Popping sounds in XPS

I have recently blogged about how I wanted a new laptop, a laptop refresh if you will. I finally bought a Dell XPS 15, decently spec’d, got enough juice to last at least 5 hours and runs graphics and everything very well. Is a tad heavy but no build issues otherwise. So, I was surprised to find this laptop have some very awesome sounding laptop speakers, actually the most awesome speakers that I have seen in a laptop ever! I was very glad that the laptop had brought with it a very good surprise. But there was an underlying issue with this.

The woofer located at the bottom of the laptop would stutter while playing some music or even while doing some simple gaming. This soon became very annoying. So instead of calling up the Dell customer support, I started browsing their forums. Turns out, this is a very widespread issue. But I soon found out that this was a software issue and not a hardware one as most of the people on the site had fixed their popping issues by either removing some unwanted drivers, some Dell crapware and some other unwanted software. Some had a few cores disabled, enabling which fixed the issue. Some even suggested to stop/unisntall the Mcafee installation available with the laptop.

So obviously, I tried it all, apart from disabling the antivirus. I had all the latest drivers as listed on the Dell support site. But turns out, the best way ahead was to go to websites of the respective vendors and update the drivers from them directly rather than via Dell. This wasn’t something suggested on the forums. So the first site I checked was nVidia and boy was I lucky to find an update for the graphics card on my system – GT-540. After downloading and installing the app, things are looking great, its sounding great, even somehow better. Maybe its because of the HD audio driver that was installed along with the Nvidia driver update. Here is the link I found for the driver, its on the Nvidia servers.

http://www.nvidia.com/content/DriverDownload-March2009/confirmation.php?url=/Windows/285.62/285.62-notebook-win7-winvista-64bit-international-whql.exe&lang=us&type=GeForce%20M

Edit: Turns out, the issue with the popping sound was not to blame on the drivers. After a few days, the issue had arisen yet again. And this time I was at loss as to what to do. Again the search for the possible solution began and on one of the threads on the dell support forums, I found a suggested solution. This was with removing the bundled Mcafee anti-virus solution. I was initially a little sceptical but common sense kicked in, I did it, installed the Microsoft Software Essentials and now… no more cracking of the sound. The sub-woofer had never sounded better. Glad this is finally fixed now…

Yet Another Bittorent Client

So, I want to learn C#. I have access to the Visual Studio IDE for writing the code in C#. So I though, the best way to go about it is to start writing your own application, a windows installer, which will obviously be open source. Now I wasn’t sure what kind of an application should I create. Then I thought of using the most widely used application on my machine after iTunes. This would be the Bit Torrent client. This is the official client; which obviously follows the latest protocols and all. This isn’t open sourced. They stopped open sourcing their app after version 5 or so it seems. This I've read from Wikipedia.

So, to make my bit torrent client (which for now I would like to call Yet Another Bit torrent Client - YABC), I needed to first understand the architecture that is usually used by these apps, and most important of all, understand the bit torrent protocol. This wouldn’t be easy. So I had a better idea, I thought, rather than investing time in understand the protocol as of now, I might as well borrow the code for the protocol from some other app which is under FOSS. But then again I had a problem.

All the apps which are currently popular and available are all written in python. The trouble is that python is a language I am totally not familiar with as of now. Also, I was planning to make an app through and through in C# and .NET. So I just Googled the best I could and lo behold – I found this - http://www.alhem.net/project/btpeer/index.html. This is the btPeer client which is solely written in C++. Now the thing is, I work in C++ full time and know the language well enough to be able to port an application from it to C#. Another plus is that there is already a project readily available for Visual Studio, thus I will only have to port the application directly to VS2010; using which, when I build the project, I should have to project ready.

I will register the project at SourceForge or Google Code and also maybe github so that the configuration part of the project is handled well. More on this as things progress. Later.

The Indian Tech Journalist

I have been following the technology space for the last few years now. Mostly since I started working. The iPhone wasn't something I looked forward to, but was a fan of the major camera totting phones of the yesteryears. These were dumb phones (the Sony Ericsson ones), but then there were the Symbian handset from Nokia which always used to freezing at some point in their lives.

The blogs and tech news websites that I followed in those days were engadget and some other blogs from amteur Indian bloggers who mainly mimmicked the American blogs. At that moment in time, ZDNet was another well set up website. So I also started following them, but they mainly seemed to write about the Silicon Valley happenings, which was a good read, but I rarely knew what was happening around me, as in, in India. Soon I found out that techtree.in (then it was techtree.com) is a good site for such activities. This was mainly because my knowledge about the world technological happenings wasn't that great and thus I kept on following techtree and this other site - tech2.com which later became tech2.in. At this time, Joshua Topolsky was the editor at engadget.com and had a very good team of technology journalists as well, with the likes of Nilay Patel and Joanna Stern. So I could say, I pretty much grew my already bubbling interest in the world of gadgets reading to their articles. They all moved out of engadget and set up shop at theverge.com, which is now my goto site for all the tech information that i need.

