Greetings, Earthling 🖖

I’m Shantanu, aka Shaan.

Your friendly neighborhood co-inhabitant of this tiny speck of dust, I maintain this site as a stochastic log of my calculations towards the futile aim of weeding out the anomalies from the equation that gives me my “42”.

In my Clark Kent mode, I spend my day at The Trade Desk, trying to crunch through petabytes of data and trillions of queries every day to understand the human behavior and make the advertising technology world a little bit better.

Before that, I spent a couple of decades in the Semiconductors world at Qualcomm and Google, building processors and AI accelerators, tinkering with chips, operating systems, device drivers, human interface devices, security et al.

When the lights go out everywhere, I like to don my maker hat and build stuff that no one wants.

I like to make and break things around me ranging from my smart toaster/TV to my web and phone apps to my car, strumming a bit of guitar, 3d printing stuff, and of course, shit-posting on twitter @shantanugoel.

Sometimes I post some of my travel and 3d print outputs on instagram, because I’ve been told by my gen-z interns that that’s a thing to do.

Do check out some of the other subdomains that I run.

Windows Mobile 6 - Case of the Missing Calls: Solved

Sherlock

As the pic above says, it turned out to be quite elementary in the end. But what is “it” actually?

The Problem: Since the beginning of time (read launching of WM6), millions of WM users (ok ok, will not exaggerate from now on) have been facing a very peculiar issue. The issue is that people tell them all the time that they are avoiding those people, and not taking their calls. But as the perplexed WM’er flips through his calls log, he can’t find any sign of a missed call. Yes, the issue is that many times, the phone will go into a state where the caller will hear the ring go, there will be no sign on your phone of the same, not even a missed call. People all around the world have been after the solution with all their might, suggesting:

WM6.1 Is Here, Loves HTC Wizard…(Really?)

Screen002 Screen003

A user going by the remarkably simple handle “email123” announced on the xda-developers forum, that WM6.1 is here, alive and kicking. But he doesn’t stop there, he says that its available “now”, that too for an HTC wizard, a 3 year old phone (which I own as well). Thats not all, he goes on to provide the proof by linking in his cooked ROM for all to download. But, here is the clincher, he claims that finally “Big Storage” is available for wizard, a feat noone has been able to achieve in the last 3 years. It means that an extra 10 MB is available to you as Device Memory. It seems to get better and better for our dear old wizard. After all, old is gold.

All Your Base Are Belong To Us - Says Dell

Dell_8800

Ask any laptop user about how much he liked to kick some butt in Gears of War and he would cringe and cry with agony even before you are able to say the “C” of Crysis. But not anymore. For its notebook consumers, Dell has finally come up with the perfect answer to the questions posed by these ridiculously-difficult-to-get-more-than-10-fps games. Available now is some motherly love for your laps in the form of 8800M GTX with its M1730. But that’s not all, it slaps onto the lappy not one, but two GFX cards in one. Yes, men, you heard that right “SLI” .

BlogJet - Blog Faster, Blog Better (Now In Linux too, with a hidden bonus)

BlogJet in Linux

Blogjet in Linux

A quick googling for best desktop blogging client would yield just a few (read millions/gazillions) results. Having researched the subject a lot, my choices were finally limited down to BlogJet and BlogDesk, as per my feature set requirement goes (Primarily, off line editing, draft, WYSIWYG editing, categories, tagging support, pinging, trackbacks support, timestamping, past post editing, automatic image uploading) BUT there is one little problem. Both of these don’t work on Linux.

Beware of Fake Nokia N95 Cell Phones, Pirated by Chinese

if buying cell phones on ebay wasn’t annoying enough already, with a bajillion things that you should know, it’s about to get a lot worse - at least if you’re thinking of purchasing a Nokia N95 phone. Learn how to spot the fake Nokia N95 in this How-To.

Came across this post today, now even your N95’s aren’t safe. Make sure to check this guide to identify if your latest boy-toy is a fake or not.