Long story short, I try to practice Inbox Zero and having Facebook send me emails on every comment, tag added, tag removed, friend added, friend removed and every other permutation and combination possible..phewww…is simply not acceptable.

(To prove my case, at one point I received 28 emails in 23 minutes Update: 44 emails in 31 minutes from Facebook, that’s more than an email per minute! - See below!)

So I set upon the task of finding a less invasive & distractive way of receiving these notifications. Now I could have created a smart folder and have everything from Facebook go in there automatically but that would still not solve the purpose. I would still be looking at these emails at some point to know what’s going on. Enter RSS feeds. Here’s what I ended up doing:

Step-1: Subscribe to RSS feeds for your notifications

1. Login to Facebook
2. Click on Inbox on the menu bar
3. Click on Notifications Tab
4. Click on the “Your Notifications” link under ‘Subscribe to Notifications’ on the right side bar
5. Select your favorite feed reader application and you are set to receive updates every time you have a new notification.

Step-2: Turn off email notifications

1. Login to Facebook
2. Click on Settings on the menu bar
3. Click on Notifications Tab
4. Turn off the notifications per your choice.
5. Click on Save Settings

And you are now set for a distraction free Facebook experience.

WARNING: Please note that this setup will NOT provide you with on the minute alerts. It’s set to update every half hour or so. So if you are one of those Facebook addicts who can’t survive that long, this is probably not the best option for you. It works fine for me, because it’s less distractive and I can check the feeds when I want to, not when I am asked to. They are not intrusive and do not get in the middle of me doing other tasks. It’s a winner for me!

I had read some time back that Facebook is fast turning out primarily to be a photo sharing website rather than just another social site. And if you look at the thousands and thousands of pictures being uploaded and shared everyday, it’s not hard to believe.

Now as much as the internet community would like us to think that keeping photos online is the way to go and that it has replaced the local storage of your precious photos, I am still one of those who likes to keep a copy of a few good ones in iPhoto as well (the satisfaction of having local copies of your photos has been proven to give you a better sleep, even better than the sleep number mattresses). Hence the argument, that if I would be using Facebook to view shared pictures, I must find an easy way to be able to download them as well.

So when my cousin Kareena sent me the New Year pics on FaceBook, the quest to find an easy way to download them became stronger and eager and it led me to the discovery or rediscovery of this really slick piece of software called the PhotoBook (Mac Only) which does something really cool. It lets you browse all your friends’ albums and with one-click lets you import them into iPhoto on your Mac. And the best part - it’s free! I am pretty sure that there is a PC equivalent available, but am not motivated enough currently to go dig for it. Maybe sometime later this year

On that note, here’s wishing everybody a very Happy New Year 2009!

Ever since I switched to Mac last year, I have been going back and forth among the browsers - Safari, Firefox, Camino. I even tried Fluid which actually turned out to be something very different.

Anyways long story short, I had settled down to using Safari in the last few months. It worked for the most part except for a few dumb websites like airtelcallhome.com for which I used Firefox (more on these bozos in my next post) and that it would stop responding if I have one too many tabs open. It could just not take the load of the gazillion open tabs and I would find myself recovering the open tabs from the history quite often. It would get slower and slower with every new tab and get on my nerves big time..aghhh it was really frustrating and annoying.

But I still loved and used Safari for more or less the eye candy (call it the iAppeal)

Cut to last weekend. Kunal introduced reintroduced me to my old love (from the dark windows era) Firefox. They recently released v3.0…Gotta say, I love Firefox 3. Why? I will keep it simple -

1. It looks really good - the iAppeal that is. It now has the Mac look to it.
2. It does not seem to crash unlike Safari (I currently have 17 tabs open and it’s responding to each one of them) no delay = no frustration = love firefox)

Moral of the story - Try Firefox 3.0. It’s really awesome!

Get it here -

PS: I reserve the creative rights to assume these men may be from Mars and not belong to a toy village called Lego!

TUAW reported on Friday that the iPhone may be on it’s way to India this september. Gotta love the picture that they put up on their blog. The Mahatma himself endorsing Apple. I bet he would have loved to make the Macbook Air a part of his dandi march gear :-)… yeah yeah and iPhone too!

That is what I think happened to me today. I keep doing weird things but today I got all the permutations right. All the stars in the sky were just perfectly aligned and I hit the nail on it’s head with that IM status.

I swear I received a dozen curious pings from long lost friends and from the universe beyond, asking me who Nirvana is? Am I getting married to Nirvana? Is she the one? or is it the dog I never had? No…No..and No..

Let me clear a few things first -

Nirvana is not a female; no not a male either. Nirvana’s not a dog or a pet of any other kind. And I am not getting married - to Nirvana.

So with those speculations laid to rest, let’s begin my short story to clear the fuss. To make it more riveting, we’ll call it the Nirvana story. But let me warn you, you need to be either a passionate geek or have enough patience to understand the emotions and intricacies of this story.

Oh good, you are still reading. I didn’t scare you away. We can begin then -

I had been waging a constant war past few months trying to free up space on my 80GB MacBook. It was a constant battle. I was getting tired of having to clean up my hard drive every now and then so I could accommodate some new and really really cool apps (not to mention the iPhone SDK that weighs close to 1gb every beta release).

Now not that I did not know what the problem was. I knew it was the huge amount of music, photos and videos I have, I just didn’t know how to resolve it. I wanted to dump the gigantic 10gb music folder from the MacBook but I wanted the music to be available when I wanted, where I wanted. I guess I wanted to have the cake and eat it too! It was bugging me. It was driving me crazy. And just when I was about to pull my hair out, I found it. I found the perfect solution. Long story short, I now for the first time in the last 6 months have 18.56gb 17.45gb (that’s right it goes fast) of free space available.

I moved all my music from the MacBook to my home pc thus freeing 10gb. I then installed this really really cool app¹ which lets me share my music library over the internet through iTunes. So I now have access to my iTunes library sitting on my home pc from anywhere in the world.² It works like a champ. I am loving it. That’s Freedom, Peace, that’s Nirvana in a nutshell!

So ladies n gentlemen, that’s the long and short of the IM message you all saw this morning. It was just me really really happy. It’s too naive, too daft, too simple, too weird, too..I know, I know….it’s all of them and that’s what makes it wonderfully awesome!

1. SimplifyMedia.com
2. You need iTunes and SimplifyMedia plugin installed on both the computers