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Photography tips for Beginners Learn the basics before you step out to take a picture Buying a digital camera is easy. Anyone with money can do that. But just because you have a camera does not make you a photographer. Even if you have the eye of a photographer, you need to learn the basics first before you step out to take your first picture. Today we will be discussing some of the basic things that you must keep in mind while photographing. Check your battery and memory card Always keep a tab on the amount of power in your battery. When you are not using your camera or before you are going out somewhere with it, make sure you recharge the battery. If you are going to take a lot of pictures, especially with a flash, then it makes sense to take a fully charged spare battery with you. Also, make sure that you have a memory card inside your camera before you head out. Some cameras do not notify you when there is no memory card present inside and allows you to save the images on the internal memory. This might fool you into thinking that you have the memory card inserted when you could just be four shots away from running out of internal memory. Always check the memory card and make sure it has enough memory left for your shots. Also buy a spare one if you are planning to shoot a lot. They don't cost much these days. An 8GB Class 2 SDHC card would set you back by Rs. 650, whereas a 16GB card costs Rs. 1,400. For better performance, especially during video recording or high speed shooting, consider a faster Class 6 or Class 10 cards, but also expect to pay a lot more. Keep the lens clean Taking care of the lens is one of the most important things about photography. Think of them as your own eyes and take care of it in a similar way. For a lens to deliver the best possible performance, it should always be kept clean. Cleaning a lens also requires a great deal of care; don't clean it with the same cloth you wipe the floor with! Refer to the following video to learn how to properly clean your camera lens. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7S6VARidHk&feature=player_embedded Hold the camera properly It's important that you learn to hold the camera properly while shooting to prevent blurry shots, or worse, dropping the camera. Always hold the camera with both your hands. You may think you look cool shooting with one hand but it's bad for the photos you click. Place your index finger of your right hand on the shutter and the thumb on the area next to the display. Hold the base of the camera with the other hand to stabilize it. Make sure none of your fingers are covering the lens, the flash or the focus assist light. Don't keep your elbows floating and instead stick them close to your body to reduce shake. Stand with your feet slightly apart and don't stand on a moving or unstable surface. Also, right when you are about to press the shutter, hold your breath in for a second to become completely still and then release your breath once you take the shot. Of course the best thing to do would be to not hold the camera at all and instead keep it on a still surface or mount it on a tripod. This is especially necessary when you are shooting in low-light without a flash or at high zoom levels, where even the tiniest of movements gets magnified. When you are shooting video, make sure you are not blocking the microphones on the camera. Also, do not hold the camera vertically. Unlike still images which are saved in portrait orientation when you hold the camera vertically, the same does not happen with videos. So if you don't want to watch your videos with your neck at an angle, hold the camera normally while shooting. Familiarize yourself with the settings Cameras today come with a great deal of features built-in. Some may simply be gimmicks, while some can be of great assistance while shooting. So it is important that you are familiar with all the features that your camera has, so you can get the best out of it. Read the manual when you buy the camera and find out how you can go about accessing all of them. You don't want to be stuck fiddling with the settings when people in front of you are waiting to get their picture taken. Use auto mode for a quick shot Sometimes it is best to leave all the settings behind and use the auto mode when you quickly need to take a shot. You could lose a precious moment as you try to adjust the settings on your camera. Just stick it into auto and press the shutter and hope that the image comes out right. Remember, you can always adjust the image later in a photo editor but you cannot get that moment back once it has passed. Disable digital zoom Even though all cameras have optical zoom these days most of them still give the option of digital zoom in the settings. As you may know by now, digital