Wow! I just went through all my posts all over again and it was so awesome to relive all of this . It been almost 6 years since I posted here . I'm hoping to start posting here again . I guess the type of blog posts would be quite different since its been 6 years now  . A lot of posts would cover the technology field especially computer networking, IOT, network security,machine learning etc since these are the areas I focus on at the moment! Hope to post soon!

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Most of us use facebook on a daily basis and im pretty sure you are aware of the current scenario present in facebook. Facebook spam is definitely on the rise the amount of spam on a person's newsfeed is becoming a lot.
There was this one day in the last week or so when this problem became really bad wherein i got nearly 30-40 notifications on facebook and all of them being SPAM. My wall was full of it and i was afraid that friends who would visit my wall would click on it and spread it further. Facebook did eventually remove those posts automatically but it was after a few hours.
So its obvious that you need to be a lot more careful when clicking on links on your facebook new feed. These spam stuff comes in various forms :
1) some of them as status feeds of friends with a small link
2) some come even through chat
3) some come as a FAKE video
4) some come as an EVENT invitation and there are a lot of other ways to.

Here are a few tips to tackle these situations :
1)Make sure you read the status message of a friend before you click on the link posted by him , if you carefully see the language style he is used you can make out that your friend wouldn't really post such messages its not his way of expressing himself.
2)The same idea goes with the chat
3)Sometimes you think your going to open a video whereas that was just a FAKE video , basically a picture of a video frame with a "PLAY" symbol at the bottom , incase you find that sort of situation and your not sure of whether its a real video or not, just place your move over the LINK but DONT click on it , when you place your mouse over the link , you can see the complete URL thats when you can make out if its spam or not, if its going to some unknown site which looks shady then dont click on it , if it is going to a facebook video page or a youtube page then you can safely click on it
4)FAKE EVENT Invitations are pretty easy to handle , i guess its not difficult to realize fake event invitations as they are mostly stuff like FREE IPAD,FREE ANDROID or something of that sorts.
5)Whenever you see any wall post or message with a link saying you can win a FREE IPAD or anything else , it is mostly FAKE , but incase you feel there is a possibility of winning one , you could always google the domain name of the link first and see if it is legitimate and then proceed.

Hope these few tips will help you realize what spam is on facebook and be careful before you click on anything on facebook. Read More Of This Post!

This feature has been there since quite a while. I just read about it recently and i find it really useful to get my facebook notifications as RSS feeds instead of email notifications . If your an RSS fan and have a good RSS reader either on your desktop or your phone , then this one is for you

Its really simple to get your RSS link.Here is what you need to do :
Step 1 : Go to THIS LINK

Step 2 : Click on The VIA RSS button
Step 3 : That is your RSS feed

You can use this feed on google reader or any other RSS reader. You can have it on your phone and get updates instantly. If you are a software developer then this RSS feed can help you build some really awesome scripts as most programming languages have many libraries to support RSS. Read More Of This Post!

TO be honest , i was expecting this . The Android Market has been growing exponentially every single day and there were talks of the android market going past the apple store.This makes android market a prime target as a lot of users use it to download many apps.Android being opensource is easy to create malware and even more easy to put the apps on the android market.

THis is exactly what happened , google first reported that it removed around 21 malware apps from the market and now the toll has gone over 50 . Its just a matter of time when more and more of these malware apps come onto the market unless google changes their policy on uploading apps to the android market. It is reported that over 50,000 users download these apps every single day.
Some of these apps are so dangerous that they give root access to the phone and even take screenshots of the phone from time to time making it a major privacy threat.So before you download any app from the android market make sure you research well about it on the internet and make sure its a genuine app.


Here is a list of the bad apps that were removed by Google. All of these applications were made by an entity called Myournet.

* Falling Down
* Super Guitar Solo
* Super History Eraser
* Photo Editor
* Super Ringtone Maker
* Super Sex Positions
* Hot Sexy Videos
* Chess
* 下坠滚球_Falldown
* Hilton Sex Sound
* Screaming Sexy Japanese Girls
* Falling Ball Dodge
* Scientific Calculator
* Dice Roller
* 躲避弹球
* Advanced Currency Converter
* APP Uninstaller
* 几何战机_PewPew
* Funny Paint
* Spider Man
* 蜘蛛侠

There are a lot more to this list. Lifehacker has shown a way to help prevent downloading these apps by downloading an app called LookOut. You can read more about this from HERE . Read More Of This Post!

