5 minutes home wi-fi setup

Recently I purchased a broadband internet connection from Airtel for my new pad in Noida. The setup at home sure took me by storm, with no less than an army of 8 people coming one after another within 2.5 hours to finish every thing from cabling, ADSL phone setup, line activation, internet setup etc.

Soon I had access to always on internet access, but only if I was sitting in the same room and wired to the modem. So as soon as the Airtel army finished their job, I connected my wireless router to the setup. Now I sitting in my inner bedroom, and writing this article on my home wi-fi setup in the comfort of my cozy bed.

Here is how I connected and configured my wireless router with my ADSL Beetle 220bx modem(mind you, my Linksys WRT43G router does not have the default firmware, but dd-wrt):

1. I assume that your adsl modem has been configured by the company to provide always on internet as is my case
   
2. Connect the internet cable from your Beetel modem to the Internet-in port of your Linksys router.
3. Ensure that your Windows PC is set to automatically receive IP settings by acting as a DHCP client.
4. The most important step is configuring your router, because I found that by default both the Beetel modem and Linksys router were on the same subnet and were hence conflicting. Hence I changed the router subnet as shown below.
5. Now turn off both your modem and router. Then first turn on the modem and after about 2 minutes turn on our router.
6. If every thing went fine then now you should be able to access your modem administration on 192.168.1.1 and your wireless router configuration page at 192.168.0.1
7. Remember not to give your neighbors free lunch by securing your wireless connection, else apart from you anybody around your house can access your internet and use up your paid bandwidth. Remember that the newer WPA standard s much more secure than the vanilla WEP security. I configured my security as shown below.

I have assumed lots of thing to finish this quick article, so if I missed some glaring steps or tips then let me know and I will update this article.

Even otherwise, do leave a comment! :)

Using GMAIL offline and sorting mail by size

You read it right! You can now be sitting on a flight with no internet connectivity, yet use almost all features of Gmail. You can read new mails, reply to them, sort through old mail, delete unneeded mails, compose new ones, or just sort by size to delete those huge mails with attachments. All this will happen offline on your PC/laptop, and will sync to Gmail server as soon as you next connect to the internet.



No, you do not need to install a third party JavaScript API like Google Gears, but just leverage the latest feature provided for free by Gmail - IMAP.

IMAP, short for Internet Message Access Protocol allows any compliant desktop software to access your Gmail mails for you. This means that you can now use powerful Windows software such Microsoft Outlook, iPhone, Thunderbird or your Blackberry to access your Gmail account in it's full glory. IMAP by definition quickly fetches all the email headers, such as the mail subject, from, date, size etc. from the mail server. This means that once synced, you can go off line and manage your mail at your own leisure. You can mark the full mail body to be downloaded, mark others for deletion, compose new mails, using powerful spell checkers etc. and reply to other mails. All this even on a flight with now Internet. As soon as your laptop gets internet access, you IMAP client like MS Outlook will connect to Gmail server and automatically sync all your changes.

A powerful benefit of using this method is that the actual mails always reside on the Gmail servers. So, you can still access your Gmail account from the browser from anywhere, as you were doing earlier. Now, all that is changed is that if you wish, you can use more powerful and offline applications to manage your web based gmail messages.

One of my all time favorite gripe with Gmail was it's lack of mail size display. This prevent me from sorting my mail for the ones with huge attachments unnecessarily filling up real estate space. I know we are already at 4 GB of space...but still! Lesser messages on server mean lesser clutter and more productivity. This is now taken care of using IMAP. I found tonnes of old forwards with huge attachment which I could delete right away!

You can read on how to configure Gmail in Microsoft Outlook2007 on their corresponding Help Center page.

Outlook will show your gmail labels as folder auto-magically, but for that I had to do the following:

• Right click on the newly created mail group for your Gmail account in Outlook and click on 'IMAP Folders'
• Under the 'All' tab, click 'Query'
• Click OK.

Doing so does a one time required sync of all your custom labels, and some Gmail specific special folders. Here is a screen shot of the same:



Additionally, all your star marked mails, show up as flagged mails in Outlook. Any new mail you flag in Outlook, will automatically show as starred back in Gmail. Neat, isn't it? :)

The 'Getting Started' page by Google will help you, well, get started :)

Do comment how IMAP is changing your Gmail life.

Problem playing music in a Picasa slideshow?

I am a big fan of Google Picasa for the simplicity and features offered. I am quite confident using Adobe Photoshop, but still I find doing minor adjustments such as basic levels corrections and Color correction much more easier, and in a non-destructive way.

