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Satyam Dial-Up and the Numbers Hidden in a File

The year was 1999 or 2000, and my parents had a Windows 98 computer, a U.S. Robotics modem, and a Satyam dial-up connection. Satyam came with a small program on CD that made dial-up easy. It had a drop-down list containing four or five numbers. You selected one, clicked Connect, and hoped to hear the familiar modem handshake noise. But more often than not, you would get a busy line. Sify Satyam IntelliDownload page

Keen.com, 1999, and the $5 That Kept Multiplying

This was somewhere around 1999 or 2000. I was still running Windows 95 and was completely in awe of this new and exciting place called the Internet. IP telephony existed, but the voice quality was so poor that almost all voice calls still happened over landlines. Keen.com homepage from 1999

Remove all Images from a Pdf in Python

I had a PDF file with certain images that I wanted to remove and keep only the text portion. There was no program that could do this for me quickly, so I wrote a Python script to do just that, using the awesome pikepdf.

Office 365 Mail sending problem with Thunderbird

Problem: SMTP settings of office365 don’t work with Thunderbird. POP and SMTP work so you can receive emails but sending doesn’t work.
Resolution: You need to disable the smtpautorization.

Lexmark \"Flushing Buffer\" on PDF

Error: You print a PDF document on your Lexmark Printer ( MS317DN in my case which is based on best selling MS320) , and get a message “Flushing Buffer” on the LCD Screen.

Discord trick or treat bot

Alright, so my daughter got hooked on to this Trick or Treat craziness on Discord, and honestly I also found it amusing.

Not to cheat, I wanted to see if I could write a script in python to quickly help me type and get ahead of anyone.

Thunderbird Embed Image in Email Signature

Even in 2020 today, emails remain the primary mean of external communication ( at least in my organization). Email signature in such case becomes a powerful marketing channel which you can use to display your Vendor partnership and other marketing communication apart from the usual contact information

Prestashop 1.7 Displaying 1 product in 2 categories

Problem : You have a product in 2 categories. However it only shows in the menu of the default category

Example : you have a Product called ‘ACME Face Mask’ with default category of ‘medical supplies’. It also belongs to ‘personal gear’ category. It only shows in Manu ‘Medical Supplies’

Amazon.ae Automated pricing vs third part amazon repricer

If you sell on Amazon, you already know what a repricer is and how important it is to win the buy box .

Create a repricing rule, assign the SKUs and you have an automated assistant who will keep changing your SKUs price, below the competition till it hits your minimum or maximum price.

eChoraix Ransomware on Qnap

So you have heard that eCh0raix ransomware is specifically targeting Qnap NAS, and breaks in with brute-force techniques. Once it does so , it will encrypt all your files. ( Read more on Security Firm Anomali Website)

WD 10TB Red at this price is a bargain

Today Amazon has 10TB Red at an amazing price. I am a big time fan of Qnap NAS and often asked which is the best drive to use. As on Today ( 24th June 2019) they are retailing for AED 1169 Each.

If you are a souq seller, start learning Amazon Seller Central Now

Amazon Seller Central (ASC) is now live and the existing Souq sellers have access and are prompted to do so since souq selling center (SSC) will soon be deprecated. How this works as on today is that there is an auto Sync - all the data from your SSC is Synced to ASC periodically.

Automatically get prices from Souq.com to your Google sheet

If you are a regular seller on Souq.com, then you know there is nothing more important than keeping a tab on the competition prices, and adjusting your prices accordingly. of course the seller console alerts you whenever there is a product available for a lower price, it does so in a limited manner. It doesn’t show you the seller name for example.

My top 10 little known Productive apps

I am a productivity freak . I am always looking for ways to automate repetitive tasks and minimize the number of clicks it takes to do something. here are my top 10 windows apps which helped me save countless hours in 2018. I am not including Popular apps like gmail, evernote, slack and whatsapp , which everyone uses anyway.

Openvpn process killed after \"Initialization Sequence Completed \

Problem : Your openvpn client on ubuntu doesn’t connect to your server. After “Initialization sequence complete” the process is killed.

A Log Excerpt , after the last step the process is killed Sun Jul 8 14:13:58 2018 GID set to nogroup Sun Jul 8 14:13:58 2018 UID set to nobody Sun Jul 8 14:13:58 2018 Initialization Sequence Completed

Recover Data on Qnap with Photorec

Last week I got a qnap from a friend where multiple hard drives failed and he was not able to see the volumes with Qnap disk manager. Having exhausted all the other options, we were willing to take up recovery.

