In february, 2011 Amazon’s UK division made a move that could potentially change the online shopping business paradigm in India, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand. It started offering free shipping to all these 4 countries for orders above £25. Since the shipping charges on a standard £25 order could be to the tune of £15 to £18, it used to be prohibitively costly and unviable for customers to order. With that out of the window, things could change for the local players and us customers.
If you are a web developer, at some point of time or the other you would have heard about ADA compliance or SEO (Search Engine Optimization). If you haven’t, then its high time that you do make your website ADA compliant.
ADA stands for American Disability Act. The Act is there to ensure that establishments are fully accessible to disabled people. While its not very clear whether websites come into its purview or not, there have been lawsuits based on this. While many big website owners are going that extra mile to make their site accessible just to prevent costly lawsuits, following standards for ADA compliance also has its own good side effects since Search Engines also crawl through your site in a similar manner. Below is a set of rules you should follow to increase the accessibility of your website and make it ADA and W3C compliant -
Windows 7, with Windows Live Essentials loaded, has almost everything you need to do your things if you are a casual user. Here I list 10 very small (micro) free applications that will make things easier for you.
1. Connectify – If you use a laptop which has a wifi adapter, this is a must have application. Hidden deep inside, Windows 7 has the ability to turn your system into a wifi hotspot. However this is not a documented feature and requires you to use the command prompt to use it. Connectify makes this extremely easy to use the feature and can be used by anyone who can use windows barely.
India is a relatively new market for Direct To Home (DTH)/Direct Satellite Broadcasting. Since the first broadcast by Doordarshan in 1959, television broadcast in India has gone a long way. The two major leaps this industry took was in 1991 when deregulation made it possible for foreign players to jump into the Indian market and once again in 2004 when the KU Band direct to home broadcasting was legalised. Between 2004 and 2011, 7 Direct Satellite Service Providers have launched their services in India catering to an estimated 25 million subscribers, making India the second largest market after USA.
In this article we will try and see how the different provider stack up against each other in terms of service quality and initiative and selling point.
For my second post, I thought of posting on one of my hobbies. Philately is said to be one of the oldest and widely followed hobby. I caught the Philately bug in my childhood from my Dad. That was the age when there was no internet and computers used to run on Windows 3.1 or DOS. Collecting new stamps of my own country was easy, just keep an eye on the release schedule, go to your nearest Post Office and get the stamps. To get stamps of other countries, old or new, used to be a challenge. I remember writing to my relatives abroad to send me letters stamped with new stamps from their country. Going to the Post Office to get hold of stamps on letters which did not make to their destination. One of course needs some contact at the post office for this. But it was still very difficult.
But with the internet revolution, that happened 10 years ago, keeping up with your hobby is now a lot easier. or might I saw a cakewalk in most cases. Now many post offices around the world publish Philatelic Journals which not only serve as a catalogue of the country’s upcoming stamp issues, but also are a great read, with loads of information about the country and culture. Below is given a list of philatelic publications and stamp bulletins along with their websites.
If you are using a laptop or you are using a Branded PC from a big manufacturer like DELL, Sony, HP or Lenovo then chances are that it came preinstalled with a version of Windows 7. One thing to note here is that the Product Key which is there on the COA sticker on your computer is an OEM product key. This license is valid for installation only on that computer. Another thing to note here is that if you use a product key sniffing program like Speccy, you’ll notice that the product key on the sticker and the one used for installation is different. Here I am going to explain 2 ways to activate an OEM copy.
