Freshly Brewed Ritwik » Uncategorized

Google Maps April Fools Fun

ritwik — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 07:22:36 +0000

The maps team for Australia have come up with a really good prank. Search for directions in Australia and look at the results to see what I’m talking about. For those elsewhere in the world/ those who want to see the result, hit the ‘read more’ link.

The directions you get are given in an Australian tone, as in the screenshot below.

Aussie Version of Google Maps

Big thanks to my friend Alex for pointing this one out.

India Trippin’

ritwik — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 06:18:15 +0000

Just a quick note, I’m currently in India, so most of the posts from now will be about the things I see / hear / smell and generally experience. It’ll be a temporary break from the usual technology posts until I’m back home (except maybe a few about the tech I’m carrying with me on this trip). I’m also hoping to get a lot of photography done, so expect some posts with pictures from my travels :)

Dropbox updates with LAN sync

ritwik — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 05:08:40 +0000

One of the tools I install every time I install a new OS is Dropbox, a multi-platform file syncing service. For those who haven’t heard of it, Dropbox basically allows you to sync a folder across multiple computers connected to the internet. Any file changed on one computer, gets updated automatically on all of them. The latest build has a feature called LAN sync that I’ve been waiting for eagerly.

I have, at almost all times, at least two machines running dropbox at home. Sometimes there are up to 4 or 5 running dropbox at the same time, all in sync. In the past, this meant that every time I changed a file in my dropbox, it would get downloaded by each machine independently. That’s 4 downloads for the single file if there are 4 other machines running. With LAN sync, the dropboxes that are linked to one account recognize when they are on the same local network, and synchronize with each other. Thus, the update is downloaded at most once, and shared among all the local computers.

Hit the link to see the official post from the Dropbox forums.

Dropbox forums

Direct comparison tools for Bing and Google

ritwik — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 15:31:31 +0000

I’m still going strong with my 2 weeks of Bing attempt. In the meantime however, I read a recent post on lifehacker that points to three sites for doing side-by-side comparisons of the two search engines:

I liked the first two, but I’m not a big fan of Bing vs.Google, because scrolling in one pane would cause the other pane to scroll too. I don’t know if that’s just a Firefox bug or a local problem to me, but it didn’t happen with options 1 & 2. Either way, if you want side-by-side comparisons, you can go crazy with these. As I’ve said before, I don’t agree with the idea of choosing a search engine based on a few random searches.

Search results on Bingle

Going full Bing

ritwik — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 06:58:36 +0000

I’ve decided to try out Bing. Except, not like the average person “tried” Bing, with just a few searches to compare with Google. I’m a fan of Diggnation, and on a recent episode, Alex Albrecht suggests that people should try out Bing for a while before passing judgement. I completely agree. Its not fair to say Bing isn’t as good at search based on a few single searches.

So, to rectify this injustice, I’m going to switch to using Bing exclusively for 2 weeks, and I’ll see if I’m happy with it. It seems like a fair trial of its abilities.

Bing as the firefox default search provider

But I’m not just going part Bing for searching, I’m going the whole nine yards. I’ve changed my default search provider to Bing, my homepage to Bing and even my location bar search in firefox to Bing. Basically, if I type a word into the location bar in firefox, it uses Bing to find it instead of the default Google. This is a fairly big step for me, as pretty much every part of my workflow uses a google product. From Gmail to Google Calendar to Google reader. So switching away form Google search is a big change, and Bing will have to be really good for me to stick with it from there on.

I’ll update at the end of these two weeks on how it went.