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Aug 29, 2011

Blogger, where is my "Edit HTML" button ???

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Hello.

So have you noticed the new Blogger dashboard lately? It looks really polished and more organized, don't you think? I like it.

If you have been following this blog, you'd have noticed that it keeps changing every now and then. Nothing wrong with that, right? Well, it keeps changing mainly because I keep messing with it all the time. It seems I can't make my mind up on what I want this blog to look like. I even tried learning some basic HTML just to mess with this blog. As you can tell, that didn't go as planned.

Anyways, few days ago, I was thinking about widening the blog post area a bit to better display the images in the blog. I got some time today, logged on to Blogger, and guess what, I couldn't for the life of me find the good old "Edit HTML" button anywhere on my Blogger dashboard. Well, that sucked. 

So, naturally, I did some googling and it seems the new blogger in draft doesn't have the "Edit HTML" button anymore. Google also told me there is a clever way to bring it back if you really wanted to.

Here is how. I can confirm it works for now.

- Log on to Blogger and got to Layout option.



- Notice the highlighted are in the URL? Now edit the URL, instead of "blogger.g" change it to "html". Hit return.



- There you go, you have the good old familiar layout with "Edit HTML" button.

Now you can play around with your blog as much as you want, but back up the old one, just in case. Hope that was helpful. Happy HTML editing. Blog away.

Laterx.

Aug 15, 2011

New!!! Gmail offers free SMS chat …

1 comments


Hello.

Have you noticed a "Send SMS" button on Gmail lately?

At first I thought it was something related to Google Voice, which is not available in my my part of the world. GV is totally useless to me, so I thought this SMS thing would never work in Maldives, but I tested it out anyway, and guess what, it seems to works perfectly well for local Wataniya subscribers.

So what is it? I did a little googling and it turns out its a two way chat system. Google allows Gmail users to send text messages from inside Gmail to a contact's mobile phone. The contact can then reply to the text message as one reply to a regular text message, and it shows up on my Gmail chat window. Nice!

How do you do it? Well, I think its an experimental feature on Gmail, so you have to first head over to Gmail labs to enable it. Go to Settings -> Labs -> enable SMS features.

It has been sometime since I have been requesting Wataniya to provide a way to let us send text messages to Wataniya subscribers from my desktop, something like WebSMS that Dhiraagu offers. Wataniya came short, but now, I can use Gmail to send text messages and I don't even even have to sign in to another service. Good stuff!

If you need more information about how this service works, here is the link to the official Google SMS help page. Give it a read.

Sending SMS from Gmail.

It is interesting to note that, currently there are about 20 countries on the list that support this service, and Maldives is on the list. Good going Wataniya and thank you!

Now log on to Gmail, and send some text messages! :)

Laterx.

Aug 10, 2011

Calculating mileage for my Honda Wave S ...

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Hello.

Being the curious type, I often wondered what kind of mileage I can get with my old Honda Wave S. With petrol prices sky rocketing (it has gone up 6 times so far this year), so I really wanted to know.

I set out to do a little experiment to calculate the fuel consumption of my bike. I am sure there will be more scientific and much more accurate methods to calculate a bike's fuel efficiency. I describe below the method I went with.

Step one. Log odometer reading with a full tank.
I filled the tank up to the brim. According to my bike's specification, my fuel tank capacity is 3.71 liters. I managed to pump around MRF 55/- worth. To log in my reading I took a picture of my odometer. It read 38,638.2 Kilometers.

Step two. Ride!
I rode the bike as I normally would, checking the odometer every now and then, and keeping an eye on my fuel gauge. On the 9th day, low fuel indicator started blinking. I wanted this test to be as accurate as possible, so I had to ride until the I completely ran out of petrol, but what if my bike runs out of petrol in the middle of main street? I rode out and bought a half liter PET bottle of petrol and kept it in my U-Box for emergency refilling.

Step three. Log odometer reading with empty tank.
On the 10th day, while coming back home from IGMH, my bike choked, stalled and died. I took a picture of the odometer again. It read 38,776.0 Kilometers. Lucky I had some emergency fuel supply, eh?

Step four. Arithmetics.
Previous odometer reading = 38,638.2 Kilometers.
Current odometer reading = 38,776.0 Kilometers.
Fuel tank capacity = 3.71
Using this data, you can calculate:
Distance traveled since last fill = 137.4 Kilometers.
Fuel consumption usage = 37.14 Kilometers per Liter.
Fuel direct expense = MRF 0.44 per Kilometer.
Fuel fill expense (full tank) = MRF 60.06.

My milage turns out to be 37.14 Kilometers per Liter, thats about 2.7 liters per 100 Kilometers.

My fuel consumption is 37.14Km/L while Honda claims 56 km/L for 125 cc fuel injection type. A difference of more than 60 percent.

This sucks!

There are a few things to be taken in to consideration here. First, I could not find the official mileage for Honda Wave S. The one I'm comparing to is Honda Wave S fuel injection type engine.

Second, for marketing reasons, Honda may have given the highway mileage. Fuel efficiency in urban environments tends to be much lower.

Anyway, my bike's performance seems to be really low. I need to service my bike more often and be more regular about it. Also, I think I need to read some fuel economy tips on this automobile sites and club forums!

Laterx.