Friend of mine Lavanya acquired a Reva last month. Since I have never driven an electric car this was my best chance. So both of us reached parking lot but unfortunately we couldn’t take it outside parking lot(that’s another story). So I decided to take it for a spin inside the parking lot itself. At first you will doubt weather this car can take two people. But then you will be amazed how comfortably it can accommodate two and still has place for some luggage at back.

As usual as soon as you enter you will search for gear level (It has seat belts) but there is none. There is a switch for Drive, Neutral, Reverse and Booster. Booster is for extra power when you want to climb, the rest are self explanatory. Driving is very, very easy. If you know to ride a bicycle then you can drive this car. Even if you don’t know to ride a bicycle you can drive this car. You just use you right leg to handle both brake and accelerator. The dashboard has regular meters cum battery level indicator. It doesn’t make any noise. It just need place of two wheelers for parking.

It can easily accommodate two normal sized humans (I mean 70Kgs and below 6ft). Absence of the engine in front means good leg space.The back seat is for kids or small luggage. The extra tyre is in the front below the hood. Don’t expect everything to be automatic. You are pretty young.

Even though I didn’t do speed test, according to the owner it can go up to 70kmph. But around 50kmph is the safe speed. It does the corners easily ( I climbed the circular ramp at good speed). The pick up is good on a normal road and it was decent on climb in regular drive (I didn’t try booster). Steering is easy and soft. There is seat belt for front seats. I am not sure about the safety features but I guess its lot better than your two wheeler.

With fully charged batteries you can go up to 80Kms. You can recharge 80% of the battery in three hrs and the rest takes another four hours. With less than a rupee per km it competes with your two wheeler. But it beats your two wheeler in price (of course higher), pollution (No direct) and safety.

Verdict: It can’t be your first car just because you can’t take it on a long drive. But if you want vehicle to drive inside the city or to go to work or your old parents to drive, then it works pretty well. Its a comfortable drive if you just want to go to office. Its is Fun, Easy, Good, Economical and Nature Friendly.

PS: Reva is from Maini, Bangalore based company.

I have been tracking micro finance and social entrepreneurship for quite some time now.  Of course after the success of Gramin Bank “Micro Finance” is Macro. But me being a *web* person was impressed with Kiva’s usage of web and social media for doing its part in eradicating poverty. At Kiva you can start your social investment (sounds better than lending right?) starting from $25. Such multiples $25 can help a farmer to buy a cow in Zimbabwe. Even though I have been great fan of Kiva, I never lent any money there. With millions of people below poverty line in India, I was waiting for them to start their program in India. Strangely it has not happened yet.

As usual I turned twitter for help. There were two main suggestions from my twitter friends for Kiva like organization in India dhanaX and RangDe. Both do micro financing in India through web. I had heard about dhanaX on one of CNBC programs. Naturally I went there first. Unfortunately the minimum amount you can invest there is Rs.10000 ($200). That is big for most of us to start with.

The next choice RangDe had a min limit of Rs.1000 ($20) which worked pretty well for me. It didn’t take long for me to create an account there. You just need an email id for registering. For lending, all I had to do was search for the borrowers depending on my criteria i.e women, education etc. Since I have set a personal limit of Rs.500/lending I choose two borrowers. Then like a regular shopping cart, did checkout, entered credit card details and pressed OK. I was done. Read the rest of this entry »

I like to comment when I read a good post. More than 50% of the blogs that I read are on either wordpress.com or hosted . So I created a simple scriptlet to fill the comment form for ease of commenting.Then I thought it could be useful to others too. So I wrote this small script to create a scriptlet for you.
Fill up the name, email and url you use while commenting. You can even have some default comment if you want. Make sure not to use single or double quotes. As of now the JS code breaks. Try to manage with out quotes : )
Once you have entered the details click “Generate Scriptlet”. If everything goes OK then the link below the button becomes “Fill Comment”. Pull it to your links bar. Now that should make your commenting easy on any wordpress blog. Send in your comments.

