There are a million reasons why I find Mac OS X better than the other OS around ( Yes, I said better. NOT best. ) One of them, is GrabUp.

GrabUp is a preference pane for your Mac OS X that makes it extremely easy to share screenshots with other people quickly. All it takes is 3 keys. Let me elaborate a little about this nifty little utility. I’m pretty sure, I’ll find this installed on your Macs, if you haven’t already by now.

Installation:

The 567kb file can be downloaded from the site and once installed, it can be accessed as a preference pane from the System Preferences.

Usage:

Apple and Mac OS have already made it easy to take screen shots of your desktop or the apps that you have running.

1) Command + Shift + 3 ( ⌘ Shift 3 ) - This takes a screenshot of the entire screen and saves the file to the desktop.
2) Command + Shift + 4 ( ⌘ Shift 4 ) - This will give you a crosshair, using which you can select the area you want to take a screenshot of.
3) Command + Shift + 4 + Spacebar - After hitting a spacebar after the above, you can click the mouse to take the screenshot of only the window or app that is in focus. Similar to Alt + PrintScreen in windows.

All the 3 methods above, save the screenshot taken as a file on the desktop.

But what happens when you have to share the screenshots with a friend or colleague ? Your options would be to email them, drag the screenshot to an IM window or as most other users, upload the images to an image hosting site.

Here’s where GrabUp comes into the picture. GrabUp automatically uploads the images to their server and returns the URL by copying it to clipboard. That leaves you to just paste it wherever you want to. Fantastic, isn’t it ?

But, is that all it does ? No. There’s more to it.

What’s more?

GrabUp stores the URLs of your last 10 screenshots and links them to the URLs. This is presented to you with the exact date and time at which it was taken, accessible from the menu bar.

Clicking on it opens up the image in your default browser. There is an option to clear the list of recent items too.

The URL returned changes the filename to a randomly generated string, so it is almost impossible to guess the images uploaded to the server. An example of the link would be /uploads/799366f2e6b804dcee28de284e431015.png

Limitations/Disadvantages?

The developers have tried to keep it as simple as possible. So there are no options to configure at all, except the option to start at login and show in menu bar. However, I would really like to have one option in the preference pane. There are times where I don’t want the screenshot to be uploaded to the server. At such moments, I have to quit GrabUp, take the screenshot and then then relaunch it again. Instead, there can be a hot key setting that would somehow not upload the screenshot to their servers.

Secondly, I don’t know if this has been left out on purpose, but some kind of user login system would be helpful to retrieve old screenshots.

At the time of publishing this article, GrabUp has had 4180 downloads and 24,406 grabs have been uploaded to their servers.

There was one thing living in my society that really fascinated me, everytime I looked at it. It has been living from the time I wasn’t even born and has lived all these years with it’s head held high.

All the children in the society have grown up playing under it’s shadow. Every child in the society has had a special liking for the tree.

We used to play with almost all the parts of the tree. There was that sweet little game called sword fight that we used to play with the flowers. The leaves were fun to put atop fans in the society’s office, so when switched on, they would be showered on everyone. The wood could be used for occasional bon fires. The tree provided excellent shadow to play box-cricket.

However, everything was snatched away from us yesterday. All that it left now, is this.

Good bye, oh great tree.

[Image courtesy: My flickr stream]

Okay, before you start hitting URLs, I am NOT an active member on Facebook or Orkut for that matter. I have accounts on the respective sites, just for the sake of it.

I found this video in one of my RSS subscriptions. Take a looksie. This is how Facebook in real life would be.

[Via Textually]

Ever since the past one week, I have been beta testing the upcoming “Legendary” version of Hahlo, the twitter web-client from Dean J Robinson. The new version, Hahlo 3 is even better than the native twitter clients that are currently available for the iPhone.

However, once I signed up for the beta, I realized there was an issue I was facing. Hahlo was unable to remember my settings or even my username / password for twitter. Soon enough, I realized that the issue was due to a bug in some iPhones / iPod touches with firmware version 1.1.4. The phones do not save cookies correctly. Here’s how to fix the issue:

Make sure you iPhone is in the same WiFi network as your computer.

Now, there are two ways to resolve the issue.

A: Using an FTP client. ( CyberDuck / Transmit / Flow )

1) Using the (S)FTP client, connect to your iPhone using the username as root and password as alpine. Make sure you connect using port 22 ( Secure FTP ) and NOT port 21.

