Blissful Life

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Notice: after planning it for years, I moved this blog out of blogger/blogspot (which google has abandoned long ago) to wordpress on a fine evening in Dec 2024. This notice will stay here to warn that things might be broken. Let me know if you find anything.

  • Type in Indic, Greek, Arabic Anywhere, Anytime With Google IME

    Google’s transliteration feature has been of great help to Indian’s looking to type in their own languages. But to use it one had to be connected internet.

    But our dear Google (G capital for God and Google) has again come for our help. They’re providing an IME tool which when installed works as a new language in your windows system (yeah that language bar you tried so many times to hide, you’re gonna need that)
    You can just type in the language you choose even in notepad.

    Google Transliteration IME is currently available for 14 different languages – Arabic, Bengali, Farsi (Persian), Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.


    First you’ll have to download the language pack you need from this page.

    And don’t cut the internet connection

    Then when you run the file it will download the files it need, install itself and disappear into nothingness.

    Then when you’re clueless about what to do, go to the Google Transliteration IME help page Google Transliteration Input Method (IME) Help there. (You can’t find that link by searching, they show some Chinese pages, so rather save it now)

    There, they will tell you to enable the language bar (by right clicking on taskbar, pointing to toolbars, selecting language bar) and then to select your language to see the Google IME.

    Rest is explained nicely with pictures over here:
    Google Transliteration Input Method (IME) Help

    Just go there, start typing without pain…

  • 3 Questions to Define What is Productive and What is Not

    Time management is about knowing what is productive and what isn’t as much as Bhagavad Gita is about self improvement. When you are able to conceive the difference between productive and unproductive work, time management is just a matter of avoiding the unproductive one and doing the productive one. But how do we distinguish between the two?

    Any work doing which we are bound to benefit in the future can be termed as productive. (But only when you are doing it as efficiently as possible and have nothing more important to do, as I will explain below)
    Learning anything new, exercising, helping someone else, …

    And any work doing which we may get benefit in the future are unproductive.
    Watching a film (about which a question may be asked in the Who wants to be a millionaire? program which I’m planning to participate in 20 years from now), playing farmville in facebook (thus showing my friends my skill in farming?), chatting endlessly with friends (do you think that the amount of time you spend with your friend strengthens the bond of friendship between you?) …

    Your mind may sometimes trick you into believing that you’re being productive when you’re actually less than 10% of what you can be, as is clearly demonstrated when someone gets addicted to anything I said above (social networks, tv shows, etc)

    Let us analyze them one by one

    Social networks:
    Facebook, orkut, and all others of the genre are truly great sites when it comes to keeping in touch with friends, sharing photos, videos, clearing doubts in an online forum and so on, and I personally have a profile in each one of them. But they become evil when we start forgetting why they are there. They are meant for strengthening interpersonal relationships. But you could spend a whole day in any one of them, and still end the day gaining nothing more than what you could achieve in 10 minutes. Think of how you could post updates every 15 minutes throughout a day and 2 of your greatest friends who log in at the night sees just the last 2 of your updates and comment on them. Think of how you could post a very clever, very attractive single update a day and still have almost half a dozen people liking and commenting on your update.
    Think of how you can get back your time from these sites. Think how you can compress your activities to bare minimum.

    TV:
    The #1 time killer in most house holds even after the advent of the internet is television. Because while internet soon becomes boring especially when you don’t know more than 3 sites by their URL, TV + remote ensures that you find something or the other every time you switch the thing on. And unlike internet you needn’t even know what you want to waste time on TV.

    Time for some entertainment… Aha I’ve my favourite program in Nat Geo (well Nat Geo is after all educational)… Oh it’s commercials time, let’s see what HBO is showing. Is it Rush-Hour 3? My Goodness! Never got a chance to watch it. And it has just begun… [2 hours later]… my gosh, my eyes are paining. I think I need some rest. [Power off]

    Tell me how many of us haven’t gone through these exact routine. You get a chance holiday and think that you would finish all your pending works on that day. But at the end of the day you would find yourself just a bit further than where you started.

    Because you forget what you should have been doing. You think you are being productive when you aren’t actually.

