TechnoSlab

Today I purchased a brand new Aircel SIM to try their heavily advertised unlimited 3G plans. Unfortunately they don't provide an easy way to active any of those plans. Here's what I did to activate my desired plan: "Unlimited 3G for 3 days at Rs. 17".

1. Dial *122*3000#
2. Press 1 for 3G plans
3. Select your desired plan and press the number corresponding to it
4. You'll see general information for that plan.
5. Again press 1 to activate the plan and wait for a couple of minutes.
6. Connect to Internet.

You may also try dialing *122*<insert-value-here># for activating desired plan; Eg: *122*8#, *122*17# etc. Although the second method didn't work for me.

Windows 8 is the quickest and most resource friendly version of all latest Microsoft releases and it has got a lot of good reviews. There’s a good news for people planning to upgrade to shiny new Windows 8 this fall.

Microsoft has announced that all users running Windows XP or a later version of Windows OS can upgrade to Windows 8 Pro for just $40. That's really cheap because Microsoft charges a lot in general. For example, cheapest upgrade from any older version to Windows 7 is $120. An upgrade from one version of Windows 7 to another version costs around $65. Apple, on the other hand, charges only $29 for an upgrade to newest version of Mac OS X and plans to slash upgrade prices further to $20 for the latest “Mountain Lion” scheduled to be released this month.
Looking at Microsoft’s high upgrade free structure, this promotional price cut is really worth considering. The offer will last throughout the end of January 2013. Users will have to download Windows 8 from the Internet though. If you’re looking to purchase a DVD version, it’s be available in stores and will cost you $70.

GIT is a distributed version control system which allows groups of people to work on the same codes at the same time, and without interfering with other's work. It primarily offered a command line client but many GUI versions are now available.



Have you tried different version controls but were not satisfied? Do you get confused when reading or listening about Fork, Pull and other GIT related terms? Want contribute to the open source community but can't understand GIT? Now's your chance to educate yourself.

You can be a total stranger, a novice or one who failed at first attempt but now you can learn GIT if you're willing.

Try Git is a website hosted on a new sub-domain and presented by CodeSchool. Try Git offers step by step tutorial and a web based console to practice as you learn and explore Git. Head over to try.github.com and start learning. Best of luck!

FFMPEG installation can be tricky sometimes. Here I'm sharing, for self reference in future, a simple procedure to easily install ffmpeg and all related dependencies, libraries on any VPS running CentOS. Hopefully this will help a few clueless VPS admins. :P

Establish an SSH connection to the VPS as root in order to run these commands.

yum install ffmpeg ffmpeg-devel


cd /etc/yum.repos.d
nano dag.repo

Paste this into dag.repo file and save

[dag]
name=Dag RPM Repository for Red Hat Enterprise Linux
baseurl=http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el$releasever/en/$basearch/dag
gpgcheck=1
enabled=1

Finally run:

yum install ffmpeg ffmpeg-devel


rpm -Uhv http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/i386/rpmforge/RPMS/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm

Again run: 

yum install ffmpeg ffmpeg-devel

Aakash 2 will have a faster processor, longer battery life and more programming capability than an earlier version.

Indian government believes that these low cost tablets can help revolutionize the way country's youth perceive Internet and technology. The aim is to encourage E-learning and to expose people to technology. The first version of Aakash was supposed to be distributed to schools and colleges through out the country but unfortunately, distribution has been a major issue. A Right to Information request disclosed that merely  572 devices were delivered across 20 colleges.



UK based company Datawind, which faced criticism over delivery of the Aakash last year, will manufacture the Aakash 2. The manufacturing process is expected to being by July or August and prototype versions of Aakash 2 are now being tested.

Aakash 2 sports a 800Mhz processor and operates on the latest Android software. Device's power consumption has been optimized as well i.e. battery life has been expanded to three hours. It also features a SD card slot, USB port and offers hi-speed connectivity over Wi-Fi. 3G connectivity is not an option yet.

Aakash 2 is expected to come loaded with many educational applications developed by Bombay IIT, an engineering institution, which also aims to help in distribution of 100,000 Aakash 2 tablets across various colleges by the end of this year.