How I Listen to International Music Legally

11 Thursday Jun 2015

Posted by in ICT World, Software Review, Tutorials

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Well, I respect intellectual properties and I try my level best not to use anything illegally. I stopped using pirated software years ago and since almost a year I do not listen to pirated western and Bangladeshi music. Well now the question is how. The answer is simple. For Bangladeshi music, I buy original CDs, as they are super cheap.  For western I am depended on Spotify. Well may be Taylor Swift is not on Spotify but I can live without her music. 😉

Spotify’s slogan is “Music for Everyone” but unfortunately it is not. You have to live in one of those countries where Spotify operates and unfortunately they do not operate in my country Bangladesh!

Spotify has two types of subscription, Free and Premium. Free is ad supported music streaming service with some restrictions and premium gives you freedom to listen to your favourite music wherever and however you like, even when you not connected to the internet. But unfortunately everything is limited to the countries they operate. Now if you have money and want to become a paid premium subscriber, you cannot just do that. So how I am doing it!!

Well, I did some research and decided to avail the service using VPN. With VPN (virtual private network) you can have secure and new network footprint. Almost all Internet connections of Bangladesh are routed through Singapore, so getting both Spotify and VPN service from Singapore would be the perfect blend. I have subscribed to Express VPN because they have 3-4 servers in Singapore and I can access their service from almost all the devices I own. I have a long term agreement with them, I have paid for a year and getting the service for 20 months. So it a good deal for me.

I have subscribed to Spotify Premium with Singapore Dollars 9.99 per month and I have the freedom to listen to whatever I would like to. I do agree that this is not 100% legit way to avail the service, but at least I am not cheating the artists.

I do encourage everyone to avoid using illegal/pirated materials.

Android Wear – The Ultimate Junk

16 Monday Mar 2015

Posted by in Android, Google, ICT World, My Gadgets, Review

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Well, Apple is overpriced but how you will disagree that they has the ultimate design innovation talent! Sometimes it feels like all the consumer innovations are only coming from them. Recent days Google pretends many things but their only intention is the sell ads to the consumer.

Many of my friends know that I am an early adapter, so if I am fascinated about something, I get it despite of all challenges. When Android Wear came, I thought this is the most innovative step from Google and Android team. I bought a LG G watch R back in January, which is currently running Android Wear 5.0.2. I feel so sorry for the device and the operating system. Let me highlight some of the points one by one.

Not even a Remote Control for your phone: Say you want to play music on your phone and control that from your watch, what things you would like to do? Definitely you would not like to skip tracks and control volume, a $50 Samsung phone’s headphones can do that. You may like to look into the playlist and then play the tracks you like or manage your queue etc. Unfortunately this Android Wear cannot do beyond what that $50 Samsung phone’s headphones can do.

No Playlist: No matter what media player you are using on your phone, there is no option to browse through the playlist on your watch. So you cannot just tap on your song and play it, you have to trust on forward/next options. I found only Sony Walkman and Google Play Music are the only apps that the phone supports. If your watch has internal memory (Sony, LG and Huawei does) you can download your selected playlists on your watch and play them directly on a Bluetooth device. But on the same case you are not allowed to browse the playlist and directly play the track you want to!

No Contacts, Calling: I was expecting I would be able to call someone right from my phone. The feature is there but only if you are connected to Google Now cloud services and if they can understand your pronunciation. You may want to call home, they will call mom. That is what happened with me.

Well, calling became so challenging because there is no contact list you can see from your watch. Say, I am wearing the watch and my phone is connected to my car’s speakers (AUX), if there is an incoming call, I can see who is calling and I can take/reject the call right from the watch. Now if I want to call someone it will be super challenging. You cannot browse the contact list and just tap to call someone. I have no clue why Google did not think about this simple feature but this is what it is.

Cannot Rearrange Apps: Say you like and use Google Keep a lot and want to access the app easily from the app menu. You are not lucky, you cannot re-arrange the apps, have to access them as they are.

Notification Without any Clue: If you want to keep things private on the phone, they gets private on the watch as well. For example you have chosen to keep your message notifications private on the phone (phone will show incoming notification but will not show summary etc.) then the messages will not appear on the watch as well.

Disappointing Google Now: You know there is nothing called Google Now, right? The information you see on Google now are already backdated, e.g. game results. The weather Google Now shows are few hours old. So Google Now is not Now, it is may be Google’s now not ours. It is not watch Google Now, for every platform it sux big time.

