I recently applied for a US visitor visa (B1/B2) that allows for short trips to the US. If you plan to visit the US for a business or pleasure trip, you will require a non-immigrant visa B1 (business) or B2 (Pleasure). Usually Indians are given the combined B1/B2 multiple entry visa with a 10 year validity. This means you can use the visa for both business and pleasure trips. A US visa not only allows you to travel to the US but also gives visa free entry to 30+ countries. The process to apply for the visa is long drawn but not as difficult as it is made out to…
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Short stay Schengen visa for Indian passport holders
If you plan to visit any of the western or central European countries for a holiday, you will most probably require, what is called as a Schengen Visa. My wife and I planned a trip across Austria, Poland, Czech Republic and Germany in August 2016 and needed to get a Schengen visa. There are many blogs on how to get a Schengen visa already. However very few discuss Indian perspective. So I thought of sharing my experience when applying for Schengen visa from India. This blog is not a visa advice though and what worked in our case may or may not work for you. Which Embassy to apply the visa to? First thing to consider…
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SSD Performance tuning guide for MacBook Pro
Last year I upgraded from a HDD to SSD on my ~5 year old macbook pro. I must admit, it was money well spent. It skyrocketed the performance of my old laptop and has made the laptop usable for next few years. However recently I ran tests on the SSD and was shocked to notice a sharp drop in read/write speeds. From 250MB/s, the read/write speed had dropped to under 50MB/s. While applications were loading fine and boot time was still acceptable, I was concerned about the disk reliability. Here are some steps I took to tune the SSD and get back to original performance. These tips are mac os…
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Quoting CIN is mandatory from April 1 2014 for Companies
The Ministry of Corporate Affairs notified many new sections of the Companies Act 2013 recently. One that requires urgent attention is quoting of the Company Identification Number (aka CIN). This number is printed on the Incorporation certificate and is also available on the MCA portal. Section 12(3)(c) of Companies Act 2013, which will be effective from April 1 2014, provides that every company shall get its name, address of its registered office and the Corporate Identity Number along with telephone number, fax number, if any, e-mail and website addresses, if any, printed in all its business letters, billheads, letter papers and in all its notices and other official publications. Any…
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Microsoft Bizspark worth it for Open Source startups?
At WonderPoint, we’re building some awesome logistics apps using open source technologies (Angular JS, PHP, Redis, Resque and Percona) which will be delivered as SaaS. So does Microsoft Bizspark program make sense for startups such as ours? Short Answer: Yes! Long Answer: It is true that Microsoft Bizspark program comes loaded with free Microsoft software that are worth thousands of dollars in open market. But these are of no use if you are building your product using open source stack. The licenses issued under Bizspark are not for internal use. For example, you can install MS Office for testing but cannot use it to create a word document/or draft an email for…
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Online classified websites in India – Quikr vs OLX
I have been thinking of upgrading my phone to iPhone 5S and decided to sell my 2 years old iPhone 4. Taking a cue from the TV ads of OLX and Quikr, I decided to test both these websites to sell my phone. I clicked few photos of the phone and accessories and posted the ad on both OLX and Quikr. Within hours of posting the ad on Quikr, I received few responses on email and phone. Looking at the encouraging response, I took the Quikr upsell and converted my ad to “Premium Ad”. Quikr promises 10 times increase in the number of responses. The number of responses did increase…
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Indian LinkedIn Members review your USD account subscription
I am a premium LinkedIn member for past few years. Recently my account came up for renewal. I noticed that the subscription was being billed to me in USD. This is probably because I had signed up for the premium account before LinkedIn started INR billing for Indian customers. Given the current Rupee depreciation, the price different between USD and INR subscriptions at LinkedIn has shot up to more than 27%. I emailed LinkedIn about it and they were happy to change my billing currency from USD to INR. This requires canceling my existing subscription. When I try to sign up again, the only option I get is INR. Once…
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Upgrading Macbook Pro 15-inch Mid 2009 unibody HDD to SSD
Recently I went through the process of replacing the hard disk drive (HDD) with a Solid State Drive (SSD) in my laptop (MacBook Pro 2009). And to say that the laptop performance has increased will be an understatement. It has nitro boosted for a 5 year old laptop (which still runs on SATA II). Booting time has reduced from 120+ seconds to under 30 seconds. Applications such as iTunes, iPhoto, Eclipse open in less than 3 seconds. Check the read/write speed of the drive in the screenshot below (remember on SATA II, the maximum transfer cannot exceed 300MB/s). There is already enough literature about SSD vs HDD and why you…
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Police Verification for Passport
A lot of visitors to my passport application article have been asking me about the police verification process. Below are the steps that I took to complete my police verification. Some disclaimers: The verification was done in May 2013 and the process may change in future. The verification was conducted in Mumbai. Process for other police stations may be completely different. Even within Mumbai each local police station acts independent of the other. The verification was for a re-issue of passport. For fresh applications, the verification process may be different. A police constable visited my house within 2 weeks of the receiving the passport. My application was put for post…
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How to renew or reissue your Indian Passport?
Update (Nov 2018): Recently my parents got their passports reissued under tatkal scheme and got the new passports in less than 24 hours without any police verification. Recently I went through the whole process of reissuing my passport as it was about to expire. I just thought of documenting the whole process so that it could benefit others. The steps listed here may or may not be of help to you as every passport reissue case is different. Do note that renewal and reissue of passport are two different things. Passport is generally reissued. Renewal only happens in special cases where a short validity passport was issued which now has…
