The Deceit Of Orange Mauritius

by
Inf

As you probably know by now, Orange has announced a price cut on its ADSL packages, and a speed-doubling measure on its MyT packages. The discussions have been raging on for the past few days on various fronts, including Twitter and CarrotMadman6’s Article on the price cuts.

MyT users are probably rejoicing by now. ADSL users too maybe, but probably in a lesser measure. I’m an ADSL user. I’m definitely not rejoicing. I believe Orange has successfully performed corporate tricks on its users, and has come out with a profit, all while announcing the price cuts / speed boosts.

Let me begin with the more obvious of the ripoffs:

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My New Twitter Account

by
Inf

Shameless self promotion article, just to get more followers on Twitter! Yay!

I’m following like, 10 Mauritan bloggers, but none are following me, not fair! Hopefully this post will get their attention.

So, to start, I decided to start my own (personal) Twitter account, separate from Geekscribes’ Twitter account.

This new account will mostly contain my personal thoughts, but also have Tech news and Geek rants. Mainly short posts and ideas that I don’t want to write a full blog article on. Like this short article itself, which should have been on Twitter!

You’ll be able to find those from the Twitter widget in the right sidebar by the way.

If you are interested, here’s a direct link to my Twitter Account, that is, Inf’s personal Twitter account. @_1nf (underscore-one-enn-eff). “Inf” was already squatted. As was other simpler variations. 🙁

Geekscribes’ Twitter Account is here, in case you want it too.

And this is how, the smallest post on Geekscribes (till now) concludes!

Orange Mauritius Announces Price Cuts, Speed Boosts

by
Inf

Orange (and Mauritius Telecom), have just announced our Christmas gift for the year 2010: ADSL users can expect a reduction in prices and MyT users will see their current speed doubled. The changes will start taking effect as from 1st December 2010.


Update 0: I put this as Update Zero because it’s most important: MyT Users with NO TV option will get neither speed boost NOR price cut, as confirmed on TheMediaGuru’s comment section. You will have to pay Rs. 999 (Rs. 151 extra!) if you want more speed.

Update 1: According to the user “Sab” on TheMediaGuru’s article (see link below), there won’t be any speed boosts for ADSL users, only the Rs. 100 reduction in prices.

Update 2: The price decrease / speed boosting is not pleasing everybody. There are some complaints coming from Jeyen Chellum and ACIM that Orange has done something weird or how it was ICTA’s role to announce the price cuts. I’ll admit, I didn’t understand what the problem was myself. Moreover, commenters on the L’Express article would prefer a price-cut over a speed boost. I personally prefer a speed boost over a price cut. I am opening a poll for you to answer this question.

[poll id=”2″]

Update 3: FUP no longer applies to MyT. Not that it was ever applied…

Update 4: You may be interested in this article too…


Here is a summary of the changes for ADSL (All prices are Vat Inclusive):

  • ADSL Home 256 Kbps(3GB Cap Limit): Rs. 499 → Rs. 399
  • ADSL Home 512 Kbps: Rs. 848 → Rs. 759
  • ADSL 128 Kbps for Rodrigues: Rs. 499 → Rs. 399
  • ADSL Business package prices fall by 10%. New prices will probably be:
    • ADSL Business 256 Kbps: Rs. 1840 → Rs. 1656
    • ADSL Business 512 Kbps: Rs. 2875 → Rs. 2587.50
    • ADSL Business 1 Mbps: Rs. 5750 → Rs. 5175
    • ADSL Business 2 Mbps: Rs. 10235 → Rs. 9211
  • Dedicated Lines fall by 24%

MyT prices remain unchanged, but the speed doubles:

  • MyT 512 Kbps → MyT 1 Mbps
  • MyT 1 Mbps → MyT 2Mbps
  • MyT 2Mbps → MyT 4Mbps (!!)

MyT will also offer 3 new channels – Boing, MCM Top and Motor TV and add more titles to its Video on Demand service.

There is no word yet on whether the speed doubling will be applied to existing ADSL users (like me). I hope the Christmas gift comes to us ADSL users too. I’ll update this article as more details surface.

If you have any more information, please do share!

Hat-tip to TheMediaGuru for sharing the initial news.

(Source)

5 Bookmarklets To Make Websites More Readable

by
Inf

If you’ve ever read a long article online, you know that reading on-screen is not easy on the eyes. Some web designers do a good job at making their content readable. Some, well, let’s just say they want to keep to traditions and keeping simple.

Let’s say you have to read a long article on one of those traditional-looking web pages. You don’t have to subject your eyes to the torture of reading tiny fonts on a stark white background. We’re going to save your eyes using bookmarklets, which are bookmarks that use Javascript code to do some task instead of going to a page.

