Tech Lounge 4u

All Nokia devices supported by iSync can connect to your Mac via Bluetooth. However, selected Nokia device models can also be synchronized through a USB cable in addition to using Bluetooth. If iSync supports both Bluetooth and USB connections to your Nokia device, you can choose whichever connection method you prefer for the initial setup. Follow these simple steps to connect your Nokia Phone with you Mac.

Before you set up iSync, make sure that your Nokia device and your Mac are paired via Bluetooth.

Launch iSync

Launch the iSync application on your Mac. Navigate to Finder Menu > Go > Applications > iSync.

Add Device

Select Add Device from the iSync menu, then chose your Nokia device from the list.

Sync Your Data

You may now sync your calendar and contact info.

Pairing Your Phone With Mac

To pair your Nokia device with your Mac via Bluetooth,

make sure Bluetooth is enabled on your Mac.

You will also need to turn on Bluetooth on your Nokia device. The settings can usually be located Under Connect > Tools or Settings depending on your Nokia device.

On your Mac choose Set up Bluetooth Device from the Bluetooth item on the menu bar. If you do not see a Bluetooth item on the menu bar, go to System Preferences > Bluetooth > Devices and click Set Up New Device. The Bluetooth Setu p Assistant will now pen. Click Continue and select mobile phone as device type.

Now Mac will begin searching for mobile phones. When you see your Nokia device’s name on the list, select it and click Continue. Now your Mac will gather information about the Nokia device you selected. When it has completed, click Continue.

Your Nokia device should now ask for a passkey to connect to your Mac. Enter the passkey displayed on the dialogue box and accept the connection requests from your Nokia device.

Select the services you want to use with your device by checking the boxes. If you are using iSync or Nokia Multimedia Transfer, you have now finished pairing your Nokia device and Mac and may press Continue. You should see a confirmation message displayed on your Mac.

I hope I haven’t missed any step, do let us know with your feedback in the comment section.

If you are on Twitter then you know how it works – you follow people and they might follow you back. But it is not necessary that everyone you follow will follow you back.

He/She might follow you back only if your tweets are interesting or are of their interest. Instead of having to check the followers every now or then, there is a service that does the job for you. Are You Following Me Too is a dead-simple service for testing purpose only. It shows you the list of people whom you are following and they are not following you back.

This can come useful if you get few hundred followers and it becomes tiring to search for a specific person in the Following list.

Are You Following Me Too

The world is changing so shouldn’t your old alarm clock change as well? If you are in the habit of sleeping very often during work or some other activity, then Online Video Clock will help. It sets your favorite YouTube video as an alarm sound. Now you can wake up to your favorite YouTube video.

To set the alarm, choose the desired time, and click the YouTube browser button and then choose the video which you wish to set as your alarm video.

Once you have selected your desired video, click the Set video button to set it as your alarm video.

Online Video Clock

It is a common annoyances with netbooks and laptops which lack the disable touchpad button. Most blogs out there are covering a single method to disable the touchpad, i.e, go to Control Panel > Mouse Properties and then disable the touchpad from there.

The above method is not suitable for those who need to disable the touchpad frequently for short periods of time. Who in his/her right mind would navigate back and forth just to enable/disable touchpad? This could be quite a hectic process.

TouchFreeze is a brilliant little app that solves this problem. It disables the touchpad temporarily the moment a keystroke is pressed. In layman’s term, it disables the touchpad automatically when you are typing and enables it back when the typing is stopped.

It will sit silently in the system tray without disturbing any of your work. Just start typing and don’t worry about the touchpad any more.

I prefer using this app even though my notebook has a disable touchpad button. Please note that this app might not work with certain laptops, but should work with most netbooks and laptops that lack the disable touchpad button.

Back in August, we learned that Mininova, a popular torrent tracker, was ordered by a Dutch court to remove any and all copyright-infringing torrents. Today, we learn that the tracker site has done just that, going completely legal. If Mininova had not complied with the orders of the court, the site and its owners could have faced fines of roughly $1,500 USD per infringing torrent, with the maximum penalty of approximately $7.1 million USD.

Mininova, which lost a court battle in August with the anti-piracy BREIN Foundation and was given three months to comply with an order to removed torrents that infringed copyright : “Unfortunately the court ruling leaves us no other option than to take our platform offline, except for the Content Distribution Service.”

As of current, only approved uploaders are allowed to share content, so as to prevent any uploading of copyright-infringing material. The decision to allow uploaded content only from approved individuals was a tough one, but necessary. Mininova has attempted to test various techniques to prevent the uploading of copyright-infringing torrents, but none have proved themselves 100% effective.

Now I completely agree with all copyright police in different parts of the world that illegal content should be removed from the web. However, I strongly feel that they should also work closely with the content distributers to make legal content easily available for cheap. This is extremely important in order to stop new sites from popping up.

Lets take an example:

• India does not have HD TV transmission yet
• Blu ray players cost 5 times as much in the US (the cheapest one is the PS3)
• Limited Blu Ray library at high prices. Very few bollywood movies available in HD
• No iTunes (or any other) online media store
• Popular US/UK TV shows are broadcast usually after 1 or 2 years

Where do you expect people to go when they want to watch HD movies or TV shows that are not yet available in India? There are no official legal channels. They have to go sites like mininova. Hence there will always be an audience for such sites to tap into.

