Piyush's Scribbles

Easier said than done.

It requires the courage to repudiate pride and the strength to love others — family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances, God and even strangers and enemies. Only deny love to things that actually are objects. The practice that achieves this is charity. Few things are as liberating as giving away to others that which we hold dear.

This also requires a condemnation of materialism. This is manifestly not an argument for any specific economic system. Anyone who has spent time in a socialist country must concede that materialism and selfishness are as bad under collectivism, or worse, as when markets are free. No political ideology is immune to materialism.

Finally, it requires a deep skepticism of our own basic desires. Of course you are driven to seek admiration, splendor and physical license. But giving in to these impulses will bring unhappiness. You have a responsibility to yourself to stay in the battle. The day you declare a truce is the day you become unhappier. Declaring war on these destructive impulses is not about asceticism or Puritanism. It is about being a prudent person who seeks to avoid unnecessary suffering.

The Indian government's online Income Tax calculator is a fairly comprehensive calculator that enables you to calculate your tax liability for a given year while accounting for various possible deductions that can be applied.

The tool has the income tax slabs pre-configured for various years according to the prevailing government policy in that year, with respect to gender, age bracket, residential status, etc. So you won't need to worry about all these factors.

Moreover you can also input your capital gain tax laibility, along with deductions with respect to your life insurance premiums, ELSS tax-saving mutual funds, etc. Give it a go!

Has it ever happened that you sent a Word document or an Excel Sheet to someone to review and they changed it and sent it back to you without having the 'Tracking' functionality on? Damn those people!

Well you don't need to fret so much afterall. There are a few solutions to this:

Diff Doc (Windows): Diff Doc is a Free Windows only program that allows you to compare two Word, Excel, PDF, etc documents and highlights the changes. (You can also try ExamDiff).

Word on Mac OSX: Do the following: i) Open the two docs; ii) Go to Tools > Track Changes > Compare Documents; iii) Select the two documents. [Tested for Office 2011].

Word on Windows: Word also has built in functionality to do so. Read here on the steps for comparing and merging two Word Documents.

Online Tool: Upload the two documents to msdiff.com to get the comparison result.

Command Line, etc.: Then there are a few other methods to make Word File comparisons as well.

It is a very common problem I have faced of how to export multiple scanned image files into a single PDF document for easy emailing.

It so happens that Mac OSX can do it with its native set of tools. And that tool is called 'Preview'. Here are the steps on how to do it:

In Finder, select all the images and do Right Click > Open with > Preview (Default)

  In Preview - Drag drop to arrange your image files in the order you want them in the final PDF.

  Select all images (Cmd+A), and then Print (Cmd+P).

In print dialogue > PDF (bottom left) > Save as PDF... 

Problem:

I was experiencing super slow internet on my macbook pro for some time. Whether I was in the office or at home it was slow. But the puzzling part was that some parts of the day it was fast and sometimes slow on the same WiFi spots. And it was fast for others on their PCs or Macs.

For sometime I lived in denial that my shiny new Macbook Pro could be at fault here. But when it became intolerable I thought of giving it a chance of Googling to find out if others were experiencing the same. Very obviously, it was a common problem.

Solution:

When I tried to look for a solution, I figured that the slow internet was a result of some pre-determined DNS setting in my macbook.

In Mac OSX Lion, these are present under System Preferences > Network > Select Wifi on the left column > Advance > DNS

Mentioned above are the changed values. But there were some fixed random values here when I opened this. I am not sure where those had come from since I never set it myself. May be it was somebody from the IT department of the company that I once worked in for 2 months.

You just need to change the DNS values here (you can use the ones shown, they are from OpenDNS). Add them if nothing is present here. You can also use OpenDNS servers. Here are complete instructions on how to change these and what to change them to:

How to change DNS settings to point to OpenDNS servers