My point being that India does not have any good tech websites/blogs that cater to the geeks of the country. The big two which i mentioned arent anywhere as good as engadget or theverge, even techcrunch for that matter. They still think that symbian phones are cool. That one statement pretty much digs a hole for them.

Just writing about this is a bit frustrating for me, because reading the pathetic articles on these sites makes my blood boil. Its not like India doesnt have any good technology observers. Its just that it hasnt been thought out as a very good idea yet. Techtree and Tech2 have had some really good articles on games and other things but the look and feel of their sites and the content otherwise is just disastrous. I think that there is a lot of room for improvement in the technology journalism space for this country.

Whom do I discuss phones with?

So I told a friend in India that the Samsung Galaxy S2 has the most amazing screen ever with the Super AMOLED plus working its magic and showing the colours as they should be seen.

He told me that his Nexus S, which as a SCLCD (i9023) has a better screen than the S2. He said that he would be sending a mail to me proving it to me that the SCLCD was better than the SAMOLED Plus. Being the bigger person that I am, I stopped arguing and said that I was looking forward to the "proof" he was presenting to back up his claims.

A few days later, I got a mail which had two screenshots of what looked like the same home screen. It was running launcher pro, same wallpaper, same set of widgets and shortcuts on the screen. To any eye, they were screenshots of the homescreen of the same device. The subject line of the mail just mentioned - see for yourself.

On questioning my friend as to what am I supposed to see in those two images, I was told that the one named 1.jpeg was the SAMOLED Plus and the 2.jpeg was the SCLCD and the SCLCD was the best one.

Don't expect everyone to get the joke.

Time for a Laptop Refresh?

I was and always have been fond of screen with high resolutions. So last year, when I spent about £611 on a Thinkpad Edge which I thought I had pimped out, I was somehow expecting a larger resolution screen. This wasn't because of any misinformation on the part of Lenovo, but it was due to my ignorance. I just assumed that the thinkpad will have a higher resolution that the HP laptop that I previously owned. The thinkpad edge laptops, regardless of the size of the screen, max out at 1366 X 768 pixels. Not my cup of tea. So after using the laptop for exactly a year, I am giving up on it. The thinkpad will be gone. Selling the damn thing off!

Thus, I need a new laptop, or maybe I tweaked the machine I had in India when I get back but till then use the existing thinkpad. I gave up on it. I thought, I'd rather use a new laptop than some old low resolution thinkpad, which, to be fair could handle a fair deal. CS5 ran very smooth on it. So now for the new laptop, my budget was teetering on £1200. It was a pretty string budget and many good laptops fell into this category.

I have always been fascinated by the MacBooks. I loved their sleek designs and the aesthetically pleasing looks and the always talked about fast performance on them. So I checked a few out, and on eBay, I found a few good deals. One of them was the latest 15incher with the 500GB HDD, i7 et all, for a reasonable £1299. It did overshoot my budget by a £99 but then I was very much for it. But then, I began thinking about the future prospects of owning a MacBook. I am a PC, through and through, and also the occasional Linux user, but never a Mac user. So, it was obvious that I would be bootcamping the MBP as soon as I got it. To do this, I would have to shell out a few more quid on the Windows DVD. Along with this, I would this I would also have to install the Visual Studio 2008 and loads of other software I need for my extra-curricular educational needs. Another factor in my waning interest in the MBP was the screen resolution. For a full HD resolution, I would have to pay a bomb and also buy via the Apple Store online, which is the costliest of the lot when buying MBPs. So I was very much in two minds about it all.

So I now started looking at the line from Dell. There were quite a few laptops available on the dell line which were well under my budget. I was exited by the Alienware series and almost bought one, but stopped short when I realised that the 14x doesn't have a 1080p screen nor does it have it as an upgrade. I also checked the line by Asus, the G53SW which looks really pretty to be fair, also the Dell Precision series but none were much  of any interest to me. So again I landed on the Dell website, and struck jackpot with the XPS 15 series. This is not the 15z, which was recently released but the XPS 15 which I literally pimped out as and then forgot to add the backlit keyboard but was finally able to get the laptop for £1089. I got a £405 discount on the laptop. The configuration of this new machine is as follows:


XPS 502x : 2nd generation Intel Core i7-2670QM processor 2.20 GHz with Turbo Boost up
to 3.10 GHz
Display : 15.6" FHD B+RGLED True-Life (1920x1080) with 2.0 Mega Pixel Integrated Camera 1 S
LCD Back Cover : Metalloid Aluminum (WLAN) L501X 1 S
Memory : 8192MB (2x4096) 1333MHz DDR3 Dual Channel
Hard Drive : 750GB Serial ATA (7200RPM) 1 S
Optical Drive : 8x DVD+/-RW Optical Drive 1 S
Battery : Primary 9-cell 90W/HR LI-ION 1 S
Graphics : 2GB NVIDIA GeForce GT 540M Graphics card

I'd say pretty sweet for £1089. Should be here with me by 16th of November.

