The Stalwart - Engineers Day Remembrance

It was well beyond midnight, during the British era in India. A train was travelling to its destination with a howl in the silence of the night. A man was sleeping with his head on the side window of the train. Suddenly, he woke up from his sleep.

He jumped from his seat an pulled the chain hanging just over his head. The train stopped immediately. The employees and other passengers in the train rushed to the compartment to know what had happened.

They were angry on this man. All surrounded the man and asked the reason behind chain pulling. The man told them that there was a crack in the railway tracks, a few metres ahead. The people did not believe him. The man asked them to go and check for themselves.The railway workers got down to the track to examine it. And yes, they found a crack in the track.

The man told them that he heard the sound from the track while sleeping and it changed at some place. The vibrating sound changed too heavily which the man recognized that it was due to the crack in the railway line.

Do you know who was the man who saved many lives on that day ? It was none other than the best engineer that India ever produced, Bharat Ratna Sir Mokshagundam Visvervaraya. This man is responsible for the building of India's irrigation structure and was instrumental in taming Hyderabad floods of 1908 for decades.

15 September is celebrated as Engineer's day in his memory.

“Remember, your work may be only to sweep a railway crossing, but it is your duty to keep it so clean that no other crossing in the world is as clean as yours.”

How to Restrict Applications To Load On Start Up

Have you ever been in a situation that you want to do an important task and when you start your laptop, you end up waiting for a long time for the system to be in a workable state.

Well, chances are that some of your resource eating applications or services takes their own sweet time to get loaded during the waiting time.And yes, you are right - its very annoying !!

Good news is that we can easily restrict the by-default loading of applications on the start up. Here's how we can do it :

1.   Type (Windows + R) in your Keyboard to bring the Run window. Enter "msconfig".

     2.   System Configuration window would be opened. Go to “Startup” menu. This is the place where all Startup Items would be listed. Uncheck the ones which you don’t want to start on system start.

Click on Apply button and the configuration changes would be saved. Again click on OK button.

    3.     There would be a popup prompting us to restart the system, so that the latest configurations  are set. Click on Restart button.

            And that’s all. After your system gets restarted, you would see it load faster as unwanted applications or services would not load on start up.

Kryptos

In the language of Cryptography, Cipher is a secret or disguised way of writing. It can also be considered as a code, developed by its creator.

Kryptos is a sculpture made by an American artist, Jim Sanborn on the grounds of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Langley, Virginia, USA. It was dedicated in the year 1990 and had 4 encrypted messages. Cryptoanalysts around the world have delved into it and only 3 of the messages have been solved so far. The 4th one is yet to be solved, till date, and has already become one of the famous unsolved codes in the world, to reckon with.

Jim had confirmed that should he die before the 4th message is deciphered, the answer would be there with someone, safe, to affirm the solution.

Plastics Numerals - What Do They Say

Seldom can you find a place on this planet, where you would be hardly distant from Plastics. It would be ideal to say that plastics have become a part and parcel of our daily chores of life. But the thing which had always intrigued me was the numeral which would be written below a plastic bottle.

It stands out that these numbers indeed have a numeral significance and has been there to showcase the quality of plastic and whether they are relatively safer or needs to be avoided at all costs.

Have a glance at each of the numeral and what they really say about the plastic you are holding in your hands :

NO : 1 [POLYETHYLENE TEREPHTHALATE (PET OR PETE)]
Verdict : AVOID re-using them

NO : 2 [High density polyethylene (HDPE)]
Verdict : Relatively Safe

NO : 3 [Polyvinyl chloride (V or Vinyl or PVC)]
Verdict : AVOID re-using them

NO : 4 [Low density polyethylene (LDPE)]
Verdict : Relatively Safe

NO : 5 [Polypropylene (PP)]
Verdict : Relatively Safe

NO : 6 [Polystyrene (PS)]
Verdict : Relatively Safe

NO : 7 [Other (O) - all other plastics]
Verdict : AVOID re-using them

In the end, however, no plastics can be said to be safe for-ever.

English Language Trivia - Part 2

“Forty” is the only number which has its letters in alphabetical order.

SWIMS & NOON are words that can be flipped backwards and upside down and be spelled the same way! It is an example of an Ambigram which is a word, art form or other symbolic representation whose elements retain meaning when viewed or interpreted from a different direction, perspective, or orientation.

The only letter that doesn't appear on the Periodic Table is the letter 'J'. The periodic table is a tabular arrangement of the chemical elements, ordered by their atomic number (number of protons), electron configurations, and recurring chemical properties.

The most used letter in the English alphabet is 'E', and 'Q' is the least used. The letter E is over 56 times more common than Q in forming individual English words.

Typographical symbols such as '@#*&', that are used to replace swear words are called 'Grawlix'. It is a sequence of typographical symbols used to represent a non-specific, profane word or phrase.

'Q' is the only letter in the alphabet that does not appear in the name of any of the 50 American states.

English Language Trivia - Part 1

As per Guiness World Records, the English word with the most meanings is the verb 'set', with 430 senses listed in the Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, published in 1989. The word commands the longest entry in the dictionary at 60,000 words, or 326,000 characters.

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"Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" is a grammatically correct sentence. It is unpunctuated and uses 3 distinct readings of the word "buffalo" :

1) City of Buffalo, New York, United States
2) The noun buffalo (American bison), an animal
3) The verb "buffalo" meaning to outwit, confuse, deceive, intimidate or baffle.

Now read the below sentence, keeping the above words in mind :
The buffalo from Buffalo who are buffaloed by buffalo from Buffalo, buffalo (verb) other buffalo from Buffalo.

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The sentence " Are you as bored as I am? " can be read backwards and still make sense.

Longest English word without any vowel is "twyndyllyngs", which means "twins"

The division sign "÷" is technically called an Obelus.

Troubleshoot 1 -- Skype Connectivity Issue

While launching Skype, I suddenly came across this message, which was quite surprising :
"Sorry,we couldn't connect to Skype. Please check your internet connection and try again"

Going by the look of it,I thought there must be a problem with the internet connection but then
when I confirmed that there was nothing wrong with connectivity, then I was intrigued.

Finally, after Googling for some time, I came across this simple troubleshooting method :

1. Go to Control Panel of your system.
2. Click on Internet Options link. An Internet Properties popup would appear.
3. Click on Advanced menu tab.
4. Click on Restore advanced settings button. And click OK.
5. Launch your Skype instance again.

And Voila !!! You are ready to launch your Skype instance and talk or chat to your near and dear ones.