Ezzy Enough - Random thoughts of an average mind

I recently purchased a Canon 550D camera using PaisaPay EMI facility.

Key features of PaisaPay EMI* :

• Available on ICICI, HDFC and Citibank credit cards
• Payment can be done in 3 or 6 monthly installments
• No interest charged on EMI payments
• Instant online approval of loan amount
• No paperwork required
• No down payment required

*3 month EMI is not charged any convenience charges.

6 month EMI is charged an additional 2.5% of the order amount as convenience charges (including 10.3% service tax). This amount will be charged in 6 installments added to the installment amount appearing on your Credit card statement.

Example: Your total amount is Rs. 10000

You will be charged 2.5% on this amount i.e. Rs. 250 payable in installments. The total charge on your credit card for this transaction will be Rs. 10250. This amount will be charged in 6 installments therefore each installment will be Rs. 10250 / 6.

Important thing to note here is that you will be charged the full amount of the purchase.

This is what the eBay India support person ‘Lily B.‘ had to say:

…well, thats just a catchy title, not completely irrelevant though. :-)

Nothing wrong in using Google Public DNS, but as noted by others, its not ideal for everyone — slowed down my speed about 250kbps, compared to my regular DNS.

So, here’s a great tool to search for fastest and nearest DNS available for your location — Namebench; Just install and run it with default settings and it will present you with a detailed benchmark of your current DNS and other available DNS servers that you can use.

OpenDNS works best (about 54% faster than Google DNS) for me right now, Sorry Google! :)

Creating a new page with 0.00 margins or modifying an existing page margins from “Page Setup..” apparently has no effect on the margins in Firefox.

The Fix

Update these about:config entries:

print.print_margin_bottom - make it 0
print.print_margin_left - make it 0
print.print_margin_right - make it 0
print.print_margin_top - make it 0

Hope it helps!

So I installed Windows 7 after hearing a lot of positive buzz. But this is one (of many) thing that NEVER EVER happens in OS X…

Makes me think that there is still something wrong and rotten in the core. I wish they rewrote the whole thing!

Anyway, overall, Windows 7 does look and works a little better than its predecessors.

Arial has been around a very long time but Web 2.0 returned Arial back to its glory days and It spread like a virus through the typographic landscape.

But now, Lucida (Grande) is the new Arial. Lucida is now everywhere, a side effect of Mac’s success.

Lucida Grande

Lucida Grande is a humanist sans-serif typeface included with the Mac OS X. It is currently used throughout the Mac OS X user interface, as well as in Safari on Windows.

As with all humanist typefaces, these fonts allude to human handwriting in the construction of the letters, making the type as a whole more friendly and warm than something like Arial or Helvetica.

Some of the big sites like Facebook, Twitter, Last.fm, Hulu, and Techcrunch and many others are already using Lucida. And well, I too am using Lucida for this (qelix.com) website. :)

Using it on your website

Lucida Grande is a great font to use in websites, but it doesn’t come standard with Windows, so we turn to Lucida Sans Unicode and Lucida Sans to get a similar look. Unfortunately, both typefaces have imperfections that make them less-than-worthy candidates for substitution. The solution to this is to create a hybrid font set, like so:

body {
    font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Grande", Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
}
 
strong, em, b, i, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, address {
    font-family: "Lucida Sans", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Grande", Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
}

Its assigns Lucida Sans Unicode as the base font and override the other elements (add others if you like) with Lucida Sans. This effectively combines the best of both.

Like everyone else, I was getting pathetic speeds (120kbps) from my 2mbps ADSL connection over WiFi, so I tweaked my router a bit and I get around 1.6mbps consistently now.

Backup or write down your current settings first so you can revert back anytime. So, here’s what to change:

Channel ID: Channel 9 (2452 Mhz)
Beacon Interval: 50
RTS/CTS Threshold: 2305 (Also try 1500, 2305 works better for me though)
Fragmentation Threshold: 2304 (Also try 1024, 2304 works better for me though)
DTIM: 1
Protocol: 802.11 b (This is the most important bit. 802.11 b works better for iPhone, for some reason)

Reboot router and reconnect.

Note: The max data rate of 802.11b protocol is 11 Mbit/s, if your connection speed is less than or equal to that speed, you’re good, if its greater (which is highly unlikely, unless you’re in France, Japan, or Singapore etc..), then your speed will be capped at 11 Mbit/s. My connection is 2mbps, so its not a problem for me.

Hope it helps! Let me know in the comments how it worked for you.

- Fixes Home/End Keys
- and Backward/Forward keys

Download a keyfixed version directly here (zip - 17.13MB), or get toolkit.jar and hack manually.