Naveen’s Blog

This Virtual Credit Card creation method is for Indians who does not have a valid credit card and wants to make online transactions where credit card is mandatory.

What is a Virtual Credit Card?
Virtual Credit Card (VVC) is a one-time usable credit card with a preloaded amount and comes with few months of validity. It is the safest way to pay online.

My Method!
Following is a method I am using since 2005 to make online transactions. At that time, I did not have a credit card and getting a credit card was very difficult thing. I found this facility in HDFC Bank, explored its full strength, and able to make online transactions since then.

How to get these VVCs?
For this method, you need to have an HDFC Bank savings account with International Debit Card. If you have a normal debit card, apply for an International Debit Card. Visit an HDFC Bank branch nearest to you and submit a simple application for International Debit Card, which takes around a week or two to get your card. If you have not opted for online banking facility, go and get it.

You can create unlimited virtual credit cards using NetSafe by HDFC Bank. Go to the homepage of HDFC Bank and select “NetSafe/ Verified by Visa/ MasterCard SecureCode” from the different account logins available on the homepage. It pops up a window where you can register for NetSafe using your International Debit Card.

Once you registered, login into your account and it will show your balance and option to create a virtual credit with a specified amount. Fill the amount and click “GO.” It will create a virtual credit card with expiry date, CVV, and the amount you have chosen.

Don’ts:

• Do not use this virtual credit card where physical goods are delivered at your doorstep upon presentation of the card to the delivery boy.
• Do not use this card where recurrent payments are made because it expires in a month or so.

Except the above, you can now use the virtual card for online payments safely.

VCCs Benefits – From my experiences
Though I have a credit card now, I still use virtual credit for online transactions where free trials are offered upon entering the credit card.

• Past year, I have signed up for a hosting company, which offered one year free hosting. I just needed to signup with my credit card to get this offer. They told that if I am not satisfied with it, I have to cancel it before next renewal. I found that their service was crap and when I tried to cancel it, I found that I have to contact their customer service team to cancel it. There was no option to cancel it from the control panel I have been provided with. Assume, if I have provided my original credit card and at the time of renewal, I mailed them to cancel, but they did not turn up on time, then I had to lose the renewal free, which was more than 150 dollars. Fortunately, I have signed up with them with a VVC of Re.1, which already expired. So, happily I have just mailed them to cancel it and forgot. Because, it was a VCC and I do not need to worry about it anymore.
• I get a lot of free trial offers for webmasters where I need to signup with a credit card to available the trial offer, but I need to cancel it before the trial offer expires. Sometimes, I get offers that are just 1 or 2 days valid. After that they bill my credit card without any notice. For these, I always use VCC with a value of Re.1. I just concentrate on getting more benefit from the offer than worrying about the automatic re-bill because they cannot rebill my card with their huge fees as my VCC can be billed for Re.1 only and eventually, they can’t bill it and the offer expires.

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After making usage of any bank ATM free, RBI now moves towards changing the interest calculation of savings accounts. It is really a good change and our savings accounts will earn a better interest income.

How savings account interest is calculated?
At the present time, banks are calculating the interest rate on the lowest amount available in your savings account from 10th to the end of month. The disadvantage is that if you have a low balance on any of these days, you will get interest on that amount only. For example:

If your account shows the following balance for the month of February 2010:

You will get interest only on 1,000/- rupees, which is the lowest balance available in your account at 3.5% per annum, which turns out to be, Rs. 2.92.

According to the new circular from RBI, banks have to calculate the interest on a daily product basis and this must be implemented from April 1, 2010. This way savings account holders will not lose interest for even a rupee.

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I had Symantec antivirus software (network version that I got free with Sify internet connection) running for the last six months and my system got affected more than 3 times with viruses, which are mainly from external USB drives. Before that I had AVG Free, which also failed to recognize few viruses.