The bookmarklets in this post will change the look of the web page you apply them on to something that is more readable and easier on the eyes. Some of those bookmarklets can be customized to your liking, e.g. in terms of background color. So let’s start…

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10 Tips on how to Speed Up your Computer for Free

by
Inf

I’ve never heard anybody say: “This computer is too fast! I wish it was slower”. We all wish our computers performed faster, that it booted faster to allow us to get down to gaming working in a shorter lapse of time. The thing is, computers tend to get slower after some time. Windows XP was particularly vulnerable to this. Just after installing, XP booted in around 30 seconds. A few years later, it seems it takes ages to boot. Windows 7 holds its ground better in this area.

Leaving chatter and nostalgia apart, let’s see how I can get that machine of yours performing faster, while saving you some money. I’ll assume you are on Windows Vista / 7. Especially Vista. Yes, you resource-hogging Vista.

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Media Player Classic: No Sound When Playing Multiple Videos – Solution

by
Inf

I’ll confess that I love Media Player Classic (or its newer flavor, Media Player Classic – Home Cinema). I have yet to find a player that has a simple interface yet packs so many features. Undeniably there are other great players out there, such as KMPlayer, SMPlayer and VLC among others. But I still find MPC’s interface to be better than the rest. Or maybe it’s simply nostalgia…

Recently I was having a small problem with Media Player Classic (MPC). When I set MPC to play different videos in different instances, that is, two videos in two different MPC windows, one had sound, one did not.

The volume control was not muted, and it was nothing to do with Windows’ volume settings. It was just a misconfigured setting in MPC and it’s simple to correct.

A quick journey to the MPC IRC channel (#mpc-hc on Freenode) gave me the answer, which was simply selecting the right option from a drop-down menu…

The steps are:

  • View menu – Options
  • On the left, under Playback – select Output
  • Set your Audio Renderer to this option: “Default DirectSound Device”
  • Problem solved

Answers are sometimes as simple as that. I don’t even know how to conclude this post, so I’ll just leave it at that. Thanks for reading, and hope this helps you. 😀

I’ll also thank the developers of MPC for the awesome program they provide to us and the quick help I got from the people present in their IRC channel. No “RTFM” or anything, just a straight answer. Thanks!

Mount ISO Images In One Click Using WinCDEmu

by
Inf

Do you often have to mount ISO images? If you don’t know what ISO images are, they are simply images, or copies, of the filesystem of optical disks such as DVDs. You can think of them as “zip” files containing whatever there was on the disk.

Now before you can use an ISO file, you have to do something called “mounting” the ISO file. Mounting means to make a separate filesystem part of the current filesystem used by your Operating System. It’s like you’re taking a branch, and sticking it to the side of a tree. Then by climbing the tree, you can reach your new branch and its leaves, correct?

For ISO images, this “mounting” process is done by making the ISO file be represented as a virtual drive in Windows. All this to say, you’ll just get an additional “DVD” drive in your My Computer if you mount an ISO file.

There are various tools out there to do this mounting job. The most famous ones are probably Daemon Tools and Magic ISO. Maybe even Ultra ISO.

But, I tend to like minimum effort. I tried getting Daemon Tools to give me mounting options when I right-click on an ISO file without much success. The others are either too complex or not free.

If you want a dead-simple solution, try WinCDEmu. Despite its name, it does work with DVDs huh. And even Bluray I guess, but I haven’t tested those. I’m not lucky enough to be the owner of a BR drive… yet!

So WinCDEmu is an open-sourced application that works by installing a sort of virtual driver, along with its virtual bus and drives. Nothing for you to worry about, since it’s all done automatically. But you’ll need to have appropriate permissions (being Admin, for e.g.) to grant the permission to install the driver. And it’s a signed driver at that!

The process is just a Next-Next-Next process until it’s done. And? That’s it.

You’ll be presented with that window to customize settings. Nothing much to do.

To get it working? Double-click on your ISO image. A new “DVD” drive will be created in My Computer. You can then access the ISO contents as if they were a normal disk.

To unmount the ISO image, just right-click the virtual drive and select Eject.

Simple huh?

Also, WinCDEmu supports a variety of other disk image formats, such as ISO, CUE, NRG and IMG to name a few.

Just to mention that WinCDEmu didn’t associate with the CUE, NRG, IMG and other file formats on my machine, just ISO. If that’s the case, just right-click the image file, then select Open With – WinCDEmu Mounter. You can also change file associations in Windows to point the WinCDEmu Mounter—to have the double-click mounting functionality—like this on Windows Vista/7. For XP just Google.

  • Head to Control Panel – Default Programs – Associate a File Type or Protocol with a Program.
  • Locate your File Type e.g. NRG
  • Select it then click the Change Program on the top right corner.
  • Select WinCDEmu. Done

That’s it. Go download WinCDEmu and give it a try. A portable, but beta version, is also available. And if you know some application that can beat WinCDEmu in simplicity for this task, do share! Thanks for reading 😀