Install Transmission on Qnap with Docker the Easy way

Transmission is the favorite BT client for many , but Qnap doesn’t offer it in app center any more. However Qnap now offers you container station in which you can run LXC or Docker container. With Docker, you can very easily install transmission and several other applications Graphically , within minutes

Running Couchpotato on Qnap with Container Station

The Easiest Way to run Couchpotato on Qnap is with Container Station The Easiest way is to use Docker on Container station, in this tutorial we used an LXC Container with full Ubuntu installation. We can instead use lightweight Docker container.

Synology RT-2600 With Etisalat.

Synology RT-2600 Router is based on the Synology SRM OS. Like Synology NAS , this OS is what makes this router really unique.

I have had it for almost a month now and this is the best router I have ever had. What I specially like is the Parental Control , internet time Restriction based on Device ( No internet on Daughters IPad after 9 ) , Traffic Control ( Guaranteed Bandwidth to Youtube on Smart TV) and reporting. Offcourse there is a lot more than you can do with it , which I currently don’t since I already have a dedicated NAS to do all those things.

Thunderbird Stuck on \"Checking inbox for new messages\

Problem : Sporadically Thunderbird would get stuck on “Checking inbox for New Messages”. Whatever you do, the new messages are not downloaded. It gets past the logging in so you know it has logged to your mail server and is waiting for the server to send it the list of new mails.

Quickbooks Stock Ageing Workaround

Quickbooks is so popular that it almost has a cult Following, but its not without its shortcomings. One of the featrues it lacks is the ability to generate a Stock Ageing report. The Report that shows you which stock has been lying with you for how many days and its value. This report is indispensabel for anybody in Distribution business with inventory.

Qnap CVE-2017-7494 Samba vulnerability Fix

Samba Team discovered a 7 years old security hole in Samba version 3.5.0 +. If your SMB port is forwarded , and you use vulnerable SMB version, you are at risk of an attack.

Qnap Data Disappearing - Symlink deleted

I had 3 cases of disappearing Data on Qnap. Not exactly Disappearing techincally, but the user couldn’t see the shared folders in File Mananger.

Your Data Actually is in /share/MD0_DATA ( for older systems) /share/ CACHEDEV2_DATA ( on newer systems).

Quick Books Scheduled Reports are useless with Multiusers

Quickbooks Added the Auto Scheduled Report feature 2017, which sounds great the first time. However there are so many rules for this to work. Though most of the conditions are ok, there is one which is a deal breaker - Your compnay file must be in single user mode.

Periodic Email from Qnap with Sendmail and Crond

Qnap offers Auto Email notification , but they are limited to ‘Errors and Warnings’. So you can’t do for instance - A Disk health check every Saturday and email you the result. You only get the notification on teh Errors and Warnings with the GUI front.

GLG- Gems Learning Gateway ( Now Gems My Learning)

KGS uses Gems My Learning which was called GLG ( Gems Learning Gateway) earlier, as an online Education portal. It’s not a fully blown LMS, so students can’t take quizzes/tests, submit assignments or interact. My learning serves 3 Major Purposes

Data Protection on Qnap

Qnap is an extremely versatile NAS box that offers many layers of Protection for your Data. Lets have a quick look at all the options you have

NameProtection againstRemarks
RAID ProtectionOffers Protection against Hard drive failure ( On site Data)Only Hardware protection. If file is deleted, or changed, RAID can’t help you restore it to a previous state
Volume SnapshotOffers Protection against file changes ( On site Data)Most Effective against Ransomware attacks.
Remote ReplicationOffers Extra Layer of protection by keeping a copy of the data offsite on a server owned by you. ( Offsite Data)Compression and Encryption are supported while copying the data offsite
Public CloudOffers Extra Layer of protection by keeping a copy of data on public cloud ( Offsite Data)Major Public Clouds are supported
RDX Tape Backup/ External Hard drive BackupOffers Extra layer of protection by copying data on a Removable tape/ removable hard drive that can be stored offsiteNeeds Purchase of an RDX Dock and the tape, or an external hard drive

Lets look at all these one by one.

