“Google Gmail, Google Chrome browser, Google Calendar… very soon a Google OS.. how easy it is to find everything in one place from one company…. but..”

I started to use Gmail somewhere in mid 2005 and it became my primary email by simply replacing Yahoo mail.  Hotmail, AOL and Yahoo are just the history for me as well as for many millions out there.  In late 2008 Google Chrome came in to the picture with its unique and sleek interface. Even though I was widely using Firefox  I started to use Chrome as an alternative browser. After few months, Now I’m typing this post using Chrome as my default browser. I’m not using most of the Firefox plugins and addons so I felt like I found yet another browser with slightly better performance from Google.

About few days back Google announced that they will be taking their next step by introducing a new operating system, Google Chrome OS.  Yes there were enough and more rumours about a Google OS well before they introduced the Androide. I think it will be great (well.. not for Microsoft and Apple )  as it’s going to be a free and open source product based on Linux kernel.

While eagerly waiting to try out this new OS, I started to realize that one day Im going to be a total dependent of this gigantic company, “Google” in the cyber space. I know that I’m not alone and there are many millions who followed the same path, unintentionally. A few questions would reveal this dependence.

• What is your primary email : Gmail
• Any other email accounts : Well, gmail is the only email address that I used for many years. It has all my conversations.
• What is your default browser : Google Chrome, it does the job and I’m happy with that
• Operating System : Google Chrome OS (not as yet, but it might be the answer in the future)
• Using google calendar : Yeh.. it is really nice
• Any google apps : Of course

This means, Google has all my information and if needed it could disable my account, use all my information and simply leave me nothing if I don’t have any backups locally.

The bottom line is we are unintentionally funnelling our  information in to one single (may be two, if we consider the Facebook owned by Microsoft ) company and it is yet another giant with its best interests on profits at the end.

When I bought my Lenovo R61 it came with a pre installed Vista Basic edition. I replaced Vista with various linux flavours like openSUSE, Fedora, Debian ,CentOS etc. Finally I found Arch Linux and I think its the best distro for me.  I had Arch as my main OS and had windowsXP on a Virtual Machine till end of Feb, 09. However I had to install windowsXP by removing Arch due to some software packages that demanded nothing but Windows. This time I kept some free space to set up a dual boot. About a week back I managed to do a fresh Arch Linux installation.  

For a change, I picked up KDE 4.2 instead of the usual GNOME . I used it for few days and I felt like I’m missing something, the clean and simple GNOME . The all new KDE 4.2 is appealing but I think its not for me. I tried KDE even with some other distros like Kubuntu, OpenSUSE but always wanted to go back to GNOME.

I enjoyed setting up the new Arch and felt very happy about the improvements that it gained during the past few months.

Few things that are noteworthy.

• Wireless is working flowlessly. Back then I had lot of problems with my AR5212 card and madwifi drivers. This time I’m using ath5k and my wireless connection is even faster than it is in WinXP.
• Thinkpad hot keys are working out of the box ( volume controllers, battery meter etc. )
• ALSA sound is working perfectly with no cranky noice. I had to adjust the PCM volume (in alsamixer) to a level such that gain is zero to get the best sound quality. Last time I replaced ALSA with OSS as ALSA made lot of noice. 

At the same time I had a look in to OS x86 project. I would love to try that on a separate machine if I get a chance.

 

 

 

Text To Speech (TTS) is a wonderful feature. It is a default in many GPS devices , the latest Kindle2 etc. TTS on the computer is very useful in reviewing documents.  Reading through the same document over and over may not much helpful in identifying errors and missing punctuations, specially if you are the writer. TTS comes in handy at this point.

Myself and my wife found TTS feature very useful during the writing and reviewing of her Thesis.

Hope the following would help someone to try out and enjoy TTS on WinXP.

Check the availability of Text To Speech feature:

Open Start>Control Panel>Speech.
Go to the Text To Speech Tab.
Verify the availability of voice engines from the drop down list.

Grab a good Natural Voice Engine:

The microsoft default voice engins are nearly useless in real world. You will realize this, soon after hearing the sample voice  

I found some good free voice engines from Cepstral

Their free version does not expire. However it promotes you to purchase the licensed version in every minute or so. Of course it is bit annoying to listen to that message very often. The right tool to remove the message (The License key ) is available for $29.99 on there web site, if it is affordable for you.