A month ago, I came across a report from AV-Comparatives analyzing around 16 antivirus software available in the market. It has divided the tests into 8 categories and ranked the products as Gold, Silver, and Bronze. As usual, I have gone through the report and the products to see whether they have free versions for my system. What caught my eye was free antivirus tool from Microsoft (yes it is free) called, Microsoft Security Essentials. It has secured 2 Gold ratings and one Bronze in overall 8 categories. So, I wanted to give it a try and the results were amazing! To date, my system has not been affected by any virus and has even cleaned the viruses from System Restore Folder. Detection is too fast and now, I am free of USB virus worries.

“Microsoft Security Essentials provides real-time protection for your home PC that guards against viruses, spyware, and other malicious software.

Microsoft Security Essentials is a free download from Microsoft that is simple to install, easy to use, and always kept up to date so you can be assured your PC is protected by the latest technology. It’s easy to tell if your PC is secure — when you’re green, you’re good. It’s that simple.” says Microsoft on its website.

Click For a Bigger & Clear Image

The best things I have noted in it are:

• Small in size. Around 9 MB. Updates are around 40 MB in size. (AVG Free installation file itself is around 76 MB)
• Simple graphical interface.
• Good detection of USB viruses.
• Able to clean the viruses that are in System Restore Folder.
• Free (I am crazy of free software)

Down sides:

• You need to have genuine copy of Windows. Before installing it, software verified that you are running genuine Windows OS.
• You cannot clean or delete the viruses until it finishes the scan. So, if power failure occurs in between, then you need to start again, which is really irritating.
• Sometimes it does not turn green (which tells that it is running) automatically, though it is running. We need to click it open to turn it green.

Caught the Viruses

Except those down sides, which I hope Microsoft will update in the future upgrades, it is the best free antivirus I have run ever. It is much better than Free AVG version. Few of my friends told me that installing it made the system slow down, though I never experienced it on Windows XP running on 512 MB RAM. Make sure that you installed the latest .Net Framework (3.5 SP1), which I think is the cause of slow down. Try it and tell me your experiences in comments section.

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Google has now introduced the facility of posting your RSS feeds directly onto your Twitter account in FeedBurner.  You can now say good bye to all your plugins that you used to post your articles onto Twitter.  If you are publishing feed through FeedBurner, just log into FeedBurner and add Twitter account.  All your post titles will be posted with a shortened URL onto your Twitter account.

What is noticeable in this process is Google’s own URL shortener, GOOG.GL.  There is no doubt that Google has introduced its own URL shortener for this facility.  It has used a pretty domain, GOO.GL.  If you go to the domain http://goo.gl/, you will see just a landing page showing few words about stability, security, and speed of Google’s URL shortener.  You don’t find a way to create your own short URLs or an API to include it in your applications.  I think Google may be in the process of developing those, but enthusiasts already digged into the Google Toolbar and HTPP headers and developed web applications to create goo.gl shortened URLs.

Read Alexander Gaigalas’ experiment and watch it working here: http://gaigalas.net/lab/googl (post is in Portuguese use http://translate.google.com/ to translate it into English)

Another service I found on the Internet, which is working fine is:  http://jsbin.com/idalu3

I just switched from Tweetly Updater WordPress plugin to FeedBurner’s inbuilt feed tweeting.  Just take a look at my twitter account to see this in action.

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Mobile Number Portability is going operational from January 1, 2010.  You can change your mobile operator retaining the same mobile number at your will at just Rs. 19.  TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) has released a Press Release fixing the porting cost at Rs. 19 and porting will take a maximum of 4 days.

TRAI explains Mobile Number Portability (MNP) as “it allows the subscribers to retain their existing mobile telephone number when they move from one Access Provider to another irrespective of the mobile technology or from one cellular mobile technology to another of the same Access Provider, in a licensed service area.  The facility of retention of existing mobile telephone number despite moving to a new telecom service provider helps in increasing competition between the service providers and acts as a catalyst for the service providers to improve their quality of service.”