    So the next time you are in a doubt whether or not you’re doing the right thing, just ask yourself these questions.
    #1, Is what I’m trying to do my absolute priority?
    This is another way of asking yourself whether you have a task to be completed with its deadline tomorrow, or whether you have a critical examination tomorrow. (Most people think of doing some exercise, or learning javascript at such critical eleventh hours) Just ask yourself whether there’s anything very important. Even if you are trying to exercise or learn a new language, right now it is unproductive, if you have a deadline tomorrow.

    If I don’t have anything absolutely necessary to do
    #2, Is what I’m trying to do going to be of any help for me in the future?
    Am I learning? Am I building my muscles? Am I doing something new? Am I building up on my relationships? Am I really having fun? Am I being adventurous? Am I doing something, the fruit of which I can proudly display in front of others?

    And if I’m doing something useful
    #3, Can I do what I’m doing more efficiently?
    Am I utilizing what I’m doing to the maximum? This last question can have great effects. You will soon find yourself chatting with friends just enough, such that you don’t find both of you talking about how bad your favourite actress performed in her last movie (unless you are a movie critic).
    And don’t think you will be termed as a kill-joy, or a silent person. Talk to your friends enough. But just enough. Don’t let gossips be your topic of discussion. And don’t fear that you will turn out to be an uninteresting person. How about talking about a picnic or a group work. Find topics that are productive, interesting and relationship strengthening, all at the same time.

    Don’t be fooled by the calendar. There are only as many days in the year as you make use of. One man gets only a week’s value out of a year while another man gets a full year’s value out of a week.
    – Charles Richards

  • Billy – Media Players Can’t Get Lighter

    Just 4 days ago I told you about Quintessential Media Player.
    But the day I started using QMP I had also installed another media player called Billy. It was very small a program that I didn’t try to run it that day. I thought it wouldn’t be having any features I wanted.
    But wait! This 665 KB (with setup and 357 KB without setup) media player can do anything including managing playlists, playing shuffled, have a tiny mode, calculate total playlist time, have sleep timer, rename multiple items, jump to playing file, a softmute (30 % of volume) and every one of those functions have a keyboard shortcut too. Even seek can be done with cursor keys. And there is a tiny visualisation too. Moreover under the seek bar it shows you the total time, elapsed time and remaining time all at once. And in the status bar it shows you the properties of the file, the number of files in the playlist, play mode, etc. What not, there is a find option which can be used to search any file in the playlist (and it can search within track information too)

    And the most thrilling part is it uses only under 1 MB of resources while running for itself (+ the size of the song)

    My God!
    At last I have found the truly lightest media player… It’s Billy…

    Download Billy Here

    Additional Info: (from Billy site)

    Features
    Freeware (no adware)
    Runs on Win 95/98/NT/Me/2000/XP/2003
    No skins, no mp3 tags, no equalizer, no nonsense – pure audio
    Supported formats: MP3, WAV, OGG
    High quality sound engine, by Un4seen Bass
    Extremely fast, loads 1000 mp3 files in a second
    Gapless trackchange of mp3 files
    Directory based or playlist based
    Filenames renamer to organize your music albums
    Calibrated dB level meter
    100% controllable by keyboard
    Low memory and cpu usage
    Queueing your next songs
    Find a specific song quickly
    Sleep timer
    Drag & drop

    Info
    Billy is an audio player that allows you to quickly play an entire directory of MP3 files. It can usually load files 2 to 8 times faster than winamp or media player. Billy plays music albums without any gaps between tracks, so an overlapping applause or beat will continue. The player is 100% controllable by keyboard and its easy finder and special rename functions help you to find and organize your files quickly.

    Download Billy right now… here

  • Quintessential Media Player – The Best Light Media Player

    I have been on the look out of a light media player which can perform all the tasks I want to do (all those shuffling, playlist organizing, etc. etc.), and I always thought that after media player classic, there’s nothing light that can do those. But ever since I started using Quintessential Media Player I have been in love with it. It supports plugins, it can shuffle playlists, it has many skins, there’s a shade mode, shows remaining time for a track and above all it runs very very light on resources.

    So what are you waiting for just go to Quintessential Player website, and get it.

    Update: I discovered Billy later which is as light as it can get, and as good as everything else.

