The popular Amar Chitra Katha Comics are now available on iRemedi’s ‘Ether Media’, a proprietary media content delivery solution for the iPhone platform.

Amar Chitra Katha (ACK), is an assortment of popular Indian myth, epics, history and fables. It follows an Indian version of story telling that presents a perfect combination of commentary, dialogue and illustration.

For now, the only free offering of the comics is ‘The Tale of Arjuna (Lite) – World’s Greatest Warrior‘ and ‘Tales of Saibaba (Preview)‘. Other comics such as the classic ‘Jatakas – The Tales of Courage’, ‘Birbal – The Clever Minister’, ‘Birbal – The Witty Minister’, ‘Ganga’, ‘Dhrona’, ‘Bheeshma’, ‘Dashavatar’, amongst many others, are all very nicely priced at $1.99 to $2.99. This is quite a treat. I still have fond memories of reading these comics (albeit picked up for a price of 10 cents at the time) through my childhood.

Sridhar Bhat, CEO and Founder of iRemedi, mentioned, “This is a historic moment for both ACK and iRemedi. At iRemedi, we are very thrilled to have ACK as our first media partner for our high quality intuitive media app for iPhones and iPods. We always strive to deliver the best experience for the iPhone user community and we are confident ACK’s fans will share our excitement in enjoying ACK comics on the go. For ACK this is a key milestone in bringing the classical Indian mythology and rich culture to the global community instantly in the amazing user experience with iPhones. The iPhone’s revolutionary platform brings limitless avenues for various dreams to become.”

The Amar Chitra Katha digital comics can be read in a panel by panel view, by page numbers, and navigated with the slider. A slide show mode is available for reading through the comics in a faster manner. The app also makes use of the iPhone’s landscape and portrait modes quite well. I would definitely recommend this to anybody, Indian or foreign, who would like to read some great Indian mythology, to download at least the free version.

Picture this, you’ve positioned all your icons on the desktop in a nice little manner that you like, say some icons on the left of the screen, on top of the screen and to the right. If Windows Explorer experiences a crash, or if you change your screen resolution, all your icon placement are lost. Frustrating right?

IconRestorer can help you in such situations by restoring all the icons to their respective positions before the crash, saving you of a boring and tedious job of restoring them manually. You can even have more than one profile (with different layouts). You can even choose to save the layouts automatically, say for instance, hourly backups. You can then restore any of the backups at anytime you want. With the free version however, you can only save two backups and you cannot save layouts automatically. It can even remember what wallpaper you were using with the saved icon layout!

With IconRestorer, you can also have your icons displayed as a list. Helpful if you’re into keeping a lot of desktop icons. =P

You can download the freeware from here. Available for 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems, and works with all versions of Windows including the new Win 7.

Love downloading free iPhone apps? Here’s a way to get notified either by email or sms when a paid app is available for free.

I absolutely love downloading free iPhone apps (who doesn’t). But it’s hard to keep tab of which app goes free and when. By using Google and Feed My Inbox, you can get SMS or email alerts when an app is available for free.

Google SMS: This service has currently been made available only for Indian mobile subscribers and is still a Labs feature. So we might not really know whether this will be around few months from now. Until then, Indian users can subscribe to this SMS channel. Around 3-4 SMS are sent each day, depending upon the number of apps that become free and also the number of SMS you’ve limited Google sending you.

Feed My Inbox: This is actually an RSS-to-Email service that sends you any feed as an email. You can use this feed created by our friends at KRAPPS (based on App Shopper).

Good ol’ RSS: If you don’t want to mess up your inbox and want to know when an app goes free the good old RSS way, use this link.

Quick Links:
Google SMS Channel
RSS Feed (for both RSS readers and Email subscribers)

How would you like to create a .exe video file that executes in any Windows operating system without the need for an additional codec to be installed? Sounds good for distributing videos right?

Create. Click. Watch.

MakeInstantPlayer is a little software that converts any given video file into a .exe (executable) file with all the necessary codecs installed. Just choose the video, press the button, and you have a file that can be run without the need for any additional media players. It’s that simple.

Additional features include the ability to open a webpage at the end of the video, choose a splash image (this is seen while the player initializes), and set an icon for the executable file. Check out the screenshot for more features and options.

Why need another media player when there are already a thousand? Because Damn Small Media Player (DSMP) is the smallest, lightest, portable media player that’s also cross-platform and open source.

Author and good friend Saurabh Minni, heard all our suggestions and promptly created DSMP keeping in mind portability, small memory footprint, and simplicity. Though DSMP is written for Windows, it can easily be compiled under Linux and Mac operating systems. This is currently under development.

DSMP is currently in Beta and the current version stands at 0.3, but the 716KB media player has already become our favourite portable player beating out VLC Portable.

