Minute but many developments took place when I was NOT blogging in college.

I improved a lot with Photoshop and picked up great techniques in Corel draw. Thanks to my college magazine design buddies Advaith and Mayank. One day after writing an exam I was in a very jolly mood. I couldn’t resist opening Photoshop. I started working from scratch and with my golden iPod nano in front of me. I came out with the following illustration of the iPod Nano

I stopped playing the most loved hostel multiplayer – counterstrike. It was sucking away huge amounts of my time.

I touched the 400 floor in the icytower, could survive till the 422^nd floor. This made my worldwide icytower rank to A. I was the first among my icytower playing crazy friends to achieve this. The following screenshot shows the A rank and the floor 422. To go to the next rank you are supposed to go to 500^th floor. 500 I think is possible. But the 2^nd goal (highlighted) to reach the 400^th floor without combos a little too much.

Started playing Farmville and Mafia-wars just to learn some tricks so I could post it for new players.

Well, when I was away I didn’t stop gathering information to blog about. So I could immediately start writing when I get back. Some of great such new things are waiting to get written and posted. Watch out

With lots of things going around and people of wide variety of interests, it becomes too tough to blog at college. I live in a hostel with an erratic internet connection. It is like that due to numerous people leaching it at the same time. In such conditions Facebook is the only thing that opens with ease. Several other reasons like blocked ports make my life hell.

It took me 2 months to reach good highs among the blogs of the same niche. It was such a pain to watch my blog fall drastically from great hights on the indiblogger ratings and alexa ranks within 3 months of less activity. This great fall screams for a need to lift it up again. I’m determined to work hard and take my blog to a better high again.

Now I’m back to my home. With a free flow internet connection, I can stay informed about the happenings in the world by frequently visiting various websites and watching videos. This way I’ll be having good matter to post material on Mrpant.com.  I’m quite back to blogging and will try to continue when I go to hostel during the first week of July.

I used to hate those millions of Farmville and Mafia war’s feed on my Facebook feed. I blocked them, they got added to the blocked app list. But trust me when you actually start playing these you have hard time surviving without those feeds. Now when I want to enable them i find no option to do it. Facebook changed its interface recently just after the “birthday”. Everytime Facebook changes its look, its like “you better devote some time to find all those misplaced areas”. I did that. I found where the applications can be added to the feed again.

The trick is to move to “Top news” first. The most used “most recent” page doesn’t let you do it.

• Go to Top News link on the top of your feeds.
• Now navigate to the end of the page and find “Edit Options”
• Go to the “applications” tab in the floating box.
• Click on the “add to news feed” button. You are done.

The catch here is that you’d kill yourself from frustration after not finding any such options under the “Most Recent” page. True that you never go to the “Top News” page. But for this you’ll have to go. There is no other way on the present Facebook interface to unhide applications from your news feed.

P.S. You also find blocked pages there.

Start pages are always a mess in web browsers. Firefox put up a design contest for users to design a perfect start page recently. Be it Chrome’s most used pages or Firefox’s default Google search page. Well, Chome does the work to a pretty good extent not to mention opera’s and safari’s speed dial pages. But it is totally a different experience when you have the start page on the cloud that is perfectly customized according to your needs. All those web services on your home page for you to access at a click. Doesn’t that seem perfect.
Symbaloo - Start simple, is a simple interface that basically focuses to refine your first contact with the internet everyday. The symbaloo pages houses draggable boxes that link to your favorite web services like feeds, mail, radio, search, translate and what not. If even that doesn’t make you scream enough. You have free places where you can add your own boxes that link to a service specified by you. Now that’s too much YOU.

To set it as a start page. Just click the button at the bottom of the page that says “Set as startpage“. The following light box a the center of the screen gives you the instructions. OR simply drag the link http://www.symbaloo.com to the home in firefox.

Well I heard of Unite very recently….and actually got to use it only after installing Opera two days back. It was a long time since I’d used Opera…the last time I think when 9.6 was around…maybe it’s just a mindset but I (and many others I know) never saw Opera as a default browsing option, but more like a standby to Firefox, or sometimes Chrome. But the new Opera 10.10 looks very much set to change all of that…it feels light and zippy, and the interface is soothing and soft…for me, it’s a welcome change to the sharp lines of Chrome.

The major improvement is in speed…Opera says it uses some compression algorithm or something….whatever it is, it’s new Presto rendering engine seems to be more than able to rival Chrome’s Webkit, Safari’s Nitro and definitely Firefox’ Gecko (and I should think it’s customary by now to leave IE out of the discussion when browser speeds are being talked about )

But more than speed, what’s creating waves about this new Opera launch is something called Opera Unite…a new concept that might just change the way people normally share files online. What we generally use to share files is a system called the ‘client-server’ architecture. What Unite does is turn your PC into a client, as well as a server; allowing you to share data across several computers without the requirement of a third-party server.


Let me try to explain in more simple terms. Suppose you want to share a few photos with your friend. What you’d normally do, is upload your photos to a photo sharing website like Flickr, Photobucket or PicasaWeb; and then send them the link with the password. You could also e-mail the photos as attachments. But what if the photos you want to share are high-resolution, and large in number? Then e-mail sharing is out of question, as there are file size limits to attachments. Also, in the case of photo-sharing websites, you have limits to the total upload (unless you are a paid member, but even if that is the case, it is cumbersome and time-consuming to upload hundreds of megabytes of photos and especially so if you happen to have a low bandwidth connection). Or similarly if you wish to share a big file (a PSD file, RAW image, a HD video, etc), it can be quite taxing to upload it someplace and then share it. Moreover, from an Indian perspective, where ISP’s  impose download/upload limits in most internet plans, it can be impossible for someone to share a considerably sized file.


It is here where Unite comes in and makes the sharing process a breeze. And it’s so simple, anybody without any prior file-sharing experience could easily do it. In the client-server architecture, the files you upload are stored on a server, which is usually a high-capacity mainframe or other powerful computer with high file storage and processing capabilities. Then, the person who you want to share the file(s) with, downloads the file from the server.
But what Unite does, is that it hosts the files from your computer itself, i.e, your PC is sort of a  mini-server now! So now whoever you want to share data with can download the requisite files directly from you, instead of using any via-media. This simplifies things a lot, and is very very advantageous in the following ways…

• You no longer need to upload the file from your computer, so if you have any limits on your uploads, you no longer need to worry…
• You can share huge files in a jiffy…in fact if you wish, you can share all the contents of your computer and/or any external media; and also the contents of your local network which you have access to.
• This way of sharing is more secure, as there is no third-party involved; the transaction takes place only between the people concerned.