And as I recently blogged, I bought a Nikon D5000 DSLR camera from G.K Vale for 37k bucks on June 10th. Having a great time with it, but not able to spend much time experimenting it’s features coz of being busy. Nevertheless, I did manage to take some newbie shots and uploaded them on facebook and good one’s on Flickr. You can find some snaps below:

And here are shot of my Nikon D5000 DSLR:

Dear Mark Zuckerberg, sorry for hotlinking images directly from Facebook.

Meanwhile, a smile lit up on my face soon after I returned home after the exam. My customized twitter profile t-shirt was delivered on time as show on the shipping tracking system. I got it from “Pringoo” and they call it Twitter Swag. It’s really feels awesome to have your customized twitter profile t-shirt with your picture, user name and your followers/friends.

Here are few pics:

This definitely is a geeky t-shirt to wear while going out for an tweetup, exhibitions, malls, events etc. I just tried wearing it  fits me well (size is L) and the material is of good quality. This t-shirt is totally worth for it’s money (350 bucks + shipping). Since there’s a Father’s Day discount sale going on, I got it 15% less than the actual the price.

I selected the friends’ (those who I follow) picture to appear on the t-shirt while customizing it. If am following you, probably there are chances for your picture to be included in this tee. :p

For some reasons, I am bored to write about anything new that I buy or new things I do, travel etc these days. But still to keep it as record and to keep my old pals who are not in touch and yet reading my blog, updated about what am up to. Well, the main purpose of blogging itself is to write whatever am doing and let the world know, but am simply feeling really lazy to update the blog. The biggest reason is because of the addiction of mighty twitter micro-blogging. Anything I do, will be blogged in just under 140 chars. So why write a epic story here?

At the moment, my 4th Sem exams are going on and so am very busy with studies. I luckily got an awesome 10-day gap for my last exam, and so I got some time blog in here. Also, we had been to an Geological Field Trip / Fun Trip from college back in March 2010 and it was pretty fun. Yea, I didn’t blog about the trip. Don’t ask me why. You can view the tour photos, over here.

And as I said that am now interested in Photography, I will buy a Nikon D3000 or D5000 DSLR next month. Though I have enough money to buy the D5000, am questioning myself whether I need all those extra features since am still a beginner to DSLRs. I have read/viewed a lot of reviews on the web seeking for the best choice on sites like DP Review, Camera Labs, Imagining Resource etc and rounded up with these two models. I don’t like Canon DSLRs because of their ugly looks and pretty bad performance. Nikon has manged to put in both looks and performance in their cameras (atleast in DSLRs) and I like it. Also, the other reason is because Nikon’s major concentration is towards optics and photography. Whereas Canon is into many things and so they end up in crap. But am not saying that they are worst! Their higher end models are really fantastic. The mid-range and entry level models like xxxxD and xxxD series are crap. And most are developed mainly to compete with Nikon’s counterparts but they fail despite cramming in more jazzy features. If you are a Canon EOS fan, no offense please. Nikon has a very good history when it comes to it’s Nikkor lens. It has been even used in Apollo missions to moon and several other outer-space research by NASA. Also as part of my interest in photography, now am reading tutorials, articles related to photography and even bought my first copy of Better Photography magazine.

And as far as my Web Designing work is concerned, am not able to spend time on it and so its on halt. I will get back with some open source designs in my holidays. That doesn’t mean that am out of touch with my CSS and xHTML skills, I am infact getting better since I try new stuffs in spare time instead of designing a whole template or theme. And that helps me to implement in the full-fledged designs.

That’s it for now. I might have forgot few things while writing this post, sorry for that. Not everyone cares though. I will try my best to write a new post after purchasing the new DSLR next month. So stay tuned.

I received it from my friend for transferring some data. So I thought of taking a deep look in and out of the device. So here’s the small pictorial review:

This is is how it’s height and length looks like:

It’s width:

Comparison with HP v165w

Some iBall’s not so big flash drive. Note the widths.

Size comparison:

On top of iBall flash drive.  It takes some time for you to get used to while connecting the device since it doesn’t have a latch.

