored. But along came some dedicated individuals who proved me wrong… and kicked Nokia’s ass!!

Hurray!! Symbian pwned!! Time to start collecting cash for the N82!!

If you wanna know more about the hack, read this post on the Symbian Freak’s forum :

http://www.symbian-freak.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=17479

It took me some time sifting through the entire post (84pages) but it was well worth the knowledge I gained.

History has been created… finally!!

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It’s been long since I heard a song and instantly liked it. Well no more…

Suddenly, there arrives a song, who with its brilliant musical arrangement and lyrics caught my mind like never before. The song is waste by Seether. I find myself listening to it all day… and as stated in the previous post, it gives me my dose of sadness. The song oozes pain and sadness… the wasy the guitar is played… the way those guys have sung the chorus makes the pain all the more real.

Probably one of the finest compositions I’ve heard in a while with so much emotion and pain put into the song. Amazing.

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This is probably one of the funniest videos I’ve seen in a while.
If you follow the comments on any popular blog, you’ll easily get the humour.

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This week I came across an article on Lifehacker providing a way to hide and lock a folder in Windows XP. The moment I read it, I fond out that they were using the same technique to hide files that I used to use in the start of 2005 to hide porn on my PC.

Although there’s no porn on my machine now, I had still kept the folder structure and the tools that I had used to accomplish this task back then in order to document the procedure sometime later. I never really got the motivation until now. I used to be of the opinion that no one would really be interested in it. I had discovered this process by snooping around to find how a software, by the name of “Folder Lock” that I was using worked.

The process is fairly simple and requires little technical expertise. I would also like to address some of the issues faced by the readers of Lifehacker. This tutorial will cover mostly all of the aspects of creating special system folders and to use them to mask your secret files. Even though this method is not fool-proof, yet it is amazingly easy to implement and fools the other person effectively.

View the next page for more…

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Na na… that’s not the code name for some terrorist organization. Its just a model number of a battery that comes with a number of Nokia phones – 46 million of them to be precise.

And its defective. It overheats. It gets deformed. Who knows, it might even burst!!

I seriously advise people to check Nokia’s website for more information and to check if their battery if one from the defective
lot.

• http://www.nokia.com/batteryreplacement/en/

The good part is, Nokia will replace the defective pieces. So don’t start panicking and switch off your phones. Wait for Monday to come (Aug 15th is a holiday, Saturday, Sunday too) and get your battery replaced. Don’t wanna discourage you here but the Nokia Care people are even more terrorizing. They returned my phone after two weeks and they just had to tighten a screw. So make sure you put some pressure on them. Good luck and stay safe!!

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Twango? Dunno??!! Well its quite a cool media sharing website. Sorta like Flickr but allows you to upload video, audio etc.

Well Nokia has acquired Twango according to an email I received from the Twango guys. Strange move considering nokia is developing a social media sharing network specifically for mobile devices on its own. MOSH is the name of the network that Nokia is developing and is currently in private beta (yeah right!! Click here for a Techcrunch post with info about MOSH and how to access it). Even Twango had a mobile interface, which was quite basic but MOSH look pretty cool to me.

Considering that it has been developed by Nokia, the website must have been optimized to work better with mobile devices. I have registered with the service though I’m yet to play with it.

Here is the email that I received.

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I usually don’t visit social networking websites much but I was quite surprised to land on the front page of Orkut.com and find the Orkut logo coloured in the colours of the India National Flag. Good thinking on the part of the Orkut team to connect to and engage a substantial number of users on their network. They even have a number of polls up for the users asking various questions about the 60 year old baby, who is still growing… growing stronger day-by-day!!

A similar gesture for Pakistan (Aug 14th) would have been appreciated too by the users from Pak I guess. I wonder why the Orkut team didn’t do it. It most definitely has to do with the userbase from both the countries. From what I know, Indians dominate this social network after the Brazillians.

Click here for more info from the official Orkut Blog.

Jai Hind!

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You’re like a dog chasing a car. You’ll never catch it and you wouldn’t know what to do with it if you did.

Snow Patrol – Chasing Cars

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I have just launched a brand new project. Something similar to the Dreams Database that was present on Tandem Felix.

Its called Surreal Stories. You go, register, post your dreams and other people post their thoughts.

Give it a whirl. I don’t dream. Seriously. And this site is just an attempt to peep into your mind. Please participate and spread the word.

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Here’s something I recently came across… and it actually works!!

Yes, you can send free SMS messages to Indian phones. And its not an Indian website!!

Send it via a web browser, install the software on your PC or use it on your JAVA enabled mobile phone. Saves money!! The only catch – it inserts a promotional signature in every message. What the fuck, its free!! And it required no activation when I registered. They do collect your personal information like you cellphone number and the name of your operator and all. But I have personally never recevied any SPAM.

http://www.mobik.com

Remember to thank me when you send a message succcessfully !

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Seems Google has integrated their lightweight chat application with their hugely popular social networking website Orkut. Google Talk now lets you send and receive notifications of new scraps from within the application.

Find out right away when you get new scraps.

Easily send scraps, share files, call, chat, and more.

Chat, call, and instantly receive scraps with your orkut friends by using Google Talk.

Orkut will show a GREEN DOT next to your friends name when they are online and available for chat. The website also lets you add your Orkut friends to your Google Talk contact list. This will surely give applications such as Scrapboy some competition. I recommend you check this out yourself because I haven’t, since I’m not much of an Orkut fan.

Here’s a screenshot :

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These are instructions to use OpenDNS on an Airtel ADSL Connection. I have the Beetel 220BX modem.

My domain expired two days back and I forgot to renew it. So, I renewed it and transferred it to GoDaddy. Cost me around 750 bucks. The site might not open still at someplaces because its taking time for DNS to propogate. If I use the Airtel DNS, it still shows my domain parked somewhere.

So, I switched to OpenDNS. Click on this link and follow the instructions, If you have an always on connection. But if you dial to connect (bridged mode), like I do, then first of all dial and make a connection. Then once it shows the connection in the taskbar, right click on it and select status. Then click on properties. From there, navigate to Networking, highlight TCP/IP and click on properties. Then enter the OpenDNS servers there by clicking on the radio button “Use the following DNS servers“. Click OK. Disconnect and reconnect. Voila! Its kinda similar to the procedure for an always on connection.

Its not tough, I know. But the first time I tried, it didn’t work. And now when I tried today, it did. So I thought of writing down the instructions somewhere!!!

Dunno how safe it is and how much it protects the user but the best thing is that its free and its made surfing the internet faster. Oh yeah, it also takes care of the spelling mistakes ! I’m having great fun using the service. Thanks guys!! Thanks a lot for providing such a great service!!

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