zoom is not true zoom and all it does is mess with your photos. And since you may accidentally end up using digital zoom once you reach the end of optical zoom, it would be best to disable it completely from the settings. Don't use the flash unnecessarily A flash is useful in only a handful of scenarios. One is when it is completely dark. Second would be when the subject is illuminated from the back, causing its front to be in its own shadow. In this situation a flash can help light up the front of the subject. But apart from these situations a flash is of little use. In fact, the harsh white light can ruin your images. If you are into artistic photography, you would do better by switching the flash off. If all you want is to make sure all the subjects in your pictures are properly visible, then it makes sense to use the flash. In either case, don't leave it on auto mode, making it fire willy-nilly. Use the appropriate mode on the camera You will notice that your camera has multiple modes, such as, macro, portrait, landscape, etc. These modes are created by a combination of settings that otherwise you'd have to adjust manually to achieve the same results. Although auto modes aren't always reliable, they can give surprisingly good results at times with minimal effort from the photographer. Macro mode is very useful when shooting object that are very close to the lens. Make sure you stick your camera in the right mode depending upon the conditions to get the best results. Use optical viewfinder if possible Using optical viewfinder has a couple of advantages. First, since the camera is now up against your face, it is more stable than when floating in your hands. Secondly, it lets you disable the display and conserve some battery. Most point-and-shoot cameras these days don't come with an optical viewfinder though and unlike those on DSLRs are bound to have some amount of parallax. Always shoot in RAW if possible All the DSLRs have this option and nowadays several point-and-shoot cameras also offer you the choice of saving images in RAW. An image saved in RAW format is unprocessed and hence in its purest form. This file is not directly usable for printing and very few applications can open it. It is usually meant for image editors, where you can take the unprocessed image and then make whatever changes you see fit and then save the image in a traditional format such as JPEG for viewing or editing. There is no fixed format for RAW and each camera manufacturer has its own version, so you need to make sure your image editor is compatible with it. Also, shooting in RAW only makes sense if you are going to edit the image later, otherwise it would be better to shoot in JPEG, as RAW files are very large in size and take up sizable amount of space on the memory card. If you are unsure, you can use the JPEG+RAW mode, which most cameras supporting RAW have, which saves the same image in both JPEG as well as RAW. Backup your images Make sure you always backup your images. If you have stored the images on the hard drive, make sure you have another copy of it somewhere else as hard drives are prone to failure. A smart thing to do would be to save the images on an online service such as Microsoft SkyDrive or Flickr. The former is free while the latter has a yearly fee, but is more suitable for those who want to share their photos with others. Do keep in mind that there is a slim chance of failure with cloud based storage as well, as was demonstrated by a recent incident where an account of a Flickr user was accidentally deleted by Flickr, causing four years' worth of images to be lost in an instant. If your images are on a memory card and you are waiting to transfer to a computer then use the lock switch found on all SD cards. This puts the card in a read-only mode, which means you cannot write or delete any data on the card. You can also get an Eye-Fi card for your camera, which wirelessly upload images on the card to a computer through Wi-Fi, so you don't have to worry about the data on your card getting deleted. In the next part of this article we shall discuss some of the more advanced techniques that you can employ to take great pictures. Thanks to Prasad Naik. Courtesy : Techtree