Being a heavy keyboard user, one of the main aspects of a media player that I look out for is the support for global hotkeys. I like to control my media player without having to open it. With DSMP, you can play the previous track (Ctrl+Alt+Z), Play/Pause(Ctrl+Alt+X), Stop(Ctrl+Alt+C) and Play Next (Ctrl+Alt+V). Quite convenient. In terms of memory, DSMP consumes only 4MB.

Download DSMP from here. Get the code here.

Lenovo recently launched their new IdeaCentre A600 desktop, and I was one of the few invited to try it out first hand.

As you can see in the image to the right, the A600 is an absolute beauty. The A600 is not aimed at the regular desktop user, but at the high-end user who wants a sexy PC that can be kept in the living room and used as a regular HDTV as well. As a direct competition to the Apple iMac range, the Lenovo IdeaCentre A600 offers a whole lot of new features that are currently not available in any other competitive desktop offering. The entire package consists only of four units — a 21.5″ Full High Definition (HD at 1080p, 1920×1080) LCD monitor, a wireless optical mouse with on-the-fly DPI change capability, a super-sleek keyboard that also has a trackpad (the ones seen on notebooks), and a unique remote control with some amazing features (more on that later).

The 21.5″ Full HD display is an amazing monitor with beautiful representation of contrast ratios and rich colour. The display also has a feature where it emits a sound warning the user that he is sitting too close to the display! The display also has touch controls that are built into it. Besides that, it has got everything that you find on any other monitor.

If you were wondering where the “CPU” or cabinet is and why it’s not in the picture shown, that’s because there isn’t any! As I said before, the A600 is a direct competitor to the Apple iMac range that has the whole package built into the monitor. This stunning beauty has everything that it needs to run built into the back of the 21.5″ display, and yet, it still measures an astounding 1″ at its thinnest, and a cool 2.2″ at it’s thickest!

The A600 does come with a hybrid analog and digital TV Tuner. How does the idea of you watching your favourite sport in your room, and the next hour your wife watching her cooking show in the kitchen, sound to you? I wasn’t sure of labelling this as a desktop first, because the A600 can be picked up in one hand and taken off to another room or house! In spite of it having everything in the display, the A600 is quite light weight and completely portable. It belongs to a category that’s neither a desktop nor a laptop!

Wait, don’t think that the best part about the A600 is over, because the remote control bundled with it makes for a whole new series of “talk”. The sleek 4-in-1 remote control can be used to make Skype calls over VoIP! The remote can also be used as a wireless mouse that’s either controlled by the buttons present on it, or by just moving it up and down in the air! That’s right, move the remote up and the mouse pointer moves up, and so on. But wait, it also features a ‘motion sensor’ with which you can use the remote to play games on the A600, just like how you do on the Nintendo Wii. Tennis anyone? Did I mention it can also be used as a simple remote control to control Windows Media Centre? =)

Lenovo has not forgotten the audiophiles among us. They’ve included a decent 2.1 channel Dolby-certified home theater system that can R.O.C.K the house. =)

Most would probably say that Lenovo must have sacrificed on the performance to achieve such a sleek design, but NO! The A600 features a 2GHz Intel Core2 Duo T6400 Processor, 640GB of hard disk space, an ATI Radeon graphics card with DX10 support, and — wait for it — 2GB of DDR3 memory! How’s that for blasting your way through Crysis?

Lenovo has also added their VeriFace application that allows you to use your facial image as the password to the A600. A one-touch recovery system that features Norton Antivirus is also present. This allows you to backup, recover, and/or perform antivirus scans without having to boot into Windows. In addition, around 6 USB ports, a Firewire port, 802.11n wireless networking, and a 6-in-1 media card reader are also part of the package.

The Lenovo IdeaCentre A600 costs Rs. 69,500/- (inclusive of all taxes) in India. A very good deal.

Wanted to check if a particular Twitter user was following you or any other user? Here’s how. My friend Lakshman Prasad, also known as @scorpion032, has written a small application that checks whether a given user is following another specified user.

The application, hosted over at Appspot, allows you to specify a Twitter username and check if that user is following another user that you specify. Check the following screenshot to understand better.

Twitter-Follow @Appspot.

If you’re looking for a light weight calendar with an integrated to-do application that’s free, Rainlendar 2 is probably the best choice.

The application takes a little over 25MB of memory, fully loaded, and sits anywhere you want on the desktop with a very pretty transparent interface. Rainlendar can list all the events for the day in a neat list, and can also list all of your To-Do notes as well. Check out the screenshot below.

The days marked with a star indicate an event or activity on that day. There’s an option to keep an alarm for the event, which can go off a little while before the actual start of the event. Rainlendar can also contain more than one calendars, for example for your personal and business lives. You can assign categories to events, such as ‘Birthday’ or ‘Anniversary’ which means that the event will recur every year.

The pro version of the software has the ability to sync with Google Calendars. A very handy feature. For me, the best feature in the pro version is the ability to show Outlook calendar events, since I sync all my devices with Outlook. Makes me contemplate buying the pro version, but the EUR 9.95 tag is a little too much in my opinion.

