eapen's world

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A Foreigner’s guide to getting a cell phone… err… mobile … in India

Rule 1: Forget everything you have learned

Rule 2: Remember to forget everything you learn below when you leave

1. Customer is the slave. Complaining won’t help much and once you have done something and it has passed 24 hrs, you cannot be helped.
2. Lifetime validity – I am still not quite sure but I believe it means you can get free incoming calls for life provided you fulfill some conditions set by the provider (like recharging at least Rs200 every 6 months) or so.
3. A SIM card can be had for as little as Rs 20 – perhaps even lower + a xerox of your ID + a passport photo
4. A franchise of a company (in my case – Reliance) is as useful as the guy who sells Paan and sells SIM cards. They dont have much power, any of the latest info.
5. Interstate calling is

   called STD (not that STD dummy!) and is more expensive than local calls (The way the old landline POTS system worked)

6. Booster packs
7. SMS
8. Activation order
9. You will only learn through mistakes and there is no single person you can call and find out all the information you need. You will only get the run-around.
10. Online billing… hah! Are you on crack?
11. Now most providers have the per-second billing and I highly recommend that for any new subscriber. It works out to be most cost-effective in my opinion (even if a full minute call works out to be 60 paise vs 50 paise for a 1 min call with some other plans).

TIP: Getting Spam SMS?!!? Send an SMS with the message “DND” to 1090 but you still might get advertising offers from the provider but the number of messages goes down significantly.

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As a python newbie and expert in other languages – I find this hilarious…

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I seriously regret not having got a NAS (Network Attached Storage) sooner.

I just got the DNS-321 NAS (made by D-Link) and throug h some links, I was able to install fun_plug which adds a lot of functionality to this box. It works as an iTunes device, FTP server, HTTP server (with fun_plug) and also allows you to install its custom Bittorrent software. However, with the fun_plug installed, you can install the popular (Mac) Transmission client which you manage with the web interface. There are several scripts and guides that help you through the process and I customized some of the scripts to meet my needs. It was fun to hack away via SSH (yes – geeks get excited by such simple or not-so-simple tasks) and I got to use the vi editor which I probably haven’t used since my Computer Science classes back at the University of Minnesota.

So here are the reasons you need to get a NAS:

1. Space, Space and more space (I can pretty cheaply throw in 2 1TB drives or 2 1.5TB drives compared to the 800GB in my desktop)
2. Low Power Consumption (all about going green and cutting down the electricity bill)
3. No need to buy CD/DVDs to burn data onto
4. Use for TimeMachine backups or other data backups
5. Can set it up to use RAID for additional protection
6. Uses ext2 or ext3 for the filesystem
7. Looks neat and takes less space
8. Hardwired to the network, thereby cutting down network interference (at least on one leg if you are viewing media wirelessly)
9. Space – did I mention that already??

I currently have my PS3 and NAS both hooked up to the same router and don’t encounter any of the buffering issues I had earlier when I was streaming media off my desktop’s hard drive (The desktop connected wirelessly to my router). Coming to think of it, I got a wireless router mainly for my desktop to help reduce the network issues I was having and this could have saved me $60 back in the day.

Now, that you know this – what are you waiting for? Go get one if you don’t have one already. In the long-run, I am positive this will save me some money.

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