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Saturday, September 11, 2010
What am I up to?
It has been more than a year since I posted on this blog. I was not busy or something, just that there was never enough thoughts for a post here. But I have been fairly active on my other estates on the web - youtube.com/saptarshide, twitter.com/saptarshide and facebook.com/saptarshide.
Also I have traveled a lot in last one year and captured many amazing sights with my lens. So I have decided to share these as a slide-show on the next post to keep the blog updated with my latest exploits! Enjoy!
Also I have traveled a lot in last one year and captured many amazing sights with my lens. So I have decided to share these as a slide-show on the next post to keep the blog updated with my latest exploits! Enjoy!
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Trying Windows Live Writer
Today I was exploring the Windows Live services when I stumbled upon Windows Live Essentials. It’s something similar to Google Pack, though Google Pack has much more richer collection of free apps whereas Windows Live Essentials is a collection of free desktop applications from Microsoft. Some the apps included are the replacements of current Windows applications.
Windows Live Mail replacing Windows Mail/Outlook Express
Windows Live Messenger replacing MSN Messenger/Windows Messenger
Windows Live Photo Gallery replacing Windows Photo Gallery
Windows Live Movie Maker beta replacing Windows Movie Maker
Additional to above Windows Live Writer is also included. It is a desktop blog-publishing app which features WYSIWYG authoring, photo-publishing, map-publishing, and video-publishing functionality. And the best part is that it supports all major blogging services including Blogger, Wordpress, LiveJournal, and TypePad, amongst others.
I just now installed Windows Live Essentials. I have started using Windows Live Mail, which gives me an outlook-like usability to my Hotmail mailbox and option to copy mails to my computer, and also I made Windows Live Photo Gallery the default photo viewer. Then I decided to try out the Writer with my blog hosted on Blogger, and hence this post. OK, I am clicking the publish button now …
Tuesday, June 02, 2009
Did you Bing?
www.bing.com
This is the latest web search offering from Microsoft, which calls it a Decision Engine as it is supposed to help make decisions apart from searching. Read here what Microsoft has to say about it.
Anyway I decided to bing the web and see what it can show me. From the first impression I feel Microsoft finally seems to be understand how things should work on internet. The interface is neat and simple, though bit heavy with graphics. The web search has some nice features like ability to suggest related searches, provide a preview to page contents without opening and also suggested alternatives for the search result. Shopping search is where I found Bing really good. It could help compare prices, show reviews, product pictures, and even offers cashbacks!! Also I liked the bird's eye view of the Bing Map search, which is based on the Microsoft Virtual Earth now called Bing Maps for Enterprise.
Overall impressive, I will not compare it with Google search yet. Mainly because today I was just poking around and didn't have anything sensible to search. I will be surely using bing as the second search option after google for my future searches. Lets see if bing can become the first option in days to come.
This is the latest web search offering from Microsoft, which calls it a Decision Engine as it is supposed to help make decisions apart from searching. Read here what Microsoft has to say about it.
Anyway I decided to bing the web and see what it can show me. From the first impression I feel Microsoft finally seems to be understand how things should work on internet. The interface is neat and simple, though bit heavy with graphics. The web search has some nice features like ability to suggest related searches, provide a preview to page contents without opening and also suggested alternatives for the search result. Shopping search is where I found Bing really good. It could help compare prices, show reviews, product pictures, and even offers cashbacks!! Also I liked the bird's eye view of the Bing Map search, which is based on the Microsoft Virtual Earth now called Bing Maps for Enterprise.
Overall impressive, I will not compare it with Google search yet. Mainly because today I was just poking around and didn't have anything sensible to search. I will be surely using bing as the second search option after google for my future searches. Lets see if bing can become the first option in days to come.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Forgotten hobby
Reading is a very favorite hobby of mine which had taken a back-seat for quite sometime now, except my reading the Times of India newspaper daily and reading news articles on ibnlive.in.com. Till a few years back I used to read novels very frequently, mainly from fiction (crime, detective, mystery) genre apart from a couple of biographies also. The part reason for this hobby of mine taking a back-seat are the genres themselves. You need continuous time to read them, as it's very difficult to break in between, at least for me.
But very recently I got a chance to bring back this hobby of mine to focus. On my journey back to New Delhi from Kolkata on Rajdhani express I had all the time in the world. So I decided to pick up a novel to read on the train from the Howrah station. I choose The Chamber by John Grisham. Genre wise (legal thriller) it was new to me. I did manage to read a substantial part of the novel in the train but finished the remaining part at my home after reach New Delhi. I liked novel and I think I am very soon going to buy some of the other titles by John Grisham. But more than that I very excited that I went back to my hobby after a long while.
Today while browsing the net on Google search (another hobby of mine), I found a nice site which has a good collection of some of the beautiful works. www.readprint.com. It claims to be a free online library with about 8000 online books by 3500 famous authors. Not bad! Though it also carries a strange warning on the homepage - "The surgeon general reports that having these many free online books at your disposal can be highly addictive."!! I do not think the addictive part is bad but surely I would avoid it as already due to my job I sit in front of computers for better half of my day, and if I start reading books online, I am sure my eyes will pop out in revolt. And anyway, I love buying books and preserving them, after reading, in my collection.
But very recently I got a chance to bring back this hobby of mine to focus. On my journey back to New Delhi from Kolkata on Rajdhani express I had all the time in the world. So I decided to pick up a novel to read on the train from the Howrah station. I choose The Chamber by John Grisham. Genre wise (legal thriller) it was new to me. I did manage to read a substantial part of the novel in the train but finished the remaining part at my home after reach New Delhi. I liked novel and I think I am very soon going to buy some of the other titles by John Grisham. But more than that I very excited that I went back to my hobby after a long while.
Today while browsing the net on Google search (another hobby of mine), I found a nice site which has a good collection of some of the beautiful works. www.readprint.com. It claims to be a free online library with about 8000 online books by 3500 famous authors. Not bad! Though it also carries a strange warning on the homepage - "The surgeon general reports that having these many free online books at your disposal can be highly addictive."!! I do not think the addictive part is bad but surely I would avoid it as already due to my job I sit in front of computers for better half of my day, and if I start reading books online, I am sure my eyes will pop out in revolt. And anyway, I love buying books and preserving them, after reading, in my collection.
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