Having used Picasa for sometime now, I have started using some of the extra bells and whistles it offers, such as the "Play music during slideshow" feature. I discovered that you can make Picasa play your favorite mp3 music by going to File > Options > Slideshow. Once here, just enable the checkbox for "Play MP3 tracks during slideshow", and give the folder path on your hard disk. Next time when you start a slideshow, Picasa should play music in the background, with nice fades and all....or so I thought.

For me, somehow Picasa never actually played music, even though I checked and double checked my settings, and ensured that I have the latest versions of Picasa and Windows Media Player on my Vista machine.

It was then I discovered what the problem was. For some reason, Picasa does not play music, if the folder you specify has subfolders! What a bad bug! I hope this is soon fixed, but in the meanwhile, point your Picasa music folder, to a folder, which does not have any sub-folders.

Additionally, neither can Picasa any playlists in the folder, nor can it randomize the songs. Please correct me if I am wrong.

Do comment if this helped you, and if you feel the actual problem lies somewhere else, you can write back in the comments to this post.

Apple iPhone: Cause for mass hysteria?

I must admit that I have always drooled over Apple design and simplicity, but have always been stuck to the IBM PC. I never used to keep track of what exactly is the Apple G5 or the minibook, but then came the effort called Apple Boot camp, which would allow the latest Intel based Mac to run Microsoft Windows too. This made me stop and turn. Should my next laptop be a Mac? That is about when Apple announced it's iPhone too.

I was planning to purchase a new mobile anyway, but this has made me delay my purchase. I am almost completely determined to see how the iPhone would evolve in competitive markets other than the United States, like India.

Ofcource, the iPhone being a branded Apple product, cannot be dismissed for another run of the mill mobile. We can easily see that the Apple engineers have been at work, watching sci-fi movies, and going through future models :)

The iPhone has some interesting features, to die for:

• If you are a sci-fi movie buff, then you must watched Minority Report where Tom Cruise is able to slide live video and photographs by hand on a virtual display. He zooms by almost pinching out etc. To quote a cliche, The future is now. IPhone is loaded with intelligent sensors such as the touch sensor, proximity sensor and accelerometer will really make you love your iPhone.
• The iPhone is a GSM phone, a full fledged ipod, can connect to wifi hotspots, show full featured websites(except flash and Java content), act as an excellent calender, do full blown email stuff, show movie and pictures and more! Well, at 135 grams, i'd say that this is not bad :)
• If you are listening to music and a call come, you just need to pinch the cord, and the music fades in and you can attend the call.
• While seeing a photo gallery, just slide your finger left or right to move in the gallery.
• While seeing a photograph, with two fingers slide out/pinch out to zoom the snap, and then freely use your finger to pan across.
• The display is large, but still while viewing a website, the text might be small, but with just a tap, the area under consideration zooms up. Neat!
  

Unfortunately at around $499 I do not own an iPhone yet to post any photographs, but then the internet is already choke full of them

Hmm, this reminds me of Microsoft "Surface" :)

Anyway, check out an excellent video review by our friend David Pogue at the New York Times.

Rule your "cheapo" webcam

Many a times I have faced a webcam. My parents have it, and a lot of my friends have it, but almost always, I do not get half as good a picture from it, as I might have expected. Usually, I appear either too dark, or in various rainbow colors. I see that nowadays webcams provide a plethora of settings to tweak, but usually I do not get the results I expect.

Today I came across a nice blog at Strobist which made me sit up. It takes you step by step on how to vastly improve the video quality of your "cheapo" webcam. Great! just what I needed!

See the before and after effect below!



Head over to Strobist to give it a read. Do share your experiences, or other tips in the comments.

Music track not showing up in Google Talk status?

For those who were busy fighting the aliens while Google Talk added the cool feature to display your currently playing music track in the Google status, please be aware that you can simply do so just by changing the status to “Show current music track”.

Now, it so happened that I eagerly tried the feature when it was launched, but Gtalk did not show the status with Windows Media Player 10, 11 or Winamp on my laptop. I thought maybe Google was sending the update slowly globally, so waited for a week or two, but nothing.

On further research I discovered that Google Talk installs a plug-in in Windows Media Player which sends the current music track to Gtalk. Now if, for any reason, WMP detects some problem with a plug-in, it disables it. This was the problem in my case. So here is what I did to enable my Google Talk plug-in:

1. Ensure that you have the latest Google Talk installed


2. In Windows Media Player, press Alt+T to access the tools menu


3. Press ‘Options’


4. Click on the ‘Plug-ins’ tab


5. On the left hand ‘Category’ pane, click on the ‘Background’ item


6. On the right hand ‘Background’ pane, click on the Google Talk plugin to check and enable it


7. Save changes and change the status in Google Talk to “Show current music track”

This worked for me, hope it helps you too!

