Digit 101
Tips to increase your battery life Laptop
Change power settings for maximum battery life, instead of performance or a balanced setting Reduce the brightness of the display Charge the battery, use it up completely, and repeat the cycle for a longer battery life Minimise use of peripherals (USB memory, external mouse etc) Don’t tax the machine, work on one application at a time, and regularly defragment Turn off the wireless and bluetooth services
Camera
Turn off the camera when not in use Don’t browse or review many images at once, instead carry along extra memory If you have a viewfinder, don’t use the LCD screen at all Use a lower resolution for taking images Don’t store the batteries in the body of the camera, instead keep them seperate Plan your shot well, before even turning on the camera Don’t use the flash unless absolutely necessary, use another flash gun instead
Mobile Phone
Think of faster ways to navigate, eg: use recently called lists instead of the phonebook Minimise use of flash memory, save images on the internal memory itself Stop charging the phone when the batteries are full Turn off your mobile phone when you know you won’t use it Decrease the brightness of the display Disable extras, such as Bluetooth, keypad sounds, vibrate alert along with a ringtone alert etc Use a low volume for alerts
India on the forefront of FOSS A quick peek into Google Trends shows that India is right on top when it comes to Open Source, and Linux interest. If you are skeptical about adopting Linux, fear not as you have a lot of local company. Indian users are most interested in the Ubuntu distribution, the DVD version of which has language packs for many native Indian languages. This bridges a large language gap in technology adoption, and is one of the strong points of Open Source software when compared with their commercial alternatives. The graphs below plot the relative interest in Linux across regions in the world, states in India and cities in India. These rankings keep changing, a little time ago, Kashmir was on top of the subregions list, but has dropped off the list recently. (FOSS stands Free and open source software)
120 Digit | April 2010 | www.thinkdigit.com
PMP
Listen to music at the lowest audible volume, as a rule. This increases the life of your earphones as well. Turn off backlighting if possible, and reduce display brightness Use extra memory only if you absolutely need to. Try and listen to music from internal memory only Use short tracks, or files with smaller file sizes, which reduces load on the cache of the system Turn off album art display and the equiliser Keep the firmware updated regularly
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