So that is my honest opinion about Google’s latest innovation! At this point we can only hope things will get better in coming days else Apple will dominate this market too.

… and no one will sue Link3

01 Sunday Mar 2015

Posted by in Bangladesh, Comments, Telecom

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For a travelling guy like me, living abroad without family makes internet the key communication media. The Internet became the bridge between me and my family, and keeps us connected all the time. Which obviously makes us feel like at home all the time.

The term “broadband” in Bangladesh became a joke. I always pay premium price for my internet service but it is very unfortunate that I did not get any satisfactory service ever from any ISP. Guys started to call broadband providers fraudband providers only because the providers do not take their business seriously.

Link3, The IT Guru!

It’s more than 2 years since I have subscribed to an ISP called Link3. With their 1 mbps fibre service I was feeling like flying in the cyberspace. But since last month they made the subscribers of Dhaka Uttara zone guinea pigs and started to pilot an unfit/untested/inappropriate platform. On 21st February they have forced all the subscriber of that area to move into the new(!) platform which was not even ready yet. Well, leaving other troubles apart, they have disconnected the connection of all the users of this zone on 1 March 2015 at 1 am and sent SMS notification at 2:30 am. The SMS says that users have to pay the monthly bill in advanced to stay connected. Now how on earth the users will pay the bills in the middle of the night?

I called the Service Deliver Manager and she lied to me about the SMS delivery time. She said the SMS sent to the users days ago, I checked with few other friends in that area and everyone has received SMS after midnight service disconnection. Finally my family back their managed to pay the bill but the connection has not been restored yet. These are the people I have called:

  • Afsana Ali – Manager, Service Delivery – Cell: 01733911869
  • Md. Saiful Huq (Suhan) – Assistant Manager, NMC & HD – Cell: 01913743230
  • Bushra Salahuddin – Manager, NMC & Helpdesk – Cell: 01610001023

And none of them has been able to restore the service. This is a friend’s post on Facebook complaining about their service few days back:

Trivuz's Facebook Post on Link3This post expresses the frustration of an ordinary user. My point is why an user has to suffer, why we have to be so frustrated with a service and why service providers gets any chance to make us guinea pigs of their unfinished/untested work?

I do not want to blame the ISP. Actually we let them sell shit to us. We pay taxes and public servants just takes the salary home. We have a joker organisation called Bangladesh Telecom Regulatory Commission, it is a mystery what they do apart from fining cell phone operators for illegal VOIP usage. I never compare Bangladesh with any other country, this is what I just do not like to do. We have what we have and in my point of view we have more than what many people do not have. But besides what we have, perhaps our lazy ass public servants can make some regulations like other countries have. The term broadband means a subscriber has to get 25 mbps download speed in the USA. Cannot our BTRC make a broadband definition? Cannot a regulation define if a subscriber suffers downtime for more than X amount of time, than ISP has to give them free internet for Y time or cash patiently of Z amount? Is it very had to implement?

I wish someday they will weak up before it is too late. Else Digital Bangladesh motto would become a joke.

Update: After struggling for more than 48 hours Link3 failed to fix my connectivity and later gave me a public IP saying I have requested for that. This is a mail I have sent them while having some conversation regarding moving into private IP range:

Email Communication

I do not see anywhere I have requested fro any public IP for me. And only God knows if I have to pay for the public IP now!

The Best Bangladeshi Soft Drinks Ever!

06 Friday Feb 2015

Posted by in Bangladesh, Food Review

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It is not new that people goes for successful and well established brand names, but I am a person who loves to explore alternate options. Soft Drinks are also not exceptional here. People Likes to have world class brands like Coca Clola, Pepsi, Mirinda etc.

My case is a bit different, Mojo and Clemon (by Akij Food and Beverage) are one of my favourite soft drinks. They have this unique taste and do not taste like any other soft drinks on the market. I mean they did not try to replicate any other brand’s taste but tried to establish their own brand and taste instead. These are awesome if served chilled. But Due to less demand and poor distribution network, those drinks are not widely available on the market.

PRAN Soft DrinksI went to Dhaka International Trade Fair few days back and found one exclusive stall is displaying some exceptional looking confectionery food items and new beverages. The salesgirl told us that the stall belongs to Pran Foods Ltd. We bought couple of confectionery items and 3 bottles of different soft drinks for a taste-drive. The confectionery items were crap, so don’t want to to write anything more about them and that is not what I am up to today. Lets talk about the soft drinks.