Terminal Services on Microsoft Surface Pro 4

Microsoft Surface Pro 4 is an amazing device. Having used Thinkpad T430 for years, I consider myself as a power user with productivity at the first priority and Surface Pro has not disappointed me. It’s Not exactly as productive as T430 is, but this comes closest .

Crawl your site and find all broken links using Scrapy

Scrapy is an extremely efficient framework to write web spiders. With just 30 lines of codes, you can write a crawler that can go through each link in your website and report each link , with HTTP status and the link from where it is linked.

/media/nextend/cache - 77,000 files

I use nextend Smart Slider 2 for my joomla website. Its a great component that lets you create the responsive sliders, with CSS animation.

However I noticed exceptionally large numbers of files , close to 77K . The total number of files on this joomla installation was 96K - 80% was Nextend. Deleting the cache from frontend didn’t work.

VDI with NComputing vSpace & L300 Zero Client

First thing first - I work for Datacare, the Distributor of NComputing in UAE.

NComputing has been making news as they have become the World’s third largest desktop virtualization company after Dell and HP with an impressive YOY growth and a huge install base in Education sector.

Qnap Virtualization Station and Container Station

Qnap first brought the Virtualization technology to their NAS with the Virtualiation station. Virtualization station was based on KVM - Kernel based Virtual Machine which is an open source alternative of Virtualbox /VMWare. It was a great leap for a NAS server as the Qnap NAS could now act as a virtulization server - run your Linux, windows or Android ON your NAS.

SSH Access on WD Ex4

Western Digital My cloud EX4 is a low cost Network attached storage. You can get access to SSH to schedule crontab tasks or any other Admin tasks . To Enable SSH

Processing phplist Queue from Command line for Bluehost

phplist is an excellent open source software that we use to send the newsletter to our subscribers. Processing the queue however from frontend is difficult when you have 6000+ subscribers. Here is how to setup a commandline for phplist on Bluehost.

Joomla 3.0 Cache error shows a White Page

Problem : On Joomla 3.0, some pages show a blank white page. Refreshing sometimes renders the content, sometimes doesn’t. Logged in users don’t have this problem, it happens only with Public view.

Joomla 3.0 Image size problem in Chrome within Table

Problem : Any Table with an image would show up correctly in Firefox, but would get smaller in Chrome. Probably becuase Chrome didn’t understand theproperty.

Solution : Added a custom property to image in my template css, so the image inhirts the max-width from the table. Now the image will be shown as wide as the table is . thanks to the post here on youjoomla as suggested by Neo

Linksys E2500 Login Problem

Problem : Everytime you try to login to E2500 router, it takes you to a blank page. Refresh the page and you are back to login screen again.

Qnap Google Drive Sync Authorization problem

Problem : The manual authorization on Qnap takes you to Google Authorization page, when you click on accept, it closes the window and takes you back to the Authorization window on Qnap. You never are able to get the authorization code.

Why do etailers in UAE have to lack in customer service ?

Ecommerce in Middle East is gradually taking off and there are many new entrants in an arena that used to be dominated by souq.com only. However most of them miss the singular factor that online shoppers look for most - customer service .

Accessing a Qnap Remote Folder as a Local Folder in Windows

There can be many situations in which you would want to mount a remote folder as a local folder. It may be that you want to browse the photos on windwos and have the thumbnail.db created, or there may be users who want to access files using a logical drive , than going with an ftp client.

Not able to connect to Local Share with username and Password

Problem : A local share couldn’t not be connected to on the network. Username and password always gave authentication error. Disabling the firewall didnot help

Solution : The Local network should be a Home or Work Network. Windows configured it as a Public network which probably caused the problem.

Scraping page using Portia : Annotating Pages and Running Spiders

The last article I wrote was about installing portia. Here is the second part, explaining how to use portia.

Scraping the Webpages with Portia is a 2 step process. First you annotate a page , telling portia where to look for your data and how to extract it. Second, you run the spider that actually extracts the data.

Gedit Settings : Insert Spaces instead of Tab.

This week I wrote my first piece of code using Python. I had to if I wanted to use scrapy. This was also the week when I realized how important white spaces and indentation is to write a code in Python.