Date of Purchase : 1 day before Diwali (Nov 2010) Place of Purchase : Spice Hotspot in local Mall Cost : Rs. 10,500 Free : a. Spice QT50 Dual GSM SIM QWERTY handset (MRP 2999) [special Diwali Offer] - This was taken by one of my colleague @ Rs.2000, so effective cost Rs. 8,500 b. Screenguard (Model specific screenguard not available, Samsung Monte guard fitted all right) In the Box: Handset, Battery, Charger (Main unit with USB slot), Data cable which also act as charging cable, handsfree, driver CD, user manual The phone came with Android 1.6. I upgraded to 2.1 after a week by downloading the updater tool from Spice official website. After updation, the processor got underclocked to 480 Mhz from 600 Mhz in earlier version. However, this seemed to increase the battery backup. Also, in 1.6 version, there was a separate JAVA running app which vanished after updation. During the next month, thanks to Google, I found that this handset has many clones around the world. It is supposed to be made by a Taiwan based Co. The following are some of the clones (there could be more), in different countries, 1.Apanda A60(China) http://www.apanda.com.cn/ 2.Foxconn 3.China Vision Excalibur 4.Cincinnati Bell Blaze f800 5.Commtiva Z71 (Taiwan) 6.Muchtel A1(Taiwan) http://www.muchtel.com/products/muchtel-a1.html 7.Nexian Journey A890(Indonesia) http://www.nexian.co.id/index.php/product.html 8.Orange Boston 9.ViboA688(Taiwan) http://www.vibo.com.tw/CWS/Consumer_Netcard,2c9681c62913f646012959ee62a500a0,,,.html#top 10.Wellcom A88(Thailand):http://www.wellcommobile.com/th/a88.html 11.Motorola Quench XT502 12.Spice Mi-300 http://www.spiceglobal.com/SpiceMobiles/Model.aspx?Id=167 13.Videocon V7500 (with modified body) There is a thriving blog on Orange Boston http://boston-mania.blogspot.com/ In that blog, the official Android 2.2 ROM for Foxconn and Apanda A60 are available and as per user comments, the same can be used with Spice Mi300 right out of the box. However, so far I have not taken the plunge. Looks & Form The looks are a little geeky and has a plastic feel to it. The size is a little big for the shirt pocket. Fits well in Pant/Coat pocket. Fits well in hand and fells light enough. Touchscreen & Display The touchscreen is very responsive and even the slightest touch is enough and it also has a trackball. It supports multitouch and pinch zoom. However, the 4 touch sensitive navigation buttons below the screen (Home, Return etc) are not backlit which initially made it really frustrating to use the phone in the dark, however, it got better with practice. The default QWERTY keypad is easy to use. It is 3.2-inch HVGA capacitive touchscreen with 480x320 display and color output of 256K colors. There are 5 screens for creating shortcuts. Camera The Camera supposed to be a 5 MP one and has a LED flash. However, it failed to my expectation particularly in close-up. There are some major contrast issues. However, for distances over 6 feet, it works well. The video quality is good and better than most phones that I have seen. Call Clarity There seems some issues with the earpiece as the voice seem to break every once in a while. However, with handsfree (corded as well as bluetooth) this issue is resolved. Connectivity It has 3G (HSDPA), Wifi & Bluetooth. I have been using it with a MTNL 3G connection. Speed has been good. I use it daily for skype voice call without facing any call breaks. Also works well with my home Broadband on Wifi. Bluetooth file transfer and headset works well. Responsiveness The phone tend to become sluggish if too many apps are open. However, I normally use only music player, twitter, gmail, calender and browser and kill the other apps. With that, the response is good. MultiMedia & Browsing It does not have a FM radio, which is a little put off. It has a 3.5 mm jack. The display is good. MP3, MP4 and mpeg files play nicely. By default, videos play in landscape more. It is supposed to support 3gpp, 3gpp2, aac, amr-NB, amr-wb, imelody, mid, midi, mp3, mp4, mpeg3, mpeg, mpg, qcp, sp-midi, wav files. But have not so far tested the full array. It comes preloaded with Youtube app. It does not support flash. But that I understand is Android issue. It does not support DivX also. But installing Rockplayer solved that. The default browser is actually quite good. I also installed Dolphin & UCB browsers. The loading is fast. But that I suppose is thanks to 3G connection. Email I have been using the default Gmail option. Have not configured the Email app. It is supposed to support POP3 & IMAP mails. GPS & E-compass It has GPS including assisted GPS. I have not tried the assisted mode. But normal GPS locks in about a minute. It works well with the default Gmaps. The initial calibration of E-compass took about 4 to 5 minutes. Thereafter, it has been working fine. Memory Card It is supposed to support upto 32 GB Micro SD Card. I currently have a 8 GB card installed which works without any problem. Not tested with higher capacity. It supports installing apps from SD card and installing unsigned apps. Battery Backup This seems to be a problem area. The 1230 maH battery last only for a day with moderate use. I mostly use twitter, gmail, calender, aldiko (about 15-20 min), skype (voice call – 10 min) and music player (30-45 min) and keep wifi and GPS switched off. I charge in the morning, and by 10 at night, its around 35%. Final verdict Overall, at this price, its a good value for money.