    Related Posts:
    Billy – Media Players Can’t Get Lighter

  • Google Dictionary !!!

    Google is taking over the internet… It released its own DNS service and I thought that was the news for the day, but wait… Google has rolled out its dictionary, and unlike when it rolls out other services this came in silently. And so, there is a great chance that you may miss this. But I won’t let you do so. For, looking up words is one thing I’ve always used google for. Gone are the days when I had to type define:compere and then get a single line on something.
    Today onwards I will just have to key in the word like I do with any other search term… (Ctrl – K, then “chamois”) and see on the top right along with those big numbers a blue link [definition]

    And clicking on it I will be with the meaning…

    As you can see in the picture, there is easy starring of words (learn new words), pronunciation, synonym, categories, other languages having the same word, web links (what you would normally get with a “define:” tag. And finally there are dictionaries for almost every language. Even malayalam!!!!!

    Just go check it out Google dictionary

    And have happy days learning words…

  • 26/11 and The Colour of Life

    The true colour of life can only be appreciated when we get out of the frame and just stay as a witness.
    This, I understood when I was flipping through all the channels in my television, tonight on 26/11.

    Let me first of all salute all those heroes who died. I wish I have a death like theirs.
    It requires a lot of courage to know that you are going to die and still stand up to a terrorist. I wish to include all of them by name. But doing that would mean they have become our history. They haven’t. They are the martyrs of our reality. They are very much alive in our discussions today.

    All the channels have been airing special bulletins on 26/11 today. With a tinge of sorrow everyone reported about the deaths. And then they showed how life has came back. In NDTV, they had showed the gunshots, the burning Taj, the press lying on the floor, the firemen trying to curb the fire. And then they showed the today of the Taj Hotel. Pigeons flying. Men feeding them. Tourists taking snaps. And a small child crawling on its knees through the pigeons, happiness on her face. It was beautiful. And that is what I wish to call the Colour of Life.

    Life is so very beautiful because it is multi-centred. There is no absolute one thing that everybody wish to do. There is variety. There is diversity. There is colour.

    Just go to a city in the night. You will feel that. There will be lights everywhere. Blue, yellow, neon, sodium. There will be the fruit seller with his orange, blue, black, yellow, red. There will be the flower seller. There will be the stationary shop. There will be the rice shop. There will be restaurants, cafes. There will be the mobile coupon centres, Xeroxing stations, the cycle shop, bars, the hardware shop. There will be the hospital. And not to mention the vehicles on the road – cars, buses, rickshaws, motor cycles. And there would be the trees on the sides which we simply fail to notice in the dark, but when we reach near them we feel an eerie sense of fear of the ghost hiding above it.

    Or just flip the channels of your television set.
    There will be mourning prayers for the dead at some place. Debates about the same at some other place. And then there will be that cricket star who took 5+ wickets in his come back match. And then discussion on how he performed. Then there will be the unexpected 0-1 loss of a soccer club. And their manager’s explanation. There will be prime time movies. There will be soaps. And there will be reality shows. And there will be fashion shows. And there will be a lonely preacher talking about religion. Then there will be some ads. (These ads are the most contrasting colours. They will be so funny sometimes. Like after the interview with the NSG chief about how they finished the terrorists there was the docomo ad where a car hits another and the man who was driving the first car get down to see what happened, suddenly police surround them from all directions, and this man would be holding his hands up “Hands up”. But the police men catch some terrorists from the other car, gives a pat on his back and leaves).

    And there will be people. There will be a fisherman who talks in impure Hindi about how he saw the terrorists getting down from the rubber dingy they used to travel. And there will be a debate where different experts tell their own views about how the world should work. One foreigner telling India should unite with Pakistan. And an angry Indian saying how Pakistan hurt the “people of India”, and how they want nothing but a war. And the anchor who does not let emotion come into the debate, but still pours in questions which can be answered only through emotions. There will be sports stars, analysts, super sexy models, actors (including actresses), yoga masters, commentators, extras, junior artists, real artists, judges, showmen, and the animal planet man who goes after the largest otters. And there will be another debate, where a victim describes very emotionally about how he was terrified as well as all others when they heard gun shots, and how the hotel authorities helped them to escape, and how they comforted each other, and how the NSGs gave them cover and took them to safety under the local police. And then about how there was some report which joked at the victims who suffered. How the government was doing nothing. How Ajmal Kasab has more security than any other man in Mumbai. And he asks the minister P Chidambaram “What have you done?”
    And the minister says calmly “If you were I what would you have done. That’s the answer to that question.” (This is when I came to understand that all our politicians are not fools running after power)