The new Nigerian Scam - Bidding on eBay

This may not actually be a new thing, but it surely was the first time I experienced or even heard about it. It all happened to me when I listed my Nexus S for sale on eBay. My phone was "bought" in about 5 minutes after listing it. Immediately after, I got an eBay message asking for more pictures of my used Nexus S so as the buyer is sure that the device is actually in "pristine" condition as mentioned on the eBay listing.
So I, being overly involved in getting rid of the phone for the seemingly good selling price of £200, was very prompt in sending the pics. The mistake I did here was to mail them from the same email address as the one I use on eBay and PayPal. And I was happy to get another mail from the buyer telling me that she was happy with the condition of the device. So the next morning, I was dead surprised to get 3 mails telling me that I had been transferred £250 into my PayPal account but before it was to be credited to my account, I had to put in a shipping reference. This was the first time that I was selling anything in eBay and didn't know the exact procedure, so didn't make any effort to read the mails. Also got a personal mail from the buyer that i should send the device to Nigeria since she was buying it for her pastor son there. Also the buyer said that she was working in Syria ay the moment. I was touched by her deed of having a pastor son, So I was now in a hurry to ship the device asap,and get the amount credited to my account.
So that very day, I went ahead and posted it via DHL, spent £41 for it, with the to address in Nigeria. Only when I got back to my desk did I notice something fishy. The PayPal mail that I usually get from device@PayPal.co.uk was in reality from some mail address on the domain Europe.com. Sadly, till I realised that, I had already updated the eBay item with the shipping number thinking that it would finally have the amount credited to my account. And finally when I realised it, I immediately called the DHL center and asked them to return the device to the senders address. Sadly, the amount spent for sending the device is already gone, but a very good lesson learnt!.

Shopping with Pets

If you have a dog, and have to go shopping, in a shop where they do not allow dogs, what will you do? A thing I forgot to mention is that you seem to be a alone when you do your shopping, also none of your friends were free to be accompanying you with these chores. So you cannot just keep your dog at home, all alone, for the duration of your shopping chores. So you take him along, only to tie him/leave him outside the shop waiting for you. And this is just something that I see across the UK, it doesn't seem all that bad on the dog, I'm sure he/she wont mind some alone time, maybe see a few pretty dogs walk by as he waits.
Sadly, the dogs dearly miss their owners, I have many times seen them looking earnestly at the people coming out of the shops as if expecting them to be their owners but always looking away from them disappointed. I never had an issue seeing this outside as the owners usually got back from their shopping in around 10-15 mins and they were heading back. This is something usually outside Tesco and Sainsbury. The dogs themselves have been well behaved otherwise, not even barking or any trouble for that matter, but just waiting. So today while I was out in Bath, a historic city in SouthWest England, I saw something that just made me very sad.

This was right outside the M&S store on the high street. She was a very lovable one, just sitting there, those eyes were only looking for the owner who had one inside. She had a collar on her. Everytime some passerby ooh'd and aah'd at her and even pet her, she still kept staring inside the store. I was outside the store for about 30 mins waiting for my friends, so atleast she had some company. When my friends finally came, I told them I think I better go talk with the floor manager of M&S to check of the owner was in the store. But then when I finally got hold of one of the security guys and walked outside, she was gone, hopefully with her rightful owner. 

So coming to my point, my gripe.... I personally hate it when people do that with their dogs. No matter how patient their dogs are. I have been in the UK for the last 14 months now, originally from India, I have three labradors back home. And I would always have someone from my family with them if this kind of a scenario ever happened. It was either me. my sisters or either of my parents who stayed back to look back at the kids (as I refer to my pets). I know, the luxury that I have, of having atleast someone around to look after my pets when I am not around isnt something that all can have, but still, I would like to figure some way out so that any of the pets dont have to be left alone, even if it is for a little while. Pets are like kids, they are completely dependent on us. I know, many people will not agree with my take on this, but just saying that if I were in that position, I would make sure that my pet would be very happy always like all my loved ones.

I seriously miss my pets.....