If you are a kind of person who hates jumping from one version of ubuntu to another every year then this post is for you. Typically versions of ubuntu which are not LTS have only around 18 months of support.So what if you have a nice and stable version of ubuntu runnning with all your scripts and applications and everything customized just the way you want . Everything is working smoothly and you have no intention of upgrading to the latest version . But unfortunately ubuntu says im sorry your version is no longer supported.
What does this mean? Well you dont get the latest security updates , the repository for your ubuntu version from where you download all your software by running the sudo apt-get install command will no longer work. SO then you need to manually look for these packages on the internet and install them yourself. Now if you find this irritating, there is a solution . I would have been really happy if ubuntu automatically applied this solution so users will have no trouble. But anyway here is the fix.
All the repositories of no longer supported versions of ubuntu are moved to http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ and all you need to do is tell your machine to point to that domain name to get all the software . So here's what you need to do :
Step 1 : Go to the Terminal(Applications->Accessories->Terminal)
Step 2 : Type sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list
Step 3 : Now replace all instances of archive.ubuntu.com with old-releases.ubuntu.com
Step 4 : Save the file and close the editor
Step 5 : now type sudo apt-get update

Thats it , your done , the next time you try installing any application , it will be installed automatically.
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A lot of times whenever we start phone hunting we do a lot of searches online to find the phone which suits our needs , most of the services aren’t reliable as they either provide false information or outdated information.
GSMARENA is a fabulous service which has a great database of phones which are released in almost all countries in the world. They have their own phone finding tool which is simply great because of how customizable it is . With their phone finder tool you have a huge form to fill , even though it is a bit huge it is very efficient in its search results . At the end of the search you will find phones which suits your needs and which come under your budget .

Gsmarena provides a detail listing of the phones with pictures included and user comments and ratings as well. You also have the option of comparing multiple phones . Although it doesn’t do too well in telling you the exact price of the phone as it varies geographically and this is meant to be an international website for all users around the world.


So as a start this tool is great to find phones which suit your needs and filter them from there and then proceed to your local store to get further details about the phones you filtered down . Its not a great idea to go directly to your local store in search of a phone as the people there don’t really guide you too well and wouldn’t recommend the phone that best suits your need . They might even forget to mention a few phones which if you knew off you would probably go for . So doing a online phone search using a tool like this is always recommended before you go visit a store.. You can find the phone finder tool here Read More Of This Post!

It’s been a while since opendns powered up a new server in Singapore for DNS requests. This is great news for asian countries especially India as previously all our DNS requests were going to Europe probably London which obviously made the response time bad.

Now since there is a new server in Singapore which is pretty close by , all our DNS requests should be a lot more quicker and webpages should open up a little more quicker , you will notice the difference especially when you launch multiple webpage at a time or maybe when your on a network which uses opendns servers. There is no change in the opendns ips , the same ips ( 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 ) should route you to the Singapore server instead of the europe one.

Initially there seemed to be a few hiccups as a lot of people from asian countries including India complained that they were being routed to the Europe server even in the presence of the Singapore server. I guess all that has been resolved now.

There is a lot of debate between google DNS servers ( 8.8.8.8 ) and opendns servers as to which is better . Frankly speaking both services are reliable it depends on where you are located geographically. In Some countries google DNS might perform better whereas in the other countries opendns might perform better . But its generally recommended to use either of these servers as local ISP DNS servers are typically not secure enough and are prone to DNS attacks.So even though your computer is not attacked but if the DNS server your using gets attacked , you will be affected as you will be routed to the wrong servers. Read More Of This Post!