    And there is this whole sense of joy, sorrow, humour, love, trust, respect, motivation, failure, desperation, solitude, business, confidence, seduction, success, hope, affection, envy, hatred, warmth,…This is called the colour of life. The way things go on. The way people come and go. The way topics come and go. But life goes on, for ever and ever.

    Just get out of the painting called life and view it as a whole. It’s so colourful. When we are inside it, seeing only our neighbouring pixel, we can’t see the true colour of life.


    Let life go on…

  • Memento – The Simplest Desktop Notes Application

    You ask this:

    I want an application that can be used to attach sticky notes or to do lists or just some notes on my desktop.
    It should run with almost no memory requirement.
    Don’t make me download higher than 1 MB. (I mean download must be less than 1 MB)
    It should be easy to use.
    It must be free.

    and you search the whole internet, you won’t find this:
    Memento. Your tool. Just download it, install it, enjoy making to do lists, (like the pen and pad to do lists) and simplify your life.

    Here’s the site:
    Memento – Guys with Towels

    ——
    Related Posts:
    How a pen and a pad can save you a lot

  • Achieving God

    The success of experiencing what I did and am trying to share with you through this post will depend on how detached you are from your mind. (In doubt? Read the post The Secret to (Infinite) Happiness)
    Earlier I told you about the happiness you get out of the realisation that you are neither your body, nor your mind, and that how your body or mind feels is not how you feel. There we talked about detaching your mind from yourself, and not letting your mind influence you.
    But today we are advancing to the next step. Controlling your mind

    We often find ourselves indulging in pleasures (what saintly people call worldly pleasures). And most often we find that something in us does not want us to do that. Let it be watching television on the day before your exams, or having a deadline closing in and still finding time for everything else but the project, or knowing that you have to exercise for a healthy life, but still in the bed every morning; the times when you say “I couldn’t resist”

    What was it that you couldn’t resist on those occasions? The desire in your mind.

    Until you learn how to control your mind, true happiness can never be achieved.

    And this ability, the ability to control your mind is very difficult to acquire, unless you are willing to train it for hours and hours. (In saintly terms, prayer or meditation)

    But I just found a short-cut.

    Let’s start it straight away. (Works well if there is anything you have been postponing)
    Find a disgusting task, completing assignments, learning, reading, exercising (these will turn to be fun later, as I will show you).
    Try to do it now.
    Your mind is telling you not to do it.
    Try to do it. Mind fighting. You try. Mind. You. Mind. >><< egh… dishyum… dishyum… ><
    Don’t let mind take over you. Control your mind. Teach it that you are the master and it your slave.
    Make it do what you want.
    Now, the first task is the only difficult task. If you can do this by brute force over your mind, you are successful. Everything else is easier.

    The moment you finish the first task something in you starts working. You feel a lot satisfied, confident,…
    These are the symptoms that mind has accepted you as its master.

    If nothing happened it is because you did the task through compromise with your mind. You told your mind to remain silent for a few minutes, while you finish the task. Mind will step aside, and, after you finish the task, take over again. That is not the way. Tell the mind first hand that you decide what to do, and that mind can only accept what you decide. Then do the task. And even after the task, you will remain the master.

    Now, the satisfaction, the pleasure you just had, remember it. Just remember how happy you feel when you are in control of yourself (and not your mind). Don’t forget that ever.

    (If you can, read the rest of this post only later. Though nothing is going to happen even if you read it now, it helps you better to take the control of your mind, if you read it later.)
    _______________________________________________________

    If you are like me, your mind will regain its authority within 2 hours of completing the first task.
    It will hold a diplomatic conversation with you. Mind: “Hey! I accept defeat, you are my master. Will you please let me enjoy for an hour?” It will humbly request you. And you will let it. But the moment you do that mind will be back in power. So, what to do now?