Email back up on Qnap using getmail

Email backup to qnap using getmail proved to be so easy and efficient that I am not touch anything else. The reason i started looking was to be able to use Maildir. I was interested in Maildir format for a reason. Every email is stored as a different file, so incremental backup is very easy and there are no nasty file locks that may corrupt your mbox. I am scared of storing all the mails in a single mailbox and see it grow, and eventually get corrupt.

Converting MP4 to MP3 on Qnap using lame and ffmpeg ipkg

Downloading youtube videos is easy with python script youtube-dl. However many times you would want to extract the audio from the downloaded video. On normal installation you would be able to extract audio from youtube-dl itself ( using ffmpeg), however on qnap that option doesn’t work.

3D Printing : The same revolutionary story

3D printers are claiming to be able to radically change product prototyping, modeling and on demand sculpting, and there are models in the range of US$ 600 hitting the street, making them accessible to end users

Add new account to Google Analytics

Google for “Add a site to Google Analytics” and it will report having 55,800,000 results. Why so many results ? Because despite being an excellent and feature rich product, the interface of Analytic has been a little confusing.

Osdate : Hiding and Manipulating number of users online.

Anyone who starts a matchmaking site with Osdate has the same question. How to disable that “Members online: 0” statistics that sits on the main page.Here is how to disable or even manipulate all the user statistics like Members in Last Week, Pictures in Last Week and Members online etc.

Virtulization Station : Run Virtual machine inside Qnap

If storing your Virtual Machine on a Qnap NAS through iSCSI was not good enough for you, here is news. You can now Run a virtual machine inside select Qnap NAS models. You need decent processor and memory to be able to run a VM , so it’s only natural that Virtualization station is only offered with high end models running on Xeon processors. They are going to brand these NASes as vNAS.

Facebook Pages update notification : Hyper Alerts

If you have a company facebook page, then you know how critical it is to respond to user queries, comments or posts in time. To get the notifications in real time, you need to keep checking the facebook page that you manage frequently, which gets in the way of getting anything else done.

Cartoon : A New Holdup Strategy

Air travel is becoming commonplace, but what’s even more commonplace is use of mobile phones, dumb phone and smarphones - Not in the air, but in general. I wonder what’s keeping the airlines in letting us use our phones inflight.

Evolution of Tablets

Don’t people just love their tablets . Last month there was story about a father who left his car running to get some groceries, leaving his son in the car. forunately he carried something far more valuable with him to the grocery shop - his ipad. When a thief made away with his car, he was able to track his car and son using ipad quickly.

Rip a DVD into a Single MPEG File

I had a bunch of old DVDs that I wanted to rip and save on my qnap for viewing later. However, Generally ripping a DVD gets you multiple VOB files that most of the players can’t play sequentially. You would want the DVD to be ripped to a single large video file that can be played by any player.

HP LJ 1102 Showing as Optical drive on Windows 7 and Qnap NAS.

Recently I switched my laptop and the old LJ 1102 printer stopped working. It would show itself as an Optical drive instead of a printer. I tried connecting it to Qnap TS-221 also to see if it would at least show up there but nothing.

Zoundry Raven : 'None Type' object has no attribute 'tagName\

I had been using Zoundry Raven for blogging on Windows XP. However on Windows 7, Zoundry Raven gives an error ‘None Type’ object has no attribute ’tagName". I tried everything includeing running it on windows compatibility mode but it doesn’t work. Could not find any information on fixing it, though some chinese bloggers say this is related to IE latest versions.

Wacom Cintiq 13HD Review - By someone who doesn't draw

Working for a company that sells Wacom products, I had long lusted over a Cintiq, but I got a chance to try one when last week my cousin asked me to buy a Cintiq 13HD and ship to her in India, which meant that I would have a full week to test it and give my verdict. I am not a graphics artist, but the idea of being able to draw something and instantly see it on the screen was tempting. She was much comfortable knowing that I would have tested it and included anything extra ( like HDMI converter for Mac) that she would need ,and didn’t mind me opening and testing it. Someone was going from Dubai to India after a week, so it gave me ample time to play around with it.

Delete Duplicate Email messages from Server

I am sure a lot of us have faced this problem of receiving multiple email copies specially when the addresses are forwarded.

I had a setup where user1@mydomain.com, user2@mydomain.com and user3@mydomain.com were forwarded to collect@mydomain.com . Any email addressed to all 4, used to end up 4 times in collect box. This was an archieval box so multiple copies not only wasted the server space and resources but also made it difficult to search a particular message.