After downloading and installing the Cepstral voice you can set it as the default voice by using the same Start>Control Panel>Speech window.

The Cepstral comes with a SwiftTalker, a text editor with integrated TTS feature. It is very usefull to quick edits and reviews. Check the Cepstral menu on Start>Programs>Cepstral for SwiftTalker.

Use the TTS on Adobe Reader:

Go to Documents>Accessibility Setup Assistant and follow the instructions to setup the TTS options.
Go to Edit>Preferences.
Select Reading from the Categories list
On the Read Out Loud Options section, remove the check mark of Use default voice and select the new voice engine that we installed from the voice drop down list.
Go to View>Read Out Loud, enable the TTS function. This will also enable the other related sub menus to start, pause and stop.

Now you can listen to your PDF document.

Further reading : Planet PDF

“The President of General Motors announced Monday his plans to discontinue production of its celebrated Pontiac brand and cut 21,000 factory jobs by next year as part of a massive restructuring effort to get more government aid.” - Los Angeles Times

Pontiac G6 is a great car to drive ( well .. not to own by my self .. as it will quickly eat up my money for GAS ).

I got a chance to drive this beast on I-70 from Kansas city airport to Manhattan,KS and easily hit 130 mph without even feeling the speed.  It was an awesome driving experience !!.

 With  

As a visual person, I always rely on drawing diagrams when ever I try to learn something. Mind Maps (back then I didn’t know this term ) were very helpful during my undergrads and I used them a lot for tutoring as well.  Few months back I found XMind, a wonderful tool for mind mapping. The free version is more than enough for studies with plenty of features. However there was a one limitation with the free version. It does not allow to save the mind maps in PDF format. This feature is only available in XMinde Pro version.

Fortunately I found PDFCreator, yet another free and open source tool. Once installed it acts as a pseudo printer. You can set it as your default printer and when ever you send anything to print, it will generate a nice PDF file for you. 

With this approach I managed to get the maximum usage from my favourite mind mapping tool.

Recently I was configuring a new application on Windows XP and found that the configuration files could not handle the folder paths with spaces. I couldn’t get away with escape characters. However I found a solution in Windows itself after a small search.

There is an option for the famous dir command to display the short names generated by the system for non -8dot3 file names.

C:\> dir /x

Life…
The uncertainty..
That’s its beauty..
The turns and twists.. rises and falls
Least you expect.. The harder it hits..
Never you could know…
The next turn of its flow..
Faster you run..
More you would miss.. the true sense of life..
Slow down a bit..
Release the tense and grip..
A moment of silence..
A moment of peace..
Unleashes the wisdom..
You never meant to reach..

WordWeb is a great dictionary which is free for personal use but it does not have a linux version. Hence I was looking for a good alternative with same or better features. Finally I found StarDic. It is more like a clone of the WordWeb. As oppose to the single dictionary file in WordWeb, you can download any number of dictionary files and customize StarDic to use them according to a preffered order. You can even setup it to search for meanings whenever you highlight a word on anything that you read. 

It’s a cool piece of software to try out..

Finally the scrolling and tapping functions are working on my touch pad.Initially I was trying with 11-x11-synaptics.fdi but it didn’t work for me.
Then I used shmconfig.fdi with the same options and it worked like a charm after a reboot.

The basic steps to follow:

• Install xf86-input-evdev and xf86-input-synaptics
• Create /etc/hal/fdi/policy/shmconfig.fdi
• Set SHMConfig option as true
• Use synclient to find the edge values for the touch pad and update the shmconfig.fdi
• Install gsynaptics – optional
• Restart hal (/etc/rc.d/hal restart) or reboot

I found very descriptive guidelines at the following places:

• Ubuntu help
• Arch wiki

I was having troubles with sound on Arch for some time and ALSA did not help me much with that regard. Sound with vlc was cracking and using skype or listening to music was a pain in the neck.

Hence I tried OSSv4 on my Lenovo R61.

After few tweaks (The Arch way ), now Im enjoying good music on my laptop. For skype there is a seperate binary package which supports OSS(skype-oss). It is working like a charm.

OSSv4 comes with the ossxmix , a GUI for the command line mixer ossmix. However I used gst-plugins-bad package for the time being as it allows me to use the same GNOME volume controller with OSS.

If you also having troubles with ALSA this wiki has everything you need to try OSSv4.

Have fun with OSSv4 !!