My first impressions of Nexus 7 tablet

I've been using the Nexus 7 (Wi-Fi, 16 GB) tablet for the last ten days and I'm impressed. I plan to use it primarily as an e-book Reader to clear off at least a part of the pile of e-books I've collected over the years.

Current prices of Kindle devices in India (click to enlarge image)

I had to take a call between buying a Kindle or Nexus 7 but the superior hardware specs of  Nexus 7 (NVIDIA Tegra 3 Quad Core Processor, 7-inch HD Display) and the relatively cheaper price made me fall for it. (I bought my Nexus 7 on Flipkart for INR 9999. For the next few days it will be going for less than Rs. 9000 as part of their Diwali Cyber Sale promotion)

Thankfully, Amazon offers their Kindle app for Android devices which makes reading Mobi & Kindle  (AZW) files on Nexus 7 as good as reading it on Amazon's own Kindle. It's a 22.49MB download for Nexus 7 (the size of the app installer varies according to device). This app also helps you sync up your reading with other devices that support Kindle.

The Kindle app has the Send to Kindle by E-mail feature that lets you send documents to your Kindle as an email attachment.

Kindle Personal Documents Service supports the following file types.

• Microsoft Word (.DOC, .DOCX)
• HTML (.HTML, .HTM)
• RTF (.RTF)
• Text (.TXT)
• JPEG (.JPEG, .JPG)
• Kindle Format (.MOBI, .AZW)
• GIF (.GIF)
• PNG (.PNG)
• BMP (.BMP)
• PDF (.PDF)

These files can be combined into a compressed ZIP (.ZIP) file. ZIP files are automatically opened by the conversion service, converted to the Kindle format, and stored in Your Kindle Library.

To convert your personal PDF documents converted to the Kindle format, type "convert" in the subject of the e-mail when you send your personal documents to your Send-to-Kindle address.

The conversion is not immediate but you get a status report by email upon completion. A few of the many PDFs that I emailed to my Kindle account could not be converted. I wonder if there is anything about the contents of the PDF (images?) that causes the conversion to fail.

Another interesting feature of the Kindle app is that it can learn your reading speed and tell you what percentage of the book still remains and provide an estimate of the time you would need to finish the book based on your reading speed.

One thing I sorely missed in Nexus 7 was the lack of a file explorer. Owing to the popularity of the Android platform, there is no dearth of information. I was quickly able to find out that ES File Explorer (4.08MB) was a free, popular file manager with several other features.

(Update 28/Oct/2013) Right Choice magazine gives Nexus 7 a score of 72 (In its tests, iPad with Retina Display which sells for ~32K gets the highest score of 82)

click on image for enlarged view

I'll keep updating this review with more of my findings.

Also see:

• 10 Free Security Apps for Android phones
• There is an app for that?
• AnandTech: Google Nexus 7 and Android 4.1 - Mini Review 
• AnandTech: The Google Nexus 7 Review

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Free APIs, online services to generate screenshots of web pages

I've graded the answers to this StackOverflow question about APIs & online services to generate screenshots of web pages based on whether the service can be used directly without any API key or require a key:

No key required:

• immediatenet.com
• kwout API (generating screenshots is not the primary intent of kwout so it doesn't directly give you an image to save)

Requires (free) API access key:

• Browshot API
• GrabzIt
• thumbalizr API (Simple syntax to use the API: http://api.thumbalizr.com/?url=http://mvark.blogspot.in&width=250)
• ConvertAPI (Free 500 one-time credits)

There are also online tools can generate screenshots of websites:

• Browsershots.org
• WebShots Pro
• ShrinkTheWeb
• Amit Agarwal's Screen Capture tool
• GrabzIt

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TWIL - Week #27

This Week I Learned:

Programming:

• ASP.NET's Request Validation feature is not enough to avoid XSS 
• It is possible to inject values in a drop down list.  Developers shouldn't trust input. Anything sent by the client should be suspect, there's no guarantee that it's what you expect, and it must be validated on the server before acceptance.

India:

• Commenting on the scale of biometric date captured for the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) program, Nandan Kilekani, the UIDAI head, calls India the tech capital for biometrics. UIDAI is yet to finalize breach of disclosure and liability policies in case Aadhar’s biometric data are compromised or stolen. The UIDAI is a lean organisation with less than 300 people (but lots of vendors).
• The voluntary use of public transport once in a week is part of Oil Minister Veerappa Moily's fuel conservation campaign launched this week, which aims to save $5 billion oil import bill.  Moily saved Rs 40,000 in fuel cost by taking public transport to office. One of the many perks that Members of Parliament and some Government "servants" enjoy is free fuel.
• Currently, of the 35 women in the Bihar Assembly of 243 members, roughly 70% have husbands who are politicians. The trend of politicians using their wives as a front to keep their seats safe started in 1997 when Bihar chief minister Lalu Prasad Yadav, facing arrest by the CBI in the fodder scam, stunned political circles and 'shocked' his wife Rabri Devi by asking her to step out of the kitchen and occupy the chair he was going to quit. A mother of nine, Rabri Devi was a housewife unlettered in politics until then, but continued in office for over seven years. Like Yadav, other politicians in Bihar see the elevation of their wives as the best way to keep the power in the family. (Source: Times of India)

Trivia:

• Benjamin Franklin swore by "air baths", which was his term for sitting around naked in the morning, whatever the weather. Franklin was chronically disorganised.