2) Navigate to /var/mobile/Library/ and set the permissions of the “Cookies” folder in it too 777. Also do the same for all files inside the Cookies folder.

B: Using Terminal.

1) SSH into your iPhone via your Terminal ( Putty for Windows ). Password, ofcourse is “alpine”.

2) Issue the following command.
[code]chown -R mobile /var/mobile/

Thanks to Google for the help.

Do leave your comments :)

As you, my dear readers, may have already noticed, your favorite blog (!!!) has undergone a major overhaul over the past four days. The fantastic theme that you see has been designed and coded by [xubz], with help from yours truly. We began working on the theme almost 5 months back, but as it has been with every other project, it got delayed for various (obvious) reasons.

Well, the theme is finally out of the pipeline and as you can see, it has turned out great. I know, I know, I went around asking for feedback and some of you absolutely hate it. However, you gotta praise [xubz] for his fantastic work.

I now have a logo, a sort of a unique identity which I’m gonna use across the forums / communities I am a member of.

There have been several changes made to the structure of the blog. The theme is uniform across the main blog, my tumblog and my twitter profile page’s background is somewhat similar to the theme too. Although the prime focus will be the blog itself, I will post random short stuff that is too large for twitter and too small for a blog entry. You get the idea.

Also, as you may have seen, the sidebar carries the Skribit widget now. I’d really appreciate it, if you left some suggestions for me :)

I’ve also added and enabled the Wphone plugin, which gives me the possibility to access and manage my blog’s Dashboard from my iPhone through a fantastic iPhone interface. Some screenshots below.

Continue Reading »

That’s how many Cheques and DDs I’ve been holding with me for the past 3 months. I was just being too lazy to goto the nearest ICICI ATM centre and fill up the pay-in slips and deposits the money papers.

Finally, today, I decided to get done with it, once and for all. Well, atleast the pay-in slips have been filled up. But I’m too lazy to go out in the city’s scorching heat and boil my skin, and return home empty handed.

OMG ! No. I’m turning into [xubz]

As I finally begin writing this post after an hour of continuously staring at the monitor screen and the ceiling, there’s only one single thought that is gliding in my head.

“What do I write about ?”

I have been away from the blog for a really long time now. I know, I know, guilty as charged. But, I primarily blame myself not for being lazy, but because I had a few goals on my mind that I wanted to accomplish before I began writing again. One of them being a new theme for the blog. However, with [xubz] going offline till June 2008, I have given up my hopes for the theme now. [xubz] and me began working on the theme more than a month back, but, like every other project that has been initialized, this one never saw the doors.

As for the blog, I finally decided to use http://preshit.net instead of http://www.acchablog.com as the URL. I’ve been giving it a lot of thought lately. http://www.acchablog.com will simply redirect here.

My Nokia E50, something that I’ve always cherished, started feeling a little boring and useless, and so, I went ahead and bought myself the Apple iPhone 8GB. Nothing much to say except, “IT’s THE BEST FSCKING GADGET I HAVE EVER BOUGHT.” Unfortunately, I have no money left to purchase the MacBook now.

I started being even more active on twitter, and made quite a lot of new friends. Needless to say, the number of my online friends is thrice the number of my actual real-life friends. Come, follow me on twitter.

A few tweople ( twitter people ) decided to do a photodrive and check out the under construction Bandra-Worli sealink. So me, Brajeshwar, Kapil, Anupam, Asfaq and Aalaap set out to capture the project.

Bandra-Worli sealink pics on Flickr

Brajeshwar’s set on Flickr

I attended the city’s third and my first ever Barcamp, the BCM3 at SOM, IIT-M at Powai. I was very excited to be attending the meet, but unfortunately, I had some stupid vivas on the same day in college and hence, I reached the venue at 3PM, when almost every session was done with. Nonetheless, I got to meet most of the twitter folks like @unitechy, @aalaap, @ceetee, @brajeshwar, @shadez, @aDeSe.

Barcamp Mumbai Pics on Flickr.

Additionally, the two legendary Macboys Milind and Aayush also attended the barcamp traveling all the way from Goa and Siliguri ( near Darjeeling ) respectively. It was indeed an honor to meet the two. We chatted quite a bit at the venue and Milind finally got to play with the iPhone, something that he’d wanted to do for a long time. We went on to spend the evening with one of Digit Mods Mehul at Inorbit Mall. Airhockey at TimeZone is even more fun than it looks.

