ReviewSaurus – Technology Rocks!

Recently I was accessing few websites and I noticed that they had some hindi text, however the text was garbled and the reason for that was that the hindi font wasn’t installed by default with OS X.

Although I’d selected India as the country, it never installed the local language fonts and I think that’s kind of bad on the part of Apple. Anyway, let me tell you that how we can install various languages :

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Micro-blogging is amazing, it’s simply wonderful and there are many reasons as to why it’s beneficial for bloggers. There are many micro-blogging services available and I believe each and every one has a benefit of their own, here’s the list of popular micro-blogging services :

1. Twitter – mother of all micro-blogging services.
2. Jaiku – similar to twitter and now owned by Google.
3. Tumblr – Hosted solution of tumblelog.
4. Gelato CMS – another hosted solution of tumblelog.
5. Chyrp – Lightweight blogging engine.

This post is dedicated to Chyrp as yesterday was the first time, when I tried it and fell in love with it. What I really loved about it was that it’s pretty light weight, extendable and pretty easy to use.

Here’s what Chyrp has to say about itself :

“Chyrp is a blogging engine designed to be very lightweight while retaining functionality. It is driven by PHP and MySQL (with some AJAX thrown in), and has a pimpin’ theme and module engine, so you can personalize it however you want.”

Well, after looking at Chyrp and the way it works, I got a feeling that I’m looking at a stripped version of WordPress but still holds all the power to be extended to a level that it can compete with WordPress. Well, that may be called exaggeration but I can say that it really impressed me too much. In fact after such a long time, any product excited me so much.

Chyrp can be extended like WordPress with available modules (plugins in case of WP) and has got themes too. However, I still believe that theme engine of WordPress is far better than any other blog client.

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Well, a couple of posts back I’d posted that it’s good to start a podcast, however there is always a thing called Good podcast and a bad podcast. Just like a good blog and a bad blog. So, how can one be a champion podcaster. Well, I’ve not started one yet, so can’t say that how one can be a great podcaster.

However, Jim has created 10 videos and talks about various aspects of podcasting, how to create podcasts and even tells you that while doing a podcast, how important is lightning, sound and your clothes can be. He even tells you that what camera you should opt for, if at all you decide to start a podcast.

Note this is a contest entry plus a resource entry for every to know that yes, it makes sense to start a podcast and may be this is my first step to jump into podcasting, may be I’m just being camera shy. Anyone for the podcasts ?

When it comes to finance management, many people prefer it the old method of writing the finance entries in diaries or specific books as they find it pretty handy and safe to do so. However in this digital age, where computer games are one of the first games kids play with, can we expect them to maintain their financial records on the same old books? I guess not! In fact, I want to keep my own financial records on the computer because I believe that it’s more safe and easy to maintain too.

There are many software available on windows when it comes to personal finance management and Microsoft Money is one of the most respected software in that field. However, when it comes to OS X I guess the software that I’m reviewing right now has to be one of the easiest and best software ever for personal finance management.

CheckBook allows you to add multiple accounts and gives a very simple to use interface that anyone who isn’t good with accounting can use the software without any problem. Although, I’ve studied some accounting but still I know that I know nothing about it. I was able to create the entries and it showed me various reports and thus helped me know that where and how my money is flowing. It even let you mark the entries (deposits) as taxable or not.

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There are various plugins which allow you customize the feed items of any WordPress blog and one of them is FeedLayout plugin. It’s an excellent plugin and it allows you to put almost anything in the feed.

The good features about this particular feed plugin is that it processes PHP codes too, so if you want to display something which is generated by any other plugin for e.g. if you’ll put <? php echo bookmark_me(); ? > (provided you use the bookmark me plugin from the same author), then it will display the bookmarking icons in the feed.

Like this you can include images and whatever you can imagine in the feeds, just don’t try to put javascript stuff in it (read : google adsense).

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