I recently have this sudden craze to play around with microcontrollers and i must say its been quite a ride . Arduino is one such microcontroller which has so much support that it becomes really fun to play with and if your in need of help the arduino forums would be the best place to go.
The arduino runs on its own programming language which is very easy to work with , something similar to our typical programming languages like c++,java etc . Using arduino you can design a lot of interesting projects at a much cheaper price . For example you can control lights , fans , water heaters etc using either your computer via the internet or even using sensors like motion sensor etc all this can be done using 1 arudino board. Infact you realize that it building such projects end up being much more cheaper than buying a ready made product and not to forget the FUN you get building this stuff.

Arduino can be interfaced with loads of sensors , digital boards , LEDs , relays etc making it a very powerful tool . If you are fascinated by electronics but dont want to get into the details of designing and stuff , arduino is the way to go . COmbine it with great python , c++, java code on your system and you can create very powerful devices .
Im still working on creating loads of projects using arduino interfacing them with various sensors, relays etc . Its a lot of fun . FOr more details visit www.arduino.cc Read More Of This Post!

Its been a while since i've been using the reliance broadband netconnect plus . I did do a lot of searching on the internet before i decided on this product. Here's more on this :

The reason i wanted a product like this is because i realized that while travelling i needed to get access to the internet either on the go or at my destination . In most cases the places i went to had no internet access so i had to get access by
myself . Hence i decided to go with a 3g data card.
I had two primary options - the reliance netconnect plus and the tata photon plus . I did a lot of searching on the internet you know the typical reliance netconnect vs tata photon google search :) . And after all that hunting i decided to go with
reliance for the following reasons :

1)Reliance is known to have a much better network coverage
2) They were a little more cheaper in terms of costs
3) They had the pay as you use option i.e. 1 Rs/mb which photon did not provide

I was really excited about the 3rd reason because then i dont need to go for any plan or pack where there is a validity.The idea is to use this only while travelling cause at home i have my DSL connection . Whenever i travel its usually over the
weekend or maximum 4-5 days , so getting a monthly pack or plan would be a waste.
Hence postpaid was never an option as i dont want to spend monthly as i dont travel every month. In prepaid to i wasnt looking for any packs/plans which is valid for 15 days etc cause i wont be using it for that long. The best option was pay as you use i.e. 1Rs/mb which only reliance provides . At the most i could go for the 200Rs pack which has a 7 day validity.

My browsing usage while travelling is not much just very light browsing .Mostly email and other such similar sites or even chat . Very less of audio/video chat . So the 1 Rs/mb is suitable or maybe at the most the 7 day validity pack.
So i decided to go for this and went ahead and purchased the device . Put in a top up of around 150 Rs which i can use as 1Rs/mb which means i can use 150mb as and when i want no validity period as such and this is more than enough for email,chat etc .This is also of great use when your DSL line is down for some reason and you need internet access immediately.
Reliance also provides an online interface to check your balance and to do an online recharge incase you find yourself out of balance while you are travelling.
Will hopefully be able to do a how to on how to setup reliance netconnect plus. On the whole i am pretty happy with the service. The coverage of reliance is amazing , they cover a lot of cities across the country and in other cities which it is
not covered you will be connected to the 1X network which is not all that bad. Decent for browsing mail etc.
The reliance customer care is pretty good , very helpful and polite people . On the whole if you are in a similar situation that i am in , reliance netconnect is a good option . You just need to shell out an initial amount of around 2k Rs and after that its like filling petrol for your car :) . Read More Of This Post!

Facebook has come out with a whole bunch of new stuff apart from their usual policy changes and privacy settings . One such new feature is the option for you to be able to download all your facebook content to your desktop :
Facebook now allows you to download all your facebook information to your desktop . This includes all your wall posts right from day one on facebook . ALso all your photos , personal information , all the groups you've joined , all the LIKES ,List of all your friends , list of all the events you've attended, ALl your facebook private messages , your profile pictures and your WHOLE WALL which i guess includes practically everything :)

While downloading this content you need to be really careful not to share this with anybody as it has practically everything that is needed to know about you.Facebook does warn you about this.

Downloading it is simple JUst go to Account Settings and you will find the link to download all content. Facebook takes a while to prepare your download and you will be given a link via EMAIL as soon as your download is ready.
Some people might find this facebook info useful to have as a zip file on your desktop. Read More Of This Post!