I installed Yahoo! Messenger app on my iPhone today. Its fairly functional. I opened Safari to do some mundane thing and was surprised to see that my default search provider has been changed(hijacked) to Yahoo!

Normally I was pissed. I like Google search. I hate crappy Yahoo! search. As simple as that. [Even though it pained me to see Jerry Yang get his butt kicked out of his own company]

So change the default search provider back to Google, by going though these simple steps.

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I didn’t know how to take an iPhone screenshot till today. I thought geeks did some uber-geek hack thing and got a screenshot. Its so easy that I look stupid now.

• Be at the screen.[The screen you want a shot of]
• Press down Home Button[The Big Round Button in the centre] and then Press and release the iPhone Lock button[The Small Button at the top of the iPhone].

There will be a flash confirming the screenshot and you’ll have the image file in your Photos > Camera Roll.

Yes I have an iPhone now. But was so lazy that I did not have the time to put some nice new ringtones on my phone.

At last I did. Proof–

All I did was,

• Search for the keywords “iphone ringtones”on iTunes.
• Add one podcast that provides free ringtones from the search results.
• Download all from that podcast and drag and drop into my phone.

And even found how to take an iPhone screenshot just today. I know. So not geek’ish. Not single anymore and I feel that I’ve been banished from geekdom. Now I can finally put THAT ringtone on my phone.

[It was a very hard and crazy ass thing to do in the first place. I though I should celebrate with a blog post. Now I’m too lazy to do that even.]

New Edit…

Check out this post on the Fedora Forum and read it COMPLETELY.

Go to: http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=225999

There a bug in tk which has to be patched manually before the next version of tk comes out. What I did was to manually replace the code and then run the install script.

Again, read the bug report on gentoo.org CAREFULLY.

I casually(Yes, casually. I’m not one of those twitter addicts) logged in to see twitter down again.

I think these days they are more down than up.

I’ve been thinking for while whether or not post the pictures I take these days, as a new found hobby, to my blog. After this picture came out fine I decided that I should.

This is from 25 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco, CA. I took this picture on my way to the CostCo to get some groceries for the coming month. This building, as I came to know, houses a lot of government offices.

Like all normal users even I had a single email account to handle all my email. It had a lot of drawbacks once your start receiving thousands of emails from hundreds of different sources, some of them I’m sure many of you have already faced:

• Paranoid about deleting an email - No Recovery Options
• Storage Constraints
• Organizing
• Privacy - Separate Work and Family
• Spam

If you answered yes to at least one of the above reasons, read on. The advent of Gmail, you might say solves some of them problem like storage. But not even Gmail is perfect. So what I suggest is a 3 tier system bulletproof system to alleviate your email woes.

1. Personal Account: Create a new Gmail account and give E-mail address to only your closest friends and relatives. Lets call this PA@gmail.com
2. Your Current E-mail Account: This is the E-mail account you already have. This is for regular use and for work. Lets call this MA@gmail.com
3. Archive Account: Create another new Gmail account. Use this only when dubious a website asks for your E-mail. No where else. Lets call this AA@gmail.com

Now the Setup:

• Log in to PA@gmail.com and go to Settings > Forwarding and POP/IMAP. In Forwarding select "Forward a copy of incoming mail to" and fill in MA@gmail.com and keep the Gmail’s copy in the inbox.
• Now, Log in to MA@gmail.com and go to Settings > Forwarding and POP/IMAP. In Forwarding select "Forward a copy of incoming mail to" and fill in AA@gmail.com and keep the Gmail’s copy in the inbox.

The Setup will now look like this:

After this setup you only need to login to your current email account to access all your email. If you accidentally delete an email in either your personal email or work email you always go to your archive email AA@gmail.com and retrieve that important message. There is a lot less spam since it is eliminated in three tiers.

If you are really finicky about organizing you can create filters in you current Gmail account and filter email into their respective labels/folders and color code them. The "Better Gmail Firefox extension" from Gina Trapani of LifeHacker.com provides the folder like functionality that you see to the left. That and lots of other cool features that make Gmail even better.

Please tell me what other types of email setups you use to manage your email.

If you haven’t observed, Facebook style photo comments have arrived on Orkut. May be it has been there all along and I missed it or may be it just arrived silently. No blog post yet either on Orkut blog or the official Google blog.

This is the last block on your Orkut home page, just below the recent updates block. You have to go the image in question to post a comment as show below.

I can’t put my finger on it but there’s something really lame about this interface. Whatever happened to the Google’s favorite Ajax? Let me explain. One of my friends uploads a new image to their album. It shows up in our recent updates from friends. Now to post a comment I don’t want to go all the way to that specific picture in their album. I want to post a comment right here and right now!

[The things in red are meant for the technically inclined]

All those torrent downloads and Netflix DVD backups left me with almost no space on my laptop hard drive. For the record I currently have 80 movies on my hard drive. So at last I decided I should get external storage. I got a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST3500320AS 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 500GB Hard Drive for $100 and EAGLE ET-CSESU2-BK Aluminum 3.5" Black USB 2.0 External Enclosure for about $12 - The total setup was delivered to me in 3 days by Newegg.com and they work great. You can say that I would not need a 7200RPM drive with 32MB cache for external storage since the USB 2.0 speeds are no where near hard drive speeds. But still I see this as a future investment for my desktop.

You can see that with the total number of drive partitions I have I’m almost running out of alphabets. What if I had more drive partitions than the number of alphabets? I’ve never seen what Windows would do in that scenario. My current plan is triple a boot system with Windows Vista Ultimate, Windows XP Professional and Ubuntu Hardy Heron. Future plans include a quad boot with Mac OS X Leopard. Mac on my Dell Vostro … Hmm.

Its a rat race. That’s what it is. I do not seem to get the point why Facebook needed a chat window for its already cluttered and lame looking interface. Google has chat. Microsoft has chat. So may be they thought lets get chat too.

The online friends functionality it shows was already available. And if you see a friend online you can always post a message on his wall. And he can reply back if he wants to, then and there. Its not like you need an entirely separate area for chat, some other area for posting walls and yet another area where you send messages. I mean wall posts are public and messages are private - I can understand them. But why in the name of god do you need chat?

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There was one blog the other day where I see people whining about no “folders” in Gmail in the comments. Gmail has labels. Why do you need folders? And what is the point of different webmail clients if they all look, feel and offer the same? If you cannot live without your “folders”, please DO NOT use Gmail. What I don’t need right now is Google doing something stupid and adding a chat interface as default to Orkut, just because Facebook has chat too.