Which bank gives you the best Foreign Exchange rate for remittances in India

Be it sending money outside India or receiving money from aboard, the foreign exchange rate offered by your bank comes into play. Previously, only limited banks offered Forex services but nowadays every other bank offers this service. But you should be careful whom you bank with in order to get the best possible rate for your money. Forex is a commission heavy business and it is easy to get a bad deal from your bank if you are not aware of the market rates. I’m writing this blog post after doing some research on this topic and having sent/received money with a few banks over the past few years. Continue reading Which bank gives you the best Foreign Exchange rate for remittances in India

How to run a small website on Amazon LightSail for free

Amazon had announced Lightsail as an addition to the Compute lineup of services back in 2016 but not many developers are aware of it as the Elastic Compute Cloud – EC2 is more popular. Not only is EC2 more popular, it could feel complex and overwhelming for some developers who are used to traditional infrastructure or new to the scene.

Continue reading How to run a small website on Amazon LightSail for free

How to Get a Fancy New Google Earth View each time you open a new tab in Chrome

I have always been amazed by how large and diverse our planet is. Considering we are all stuck at home since the beginning of the pandemic, feels good to get glimpse of some new places on earth within the browser itself without having to waste time.

https://earthview.withgoogle.com/

Get the Google Chrome extension here

How to make sure your Google Apps G suite Email does not land in Gmail Spam Folder but in the Inbox

Ever faced the situation when that important email you sent someone has landed in their spam folder and they never bothered to check it ? Read on.

I was recently facing this really frustrating issue where emails from one of my domains which were using Google Apps or G Suite were being marked as spam. It was weird because it started happening suddenly and that website and IP were not blacklisted and everything seemed very hard to trace. Even emails i forward from that mail id to my personal gmail were landing in spam. I contacted Google Apps support to get some help and they did give me some very good recommendations. Interestingly the mails from this domain were landing in inbox on Hotmail, iCloud or Yahoo but Gmail alone was marking them as spam. Continue reading How to make sure your Google Apps G suite Email does not land in Gmail Spam Folder but in the Inbox

My Top Travel Destinations of 2017

Traveled a lot in 2017 for mainly work and managed to travel for fun too.  Kicked off 2017 with a trip to Las Vegas for attending CES 2017 and my last trip of the year was a trip to Maui, Hawaii almost in the other side of the world. Here is a list of my top travel destinations for 2017. Hope to travel more in 2018

Las Vegas

CES 2017 was so much fun and tiring. Managed to spend some time in California post CES.

Continue reading My Top Travel Destinations of 2017

Back to Blogging after a long hiatus

Wow , it has been such a long time since I stopped writing here. After getting busy with work and life , I never got time to maintain this site and it got defaced a couple of times beyond repair thanks to the Apache, PHP and WordPress vulnerabilities. Things have changed drastically over the past 10 years. This site is now hosted at Amazon AWS’s Mumbai data center, something which was next to impossible unless you had big bucks back then. I would be writing a lot about programming, general issues, travel and startups. Feel free to drop a note or comment.

Twitter readying Real Time Google-like Search , Contextual Ads?

Twitter is working on a Real time search engine and this might be change the face of twitter

Zdnet broke a story about the same

Santosh Jayaram who was VP , Search Quality , Google is now VP of Operations at Twitter .

SEO will have a new term – after Google Optimization and Yahoo, get ready for Twitter Optimization

Soon Twitter will crawl tweeted URLs and index the content.

This will be used to display results inside twitter.

Off late Twitter has been a source information overload for me personally after RSS overload.

Though, I’m really excited to see this decision by Twitter in organizing the data better.

Also , when you have such data , Contextual ads will do really well. Twitter is not going to keep making losses for long

Imagine a user searching for mobile phones is reading a tweet pointing to http://fonearena.com

Advertisers who usually advertise on the site will love to target the potential user base of FoneArena.

It gives them more ROI than advertising on a tweet pointing to say my personal blog

Only time will tell what’s going to happen

Why Mac and Linux is such a beautiful combination

I love my MacBook although it’s a bit slow and has a smaller screen.

Its so cool because it is light on my back when carried around .. not 4+ kilos like my old HP Pavillion

Battery lasts for 4-5 hrs . Brightness of the screen has a direct impact on battery life .

I have converted it into a Desktop by connecting a Apple wired keyboard and Logitech wireless mouse ..

The best part is the 24 inch Dell monitor ..

For all of you who want a Mac desktop which can be carried around easily , this is a good solution ..

Mac Mini is cool and cheaper but its useless without a display.

There is often a misconception that Mac is just about usability and Graphics but the command line (Terminal ) in Mac OS is very similar to Linux. In fact Mac OS to built on top of BSD Unix

I just love it

You can work on any Linux web server over SSH natively.

Putty sucks big time compared to the Mac command line