Solution : Qnap TS-221 stuck at intial setup screen.

Problem : Initial Setup on Qnap TS-221 gets stuck at “uploading image and initializing disk”, after uploading the firmware image. Waiting for 1 hour didn’t get anywhere so this must be a bug with the QTS 4.0.

Whats App Desktop

Replying to a whatsapp message on your phone can be very time consuming, especially if you have the touch screen phones without the physical keyboard. I always wished I could use my computer to send keystrokes to my phone.

Fix : \"Too many contacts deleted\" Google Syn error on Android Phones

Quick fix is to unlink the google account and relink it.

Problem : Everytime you try to sync, you get this error that says too many contacts deleted. My SIII running on Nexus 4 Jellybean rom kept giving me the error for a whole month , contacts and calender was not getting synced.

Qnap QTS 4.0 Firmware

I have expressed my love for Qnap earlier and today when I got to try the Beta version of Qnaps QTS 4.0 firmware, it made me fall in love with my machine again. I am sure the changes are more than just skin deep, but what caught my immediate attention was the change in the user interface. I will write more as I see what has changed under the hood.

Remote Access with RADMIN

Today serveral applicaions exist that allow you to access your computer remotely, and all of them perform very well on LAN. However the performacne drops as you try to work on internet with limited bandwidth.

Omega Jelly Bean ROM for SIII

I have been running my SIII on Omega Rom ( ICS) for sometime and now it was time to update it to Jelly bean. I could either choose a nightly build of Hugely popular Cyanogen mod or upgrade to Stable Omega Jelly bean. I decide to download Stable release of Omega 4.1.2 for SIII. I have been overall happy with the omega ROM, it’s fast and it gives me better battery life.

42 degree Celcius is not Twice as hot as 21 degrees

It was 21d C in Dubai yesterday and someone commented it was twice as cold as it’s in summer when it reaches more than 42d C.

Well, Not So . It’s only 7.1% hotter. Sun only has to shine 7.1% harder to make the temperature as 42 C ( angle). The problem is with our scale of temperature.

Sentinel : A NAS running on Windows Storage Server.

Unlike the most NAS that are based on linux, Western Digital Sentinel is powered by Windows Stroage Server. I was specially excited to configure WD sentinel becuase of the OS it runs on. This is my first NAS box that runs on WSS. Here is my review of WD Sentinel

\"No Additional Blogs were found for that Account\

Create another admin account and use that, if you get this error.

Error : Wordpress for Android 2.2.5 would keep giving me an error message " No Additional blogs were found for that account" for a self hosted wordpress account. Username , password and permissions were right as I could login to webfront using these credentials and Zoundry Raven could also publish with these.

Remotely Download Youtube Videos to your Qnap

Today I am going to show you how to download a youtube video completely remotely to your machine. Which means, the downloader itself will run on Qnap. In my scenario I wanted to give a list of videos Qnap from my workplace, and let Qnap do the rest of the job. The computer didn’t have to be left on to do this. Much like download station for youtube.

Remote Wake on Lan : Wake your PC using Qnap

I am sure everybody has a PC that they want to remotely access but not powered on all the time. Now if you have a Qnap machine or any other NAS box with embedded linux, which is always on, you can use it to Wake your computer on Lan.

FFMPEG unknown encoder libxvid on Ubuntu using Winff

Problem : Every time you try to encode a video using wiff ( GUI for FFMPEG) in Ubuntu, it would open the terminal and produce an “unknown encoder libxvid” error when you choose xvid encoding. None of the encodings work . Message is always “unknown encoder libxxxx” wher xxxx is the name of the encoder.

Western Digital NAS drive with NASWARE

Ever Since Western Digital Launched Red Nas Hard drives, I wanted to test them. I finally Got a Chance last week when I wanted to upgrade my Qnap to 3TB.

Fair Voting system

The other day as I was watching a popular TV program, where the winner was to be selected based on public vote. My Favorite singer lost , and I immediately could see the shortcoming of the simple voting system. No, I am not a sore loser, only that I really think that a voting system that lets you vote for a single candidate is flawed.