Everything else:

• FB Reader & Kindle are free Android apps that allow you to open both PDF & Mobi files.
• Google has developed cutting-edge face and license plate blurring technology that is applied to all Street View images. This means that if one of our images contains an identifiable face (for example that of a passer-by on the sidewalk) or an identifiable license plate, our technology will automatically blur it out, meaning that the individual or the vehicle cannot be identified. If our algorithms missed something, you can easily let us know.

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HOW TO prevent mixed content warning in web pages

What is a Mixed Content Warning?

This blog post explains it well:

HTTPS-enabled sites require all resources on the page, including the ads, to be SSL compliant to protect the user against man-in-the-middle attacks. If an HTTPS page loads an HTTP resource, the page is considered mixed content, and the browser displays a mixed content warning (like the padlock with warning triangle in Chrome). 

New browser releases like Firefox 23 are starting to block mixed active content (scripts) but still display mixed content warnings for mixed passive content (images).

The mixed content warnings vary in aggressiveness among browsers. 

One way for developers to fix this issue is by using a Protocol Relative URL.

A Protocol Relative URL is just like a regular URL except that you leave out the protocol prefix:
 //mvark.azure-mobile.net/client/MobileServices.Web-1.0.0.min.js

A protocol relative URL is just a URL without the scheme. For example //billpatrianakos.me is a protocol relative URL. These types of URLs are meant to be hit by a browser only. The point is that a browser can fetch a resource from whatever protocol the site is telling it to use.

You get the automatic use of HTTPS on secure pages and avoid the overhead of HTTPS on non-secure pages.

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What's common between Kovid Goyal & Antony Lewis?

Kovid Goyal

Antony Lewis

They are both PhDs in Physics and creators of free software applications that have been downloaded by millions.

Kovid Goyal is the creator of calibre,  a comprehensive suite of utilities for managing/converting/viewing e-books and news in digital formats while Antony Lewis is the creator of WordWeb,  English dictionary, thesaurus and word finder program for Microsoft Windows, iOS, Android and Mac OS X.

The free version of WordWeb has been downloaded over 5 million times while calibre has been downloaded by 18 million people.

calibre is released under GNU GPLv3 as the author did not want people creating proprietary software based on my work

WordWeb is free subject to very unique licensing terms:

You may use the program free of charge indefinitely only if

• You take at most 4 flights (2 return flights) in any 12 month period

• AND you do not own or regularly drive an SUV (sports utility vehicle).

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TWIL - Week #26

This Week I Learned:

Browsers

• Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition (formerly known as Portable Firefox and commonly known as Firefox Portable) is a repackaged version of Mozilla Firefox that can run from a USB flash drive, CD-ROM, or other portable device on any Windows computer or Linux/UNIX computer running Wine. The program does not require Firefox to be installed on the computer, nor does it leave personal information on the computer or interfere with any installed versions of Firefox, though installation on a hard drive is possible. Personal settings, bookmarks, and any installed extensions and themes are stored on the flash drive along with Firefox Portable. This allows the user to move from computer to computer without losing application settings.

Web Development

• To test a web app with multiple simultaneous sessions, you can create Profiles in Chrome and Firefox. In IE, you can use File > New session. 
• Despite increases in bandwidth, the load times of web pages has increased by 48% over the past two years. The average page load time of the top 100 websites is 11.3 seconds
• To compare how the print and screen view of a web page would look, in Chrome Developer Tools settings (right bottom corner),  Overrides tab, select the option "Emulate CSS media" and choose print or screen.

India

• Lawmakers turned lawbreakers  - Lalu Prasad (aged 65), Member of Parliament for multiple terms, Cabinet Minister and former Chief Minister of Bihar, has been convicted in the fodder scam that he took part in 17 years ago along with another former Chief Minister of Bihar. "Those involved (in the scam) were amply rewarded: Animal husbandry officer R K Rana, who purchased pigs from Ludhiana before falsely claiming half of them died near Varanasi, rose to become RJD MLA and then an MP." Rajya Sabha member Rasheed Masood (aged 67) has been convicted for fraudulently nominating undeserving candidates  including his own nephew to MBBS seats in 1990-91. (Source: Times of India)

Everything else

• Wolfram Alpha provides Personal Analytics for Facebook 
• Difference between GPS, GSM, GPRS with respect to location
• GPS is global position system, which uses timings from satellites to determine location. It has no relation to GSM or GPRS, except in the case of A-GPS (assisted GPS) which might use mobile data provided via GSM/GPRS to get a better starting point for your location which enables the GPS to have a better idea of which satellites are overhead where you are.
• GSM is a standard for mobile telephone and describes how the phone should communicate with the phone network to make and receive calls. It does not provide any location services in itself, but as GSM will communicate with mobile phone radio towers that are known and have a fixed location, you can get an approximate location by knowing which towers your phone can talk to and where they are.
• GPRS is an extension to GSM which allows packet switched data - mobile data, which can be used to access the internet. This does not provide any location services, other than that which can be obtained using GSM tower locations.

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FB & Twitter spam me with similar subject line

It is also funny that they landed one after another.

Related: Tweetcheero

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