ctrl.altered.mind

It’s the 8 Random Facts meme going around the world, and despite a rather tiny circle of friends with blogs, sooner or later, it had to come hit me - I have Vibz to blame for that :). First, some rules of this rather popular blogtivity -

Players who are tagged, post these two rules and write 8 random facts about themselves.
Players tag eight other people and notify them that they have been tagged.

Therefore, here are 8 random facts about me, that would make you no more wiser, and wish for the next two minutes of your life back.

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I snapped this picture at the local big-name retail computer store while casually browsing for computers. While I am not exactly in the market for a new computer running Windows Vista, this particular screen display did pull me towards the laptops section. This screen was running through the entire time I was in the store. It would help if the guys ambling around in blue shirts and khaki pants would take a peek at the displays every once in a while.

If you can get this lucky with your photo subjects all the time.

Filmed over six days in Mexico, “Warm Up” was Audi’s first commercial for the seminal R8. This ad debuted around the time I, Robot was released in Europe.

(via autoblog)

I didn’t really catch on to feeding on RSS content in a big way until Google Reader appeared on the scene. I tried NetNewsWire for modest while on OS X, but the sheer multiplicity of machines that I would be on while at school would have a deleterious effect on the temporal nature of the news feeds, making news stale when I’d end up accessing feeds at my desk at the end of the day. With Google Reader, however, this scenario changed, and my feeds were available online in a consistent format across machines and platforms. Google Reader updated its display format some time back, and improved usability in a big way.

That said, there are still some issues that need to be ironed out. Google Reader is a Google Labs product for now, which means its not even in true beta yet - however, we have all come to expect Google to set a much higher standard for its offerings, making these following items my pet peeves about Google Reader.

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I frequently get asked questions about India, ranging from the current state of the economy to whether I actually rode my pet elephant to school (seriously). Quite often, people around me are intrigued by Indian languages, and the sheer number of them. Truly, the numbers are awe-inspiring when one thinks about them, even for Indians who are generally accustomed to the multilingual environment in any part of the country.

As large and linguistically diverse as the country is, India does not have a single official language. Instead, states have more or less been linguistically divided, and each state has its own official language - in addition to the nationally recognized official languages, Hindi and English. The establishment of official languages has been quite the process itself, and makes for an interesting read on Wikipedia. The official figure of mother tongues spoken in India is 1683, of which an estimated 850 are in daily use.

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I stumbled upon this Google Earth flyby video around Marine Drive in South Mumbai, and it instantly made me feel like going back for a visit.

MarineDrive.org is a website tracking the initiative to re-brand Mumbai’s Marine Drive, and calls upon citizens to contribute towards enhancing Mumbai’s most elegant boulevard. Marine Drive is also known as the Queen’s Necklace because if viewed at night from an elevated point anywhere along the drive, the street lights resemble a string of pearls. It is also the world’s largest viewing gallery and hence has been a host to a number of events that take place along the promenade.

Now, if only Google would soon update its imagery of Mumbai to get rid of those strange brown patches in the satellite grabs.

Dashalytics is a free Dashboard widget for the Mac that offers quick access to your Google Analytics account statistics. With their revamped interface, Google Analytics is probably the best free solution available today to monitor your website visitor statistics. While my site isn’t exactly one to attract high traffic, it does add a sense of responsibility when you get quantified results - this Dashboard widget just makes keeping a tab on things a bit easier, if you’re using a Mac. For Yahoo! Widgets users on Windows, there’s Vivalytics.

As you probably already know from my previous post, I’ve been on a mission for the past couple of days to try and recover as much disk space as I possibly can, so I do not have an strong excuse to immediately run out and buy a higher capacity Seagate Freeagent Pro drive (although that is going to happen sooner or later, right?).

I’ve been using the Disk Inventory X utility to get a better ahem, picture of the stuff stored on my drives. In doing so, I discovered that Apple actually maintains a copy of deleted data in not-so-plain sight on every HFS+ volume on the computer - this means every Apple partition and external drive connected to the system. While this might be a good feature to have for most people, I am usually sure of the stuff that I want deleted - especially from my backup drive volumes. You can recover a lot of drive space by cleaning out these hidden folders, depending of course, on what kind of files have been stored in them in the first place.

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Disk Inventory X is a disk usage utility for Mac OS X (10.3 and later). I stumbled upon this application while looking for something to profile the directory structure on my external drive (which is currently running ridiculously low on space). Disk Inventory X has a universal binary beta version, and is absolutely free (released under the GPL). Advanced Windows users might find this application quite similar to WinDirStat, and naturally so because this program was inspired by it.

This utility shows the sizes of files and folders as a ‘treemap‘.