It comes with a really weird elastic rubber holder. It’s shape resembles to something really wacky on first look. And for the size comparison, I have placed a 2 rupee coin on the right.

At 3 cm, it is few mm lengthier than HP v165w (when it’s cap is open)

After having some looks on it’s physical characteristics, I performed a quick benchmark and found out that it’s Write speed is pretty slow compared to iBall’s. When compared with v165w, this flash drive is quite better in terms of performance.

HP v155w:

HP v165w:

iBall Ut165:

To sum it up, this flash drive offers not-so-bad performance. And so it is not for someone who expects good performance. If you are looking for compact flash drives which you can keep it in your wallet, then this is what you must consider buying.

For those who don’t like to take risk, here are some of the things you may notice due to heavy dust accumulation:

1. You get to hear lot of noise generating inside your cabinet. Usually generated by the fans while CPU and GPU usage are at max.
2. Your software applications will freeze! (Though heat is the actual culprit)
3. You will start seeing unwanted lines, glitches, dots, color variations while playing games that requires extensive GPU resource or even while running DirectX based apps like Google Earth.
4. Your monitor blacks-out. Similar to fighter pilots who experience blackouts while having extreme plunge towards the earth. It happens because blood will start flowing towards the brain. Similarly, when your GPU is running at full throttle, it will experience similar effect where it encounters bottleneck in dataflow. In this case, dust is the main cause. It is because; dust acts like an insulator on the PCB and will block the flow of signals (I believe so).
5. Worst case, your computer restarts or shutdowns. Worse case, components might blow up!
6. You will be f**king annoyed!

Since I experienced the first 4 stuffs, I decided to remove dust. Unfortunately, I even noticed something that may lead to the 5th stuff

Now here are the pics I took while cleaning up the cabinet. And just for your kind information, my main objective was to remove the dust and not to make it look shiny. Also, I am using a old hardware. No need to comment on it :p

Before cleaning:

After cleaning:

Before and After:

And while cleaning the graphic card, I noticed that one of the capacitor had cracked open due to some reason. At first I was pretty worried about it and when I got some comments on it’s pic  that I upload on Facebook, I was then pretty relaxed to hear that it won’t cause any major damage. But still everyone recommends me to get it replaced.

To conclude, I finally removed lot of dust from my cabinet after almost an year. And everything is now running fine at the moment. Temperature read of CPU fell from 45C to 35C and GPU’s from 60 to 50C. So the 10degC fall is pretty much okay. And as far as replacing the 6.3V Capacitor is concerned, I’m looking out for a good guy to do it for me :p

Have a ‘cool’ summer!

These plans are really worth for people who are thirsty for Internet on the move. Since this is “Mobile Office” and not “Airtel Online”, you can browse internet even on your laptop or desktop with your phone connected as a modem. These two plans are good enough for people who require internet on the move just to send and receive emails and to browse a little. And for those who want internet on their mobile phones, its more then enough to waste the bandwidth on whatever they would like to do.

Just to check, I first opted for 3 days plan, and I was really happy with the speed on the phone. But when connected to PC, it’s not enough for browsing heavy sites. For emails, its okay. And now I’ve activated the 98 bucks plan and am really happy to have affordable internet on the move once again. Hope airtel not to discontinue this plan again for heaven’s sake.

So what’s the point of this post?

Recently, on the new year day, I tweeted “M.I.A – Paper Planes (Cold Blank Remix) sucks!” and on the following day, I got a reply from Cold Blank, “you suck!”

Hahaha! So think before you say “sucks” to any music bands or companies. Hehe.

And I do know this isn’t as good as what professional designers would do, but it was just that I couldn’t resist to do it after the idea flashed in my head. Currently the wallpaper is available for download in 3 standard widescreen resolutions.

1920 x 1200 (deviantART) | 1680 x 1050 |1440 x 900 (Imageshack)

And yes, comments and suggestions are welcome.

And also, I won’t be able to blog regularly. So will put up a small section for my twitter updates, so you can get know what I’ve been upto.

Cya!