Oh and by the way, Google’s fascination with collecting information in order to show us meaningful results found its way in GTalk too. Google has a service called Google Trends. If you wish, then Google can log what you listen too, and hence show meaningful trends such as the current most popular song etc. I have opted in :)

Happy chitter chatting!

Intelligent Television Viewing - My PVR setup

I am paying monthly for my TataSky Satellite TV connection (brought in India by a joint venture between Tata and Sky) and am also paying for my monthly dose of broadband. I miss a lot of broadcasted satellite programming, unfortunately or fortunately because I have a day job, and need to go to office daily to keep these bills rolling. I miss movies, premiers, comedy serials and a lot of extra stuff. Can I do something to make my investment more value for money? You bet!

I decided to build my own home Personal Video Recorder(PVR) setup using my laptop, which would be intelligent enough to do some work behind my back.

This is what now my setup does, or can do with a little more tweaking:

• Pause live TV (so that I can answer the phone without missing the movie climax or the sport event)
• Do OTR (one touch recording), so that if suddenly my friends come to call me for an outing, I can record the rest of the program for later viewing
• Do scheduled programming. This will automatically turn on my satellite box, change channel and record a program, then make the computer go back to sleep.
• Automatically record the next telecast of a movie I recently missed on HBO etc. It can search by itself for the next telecast and schedule it for recording!
• Automatically record a series, such as a weekly comedy show
• Not to mention that all recording is in superb quality!

What all I needed

• My Laptop
• TataSky satellite TV connection for the best quality I can get at the moment in India
• A hardware based TV Tuner . I used Hauppauge WinTV PVR USB2 PVR. Remember that it now comes with a free IR blaster! I bought the MCE edition so got a bundled remote too for my laptop.
  
• A IR(infrared) transceiver. This is required because you need a way to change channels on your satellite box behind your back, so that the correct channel can be recorded by the computer. The IR blaster works like an actual remote control, only that it’s controlled by a computer. I am using the great and time proven USB UIRT.
• A PVR software. I am using the free, but feature packed GBPVR.
• Lots of storage! I am using external Western Digital 250 GB firewire drive, but you may use your laptop if you have enough storage there. Remember that a 1 hour recording can take 4 GB space, straight out of a hardware encoder and uncompressed. For archival I use xvid compression which compresses a 1 hour recording to about 800 MB.
• Some way to fetch weekly TV guide/listing details into the PVR software. I use TVxB to get listing of my favorite channels such as Star Movies, Star World, HBO, Sony, SAB TV, Star Plus, Star One, Sony Pix, Zee movies etc.
• A hardware splitter, if you want an easy way to switch TV input between your television and the TV Tuner.
• Time and DIY attitude to set it all up!
• Microsoft Vista – No, this is not mandatory at all, but Vista does simply superb power management. If you are away from home, and your PC/laptop is ON the whole day, then you would want to make it save power and hence extend its life when not in use. Visa allows your PC/laptop to go into a special S3 power saving mode when not in use, and can wake the PC back into action within a few seconds. Windows XP can’t do that easily and out of the box. As an example, I can leave my laptop on suspend mode, the whole day – without AC and on battery, and still find my battery at more than 90% at the end of day!!

How to go about it

Setup is simple. Configuration takes some time.

1. Connect the satellite TV output to the TV Tuner input. Use the best available interconnection option. For TataSky use the coaxial audio/video instead of the RF cable option.
2. Connect the TV tuner to your computer
3. Connect the IR blaster(transceiver) to your laptop and point it to the satellite box. USB UIRT, at least, is quite powerful and you don’t need to pin point it to the satellite box. It works even its roughly pointed towards the box. Even +/- 45 degrees or a bit of vertical miss-alignment works perfectly.
4. Install TVxB and configure it to fetch your favourite TV channel’s guide. The result is stored in an international standard XML format called XMLTV. Schedule it via Windows scheduler to run weekly
5. Install the PVR software, which in my case if GBPVR.
6. Point GBPVR to take the TV guide input from TVxB output file, and update automatically weekly
7. Set your IR blaster type in GBPVR, so that it can send the correct IR signal to the satellite box before starting a new recording. I had a including that because TataSky is a joint venture with Sky+ of UK, they might be using their technology and hardware, so I chose the Sky+ type for the remote. It worked!

By the way, for later archival encoding the video in XVID formating by an almost fully automated and free tool like AutoGK works great for me!

Total cost of project, if we take into account the fact that I already owned my computer and satellite TV connection, was about $290 or about Rs. 12,700

If you have more suggestions, specially pertaining to a setup in India, then do share it the comments below.