Month: June 2013

Modem settings for MTNL broadband

Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited

I finally got an MTNL broadband connection at home (Mumbai). Since I decided to get my own TP-LINK modem+wi-fi router (a good value for money model that I plan to review after a couple of months of use), I had to do the modem settings on my own. The settings for some models are available on the MTNL site, but it was missing for my particular model. The modem’s default PPPoE dialer settings did not seem to work, so I decided to check out one of the MTNL documents, and here’s the configuration that I found:

Username: <phonenumber> OR <phonenumber>@a E.g. 12345678 OR 12345678@a

Password: <CA number> (you can find this from your bill, or by calling 1500 from the landline) E.g. 4567890123

VPI: 0

VCI: 32

(The VPI & VCI settings chosen by my modem were different due to which it failed to connect & I had to change them manually to the above settings)

Connection Type: PPPoE LLC

MTU: 1400 bytes (another setting that had a different default on my modem)

MRU: 1492 bytes

Default route: Enabled

NAT: Enabled

Firewall: Disabled

You can also set the DNS servers manually to point to OpenDNS (208.67.222.222/208.67.220.220) or Google’s DNS servers (8.8.8.8/8.8.4.4) which should prevent ISP level DNS blocking of sites, and most likely provide better lookup speeds.

Below is the D-Link modem settings from the MTNL document from where I have picked the settings.

MTNL modem settings

As for the wi-fi settings, you can stick to the defaults – just don’t forget to secure your network using a passkey to keep away free riders.

What is the biggest misconception people have about life?

There are many ways that we all think / believe our lives are supposed to be at certain points of it, and failing to recognize these goals, people's fantasies about who/what they are / supposed to be cause a confusion that leads to common conclusions, which can be misconceptions, or beliefs about the truth of what life is that are incorrect.  To call someone's philosophical opinions about the purpose of life is an extreme arrogance, yet here on quora we are allowed such luxuries.

View Question on Quora

Pixar’s Global Illumination system & the Uncanny valley

CGI Lighting goes up another notch – just watch the clip from Pixar’s “Blue Umbrella” short below:

Also, check out the stills from the original article to get an idea of how far we’ve come. You’d be hard pressed to believe that it’s not real – Director Saschka Unseld discusses Pixar, photorealism, and the making of ‘The Blue Umbrella’ | The Verge.

Uncanny Valley at its eeriest

Taking the New Bhakti Park-Dockyard Eastern Expressway

I tried the recently opened Eastern Freeway in Mumbai to get to office today, and ended up covering the first 10 km in less than 10 minutes. The remaining 8 km took over 20 min, thus taking the same amount of time to get to office (Cadbury House) as my usual route via Lalbagh. The taxi fare came to Rs 225 vs the usual Rs 175.

The entry\exit for both the flyovers is at the end of Bhakti Park, behind the Odyessey building. Here’s the route in detail (from Bhakti Park to Mahalaxmi Temple) captured via the My Tracks Android app synced to Google Drive.

Not going to change my regular route for this, but it is definitely a quick way to get to CST or Colaba. This possibly makes CST closer to Bhakti Park, Chembur & Vashi (via the extended expressway) than Dadar in terms of the time taken. CST should take 15-20 min at most via this route from Bhakti Park & Chembur.

For how to embed Google maps in a wordpress blog, checkout: Google Maps — Support — WordPress.com.

Blast from the past: Nokia, the N810 Tablet & the Long View

Long in the tooth, but gotta give some leeway, considering that this was written before the App Store debuted on iOS, and before Android (which incidentally is the Linux OS that ate Nokia’s lunch):

Contrast this war with Nokia’s handset, which is based on Linux. Nokia is building a platform that can run arbitrary software. It’ll be messy, and will go through several iterations. But in the end, we know how this story plays out: iPhone is Compuserve; Nokia is the Internet. (Google’s (GOOG) much-speculated mobile device is also rumored to run a pared-down Linux.)

via Nokia, the N810 Tablet & the Long View — Tech News and Analysis.