How to Instantly Boost Your Kindle Battery.

Switch to fucking Airplane mode. Yes, just that. Your Kindle will stay alive for a minimum of two fucking weeks. Thank You.

PS: Airplane mode can be found through the settings button.

How to Connect Your Android Phone to a Mac Device?

I don't know who it is but neither Android nor Apple are playing fair. You just can't connect your Android phone to a Mac and use it in the ol' plug and play manner like a pen drive. Your phone's manufacturer forgot to add the drivers which would help your Mac device to read it. And despite the fact that Android has now captured a whopping 79% market share in terms of mobile OS, Mac would not try to fix this glitch either.

So, what do you do? How do you transfer music or photos to your Mac device? You get your hands on the Android File Transfer app that's conveniently mentioned in the link below. You install it on your Mac and then use it to copy/cut/delete files on your device. The app is very spartan in nature. No material design or fancy graphics here. It's a file explorer and it gets the job done. And considering the world where we now live in, isn't it nice when things just work?


https://www.android.com/filetransfer/

How to Find Out If Someone's Been Stealing Your WiFi.

You can't stream YouTube videos fast enough. Instagram photos take time to load. And then it strikes you, someone apart from you is using your WiFi. Well, that's just dandy, innit? You know there's a digital thief lurking about but how do you find out? You use a nifty little app called Wireless Network Watcher. It shows you the number of devices connect on your network. It even lists their IP and MAC addresses and to make things easier, it even shows the make of the device. So the moment you find some devices you don't own connected to your WiFi, you'll know someone's been mooching you off. All you have to do after that is just change your WiFi password and then just stream YouTube videos in peace.

Here's the download Link to this beautiful freeware from Nirsoft.

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/wireless_network_watcher.html

IBM's Watson Pegs Me for a Split-Personality Patient.

This is all in jest, of course. Someone or possibly the good guys at IBM used Watson to create a personality test. You enter some 100 words you've written and the test analyses your personality on various metrics. I first entered something I wrote for a client's print ad and the result was fairly right. Except it made me seem like some extremely cerebral guy who would rather put priorities before pleasure.

Afterwards when I put stuff from my blog, I got a more rounded answer. Check them out both and try the test yourself at https://watson-pi-demo.mybluemix.net/

Does Your Reading Speed Improve on the Kindle?

Yes. And no. If you are an obsessive speed reader like me and you are leafing through a particularly heavy paperback like Wolf Hall, you will keep checking how many pages more before you finish. You might even get anxious for lingering between the lines for too long. Kindle on the other hand lets you get rid of pages on its books, so you take it one page at a time. And surprisingly no matter how big the book is, your task somehow becomes less daunting when you focus on getting through the page in front of you.

Secondly, Kindle is a dedicated reading device. Unlike any other tablet or an iPad, it's not a device that doubles up as a reader. So without internet or a browser, you would be surprised how much more reading you will manage to do. Unless of course, you let your cell phone interrupt you.

But the key point that will affect your reading speed is this one - how good is the book you are reading and how much are you enjoying reading it. Pick a bad book and you will slog through it. Pick a Victorian classic that doesn't ring true with you and you will be stuck at the first chapters forever. In such cases, it won't matter if you have a Kindle or not.

That's all there is to it. Happy reading. 

How to Stop Peeping Toms from Looking at Your Cell Phones.

Works like a charm every time. Although the middle aged man next to me said he was only peeping because he was checking out the Swype keypad on my phone. Maybe that's one less guilty suspect but I have seen guys with Swype on their phones peep into my phone. So yes, you are better off with this trick.

Cheers to Apple for Sticking by its Words.

The Apple unveiled its new iPhone some days back. Or rather iPhones in this case - a big budget one called iPhone 5s and a plasticky, cutesy or as Nokia calls it an iOS Lumia clone called 5c. Both of them are really underwhelming. Yes, there's the 64-bit processor which is indeed a big deal but it's not something that an average consumer can understand, nor is it something that will change his life. Think Siri. Think Instagram. Think any of the flashy Galaxy S4 features. None of them had anything to do with the processing power, but with how the phones actually influence a user's life. All said and done, Apple did impress me by doing one great thing - they stuck by their words. Remember this old commercial where Apple bragged about how the iPhone 5 was ergonomically designed to perfectly fit in any hand?

Well that bit is true. The slightly thinner and wider design on the new iPhones make them far easy to handle than the large bulky smartphones out there. Granted the Xperia Z Ultra or the Galaxy S4 pack more processing power and bells and whistles than the iPhone 5, but do they fit right into your hand like the iPhone 5? What's even better is that Apple resisted the urge to increase their screens like their competitors. The Lumia 1020 is a goliath. The Xperia ZL is not a tab-phone/phablet, it's really tablet you use as a phone. Props to Apple for sticking with sense, instead of gimmicks. Hopefully next time they do something that really gives all the Android powered Smartphone companies a chill down their spines and a run for their money.

And It Goes Viral. Again.

You know how I roll, right? I do things. Awesome things that the world or rather the world wide web loves. Like the article I wrote for Faking News under my super secret pseudonym Snide Scribe. The article was about how Nokia phones are displaying new error messages after the Microsoft takeover. You are welcome to read and pass it along here. Since I last checked, it was liked '575' times, so you can bet it is good.

PS: Special thanks to the Faking News editors for adding some fine touches to the piece. 

Destroy My Droid - App Idea.

Ever had a your phone stolen? Ain't that a kick in the head. Apart from losing all your precious data, you lose something that's much more than a device. You lose an indispensable part of your life. Of course there are apps to track your phone in such cases (Find My Droid, some inbuilt one's from Samsung) but chances are you would never see your phone again. If your phone was nabbed by some syndicate, those slime balls can even change your IMEI too. And even if you manage to block your phone or find its location, how do you plan to recover it, if say, it's in Reykjavik.

So what do you do in such cases? Of course file a report with the cops, but do you let the bad guys get away with your phone? No, you go full vigilante on their ass.

Enter Destroy My Droid. The nifty little app I plan to create (with conceivably zero coding skills and generous donations from you, dear reader). You install the app on the phone and if your phone ever gets stolen and you know there's no chance of recovery. You send in your secret Destroy My Droid code to your phone and it explodes. Curious about how the mechanism works? I have no idea about it myself, but you know you want this app on your phone.

For $2 more you can even have your phone dictate a personal message to the guys who stole your phone before it explodes. Special discounts if you go with Samuel L Jackson's 'I will strike down upon thee with vengeance' speech from Pulp Fiction.

You can bring the Destroy My Droid app to life by participating in my Kickstarter campaign. Don't donate to make me rich, do it to do right by your phone and serve justice to those who wronged it and you.

*App soon to be launched for Apple Devices. Tentative Name - 'Here's a Rotten Apple, Bitch'.

Shit the Samsung Galaxy S4 cannot do!

There's the powerhouse octa-core processor, then there are features like Air Gesture which allow you to view messages without touching the screen and Smart Pause which pauses your videos when you look away. All in all the Samsung Galaxy S4 is a formidable phone. In fact, far more powerful than my Google Nexus 4, which only a few days back was the fastest phone on the planet.

But there's one thing the S4 can't do? And that's this.

360 Panorama / Street View pictures - eat your heart out Galaxy S4!

Yes, there's an S4 review on my monitor.

PS: This outburst has a lot to do with my phone not being the fastest phone on the planet anymore and it being outrun by the Sony Xperia and HTC One X. But I love you nonetheless my beloved Nexus. I shall continue to defend you through idiotic blog posts.