We bought Pran Maxx Cola, Tango Orange and FireFly. When we bought them, I made sure they are chilled because soft drinks do not taste good if the temperature is not right.

I started with Maxx Cola. Why started with that, because it is cola and it is Maxx with an extra X, so you can understand there is something eXtra! 🙂 Jokes apart. With the first sip I took some time to think what I am going to have. Then I took another and then another after. It was so amazing, I had this feeling that this is the next generation soft drink of Bangladesh! This drink is going to rock the cola thirsty people. It is not Coca Cola, it is not Pepsi, it’s better. It is smooth, it is sweet and moreover it is perfect.

After that I tried Tango Orange. When I was a kid, there use to be 2 orange soft drinks available, one was Orange Squash and the other one was Orange Topsy (or something like that), both of them had similar taste. When I sipped Tango Orange, suddenly I felt like it has the same taste I use to love in my childhood. I really loved it then and I love it now. It’s also a perfect orange flavoured soft drink.

Upcoming PRAN Soft Drinks

Finally, FireFly. If I summarise my experience, I can write in a simple sentence, “This is a drink which may kill Mountain Dew in Bangladesh.” I’m not a Mountain Dew fan, but I had Mountain Dew couple of times. If I am not wrong, this one tastes better.

Let me clarify couple of things here. Pran is assembling and marketing Coca Cola’s beverages (Coca Cola, Sprite, Fanta) across Bangladesh for couple of years now. They had their own brands before like Pran Up, but I did not like them. They are either too sweet or water-ish. I think this is their second attempt to make things right.

One of my contacts inside Pran told me they are going to bring 3 more ‘quality’ soft drinks, Cheer Up, Maxx Zero and Pran Lemon. Not sure about Pran Lemon but I have this feelings that they would also taste great.

Its very common in Bangladesh that companies are launching good quality products and later they do not bother any more to maintain the quality level. Though I do not expect this from Pran. If Pran does right marketing and maintain the quality and proper distribution channel, there is no way any world class brands can stop them from taking over the market.

They are definitely the best in my point of view and I invite you to have a taste-drive as well.

Kudos Disney for Saving Rock ‘N Roll

17 Saturday Jan 2015

Posted by in Songs and Music

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This is very straight forward that I love music. I love original music with real instruments playing, emphasising on guitars. I honestly hate people waste their time and money on cheap electronic music created on a computer. Any way lets go to my actual point.

I grow up listening to Disney’s OSTs. Beauty and The Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, Pocahontas, Hercules, Tarzan are some names I will never forget for their remarkable OSTs. All of those had great Title, Promotional and End Title songs which held places in international top charts for a very long time. I really appreciate Disney’s investments in big, famous and creative orchestras for doing great music arrangements and creating some original piece of art, which is quite rear now a days.

I never dreamed for a Disney life and live in a fairy tale, but their music always inspired me. Apart from the tracks on the above mentioned films, we do not remember the bands/artists much. Well Elton John or Phil Collins do not need any introduction so they are not my story heroes.

In 2006 Disney released an animated film called Cars and there was a rock song called Life is a Highway by an almost unknown band of that time called Rascal Flatts. Before 2006, this band had released three studio albums but no one knew them much. But after this song people started to buy their old albums as the songs are awesome! If you visit Rascal Flatts’ YouTube channel, you can read people’s reaction on their old music videos after they have learned their name.

Like Rascal Flatts, recently Disney have introduced two new Rock bands through their latest animated film Big Hero 6. They have used the song Top of The World by the band Greek Fire in Big Hero 6 promotional video, and the song Immortal in the movie from the band Fall Out Boy. Both these bands had created fantastic piece of art, which I call original music. But did anyone knew much about the bands before? Well, I did not.

I am a person who follow music very closely, especially the genre I like and background music in a movie or TV show. As mentioned before, I like rock music over others, and it is very unfortunate that from a very long time Rock ‘N Roll was not getting much attention over electronic music.

Well after MTV f**ked up broadcasting crap TV programmes and VH1 is also busy with something else! There are less options left for us to be introduced with good original music. This is what I loved about Disney, they value art and bring the best to us. Salute to the people working hard to bring us the best. Rock ‘N Roll can only be saved by introducing great Rock music to mass audience.

PS: It is not that I do not like electronic music, in Wreck-It Ralph movie Disney introduced a song called When Can I See You Again from band Owl City. I found this band also have some cool creativity. 🙂