November 14 was World Diabetes Day, I wanted to gift my Dad a Blood Glucose Monitor, I googled for the same a day before and landed on ACCU-CHEK® website. I called up some of my Doctor friends and made sure the product works. After I was convinced, I had a talk with my sister and asked her to get it gift wrapped.

On the morning of Nov 14, we gave my dad a surprise. Out of curiosity I first tried the product, after wasting few strips, I managed to get myself tested, thank god my blood glucose levels are normal.

Features

• Results appear in approximately five seconds.
• Just insert a test strip and with two simple steps get an accurate result.
• Using a small blood sample, apply blood to the test strip in or out of the meter.
• Test your blood sugar from your palm, forearm, upper arm, thigh, or calf.
• 200-value memory with time and date and 7- and 14-day result averaging.
• Provides diabetes management capabilities.
• Download your test results into a computer with the Accu-Chek Compass Software, or beam the information, through infrared technology, into your personal digital assistant (PDA) with the Accu-Chek Pocket Compass Software.

Blood Glucose Monitor! A must buy!

Labels: Agent 121282, Health

MS Windows Vista, may be the only product in the history of Microsoft which took five years to come to the shelf, but the result is worth all that wait.

Microsoft started its development on Vista way back in 2001 with a vision of developing an Operating System which would consists of every possible feature imaginable, initially it was being developed on top of Windows XP, i.e the code base would be of Windows XP, code named Longhorn, I still remember how excited I was to get glimpses of screen shots and wallpapers of this new Windows avatar slapped with Longhorn all over them, but unfortunately Microsoft screwed up, Microsoft realized it was a vision which would not be possible to achieve unless done progressively and in logical fashion.

Longhorn went back to the storyboards, came out as Vista and with major feature cuts, the new Vista is now based on Window 2003 code base.

All's Well That Ends Well, lets hope for the best!

Adios!

Labels: Microsoft, Software, Windows Vista

Now its possible to send instant scaps to your friends through Google Talk. To send scraps from GTalk to your friends you have to enable this feature on Orkut through settings.

Labels: GTalk, Orkut, Software

Portable Document Format (PDF) is the de facto standard for the secure and reliable distribution and exchange of electronic documents and forms around the world. CutePDF Writer (formerly CutePDF Printer) is the free version of commercial PDF creation software. CutePDF Writer installs itself as a "printer subsystem". This enables virtually any Windows applications (must be able to print) to create professional quality PDF documents - with just a push of a button!

FREE for personal and commercial use! No watermarks! No Popup Web Ads!

Step 1) Download Ghostscript 8.15 (5.01 MB) & Install it.

Step 2) Download CutePDF Writer (1.96 MB) & Install it.

CutePDF integrates itself as a 'printer', you can directly print the document as a PDF file from the File menu of the application, provided the application gives you the print option.

Score:

Labels: PDF, Software

I was in sleep, in nirvana, suddenly my cell phone started playing "In Da Club", I got up, tried to take the call. But I mistakenly rejected it in half-sleep. It rang, again started playing "In Da Club", now I was awake, picked up the call, said "Heellooo", in a lousy voice, on the other side was one of my cousin, she wanted to zero-in on a PC configuration and to seek my expert opinion ;)

I put forth some rapid-fire questions. Q) Why do ya wana upgrade? Q) Whts ya budget? Q) Whts gona happen to old Mojo? (yeah, she calls the old PC as Mojo)

I took the opportunity and asked her some irrelevant questions too ;)

We fixed up a meet and headed towards Lamington Road (Mumbai's official gray market).

We entered a small shop, I said to the salesman "We want to buy a PC.", I acted as if I didn't know anything about a PC configuration, he asked "Whats your budget?", I said "Medium", he suggested to go for an AMD, and started scribbling on a piece of paper. He handled me that piece of paper, it contained a list of items along with prices. I scanned through it, It contained AMD Athlon 3000+, MSI Motherboard, 256 MB Ram, 15' Samsung Monitor, Seagate 120 GB HDD, Sony DVD-RW, Microsoft Keyboard + Mouse, 400W SMPS + Cabinet, I asked him for a calculator, it summed-up little more than Rs. 25000 ($550). I was not satisfied with the configuration, I asked him to give me a configuration for P4, he said it would cost little more. I was looking for a mid-range PC and not for starters. My cousin did not speak a word, I was surprised, cause she's a chatterbox. We moved on.

We entered next shop, For some reason, the salesman was insistent on selling me an age old Sempron processor on an HIS board, "No, thanks", I told him as we pushed off. My cousin was getting little irritated to move from one shop to another, it was testing her patience.

The next shop we entered was a bit crowded, but the salesman seemed to be good on tech, he took no time to handle me a pre-printed piece of paper which contained a list of items along with prices. It had a Intel Pentium 4 Dual-Core PC configuration, now I put on my "techie hat" and fired few questions. I knew that I had to make up my own configuration, I asked "What about clock speeds?", he said "It starts from 2400+ and goes up to 3600+". "OK, What will it cost me?", he replied, "9k for the processor" and "6k for motherboard".