Download Rainlendar 2 for free. Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Recently, I changed my broadband plan to BSNL’s Home 500C. The advantage is of 2Mbps speeds and unlimited usage at night between 2am to 8am. Not many would want to stay awake at 2am to switch on the computer and start the downloads, not to mention (in some cases) rebooting the router or modem, and then turning off the router and computer before 8am. Here’s an easy method to automate the whole process of scheduling night unlimited downloads, right from restarting the router at 2am to switching off the computer at 8am. This is for people running Windows. I’m yet to check whether the same can be done on Linux.

Part 1: To Automatically Reboot The Router At 2.10 AM

1. Please make sure to install Firefox if you already haven’t. Not only is it the best browser, but we need it for this article.
   
2. Install it in C:\Software\Firefox. (choose “custom” while installing and give the directory I mentioned). This is for convenience. If not, don’t worry, we’ll do the required modifications later.
3. Download this file: [right-click link -> Save As..] Reboot.bat
4. Move it to C:\
5. Add a new Scheduled Task (learn how to here). When it asks you to choose a program, choose the “reboot.bat” file under C:\ that you just downloaded. Give it a name (say “reboot”), assign it to run everyday, specify the time (maybe 2.10am), enter your password (if any), and specify it to open the advanced tasks.
6. Under the “Start In” box, type: C:\Software\Firefox



7. Follow steps 5 and 6 to create ANOTHER task with the run time as 7.49 AM. This is more of a precaution than a necessity.

Part 2: To Automatically Shutdown The Computer Before 8 AM:

1. Create a new Scheduled Task, only this time do it by the File -> New method.
2. Rename it if you’d like, to maybe “shutdown”. Open it.
   Copy and paste the following into the RUN box:

   C:\WINDOWS\system32\shutdown.exe -s

   Copy and paste the following into the Start In box:

   C:\WINDOWS\system32

3. Set the password (if any).
4. Under the “Schedule” tab, change the time to 7.50 AM.

Additional Points

• Firefox HAS to be running prior to the 2 AM mark AND you need to be logged in to your router’s admin page (http://192.168.1.1). This is because Firefox has an annoying security feature where it asks you to confirm logging in to the site. If you know any work around to this, please leave a comment and you’ll get credit.
• Don’t forget to create a Scheduled Task for uTorrent to start! I’d suggest running it at 2.12 AM. Also, learn how to make uTorrent download only between 2am and 8am. So even if the computer fails to shutdown for some reason, uTorrent won’t download past the 8 AM mark.
• If you installed Firefox in it’s default directory, change the path in Part 1: Step 6 to C:\Progra~1\Mozilla or what ever it is. Also, edit the reboot.bat file (right-click -> edit) that you downloaded in Step 3 to highlight the necessary changes.
• The reboot.bat file contains the default password of most routers (ie. “admin” as username and password). If yours has a different username/password combination, don’t forget to edit the file. Example, admin:password instead of admin:admin.
• If Windows does not shutdown automatically because of an annoying “End Task” alert, you might want to read this article on how you can disable that.
• P.S. – I’ve been following this method for about 3 weeks now. It’s never failed. BUT, I am not to be held responsible if anything goes wrong, you get billed for excess usage, or ANY other incidence. This is just a guide, and is not definitive. Do so at your own risk. (I stayed up 3 nights to see if this works, and for me, it did work.)

Stop searching the Internet for any registry tweaks, because after this article, you won’t need any.

Not all of the tweaks and tips can be written down here on a single post. Ergo, The Harmless Geek has uploaded a compilation of various tips, tricks, tweaks, hidden software, et all. It can be downloaded in .PDF format. =)

Hacking_Windows_XP (15 KB)

Secrets_Of_XP (31 KB)

(PDFs created using Print What You Like.)

You can also continue reading to see a taste of what’s in the two files.

How would you like to restart Windows without having to reboot your computer?

This is what’s called as a ‘Hot Reboot’. Doing so is pretty straight-forward. Just keep the SHIFT key pressed while you click on the Shutdown option.

Have you tried out these Windows XP Hidden Programs?

Windows XP has a lot of hidden programs that is not listed in the Start Menu. Among the many, here’s one:

• iExpress
  This Program is for converting your files to executable files
  Click : Start
  Then : Run
  Type : iexpress

The Windows Registry tool is powerful. Use it!

Have you tried it yet? If not, you really should. Here’s one registry tweak that might make you want to tweak your registry:

If you’re a gamer, you might be sick of accidentally pressing the Windows key and having the game minimize to the desktop or crash. You can prevent that happening by disabling the Windows key altogether.

• Click: Start
  Then: Run
  Type: regedit
  Navigate to:
  [HKEY_LOCAL_ MACHINE\SYSTEM\ CurrentControlSet\Control\ Keyboard Layout]
  In this look for the value “Scancode Map”. Its binary data so be extra careful: Set its value to “00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 03 00 00 00 00 00 5B E0 00 00 5C E0 00 00 00 00″ to disable the Windows key.