    Actually you shouldn’t have allowed the mind even a moment. The more freedom you give your mind, the more it will take control of you. But still, you got trapped. Now how do you bounce back? Simple. Remember the pleasure you had when you had mind under your control? Yes, that pleasure of satisfaction and the feel of control (far better than even OP :D). Remember it. Savour its sweetness. So you have two pleasures waiting for you, one silly, fragile pleasure and the other everlasting, supreme pleasure.

    Remember it and fight your mind. Lo! Your control is back with you. And don’t lose it to mind ever again.

    Just go in full control of your mind for a day or two.
    And when you are pretty sure that you have your mind under your control, let it have some fun, still under your control. Some controlled entertainment. For an hour or so. And every otherwise gruelling thing you do, command the mind to treat that it is fun.

    The mind is a great servant but a horrible master

    And when letting your mind have fun be cautious. Our mind is so tricky that sometimes it will make us think that we are in control while actually it is in control. This can be called pseudo control. But you can easily identify whether you are having pseudo control or actual control. Just command your mind to do something, if it obeys you are in control, and if it doesn’t you’ll have to start taming it again.

    So, once you have tamed your mind, like a good pet dog, it will obey whatever you say. And may be if our mind does have some secret potentials like the saints say, then some day we will be able to bend spoons.

    And when you are in complete control of your mind, then you are in control, you are God, the Almighty.
    Enjoy the bliss.

  • Some Windows Keyboard Shortcuts You Probably Didn’t Know Of

    I found out some shortcuts recently which I didn’t know of.

    • Ctrl + Tab will switch through the tabs in a tabbed window like that of Firefox
    • Alt + Enter will open up the properties of a file or folder when it is selected (while enter opens it)
    • F2 can rename an item
    • Win Key (start) + Tab will cycle through items on the taskbar, without opening them (then, pressing Enter will open them)

    While dragging an item for copying or moving

    • Ctrl while dragging a file will cause it to be copied
    • Shift while dragging a file will cause it to be moved
    • Alt while dragging a file will cause a shortcut to be placed in the destination folder

    While exploring in windows explorer

    • Left and Right Arrows will collapse and expand folders (so will + and – in the number pad)
    • * (in the number pad) will expand all folders below the current selection
    • F6 will switch panes

    While viewing folders (like in My Computer

    • Backspace will let you go to the upper level folder
    • Alt + Right or Left Arrow will go forward or backward

    While editing text

    • Ctrl + Backspace will erase a whole word.
    • Ctrl + Left or Right Arrow will go one word left or right
    • Ctrl + Home or End will go to the first or last position
    • Shift + Any movement selects text. (Shift + Ctrl + Home will select from first to the point where you are, Shift + Home will select the line up to where you are, like wise)

    Some of these have been filtered from worldstart.com

    Get time to enjoy life

  • When You Look Back At The End…

    Life whizzes past you so quickly that you forget to do or get what you really want to.
    You go school for years and finally there will be a day of farewell and you suddenly feel you missed to do something. You spend your youth, your winged days and finally when you start slowing down you find that you could have did even more when you were younger. And when you finish bringing up your family, you think you could have did it better. You retire, and you find that you did nothing more than anyone would have done. Finally you are ready to breath your last, and while you look back at your life, you feel like you have messed it up. Wasted a whole life.

    Why is it such that it strikes us only at the end, when we have got little time left, that we are doing things the wrong way? Is there no way to get an advance notice?

    Fortunately, there is. And it’s really simple.

    Just think of the flashback that’s going to happen at the end. What scenes would you want to see. Make them happen now, right now.

    There’s nothing you can’t do that you would wish you had done. Our only fault is that we procrastinate. We take life as it comes and do nothing to make it as we think it should be. We lack the courage to take the initiative to make things happen.

    We think that there is always a tomorrow.
    But we forget that there isn’t always.

    We think that nothing will happen if we don’t do it now.
    But we forget that later we may wish we had done it.

    We think that we will end up losing.
    But what have we got to lose?

    We think that life takes us to where we will reach.
    But we forget that we decide where life should take us.

    And that’s why I’m saying:  

    Live the best life you can, so that in the future no one can point at your life and say “Hey! You missed the point”