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I have been using Nokia e61i (Symbian S60 3rd edition) for quite some time now. I am happy with it mostly because of the following applications. They are free and they enhance the functionality of my mobile.

1. Opera Mini is my browser on my mobile. Its open 24X7 on my mobile. It supports book marks (you can also sync the bookmarks if you have Opera Account), offline reading of the pages, supports https, supports uploading files and its fast.
2. GMail Mobile App is my email client on my mobile. Its faster than the default client. The newer version allows multiple accounts and also allows hosted accounts. It can open basic file formats like txt, doc and jpg. It lacks attachment feature. It also lacks Gchat functionality.This is my second application that will be open as long has my mobile has juice.
3. MobiGenie is my answering machine. It runs locally and hence I do not have to pay my service provider. You can set up many things like answer by voice and record, reply by sms, block the caller etc. You can record custom welcome message in your own voice. You can export the voice message as mp3 files. Thanks to Asgatech company behind MobiGenie.
4. Qik is my live video production house. It runs on my mobile and sends the live video to the world. You can either see my live on qik/thej or at my *live* site. I have used qik to live stream cycling even and a marathon. In future I might even have scheduled live program ( on the lines of schedule live video interviews/podcatst). You can watch the past videos, you can download them for offline viewing too.
5. MgMaps is my map on phone. It has Yahoo, Yahoo India, MS Live, Ask, Open Street and wikimapia on it. It can work with external/internal GPS. It can even pre download the map images and store it on your memory card for offline usage.   It also has subway maps for major cities and FON locations. Geek stuff: It can also display kml files. I usually use it while traveling.
6. Fring is my voip client. I use it log into my skype account. But you can use it log into any SIP account. It works on both edge and wifi. It also supports Yahoo IM , ICQ, MSN and Gtalk.
7. Putty – s2putty is my on the go command line. Its an open source project on sourceforge. It works all most like putty on your desktop. What more do you want as a developer on the go?
8. DEdit is the best text editor on the go. It is the best full screen editor available for s60 phones. It supports different character encoding like ASCII and Unicode.  It supports really big files (mega byte files). It has search/replace and book marking features. Its my IDE on the go.
9. Twitxme or Twitxr is my image/picture uploader. I use it to upload the picture on the go. I have also configured it to upload the same pics to flickr and facebook. It also tweets to my twitter/thej account. It works pretty well.
10. Autolock is also recent addition to my list of software. For some strange reason e61i does not have auto locking feature for keypad. So i had to install this program. It works pretty well but I want PIN support.

Read the rest of this entry »

It was during my travel back from Finland. I had an Indian doctor as my neighbor in flight. As usual we started talking about India, politicians and travel. Then later we realized both of us are from Bangalore and we both are Kannadigas but chatting in English. Then we continued our conversations in Kannada about castles & forts in Scotland etc. That is when he told me “namma chitradurgada kote munde avenu illa biDi” roughly translates too “The castles or forts of Scotland are nothing in front of Fort of Chitradurga“. That is when I got really curious about the fort. Until then I had heard about it from the Film Nagarahavu and from the legendary story of Onake Obavva.

In the picture above you can see one of the mega entrances to the fort. There are five walls visible today. Each wall has a mega gate. This is one of them. two other fort walls are lost inside the new Chitradurga city.

This time when we started planning our North Karnataka trip I made sure to Include Chitradurga. I have not been to Scotland but this for is just breath taking. I have not seen any other fort as defensive as this. Chitradurga Fort is also called as Kallina Kote (stone fort), Ukinna kote (fort of steel), Yelu Suttina kote (Fort of seven walls). It has 19 gateways, 38 posterior entrances, a palace, many temples, a maTa, a mosque, granaries, oil pits, four secret entrances and water tanks. Read the rest of this entry »