Why my next phone will never be from HTC.

   A bit of introduction. I am a (was a) proud owner of HTC One X from Bangalore, India. One X is a beautiful phone with a beautiful display rivaled only by the likes of iPhone, no doubt on that. However HTC needs to improve on their customer care.
   I sent my phone for repair on Jan 25 2013 and now its Feb 4 2013 with no news on when I am going to get it back. The so called customer care center claims they are just a collection point and they do not have visibility on the activities of the actual repair center. Also they claim it is delayed because of shortage of parts availability which shocks me because One X is a premier phone from HTC and if they do not have parts for this it means how shoddy their operations are.
   I visited a Samsung store on CMH Road, Indiranagar and took a demo on Galaxy Note 2 and I was immediately sold on it.  Also I did take a demo on iPhone 5 from nearby Sangeetha. Trust me once you have got used to a big screen, the tiny screen of iPhone 5 will never satisfy you, period. I did like the idea of having a Samsung store as against a store which sells products from multiple makers. Also they mentioned they have a unique Samsung care nearby which caters to Samsung products alone thereby giving better service to customers, unlike HTC.

Formatting my digital camera

After getting back my digital camera, Sony HX9V, from my brother I wanted to erase all the photos/videos which he has taken. I was surprised that I was seeing a photo of his even after formatting the memory card via the camera.

Inserting the memory card on my mac proved that the content was not in memory card but in an internal memory of the camera itself. And the option to format this memory appears on settings only after taking out the memory card. Now this also helped me understand why on connecting the camera to my mac I am seeing 3 drives inserted where 2 of them have the same name (one was internal memory and other was memory card).

Using SOCKS proxy in Opera

I never thought setting up SOCKS 5 proxy in Opera would be a tedious exercise. After an hour of googling I was able to set up office socks proxy partially with Opera. As of this writing I am using Opera 11.61. Opera introduced support for Socks proxy in version 11.10 as can be seen from this changelog .

For reasons unknown to me, we need to enter IP address of the proxy server directly to make it work host-name won't work. This was just the first step. My PAC file was not working with Opera. It works with Firefox and Chrome though. I posted a question on Opera forums asking this. Now waiting for replies. If its not going to work out then its good bye to Opera.

Few annoying Firefox UI problems.

Ugly inconsistent UI

1.Status bar was  removed  but they couldn't figure out where to put the addon icons. So came up with an addon bar + addon buttons in toolbar.
2. They tried to copy Chrome with addon icon at toolbar. But ended up in a horrible mixture of old status bar based addons and new toolbar button based addons. Even Opera has done a better job.
3. Differently sized toolbar buttons make it a painful affair to even look. This is unnecessarily cluttering the UI.

To restart or not to restart.

4. Having to restart browser for every addon installation.  This is the single most turn off. This is simply not acceptable after Google Chrome has shown the way.

Google Chrome v13

Starting with chrome v13 google has made a significant change in how search result in omnibox are displayed. Prior to v13 searching for something in omnibox looked for suffix match. I use google reader a lot. In earlier versions of chrome typing reader on omnibox never showed google reader. Whereas typing google showed google reader as the first result (auto completed also). This used to annoy me a lot.
Starting with v13 chrome has changed the way the results are displayed in omnibox. It now displays results from history at a higher priority. With chrome v13 searching reader will show it as the 2nd or 3rd result. That's a refreshing change making me like chrome even better.
But I wish they enhance chrome performance of chrome in mac. Atleast in my case I find it way slower than firefox when browsing certain web sites. This makes me wonder what is the hype over chrome's fastness over firefox.

Mac Terminal nightmare with 256 color

Story behind story :-

I use Mac OSX 10.6.8 and for working I ssh to a RHEL 4.8 server. Recently I tried out solarized which is a set of themes for vim, Mac Terminal app etc. It looks so elegant that I fell in love with it. Solarized has dark and light color themes with 256 color and 8 color support mode. I have been happily using the theme until I logged into my RHEL development server and opened vim. A blank, dark and gloomy screen awaited me. There were no text displayed and I was like a newly blinded man trying to walk. Even after quitting vim I bash prompt was screwed. I had to use reset command to revert the damage.

I knew that something was messing up the color terminal settings. Searching through vim man pages guided me to this setting vim -T builtin_xterm. Basically we can tell vim which terminal we are using. This fixed the terminal screw up in my RHEL box. An alias to vim made my life easy.

Then came the next shock. Inside gnu screen display started breaking again. Frantic google search pointed me to various links showing scrrenrc settings for setting 256 color support inside screen. But still terminal prompt got screwed up inside screen

Fix:-

Magic fix - use iTerm. It is a nice replacement for Terminal app. Solarized has themes for iTerm also and it works beautifully inside screen. Now my RHEL box also has the beautiful solarized themes.

But still inside screen on RHEL terminal reports its supported color codes as 8. I am going to build screen with 256 color support and see if that can fix it.

Kindle Tales

I recently bought a Kindle from Amazon.com. I bought a Kindle 3G, one cover with light and a charger. It cost me around $376 thanks to the hefty $100+ I had to pay for shipping and import duties. (It comes from US so need to pay all sort of import duties). I am still getting flak for this. Instead of asking someone coming from US to carry it for me I chose to ship it. Actually that option never crossed my mind, I was in the euphoria of getting a Kindle that I didn't think much of the logistics. Only after someone mentioned this it ever crossed my mind.

Buying the cover was brilliant. No longer I have to be bored when commuting between Bangalore and home after the bus operator turns off lights.(Well that's actually the only use case I had so far. You cannot read on Kindle without a light source, its same as reading a book). But the charger I am not so sure, never used so far.(But you never know when it will come handy). Its because I always have my laptop with me and I just use the USB charger which came with Kindle.

Delivery took 4 days. They sent it via DHL and it was tracable in transit. They delivered it to my office on April 7th. Thanks to my friends Jai and Tarun a video of unboxing it was shot.

The Kindle itself is very light. But the cover is some 3 times heavier than Kindle itself but its sturdy, looks elegant, and can protect the Kindle in case I drop it.(of course if Kindle is inside it). The power for the cover light is taken from Kindle itself through two points on the left side. Kindle is fixed to the cover via these same points.

The reading experience on Kindle is pure joy. The experience is close to reading a book thanks to the e-ink technology used for display. Also no longer I have to shuttle between a book and my laptop to lookup meaning of an unfamiliar word.(yes, my vocabulary is pretty bad.) Kindle has inbuilt dictionary, just highlight the word using the 5-way controller button and a nice popup shows the word meaning on top or bottom depending on where you are on the current page. Text speech is also nice. When commuting you can just turn it ON and listen to the book rather than read - though I don't use it much.

I bought the 3G version which has free life time 3G internet connection from Amazon. We don't have to worry about from which service provider Amazon is doing this. Its totally transparent to us. Though here in India quite often 3G degrades to EDGE/GPRS. It has a built in web browser branded under experimental features. Browsing in monochrome is not a great experience, but for simple cases like news reading its kind of okay. It also has support for playing mp3 files though I am try to try.

One complaint I have on buying from Amazon Kindle store is that not all books might be available for you country, unless you are in US I guess. So far I encountered 2 such books which I wanted to read. When I queried Amazon they said its because of restrictions from the publishers and they are working on it so that all titles are available in all countries. I think it does not make sense for publishers to restrict e-books based on countries. They are loosing out potential customers(like me) because of this.