RedDevil's Turf

iPhone 3G S is now 2 times faster

Apple has announced the new iPhone, the iPhone 3G S at the WWDC. The “S”  in the iPhone 3G S stands for “Speed”. The new iPhone is really an improvement over the predecessor. Apple claims “iPhone 3G S is up to 2x faster and more responsive than iPhone 3G”.

Web pages and applications load faster now. It now allows users to shoot, edit and share the videos right from the iPhone itself. The phone’s camera is also upgraded to a 3.0 megapixel from iPhone 3G’s 2.0 megapixel.

New Compass application in iPhone 3G S

It now has a new compass application, which besides letting you see the directions, also aligns the map to the direction you are facing, so you can now use the maps much better when you are using it to find directions.

Cut, copy and paste is now available

Cut, copy, and paste is now available throughout the phone, even between applications. The keyboard now has a landscape mode as well, so now you can have more room to type your texts and mails. The long awaited message forward is now here, so now you can forward that message you want to share. Another very useful new addition is the universal search utility, or Spotlight, as commonly seen in the mac machines. It lets you search for a word throughout the phone, like contacts, mails and even applications.

New improved accessibility features

iPhone 3G S also has some accessibility features. It has a screen reader, and also a dark color scheme with white text. iPhone 3G S will be available for sizes upto 32 GBs and will retail at $199 for the 16GB version and $299 for the 32GB one. It will be available on June 19, 2009 in US and then in other countries in the following months.

Mobile iPhone, Mobile

“eRail.in – Better Way To Search Trains” and really its as simple as ABC. Gone are those days when you had to visit Indian Rail website to check for trains and availability status, enter eRail.in and it redefines the way you search for trains. Gone is that tedious task of selecting the options spread in various pages, eRail gives you all the options in a single page, and u never leave the page. Everything is neatly provided in the same page.

After you open the website, the first thing you need to do is to select the source and destination stations, then you select the date of departure, which unlike the Railways website, provides a calendar view, which makes it easy to select your journey date. You then have the option to select the quota. Usually its general, unless you are looking for a tatkal reservation. Then you select the link in the middle of the header where it gives the names of the 2 stations, which u selected in the from and to station menus. After you click on the link, you get a list of the trains for the given route. Now here all the columns are sortable, so can sort the list of trains in whichever way you want, be it the train number, Departure and Arrival times, and even the journey length, suppose you were looking for a train with the least time taken to cover the journey, just sort it by the travel column and the train with the quickest journey comes on top. It also gives the information regarding which day(s) the train runs in a week. Then the list of the class of coach, which the train has, in order to check the availability status, you just click on that Av link, and the site queries the Railway website and gives you the result in the bottom half of the site. Another very useful thing about the site is that when you click on the train number, you get further information about the train, as the route, various fares for different classes, and even the train schedule. Then there is a map link, which shows the highlighted route over a map of India, which further gives you the idea of the train route. You can even check the status of your ticket by entering the PNR number in the “Get PNR Status” option. And also the running status of the train. Suppose you need to recieve someone at the station, but there are chances that the train may be late, you can use this service, it updates the train’s realtime status, although not exactly realtime, but still gives a fair idea of how late the train is running. So you don’t end up at the station waiting for an eternity for the train to arrive.

So this site is certainly useful, especially for those you regularly travel by train and need to check often about their favorite trains, thanks to eRail, train searching is really made simple.

Visit www.erail.in

General, Internet Indian Railways, Trains, Travel

Earth Hour is an initiative from WWF to create awareness about Global Warming and climate change. Its a great effort, and its about time some measures are taken which can help our planet. Participate in this event by switching off your lights for an hour on 28th March 2009, from 8:30 PM – 9:30 PM.

More about Earth Hour: http://earthhour.in/

General

We all use bookmarks, and chances are we have lot of websites bookmarked in our favorite browser. And we don’t always remember each and every bookmark we have in the browser. Now you are not on your regular computer and you don’t have your bookmarks in this PC at a cyber cafe, or your university or office, or anywhere else. And you wanted to access that webpage you bookmarked last week, but you can’t recall it. So how can you still access that bookmark? Although there are lot of bookmark syncing addons available for Firefox for that, but for that one needs to install the addon in the browser. Google Bookmarks on the other hand lets you store your bookmarks in your Google account and which you can access from anywhere by either the Google Toolbar or the Google Bookmarks web page. You can export or import the OPML files to and from Google Bookmarks, even import bookmarks from Firefox using the Google Toolbar. It makes it easy to access your bookmarks from anywhere just from your Google Account. The best part is that it always acts as a backup, should anything catastrophic happen to your browser or your PC. You always have a copy of the list of your favorite websites in your Google Account.

Browser, Internet firefox, firefox focus, Google

In continuation of the promised Firefox Focus series, its time for another very useful Firefox Addon which is a must have.

Now fancy this, we all Google a lot. And although Google is fairly accurate in the search results, and you do find things you were looking for in the first page itself, but sometimes you end up checking out some 20-30 pages or even more. More so if you are searching on Google Images. Isn’t it a repetitive process to hit the next link everytime you’re done with a page of search result? And not just Google, a lot of other websites which has paginated content give us the same situation. What if you didn’t have to hit that next button? What if the content of the next page loads right below the first page content? Wouldn’t it make our lives easier? Yes it would and Yes its possible, all thanks to this wonderful Firefox Addon: AutoPager

Get the addon

It works on most of the popular websites on the internet like Google, Digg, Twitter, deviantART, Last.fm and many many more.