Best Choices in GSM Androids in Indian Market It has been quite some time since we last compiled the list of best Android devices in India. To make it easier for our readers, we will be dividing our list into three categories – High-end, Mid-range, and Budget Android smartphones. Currently, there are over 40 Android smartphones available in Indian market with prices ranging from 32K to 6K INR. Now, that is HUGE number and sometimes it is hard to find the best device in a fixed budget. So let's try to make things easy for you. Best High-End Android Smartphones in India: Starting from the high-end Android devices, this category has the truly rocking phones with some great specifications. We have included phone with prices between 21,000 and 30,000 INR. HTC Desire HD: 1 GHz processor with 8 MP camera, 4.3 inch display and Android 2.2 with HTC Sense. Priced around Rs 27,000. HTC Desire Z: 800 Mhz processor, 5 MP camera, 3.7 inch display and Android 2.2 with HTC Sense. Desire Z has a huge dev community. Priced around Rs 25,500. Samsung Galaxy S: 1 Ghz processor, 5 MP camera with front facing cam, 4 inch display, and Android 2.2 with Touchwiz. Although it is out of stock at most of the places, we are expecting more stocks with Super Clear LCD in February. Dell Streak: 1 Ghz processor, 5 MP camera with VGA front facing cam, 5 inch display, Android 2.2 with Stage UI. It may be a little big for some, but you can fine with using headsets more often it is great. Priced around Rs 30,000. Best Mid-Range Android Smartphones in India: Coming to mid-range devices, this category might not having rocking specifications like high end phones, but still they are enough in making your Android experience memorable. We have included phones between prices Rs 14,000 and Rs 20,999 in this category. HTC Desire: 1 Ghz processor, 3.7 inch SLCD display, 5 MP camera and Android 2.2 with HTC Sense. Desire was one of high end phone, but due to price drop is reached in the budget of people looking for mid-range devices. It is priced around Rs 21,000 in the retail market; a little bargain can help. Motorola Defy: Launched recently; 3.7 inch display, 5 MP, 800 MHz processor, and Android 2.1 [Froyo coming later this year]. Priced around 18,000 INR. Motorola Milestone: 3.7 inch display, 5 MP camera, 550 Mhz processor, and Android 2.1 [Froyo coming next month]. Priced around 20,000 INR in retail market. Dell XCD35: Rebranded ZTE Blade, it is a great phone with awesome dev community. 3.5 inch display, 600 Mhz processor, 3 MP camera, and Android 2.1. Priced around 14,500 INR · HTC Legend: 3.2 inch display, 600 Mhz processor, 5 MP camera, and Android 2.2 with HTC Sense. Priced around 18,000 in the market. Best Entry-level Android phones in India: Coming last to the best Android smartphones for the budget conscious users, we have included best smartphone priced below Rs 12,999. Huawei Ideos: 2.8 inch capacitive display, 3.2 MP camera, 528 processor, and Android 2.2. Priced around 8K in the market. LG Optimus One: 3.2 inch display, 600 Mhz processor, 3 MP camera and Android 2.2. Priced around 11,500 INR Samsung Galaxy 3: Android 2.1 with Touchwiz 3.0, 3.2 inch touchscreen, 3.2 MP camera, and 667 Mhz processor. Priced around 11,000 INR. Samsung Galaxy 551: 667MHz processor, 3.2-inch display, 3MP camera, and Android 2.2 with Touchwiz. Priced around 12,500 INR. Source: Androidos

^^^ See here for the answer http://www.google.co...-TV-are-Friends

Microsoft’s Bing uses Google search results—and denies it 2/01/2011 02:56:00 PMBy now, you may have read Danny Sullivan’s recent post: “Google: Bing is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results” and heard Microsoft’s response, “We do not copy Google's results.” However you define copying, the bottom line is, these Bing results came directly from Google. I’d like to give you some background and details of our experiments that lead us to understand just how Bing is using Google web search results. It all started with tarsorrhaphy. Really. As it happens, tarsorrhaphy is a rare surgical procedure on eyelids. And in the summer of 2010, we were looking at the search results for an unusual misspelled query [torsorophy]. Google returned the correct spelling—tarsorrhaphy—along with results for the corrected query. At that time, Bing had no results for the misspelling. Later in the summer, Bing started returning our first result to their users without offering the spell correction (see screenshots below). This was very strange. How could they return our first result to their users without the correct spelling? Had they known the correct spelling, they could have returned several more relevant results for the corrected query. This example opened our eyes, and over the next few months we noticed that URLs from Google search results would later appear in Bing with increasing frequency for all kinds of queries: popular queries, rare or unusual queries and misspelled queries. Even search results that we would consider mistakes of our algorithms started showing up on Bing. We couldn’t shake the feeling that something was going on, and our suspicions became much stronger in late October 2010 when we noticed a significant increase in how often Google’s top search result appeared at the top of Bing’s ranking for a variety of queries. This statistical pattern was too striking to ignore. To test our hypothesis, we needed an experiment to determine whether Microsoft was really using Google’s search results in Bing’s ranking. We