( From left: Mehul, Milind, Aayush, Preshit, Shrenique and Vikash )

Milind, the genius was so awestruck by the iPhone, that he went on to buy one for himself. The Macboy that he is, his actions went on to make Aayush too buy the iPhone. Mr. Genius bought the 16GB version.

So, there we were, 3 Macboys, 3 iPhones. It was Apple Mania overloaded. Awesome fun.

Since Aayush, was already on a tour, we all decided to head over to Goa, to Milind’s place. And of-course, as expected, the trip was Legen….. wait for it …… dary.

I’m finally settling back home now. My results will be out this week, so wish me luck for the same :)

Oh, another thing. Please replace the links on blogs from http://www.acchablog.com to http://preshit.net . Thanks

… the domain name that is.

When I first began writing for this blog, it originally used to be at http://myblog.preshit.net . The blog has a nice theme with a nice header and there was this nice logo on it. “Accha?” with a weird smile. I even got a T-Shirt printed with the logo on it.

Now, I’ve changed various themes after that… and due to some reason, I let go off that logo.

It has been over a year now and I’m starting to feel like the name “acchablog.com” is not good anymore.

I may move the blog to a new, more interesting name.

I would really like to hear some suggestions about the same.

Thanks.

So I was at Trishna 2008, my college’s ( Thakur College of Science and Commerce’s ) annual day.

Right from day one, there’s this one friend who used to always tell me how grand and fantastic the annual day is, every year. He used to go, “Arrey buss to dekh, aisa annul day tune kabhi nahi dekha hoga…… wahaan ye hota hain, wahaan ye aata hain…. ” and so on.

Well, yesterday was nowhere close to that. Nowhere.

The only thing I liked in my Annual Day was the play. It was excellent. Excellent script, excellently performed.

The play was on how Media influences our lives today. The story was about a modern day Vikram - Vetaal. The play revolved around Vetaal telling Vikram 3 stories.
1. Rakhi and Mika’s Kiss
2. Abhi-Ash Wedding
3. The wardrobe malfunction on the ramp

and then a fourth story about the recent Mumbai local train bombings. The play had a lot of funny moments thrown in, but they suited perfectly at the right moment. Nothing overdone.

It is so true. The media today is as useless as the news they show.

I’ll upload a video if I get my hands on it.

Today is the world of flash drives. Everyone you know now has a PD ( Pen drive ) and wants you to copy some files off your PC / Mac.

Now, unlike me, if you’re using the oh-so-prone-to-viruses Operating System called Windows, chances are that you might have already come across the ntdetec1.exe virus. Or you will, sooner or later.

Its official name is W32.Ceted and it is a worm that copies itself to all shared and removable drives and spreads when the user double clicks on it to open it. If a system is infected, it creates a folder called ntdetec1 in your System Drive which is NOT visible via Explorer or Command prompt.

Related files:
\ntdetec1\ntdetec1.exe
\ntdetec1\cmrss.exe
\ntdetec1\run.exe
\ntdetec1\shell32.exe
\ntdetec1\drivelist.txt
\ntdetec1\child\autorun.inf
\ntdetec1\child\ntdetec1.exe

Symptoms:
1. Task Manager closes as soon as it launches.
2. RegEdit may be inaccesible
3. Folder Options may be inaccessible

When I scanned using some anti-virus software, Nod32, Symantec AV Corporate, McAfee and AVG failed to detect the files, even in Safe Mode.

To remove it, run the following commands at the command prompt:

taskkill /im cmrss.exe
taskkill /im ntdetec1.exe
taskkill /im shell32.exe

Now, make sure you are in the root drive of your system. For example, if your Windows in installed in C:, make sure your prompt shows C:\>
Now, run the command..

attrib ntdetec1 -s -h /s /d

This will make the folder visible in explorer. Now you can Shift+Delete the folder from explorer.

Also, you might need to delete the following registry key (if it is present)

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\policies\Explorer\ Run\"winlogon" = "C:\ntdetec1\run.exe"

Congratulations, this will remove all known traces of the above worm.

And remember, next time you use someone’s PD, before you access it, goto your command prompt and delete the autorun.inf file if any.