I recently came across this website – Skin Deep which is run by The Environmental Working Group (EWG) and has a Shopper’s Guide to Safe Cosmetics. The guide lists a number of ingredients that can have adverse effects on health. The problem was that one of the ingredients listed was Sodium lauryl/laureth sulfate(SLS/SLES). For those of you unfamiliar with SLS/SLES, they are the most commonly used surfactants – which are the main ingredients of shampoo. A surfactant is a compound that binds with oil so that it can be washed away with water. Almost all surfactants used in shampoo have a similar chemical makeup. I wanted to check if there were shampoos in the market which use a surfactant that is chemically dissimilar to SLS/SLES and could not find a single one that does so. If these ingredients were present in all shampoos then what was the EWG recommending? – that we not use shampoos? To answer this question I decided to study in greater detail the claims made by the EWG. read more
How to setup a linux account for SSH tunneling?
April 5, 2011 – 9:07 pm
SSH tunneling can be useful as a SOCKS proxy specially when accessing the internet over a public connection. Sometimes you may want to add users to the system who are limited to just this functionality. After looking around for a good way to do this I found the following method, recommended by llutz at freenode IRC, to be the easiest way to do this:
Add a user with no home directory and shell as /bin/false:
$ useradd –M –s /bin/false username
A quick introduction to smartphone OSes
April 3, 2011 – 7:45 pm
This guide was written as a companion guide to – The Cheap Smartphone Guide for India. Here is a brief description of the popular smartphone operating systems:
- The iOS Home screen
iOS
Apple’s iOS is the most polished OS available on the market right now. Apple has a policy of selling the hardware and software together as a package, and although their phones have the best build quality by far they are also among the most expensive phones in the market. When Apple does launch the iPhone 4 in India they are likely to make a cheap 3GS model available – as they have been doing in other markets. There are also reports to suggest that Apple is building a cheaper iPhone, but this is expected to launch only in September of this year and I feel that it will not be officially available in India until months after that. Considering these factors it is unlikely that a sub ₨ 20,000 iPhone will be available in India for the foreseeable future read more
The Cheap Smartphone Guide for India
April 3, 2011 – 7:45 pm
With the increased importance of connectivity in our lives mobile phone manufacturers have come up with a new breed of smartphones – one that targets the mass market. With a variety of different offerings available it becomes difficult to decide which set of features is right for you. In order to help other people with their research I have created this guide which will help explain some of the technology as well as access some of the cheapest smart phones currently available in the Indian market.
Core Features
I feel that the most important feature for a smartphone (apart from the obvious ability to make and receive calls) is the level of internet browsing experience that it provides. A lot of the computing tasks that we want to be able to do on the go can be completed by using a web browser – be it the ability to search for information, access email and social networking sites or keep track of real time information streams. The more complete web browsing experience that a smartphone provides, the more likely it is that your present and future mobile computing needs are covered. Also with the increased availability of cloud computing services it is likely that a web based alternative to traditional desktop applications are available, take for example Google Docs which is a web based office suite that offers most of the commonly used functionality of Microsoft Office. read more