Qnap Firmware OS QTS 4.0

One of the things that sets Qnap apart from other Nas systems is the Operating system/firmware. The system is powerful enough for geeks to configure ( and install new apps through QPKG system), and yet simple enough for non technical users. It’s this rich firmware that makes many people prefer Qnap over many other vendors. They don’t discriminate on the product specifications, which means you get the same OS whichever model you buy.

Top Scientifi Myths

When a well known paediatrician boastfully exhibited his less than average knowledge about neurology, I decided it was time to write the top 5 myths that have persisted among learned adults.

One Click Gps Coordinate finding in Google Map

Many times I want to take a places GPS coordinates from Google map and feed it to my Car’s GPS unit.

I think google changed the way the GPS co-ordinates could be found several times, that’s why there are several articles taking different approach. for me nothing worked- JavaScript, Sending link through email or even clicking directions from here.

Email Photo from SGSIII : Resizing and Shrinking

Samsung Galaxy SIII gives you many options to share your photos from the picture gallary , but one feature that’s missing is resizing the pictures before you email them unlike blackberries or Iphones. I don’t know about you but I don’t need to email a 2.3 MB picture that would take 8 minutes to upload and 5 minutes to download.

GnuCash Column Resizing for Windows

I use GNUcash for managing my personal finances and it’s a excellent program. The only inconvenience is the column resizing that doesn’t let you reduce the Description column.

Backdoor of .htaccess redirect

Last week when the .htaccess files was modified for redirects on several joomla and wordpress installation , I became extra vigilant.

Today I realized there was a new .php in the images/banner folder that shouldn’t have been there on Joomla 2.5 installation.

Modified .htaccess for Hotlinking

On one of the installations .htaccess was rewritten for hotlinking to malicious websites. I am guessing the file permission was something more open than 644 and hoping that changing the file permission to 644 would fix it.

Omega Rom on Samsung SIII and Battery Performance

As any Owner of SIII would agree, it’s an excellent phone but the battery life leaves a lot to desire. I had mine for almost 3 months now and couldn’t come to terms with having to charge the phone twice a day.

Logical Puzzle : Which ball reaches the ground first

[latexpage]

Problem There are 2 balls of mass 4 kilos and 9 kilos respectively. For the sake of simplicity, say they are exactly the same shape and volume, so that air resistance on both is same.They are dropped from a bomber flying at the height of 980 meters. Which one hits the ground first ?

How much space does a 3 years old occupy : Lesson learn in Parenting

This is to all the parents. What My daughter taught me in parenting. Comment if you agree.

  • A kid’s body has the tenancy to align it’s body with the position that’s most uncomfortable to it’s parents. It’s designed to be small but to occupy all the space on the bed and the whole comforter /Blanket.
  • You can start eating a lot of things you never did , just to set an example in front of your kid. Kids have some sort of super sense that tells them not not to eat it unless they want to set an example in front of their kids, if will be another 30 years.
  • Kids get thirsty as soon as you have switched off the lights and retired to bed. Asking before coming to bed doesn’t work. Same goes for nature’s call.
  • You complaint that your parents love your kids more than they love or ever loved you.
  • You complaint that your spouse loves your kids more than they love or ever loved you.
  • You realize that you really aren’t smarter than a fifth grader.
  • You think they look like you, they act like you. Somehow you are proud of it too. Specially when someone says so.
  • You swear that you will spend “Quality time” with them, but that Quality time never lasts longer than a few minutes before either of you start to cry and complaint.
  • You spouse thinks you can be a much better parent if you tried.
  • You put a “Baby on Board” on your Car and Flaunt it.
  • You stop at every toy shop you see when you are alone. You try not to stop when you are with Junior.

Taste Bud is a Taste Bud is a Taste bud.....

It’s surprising to see how a small translation error can persist for centuries. Different sections of tongue, designed for tasting different tastes of food is one of such errors. Last time I came across a text book of 6th Grader in India that showed such distinct regions , each meant for a different taste.

Accessing Qnap Remotely if your ISP is Etisalat or Du (Dubai)

Qnap NAS boxes are not for everyone. You have to know how to configure them, but once you do that they are powerful enough for anything. While other vendors like WD have easy to use Mionet that lets you remotely access your device, Qnap has a little more difficult to use Dynamic dns service called Mycloudnas.

+44 7781 470659 Google Verification Code

Looks like another Scam. Got an SMS today from +44 7781 470659 saying “Your Google Verification code is ….”

