Free Mobile Bill Analyser

I read about YourBillBuddy.com service in the newspaper today. It is an interesting solution for finding the best (as in value for money) mobile plan in market. Here is how it works:

1. It lets you upload 5 mobile bills of yours in standard PDF or HTML format in which mobile providers give you the e-bills.
2. It analyses these bills and shows you a couple of charts (like the one shown here)
3. Then it also recommends plans (from the current ones) that will help you reduce your monthly bill. It also gives an estimate of the average monthly bill with the new plan.
4. It currently supports following service providers : Airtel, Hutch, Reliance, TataIndicom, BSNL and Spice
   

How to benefit from this service:

1. In current scenario where number portability is not available, you may want to use this service as a way of finding the most economical plan offered by your existing service providers. Typically, it is difficult to keep up with the news plans launched by Telcos. This may be an easy way out.

2. Once Number portability is offered to Indian consumers, then this service will be a hit. Then you can even look at changing service providers to get the most economical solution and retain the same phone number.

its very easy to use....easy registration process.......and good interface..... do try.

WOW...... Firefox's interesting extension "Tab Catalog"

As I mentioned in my earlier post, I found one feature in FC6 very impressive where taking the pointer to right side top of the screen shows a tiled view of all open applications.

Since I also use Windows, I was hoping to get the same functionality in windows.

And today, I learnt about this new cool extension for Firefox "Tab Catalog" which offer something similar. Here is how it works:
If you have a number of tabs open in firefox,
with press of a button or by taking your mouse over a toolbar button,
it shows thumbnail-style catalogs of all open tabs.

You can see a sample pic below.

Great Desktop effects.....but browser is slow

After enabling the Desktop effects in FC6, I find that scrolling in a web browser become slow and jerky. I tried a quick search and found similar questions posted by others as well. One such example is here .

I am still looking for a fix for this.

Accessing my windows partition from FC6

I use Thunderbird as the default mail client. I do this because it allows me to access the same data i.e. emails, from both windows as well as linux. To get this to work, Linux should allow me to read and write onto the windows partition where the email data files are kept. This partition is a fat32 partition.

In order to get access to the windows fat32 partition, I did the following as root :
1. Create a directory where you would like to mount the fat32 partition
2. Open the file /var/fstab
3. Add the following at the end of the file
/dev/hda2 /wind vfat umask=000 0 0
Inmy case, hda2 is my fat32 partition and /wind is the directory that I created for mounting the fat32 partition.
4. Reboot (I am sure there may be other ways as well, but this is the easiest that I know.....will learn those soon ;) )

Now I was able to access the fat32 partition and had both read as well write access to it.

FC6 is impressive

#OS#
I installed FC6 on my notebook yesterday. It took around an hour but the setup was absolutely smooth. And I must confess that FC6 impressed me much much much more than Windows Vista. If you think that Aero Glass feature in Windows Vista is ground breaking......then you better check out what FC6 offers e.g.
1. The aero glass functionality runs out-of-box without any special configuration required. All you need to do is: Go to SYSTEM >> PREFERENCES>> DESKTOP EFFECTS >> ENABLE DEKTOP EFFECTS
And you have to see the effects to believe them.

2. Most impressive feature is the following : Imagine you have a number of application windows open, as soon as you take your mouse to the right hand side top of the screen, all open app windows are tiled on the screen so that you can choose the one that you want to go to. This, in my opinion, will serve as a productivity enhancer as well.

I am impressed to see how smoothly all these functions are running on my 1GB, Centrino powered notebook