created about 100 “synthetic queries”—queries that you would never expect a user to type, such as [hiybbprqag]. As a one-time experiment, for each synthetic query we inserted as Google’s top result a unique (real) webpage which had nothing to do with the query. Below is an example: To be clear, the synthetic query had no relationship with the inserted result we chose—the query didn’t appear on the webpage, and there were no links to the webpage with that query phrase. In other words, there was absolutely no reason for any search engine to return that webpage for that synthetic query. You can think of the synthetic queries with inserted results as the search engine equivalent of marked bills in a bank. We gave 20 of our engineers laptops with a fresh install of Microsoft Windows running Internet Explorer 8 with Bing Toolbar installed. As part of the install process, we opted in to the “Suggested Sites” feature of IE8, and we accepted the default options for the Bing Toolbar. We asked these engineers to enter the synthetic queries into the search box on the Google home page, and click on the results, i.e., the results we inserted. We were surprised that within a couple weeks of starting this experiment, our inserted results started appearing in Bing. Below is an example: a search for [hiybbprqag] on Bing returned a page about seating at a theater in Los Angeles. As far as we know, the only connection between the query and result is Google’s result page (shown above). We saw this happen for multiple queries. For the query [delhipublicschool40 chdjob] we inserted a search result for a credit union: The same credit union soon showed up on Bing for that query: For the query [juegosdeben1ogrande] we inserted a page of hip hop bling jewelry: And the same hip hop bling page showed up in Bing: As we see it, this experiment confirms our suspicion that Bing is using some combination of: Internet Explorer 8, which can send data to Microsoft via its Suggested Sites feature the Bing Toolbar, which can send data via Microsoft’s Customer Experience Improvement Program or possibly some other means to send data to Bing on what people search for on Google and the Google search results they click. Those results from Google are then more likely to show up on Bing. Put another way, some Bing results increasingly look like an incomplete, stale version of Google results—a cheap imitation. At Google we strongly believe in innovation and are proud of our search quality. We’ve invested thousands of person-years into developing our search algorithms because we want our users to get the right answer every time they search, and that’s not easy. We look forward to competing with genuinely new search algorithms out there—algorithms built on core innovation, and not on recycled search results from a competitor. So to all the users out there looking for the most authentic, relevant search results, we encourage you to come directly to Google. And to those who have asked what we want out of all this, the answer is simple: we'd like for this practice to stop. Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow

Just woke up...... Well here are Dont's List dont even remotely think of this they will get you one... Unprotected sexual intercourse with infected person (either heterosexual or homosexual) there are reports that transmission rate is more in homosexual then in heterosexual Transfusion of infected blood or blood products this is most disastrous as this can have been stopped and not done, friends when ever you go to seek blood in a blood bank always remember to check HIV and HbS Ag in it, and dont pressurize the doctor or attendant to do it too fast - he knows what he is doing let him finish, otherwise he will skip things and you will be in trouble. Infected mother to her baby during pregnancy, birth process and through breast feeding Use of infected needles and instruments without sterilization or sharing of needles and syringes by HIV drug addicts Always insist on New Untempered syringe and tubes - never reuse and see to it that they destroy it after single use. Friends its very difficult to get HIV unless you want to - HIV virus is very delicate

Dear Friends, My appeal to you to not run the thread based on the figures available in the internet. I feel all those figures are basically paid campaigns by operators to fool the general public and turn the tide towards them. No entity can have real data other than Syniverse and MNP Interconnection(Telcordia). I don't think any of those figures available in different websites are sourced from Syniverse and MNP Interconnection and consolidated to give pan-India value. If actually any of those websites have sourced their information from MNP operators, they could have proudly mentioned it in their website that 'these figures are sourced from anonymous sources in MNP operators'. I'm 100% inclined to believe these figures are actually fudged and provided to the last digit to make it to appear it be real.

Answers to Query 2 to 4.... 2. Yes. Those Windows Mobile Plans are available for CDMA. 3. Two Options For EVDO in Reliance, -Buy an OMH Sim handset like Samsung Corby, LG 510 Cookie Zip & Others...Get the EVDO activated from Backend...EVDO Plans are here http://www.rcom.co.i...et.html#tariffP -OR Buy a handset from the listing at RIMweb which says EVDO available in Reliance 4. Speeds for 1x are O.K.

Hmmm.... Seems like Micro$oft is an international version of Reliance, wrt ethics and honesty...