All my google services are up and running. I searched and came up with many Spanish pages. I guess it’s a scam.

untethered Jailbreaking ios 5.1.1 with absinthe

greenpois0n yesterday released absinthe version 2.0 that lets you jailbreak your os 5.1.1.

The whole jailbreaking took less than 80 seconds on my device with all the contents and settings intact, though they suggest you Erase all contents to make the Jailbreaking faster. Take a backup before you start jailbreaking, in case anything goes wrong.

Osdate Installation Errors

Problem: Getting Errors

Error 1 : Failed Process to create tables in the database failed. It could be because of incompatible type or insufficient space. If any tables are created, drop those tables. Please check and restart installation process

PHPLIST Configuration on Bluehost

Phplist is one of the best open sources mailing list program out there. However the configuration sometimes may put a few users off.

Here is my email throttle settings of PHPLIST, that should work for you also if you are hosted with bluehost.

Gems Education GLG (Gems School, UAE learning gateway) Navigation for

Well if you are thinking what is GLG, you can skip this blog.

it’s the LMS website of Gems Education group , UAE. Yesterday after spending 1 hour, clicking through every link to find the assignment and progress report, i decided to write where I found it someplace safe and document it for other parents.

Solution: Quickbooks Save as PDF very Slow or Hangs

Quickbooks uses a printer called “QuickBooks PDF Converter” to save any document as PDF. It’s a very convenient function for sending invoices, quotes, estimates or Purchase orders in PDF format right from Quickbooks.

Playing .mkv files on Samsung TV through QNAP and Twonky

I had this mkv file that wouldn’t play on Samsung smart TV. Since my Qnap is a basic one with ARM processor, it doesn’t have enough processing power to transcode the file either. So the only option was o trancode it on PC, or fix the problem.

Gettting Magnet torrent Links to work on Qnap

Update : 7th July 2012 : With the new firmware upgrade the download manager supports Magnet links. There is no need for any third party downloaders.

If you want to download ( legal) torrents on your Qnap but are put off by lack of magnetic link support, here is news. There are 2 very easy and fast ways to do this. There is very quick workaround to convert your magnet torrent link to a regular .torrent file using your favorite bit torrent client. And the other option is to install transmission using QPKG center and let it handle your magnetic link.

Importing opening balance and transactions into quickbooks

While Everyone agrees that a large quickbooks file poses performance issues, it’s often difficult to cut down the size. The various option for trimming the filesize are

  1. Verify and Rebuilt
  2. Save file as Accountant’s version and restore it.
  3. Clean up company data prior to a date.

What if none of these work for you. We had a company file the size of 800MB that was a result of 6 years of data. We not only had performance issues but also the reports were inconsistent. when several rebuilds didn’t help, we realized it was time to split the file.

Quick Resolution : Thunderbird Incoming server already exists.

“Incoming server already exists” is an occasional hiccup you get trying to configure a new email id.

Without fiddling with your inf settings, you can easily add your email account manually by adding a fake account and clicking on manually change settings.

How to Remove XP Antivirus 2012

When I saw a screen named “XP Antivirus 2012”, I knew this was a virus. It wouldn’t let me go any further, and made the PC extremely slow.

Website Hacked

One of the several websites that I maintain was hacked yesterday. Probably through SQL injection. It simply left a php file in the root directly that replaced the index.php

Emirates ID Card Al Barsha Location

My navigation skills have always been non existent. This time after spending 1 hour on Finding Al Brasha Service Center for Emirates ID, I though I will update the entry on my Blog. I hope someone will find it useful.

10 phrases you often get to hear in Dubai.

10 phrases you often get to hear in Dubai.

1. Could I get your good name ? Probably a translation of hindi “Shubh Naam”. I have heard it so many times now that asking someones name without this epithet sounds almost rude.

Annonymous Browsing with VPNtraffic

Last week I needed a proxy server to check the installation of my Livezilla client. Essentially I needed a bunch of different IP addresses to see how the Geotracking would work.

ios5 sucks too !

Afer spending 4 hours of Friday morning on this, my Iphone 4 has now ios5 ! But it’s hardly any different apart from icloud !

No camera access from lock screen ( as they promised) & no quick wifi toggle ( it 4-5 clicks to toggle wifi or bluetooth). So I guess, I still need SBS, off to jailbreaking. How can so many people like this thing !