The move has created waves around the torrent community, with comments on blog posts suggesting users will migrate to other services, including the Vancouver-based isoHunt. With other torrent sites indexing Mininova, its move today could have a far-reaching effect.

“They are one of largest sites we have indexed, and will continue to do so,” isoHunt said in a Facebook post in the wake of Mininova’s announcement. “Support their appeal, their case sets bad precedent on freedom of speech.”

Many are now concerned that the tracker site will simply die. While a grim outlook, the fact of the matter is that a majority of Mininova users and abusers were their to download illegally.

The site is currently the 90th most popular site in the world, and 108th in the United States, according to Alexa. It certainly will be interesting to see if these figures change in the coming months.

While browsing through the internet in our daily life, one of the most commonly experienced and encountered error over the internet is the HTTP 400 bad request. There may be various situations during the daily use of the internet by you, in which you would have encountered this error. This article gives you an overview about HTTP 400 bad request error, what it is and why is it displayed.

The cycle of a web browsing activity or a web search involves the client computer and the web browser used by at the client side, as well as the web server, where all the resources such as the web pages, images, videos etc accessible over the internet are kept. The client machine requests information from the web server, based on the protocols set by the HTTP, that is the hypertext transfer protocol, and the web server displays the desired files, which can be accessed on the client side using a suitable web browser.

What is HTTP Status 400 Bad Request ?

A HTTP 400 bad request occurs whenever the web server terminates this search cycle and does not allow the client to get access to any particular information requested, owing to a particular reason. In the simplest terms, a HTTP400 bad request occurs when the web server turns down the request of the client to view any particular information, owing to the disobeying of the rules listed under the hypertext transfer protocol. Due to this reason, the clear and concise understanding of the request by the web server could not be established and as a result of this, the HTTP 404 bad request error is often displayed.

Most of the times, the occurrence of a HTTP 400 bad request is suggestive of a bad programming practice at the client’s end or the end of the web server. Such bad practices can be of various different types. At the client’s end, one of the major reasons behind the HTTP 404 bad request’s appearance is due to the incorrect typing of the URL ofthe web resource by the user. In such circumstances, the web server is unable to map the URL request with the address of the desired resource and as a result, it terminates the request. Thus an easy way to rectify the error occurrence in this case is to carefully type the URL of the web resource being requested.

Though it is rarely a reason, but there are situations when such a HTTP 404 bad resource error occurs due to some inherent disabilities of the web server of the website requested. If this is the case, the only possible solution is to notify the webmasters of the website about the occurrence of this problem. The webmasters of any website can be generally contacted using the following email address: webmaster@websitename.com.

There may be other situation where the resource requested by the client could not be accessible owing to some inherent bug. It is the job of the developers in this case to rectify the problem.

Some of you might be using an Internet plan from your ISP which has limited bandwidth. As far as I know, ALL of the wireless broadband in many countries allows unlimited usage BUT there is a fair usage threshold where once you go over the limit, your connection speed will be throttled to a very slow dial-up speed. I have a wireless broadband subscription and they offer two types of plan which is 384Kbps or 3.6Mbps. Both package allows you to download stuff at maximum speed but once you reached 5GB limit PER month, then you’re screwed with a really slow speed. Honestly it doesn’t make any sense to subscribe a 3.6Mbps download speed when you can only use 5GB of the bandwidth per month. The worst part is even the uploading bandwidth is counted to the usage. At least they now tell us in advanced that there is a fair usage policy because last time they never expose this information publicly and you can only find it in their really long list of terms and conditions page which no one really reads. When you find out that there is a fair usage policy and file a complaint, they blame you for not reading the terms before signing up. For those that are subscribed to an Internet connection package which has limited bandwidth usage, it is important that you keep track of your bandwidth usage. Here’s a free internet traffic monitoring software that works.

iTraffic Monitor is a network monitor and reporting tool. It provides real time graph of network traffic. Detailed stats provide daily/weekly/monthly/yearly stats. Stop watch, Session stats.

Monitor and review your Internet or network bandwidth usage with ease

How fast your internet connection? We can graph it for your review

How much data do you transfer? We show you a real-time graph or numerical display, as well as daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly reports

Requires minimal desktop space and system resources

This is how iTraffic report looks like. It’s easy to read and nothing too fancy or complicated.

iTraffic Monitor is relatively new as this is their first version released on 4/22/2009. A few small bugs here and there such as copying the report to clipboard generates an access violation error but it’s no big deal and hopefully they’ll fix it in their next release. What I like about iTraffic Monitor is it can filter out local network traffic or traffic between specific IP addresses. This is very important for people connected to the internet via a local area network (LAN). Very few network monitors can do this and the ones that do usually is a shareware that cost money.

This software is free and takes less than 2MB memory while monitoring your bandwidth usage. Claims to work on all Windows.

[ Download iTraffic Monitor ]