Technology. Without Error

After much deliberation, I’ve decided to make thunderror.com a much more open blog for me to post onto. An open destination for all that I blog perhaps. All this while I have only always tried to post only technology related topics on here and I’ve noticed that I blog lesser and lesser about technology around here and my posts at postedbits.com were more popular anyway. I decided that get back to posting at thunderror.com and give my original blog the attention it deserves.

Technology is a topic worthy of being blogged about. But then, I think its not really a great idea to constrain a blog to a single topic unless of course I’m aiming at a targeted audience, Ad- based revenue or intend to become a master tech-blogger! Here are four reasons why I don’t think I shouldn’t be blogging about technology alone.

This decision to open up thunderror.com to topics other than technology should result in

1. Newer categories. For now, I have introduced 2 more categories > General & Humor. You will find them on the categories menu on the main page.
2. A wider audience. Technology blogs are everywhere. Every geek is out there creating a technology blog, but what about someone who doesn’t care for the most latest gadget or the latest product from Google?
3. This blog getting updated more frequently. I’m not really too sure of this, but well if this doesn’t work; I guess nothing will.
4. The blog feels a bit more human. I intend to smoothen out the steel cold technology edge that it has had all this time.
5. I still intend to write about technology out here. But then those posts would be
6. A lot more tags on my tag cloud!

I’m still not sure if I intend to use my posterous to autopost to this blog. But I guess I’ll make sure this post is on it for sure.

It was this review for the opera 10 browser that made me think about it. Thanks to the proliferation of apis, desktop and mobile applications which have made my devices completely internet enabled devices, I now wonder what I would the browser for.

1. I check my email. But I can check that using IMAP on my mobile phone or via Thunderbird on my desktop.
2. Facebook. I get an email notification, that’s when I need to check the facebook page. I have the facebook app on my mobile, which does quite a decent job, and even Gravity supports fb. I don’t use seesmic, so on my laptop, I need to use the browser.
3. News that which twitter hasn’t delivered, I need a browser for. Of course I could use RSS feeds, but I find that most of the RSS feeds for newspapers pretty much crowd up my reader with several items which will remain unread forever. So I do need a browser, or I could just read the newspaper!
4. Twitter. Gravity on my phone and Destroy twitter on my laptop.
5. Reference. Most of my reference is when I don’t exactly have access to a laptop or don’t have time to get to it. Which means, my mobile search tool is what I use for reference. It still uses the default browser on my mobile though.
6. Google reader. Gravity does a decent job, but I still would like to see images and links on my mobile phone. Now this is something I definitely need a browser for.
7. Blogging. Thanks to posterous, all I now need to do is to send an email and I have a blog post.

My laptop is all about the browser. In fact, the browser is on the startup application list. So if I don’t need the browser, I don’t need the laptop?

After writing this post I realized that Gravity for S60 is becoming a really important application in my mobile arsenal.

I have tried to take an extreme view of certain sites in here. You must’ve noticed that I still need a browser for many tasks, but the point is that I’m soon beginning to see myself using my mobile more than my laptop, and my applications more than the browser.  Now if only my mobile phone had more screen real estate and a bigger keyboard.

Originally uploaded by hunyaga

The ultimate technology in fictional robotic technology, Gundam now hovers over the City of Tokyo. Gundam is a futuristic robotic warrior anime character who was immortalized by several TV series, movies, video games and anime series.
The Gundam is a huge metal suit which human pilots can wield from their cockpits inside them.

You can watch the video of the Giant robot below.

Appcelerator’s Titanium is an open source alternative to Adobe AIR to help you build your rich internet apps easily. We first saw Titanium hit the racks of the internet around December. Its three months down the line and at least we think they haven’t made the noise they ought to have generated.

But we haven’t seen as much of Titanium as we should be? There are a few easy things which Appcelerator hasn’t done yet. And correct us if we’re wrong.

1. Average branding. Titanium is a great brand name, but my search on Titanium on Google brings up only one result on the first page which is relevant. Titanium Appcelerator seems to work though!
2. This is something Appcelerator has to do. Write a Wikipedia page. It is after all an open source project which needs users for it to get popular.
3. Get more people to tweet and write about it. We decided to blog about it after getting impressed with the free SDK, awesome tutorials and the wonderful twitter application, Tweetanium.
4. Get more blogs to write about Titanium. Because we really think Lifehacker should have featured Tweetanium. True many have already featured Titanium, like the Readwriteweb blog

The Titanium App is open source and cross platform.  Preview release 2 is now out and adds support to Linux as well. We think open source is the way to go and Titanium is a step in the right direction.
Download the Titanium SDK here and start making your own apps.
Show your support to Titanium by downloading Tweetanium

Follow them here

Do you disagree with the statement that Titanium has branded itself the way it was supposed to? Do you think Titanium has already got its share of fame for the period of time it has been around? Would you be willing to give up on AIR and go open source? Leave your comments!

Vista gives you two themes to select from, your Aero theme and your windows classic theme. But how long do you stay without getting bored? Get new themes, and install them, before that, you need to follow this tutorial.

More desktop customization, and my search for the free windows manager takes me to Styles XP. But, it is neither free nor is it available for Windows XP….So, my search continues until I find Code Gazer’s VistaGlazz. Vista Glazz lets me install third party themes, visual styles for Vista (and the best part is, it is free..)

Step 1:

Install VistaGlazz and run the program.

Now select the second icon (the one that looks like a shade card (the tick mark will be not be present until you run the program once. Follow the instructions and you are all ready to rock.

Step 2:

You can find vista themes all over the internet. I prefer deviantART for all my desktop customization needs. To illustrate, let us use the Leopard 1.0a theme by Masterhack.

Download the file by clicking on the links on the left of the page. Unzip the file after you have saved it. Copy all the files to the following folder on your hd:

C:\Windows\Resources\Themes

Click on the Leopard.theme and apply it. Done. Enjoy your new theme.

Installation of theme should make sure that you no longer need to use Objectbar as mentioned in my earlier post which lets you make your desktop look like a Mac.

This is how my screen looks like now.

Top secret Geek stuff (what, the vistaglazz app does)

It replaces three files on your hard drive (inside the windows/system32 folder) This enables you to add new themes other than the default themes which Microsoft has provided you with. These files are available for your version of windows at Within Windows

IMPORTANT:

• The theme file is a rar format (a compression format similar to zip) . You will need winrar to unrar it (thanks to Sabrina for reminding me that I need to provide a link)
• This tutorial is only for Windows Vista. For Windows XP, I guess you don’t have an option but to buy Styles XP.
• Do not try this tutorial if you have Vista Home Basic Version.
• In case you have already installed Service pack for Windows Vista, download VistaGlazz from here (instead of the link at the beginning of the post)
• There is a chance that things could go wrong and your computer could explode, implode, crash or become a black hole after trying out my tutorial. So, do it only if you know what you are doing and you are willing to take a risk.
• The author, website or anyone in this universe is not responsible for your actions after reading this tutorial, in fact, they weren’t even responsible for your actions before you read this.