web – gcmouli.com

According to wikipedia,

Cognitive dissonance is the mental stress or discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time, or is confronted by new information that conflicts with existing beliefs, ideas, or values.

In simpler terms, it means, a visualization that is used to mean something is used to trick your mind into agreeing to something which is exactly the opposite. I found a perfect example today morning, and hence this post.

See the battery icon on the far left. What does that signify? Does that not trick your mind into believing that your battery is running low? Whatever you are being measured and told, it means you are running out of that quantity. In this case, it is the amount of high speed bandwidth that I have remaining in this month (before I slip into FUP hell).

But look at the numbers. I actually have enough. Well, more than enough. I have 64 GB out of my 80 GB quota. This is the airtel smartbytes page where airtel wants you to buy bandwidth packs to replenish your diminishing high speed bandwidth.

This, my friends, is cognitive dissonance.

Two ultimate utils – Gmailit and Goosh

And yes, they are shareware. One is a firefox extension and the other is best described by experiencing.

The first is a gmail it extension. I do this a gazillion times a day – things to remember, things to blog, important phone numbers etc – I just email myself. Using this extension, just select what you want to email, right click and say gmail it. How is that for ease-of-use.

The second is goosh. For CLI (command line interface) or shell lovers, this is sure to tingle your spine. This is a shell version of the great Google itself. It is not a supported google product. It runs on the browser. And see below for a screen shot. (or) just go to goosh.org to see for yourself. Wow.

I have circled the commands that I passed. To search the web, just type web <keywords> ; to search images just type images <keywords>; for help type help. Amazing and it is blazing fast – like a good shell should be. And yes, clear, ls, and command history using up-arrow is supported. Yaay for that.