I said "Show me something hard-core", he was going through some boxes and popped one in front of me. He said "This is the latest, Intel Pentium Core 2 Duo". My Cousin said "Whatever just pick it up, I am tired". hmm.. "Whats the clock speed?", I asked. He said, "from 1.8Ghz and 2.4Ghz". I asked "What about the motherboard?", he said "I have Asus and Intel motherboards", he insisted to go for Asus, made me go through all the bells and whistle attached with the board. I said, "Tell me about Intel one", he said "Its a 946 chipset, onboard graphics, 6 channel audio, LAN" "What about the memory, does it support DDR2?", he replied "Yes". I asked for the cost, he said "15k for processor and motherboard combined". It sounded a good deal. My cousin was completely confused about what we were talking. It seemed to her as we were talking in some secret code language.

I made up my mind and decided to go with 1.8Ghz Intel Pentium Core 2 Duo and Intel D946GZIS motherboard along with two 512 MB DDR2 memory chips. Though he was offering me a 3.6Ghz Intel Dual core and the motherboard with same price as the Core 2 Duo, I decided to go for 1.8Ghz Intel Pentium Core 2 Duo, because the performance of Core 2 Duo is far much better than the Dual core. I did a comparison of both the processors. Clock speeds alone don't indicate performance.

So my final configuration looked somewhat like this.

1.8Ghz Intel Pentium Core 2 Duo Intel® Desktop Board D946GZIS Segate 250GB HDD 2x512MB DDR2 RAM 17' Samsung Monitor Lite-on DVD-RW 2.1 Creative Speakers Microsoft Keyboard + Optical Mouse Cabinet with 450W SMPS.

Which summed-up little more than Rs. 35000 ($780)

My cousin was very tired at the end of all this, but seemed happy. We had coffee at one of the shabby restaurant and said good-bye to Lamington road.

Cheers!

Labels: Agent 121282, Computer, Configuration, Hardware

I quote Google

Offline Messages Now if your friends have chat history enabled, you can send them messages even when they're not online. Just enter a message into the chat window as you would normally, and they'll get it the next time they sign into Google Talk. In Gmail, offline messages can be searched and organized -- just like instant messages in their chat history. Learn more

GTalk has many new features since the original release.

File Transfer With this top requested new feature, you can send unlimited files and folders to your friends through Google Talk. There is no restriction on the file type or size and the peer-to-peer transfer is fast and reliable. Learn more

Voicemail If your friends aren't around to answer your call, you can leave them a voicemail message instead. Just record your voice after the "Meep" and your friends will get an email to their Talk contact address with the voicemail attached as an audio file. They can play your message when they check their email and save it for as long as they want. Learn more

Music Status and Music Trends Listening to music while chatting on Google Talk? Now you can let your friends see what you're listening to by selecting "Show current music track" in your status menu. Your status message will change when your song does! You can also choose to contribute your music tastes to Google Music Trends, and check out what Google Talk users are listening to across the world. Learn more

Most of the features are available in other messenger (read Yahoo, MSN Messenger).

Music Status and Music Trends is a straight rip-off from other messenger plug-ins which are available as third party plug-ins, this particular feature is liked by many but not in-built in other messengers, seems Google is listening to what users want, but this is not typical Google style, I have noticed that Google likes to invent, and is known for that, like GMail.

Adios! Keep Googling.

Labels: Google, GTalk, Software

Mozilla provided the following figures for its browser releases and I quote:

For those that don't remember, here's what we looked like compared to our earlier releases:

Firefox 1.0: 1 million downloads in the first 24 hours. Firefox 1.5: 1.5 million downloads in the first 24 hours Firefox 2: 2 million (actually slightly more) people using Firefox 2 in the first 24 hours.

Maybe we should jump straight to Firefox 10 and see if we get 10 million users in the first 24 hours ;-)

Seriously, though, this is amazing. 30 downloads per second is just mind-blowing. We're still crunching the numbers and we hope to have some more stats for you all on Monday or Tuesday so stay tuned!

I am not satisfied with the browser, I am using it since the new release and experiencing some memory leak.

Related

• Have you heard? The Fox is in Town!

Labels: Firefox, Software

I quote the IdeaWins website

We believe people everywhere have great ideas. But they do no good trapped in your head. We want to help you turn them into a flourishing business by taking the hassle out of accounting and business management. So we're offering Microsoft^® Office Accounting Express 2007 software absolutely free! No strings attached. Get your free download here.

Just how good is your idea

Microsoft Office Accounting Express 2007 provides a number of features to entice a wide spectrum of users and remarkably even includes eBay/PayPal integration for sellers looking to become more efficient with order processing and shipping. Here's just a few of the features offered with this release:

• Create quotes and invoices; track expenses and employee time
• Enter data once and share it seamlessly with other Microsoft Office system programs
• Manage payroll and taxes with ADP’s integrated payroll service
• Store and organize all your customer, vendor, employee, and financial information in one place
• Get business insights with over 20 customizable reports
• Easily share your books with your accountant through Office Live
• List items on eBay, track sales activity, and download and process orders
• Email invoices and get paid faster with PayPal
• Monitor your customers’ business credit in real-time through Equifax

For those that want to learn more about Microsoft Office Accounting Express 2007, you can check out this downloadable product overview (PDF) or check out the FAQ. For a direct download to the application, click here (208MB).

Microsoft Office Accounting Express 2008 is released.

Labels: Accounting, Microsoft, Software