Browser firefox, firefox focus

Awesome day! So many new trailers released for the Super Bowl spots.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
This is simply awesome. It looks even bigger and better than the first one. Can’t wait for it. It has some new robots and although its not that long, the first glimpse of Revenge of the Fallen is finally here.

Fast & Furious
The first trailers were already out, but this has some new shots for the Super Bowl Spot. More in my Fast and Furious Trailer Preview.

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
I was waiting for this one too. And finally the first trailer of G.I. Joe is out. I didn’t expect to see the stuff I saw in the trailer, too much of effects. This is nowhere what I used to see in the cartoons. I hope they don’t mess this one up.

So there you have it then. Exiting trailers, can’t wait for the movies to be released, especially Transformers. Check out my complete preview for the movies in 2009.

Movies movie preview, trailer

Starting with this post, I’ll regularly post about some very useful Firefox addons, which really help me with various tasks/things. You might be already using some of those which I mention, but just incase you missed any, here they are. So to kick off the series, I found 2 very cool addons for using tabular data on a webpage.

Quite often I come across some webpages which has some tabular data, and I need to copy that to a spreadsheet software like Microsoft Excel. Firefox lets you select individual cells by pressing Ctrl and clicking the particular cell, but when you paste it in Excel, its pasted in a single cell. Not exactly how I wanted it to be. So I came across these 2 fantastic Firefox addons which not only solves this problem, but also gives you more ways to make use of the data.

Table2Clipboard
This is the addon for the basic problem of copy pasting tabular data in Excel, which it does pretty neatly. Just right click on the web page where the tabular data is and select “Copy whole table”, and it copies the data on the clipboard. Now paste it in Excel and you’ll have it just the way you wanted. Pretty useful.
Get the addon

TableTools
This is a much advanced addon, and it lets you even sort the table, right there, in a webpage. You can filter the data, and even export it as text delimited and some more formats.
Get the addon

Browser firefox, firefox focus

There is news floating around that Manchester United has approached Sahara for a shirt sponsorship deal. I was shocked when I read that! Manchester United currently has a deal with American International Group (AIG) for £56.5 million (about Rs 415 crore) which began in 2006. I knew Manchester United would be changing the current sponsor because AIG is in some financial troubles of its own, and United will surely want a new sponsor. But what I didn’t expect was the sponsor to be from India! Its said that United has sent a proposal to Sahara Group for the sponsorship, which Sahara has confirmed. Its big, really big. Manchester United is the biggest football club in the world, and the increasing fanbase in Asia and especially in India might prove to be a big factor. Sahara already sponsors the richest cricket team in the world, the Indian Cricket Team, and their shirt manufacturer is Nike, who also makes kits for Manchester United. I really hope this does materialise as it will really open up big platforms for Indian football.

Sports manchester united

Chandni Chowk to China poster

Directed by Nikhil Advani
Produced by Rohan Sippy
Written by Sridhar Raghavan (screenplay)
Starring Akshay Kumar, Deepika Padukone, Mithun Chakraborty, Ranvir Shorey
Distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures
Release date 16 January, 2009

What on earth was the team of CC2C (Chandni Chowk to China) was thinking about? I mean everything went so wrong. Ok the action was very good, but that just doesn’t save the movie from being a disaster. And neither does Akshay Kumar, who in the past has saved some movies just because he was so good in them. CC2C is horribly wrong in almost every department.

Lets begin with the story. Read the plot on Wikipedia (Spoiler Warning). So it could have been much better, but it just wasn’t enough for a movie which carried so much hype and one which Akshay Kumar himself claimed to be a semi-autobiographic film. So with that into equation it makes it all the more worse.

Acting, oh dear oh dear. Akshay was trying too hard to impress, and sometimes things were just off for him. Ok he made us laugh on several occasions, but somehow, I felt he wasn’t where he usually is in performance terms. His action scenes were very good though, probably the best movie of Akshay till date where action is concerned. Deepika Padukone didn’t do much, although she had a fight scene which she did very well, but rest she was just about ok. Mithun Chakraborty was a real waste. Ranvir Shorey could have been more interesting.

Action scenes were very well done. Every scene was very well shot and done. And sadly thats the only good thing about this movie. I expected to see some more good locales of China, but all they showed was the Great Wall of China. Some songs were just not needed, and they really made a very big mess of Tere Naina. Its such a nice song, and the people in theatre broke into laughter when the song started, its supposed to be a nice romantic song with nice picturisation. But all they showed was Akshay and Deepika floating in Chinese airspace by an umbrella. I mean what the hell was that? Seriously a big blunder.

Nikhil Advani seriously needs to think more about his movies. He’s letting himself and everyone down. His first movie as a director was good, Kal Ho Naa Ho. Then  Salaam-e-Ishq failed terribly, and now Chandni Chowk to China.

So to sum it up. I’d advice everyone not to watch this movie in theatres, really a waste of money and time. I certainly regretted watching it, and learnt a lesson. Never to book tickets before Friday and always wait for the reviews and friend’s word on it.

Rating: 3/10

Movies Akshay Kumar, Deepika Padukone, movie review

2008 was a great year for movies. Lot of big blockbusters ruled the box office and I really had a great time watching them. 2009 has some much awaited movies lined up, some pretty big names directors like Zack Snyder, Stephen Sommers, Michael Bay, Judd Apatow, and some after a long time like Martin Scorsese, Peter Jackson, Quentin Tarantino and James Cameron, so lets have a look on whats catching my eye, and probably yours too, for this year. Read more…

Movies movie preview, Movies