From Blackberry to Iphone

Yesterday I switched from Blackberry to Iphone. It’s been only 2 days, but I have started to miss the email functionality of BB already. Off course I love iphone too, but BB is far ahead in emails compared to Iphone. In every other aspect however Iphone is better.

Resolution : \"Update Failed\" on Du Blackberry

I had this problem yesterday on my Du blackberry. ( Du is a telecom provider in Dubai, UAE- one of the only 2 providers)

Every time I tried to add a new email account it would give me an error “update failed “.

Email Expiry for Thunderbird

Won’t it be good to have an expiry date button/ Category associated with each email that you send/receive. Before archiving, you could categorize an email as “Archive for ever” or short expiry “Expires in 7 Days”.

Fraud Calls

It has happened to me 5th time this year. however this time I ended up complaining to Etisalat.

" Sir, you speaking English ?"

“Yes, go ahead”

“I giving to Mr Ahmed, my supervisor. Hold aan "

Joomla Offline Client ?

I don’t know if this is simply dumb to ask for it, but I think it’s a great idea to have an offline client for Joomla. I don’t know if anyone else also has felt it cumbersome to go online, login to Joomla admin and then start writing a long article that would take 2-3 sittings and you will keep saving draft copies.

Humor : Mind Conditioning

I wonder if anyone has ever thought of fooling the mind into a desired emotional state by using the senses of sight, sound and smell. Won’t it be wonderful if you could evoke an emotion just by sniffing a scent that you have fooled your brain into associating with happiness ( much like AXE effect, but for real).

Parking Perils & Meter Menace

I am sure it has happened to all of us. You spot that excellent parking space, gleefully park your vehicle and get down looking for change to feed the parking meter. Off course there are others who would rather pay 30 fils extra and pay through SMS.

Quote Unquote

These are some of the funniest lines I have heard.

" Accounting System is not about your convenience. Illa Saar. Receivable report is not a part of our accounts package."

Patriotism is a Child of Divisions

“What should we do if someone attacks our country ?”

This was the question asked to one of the many homegrown Gurus who has become very popular in recent times. The Gurus response was - To defend yourself.

Humor : Communication Skills

Today People of all kinds are yapping about communication. Management rookies incessantly debate the best ways of improving it, management gurus making all sort of pseudo intelligent theories they can cook with complex words and colorful charts.

Scammers Lurk on Dubai Streets

A list of Scams I have come across on Dubai’s streets. Some are so common that I am sure people don’t fall prey to them. Others may not be heard of.

Communication SKills

This time in India, I interacted with several management students on many occasions. I also had a few meetings with the faculty and I was surprised on how much they stress on Communication skills now a days.

Domain Scam

This is another Domain name Scam I got after I tried listing my domain for sale with a few sellers. Scammers are getting better at it. Just when I thought I had seen all sorts…………

Why I love Thunderbird

I was sitting with a colleague last week when an email arrived. Looking at the email I told him it was from Lebanon, and the same guy had sent us a similar email 2 months back. He was impressed.

Facebook RSS feed using third party

I was trying to import my blog as RSS feed into facebook. After lots of trouble, I was able to do it, though it should supposedly be an easy task using built in importer.

Domain Name Scam : China

I thought that all the scams originate from Nigeria or Senegal, but here is news : China Joined the list too.

Offlate I have started getting regular emails from these chinese companies, trying to sell us their domains. It’s a definite scam, made to look like a legitimate email from a concerned IP management company.

God Indra Meets a Logician

Once there lived a king who was as cerebral as he was kind and altruistic. So much so that he had earned the name of “The Intelligent king” ( If you are thinking I did it to avoid the work involved in thinking of a name , you though right).

Purpose of Life

Many many philosophers have tried to answer this question in their own way. Last week after having heard a self proclaimed Guru on TV, I realized It’s about time I throw my two cents in.

Humorosophy : Numerology

Last month I got to know that there is something striking about me to some people , I am not talking of my lean physique but my Numero Uno Status. Yes, I am a number 1 in numerology ( According to Gregorian Calender). Very flattering. Numerology is very intriguing with all the calculations involved, but I can hardly call it a science. I think it was invented as a hoax, later on when it went out of hands they freaked out and never told anyone it was a hoax.