These days, I can see a lot of people carrying SIMs of other networks just because it has low-priced call rates.  Here in Hyderabad, TATA DoCoMo entering the market with second pulse rate made a huge impact.  Dual SIM mobiles have got sudden demand and everyone has got two SIMs, one DoCoMo SIM and one their good old number.

Now with MNP going operational, things will change a lot and there will be a huge competition between the mobile operators to retain their customers as the customer can change their operator if service is not good or others offering a low tariff, which TRAI thinks will intensify the competition thus by making mobile communication so cheap.

TATA DoCoMo’s one second pulse rate made a revolution in the cellular industry and intensified the competition between the service providers to a level that now every one has to offer one second pulse billing to retain their customers.  Mobile calling charges have come down to 50 paise per minute.  Roaming charges are also coming down these days.

Download a copy of Mobile Number Portability Press Release in PDF form here.

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I am a fan of tiny tools.  I wrote about few feature-rich tiny tools including tiny screen zooming software, tiny browser, tiny ISO mounting software, etc.

Today, I was searching for a tool to edit mp3 tags and embed album art into the files and found this tiny tool with amazing features.  “Mp3 Tag Tools” with a project name of “massid3lib” on SourceForge, is a tiny tool, just 281 KB, to batch edit mp3 files and embed the album art and lyrics directly into the mp3 file.

Features:

• You can edit ID3V1.1 and V2.x, copy from one to another, and sync them.
• Embed album art (album picture) and lyrics into the files.
• Batch edit the tags and embed album picture.



• At just a click of button, you can correct the case automatically.



• “Clean Filenames” option will remove excess whitespace, capitalizes after symbols & prefixes.
• Batch rename the files using a custom format.
• Sort all the mp3 files into artist, album, genre or in combination formats.  Very useful option to sort the songs according to artist or genre.



• A lot more other features.  Visit the project page to discover all the features.

Get it from the project homepage on SF | Direct Download @ Ziddu

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Google has added English to Telugu, Tamil, Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Malayalam, and Bengali dictionaries and vice versa to its Dictionary section. English-to-Hindi dictionary has been available for a long time. Go to http://www.google.com/dictionary and click the drop down menu and hover the mouse on English. It shows available languages menu and from there you can select the language.

If you want to check the English word for one of the above languages, hover your mouse on your language and it opens another right-side menu where you can select Your Language>English. Use the Google Indic Transliteration Tool to type the word in your language phonetically and paste it into the Google Dictionary text box and click “Search Dictionary.”

If you are logged in, you can bookmark the searched words for future reference and also you can hear pronunciation of the English words.

It is really good especially the “Related Phrases” section. Now, I can easily find the exact Telugu meaning for an English word very easily. Thanks Google!

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I often see people copying images from other websites and blogs freely without permission.  They are not aware that copying image from other websites is illegal.  You can be sued and/or your site can be taken down for doing so.

So, when you need an image to put in your blog or website, either you need to purchase one from stock photo selling websites like Getty Images, iStockphoto, etc. or find free ones.  Before going into free resource details, I want you to learn about different licenses like public domain, creative commons, etc.

There are a few good sites where you can get high quality pictures for free.  Below are the three best sources I use for all my needs.

Stock.Xchng:  It is my favorite site to get quality images for my work.  There are around 4 lakhs of royalty-free images available on SXC.  Don’t forget to browse through Hall of Fame, Most Commented, and Most Downloaded images from the drop down menu below the SXC logo.

Flickr:  It has millions of photos you can use for your site or blog with attribution.  Flickr photos are tagged with Creative Commons licenses.  Use the advanced search to find the image you need.  Don’t forget to select the license at the bottom.  Browse photos by license here.

If you find a photo you really need and there is no license mentioned, you can always mail the owner asking permission to use it on your site.  I was working on a tourism site and I searched for the photos on Flickr.  I found high quality pictures on Flickr, but there were no license details mentioned.  I sent mail to the owners asking for the permission and they happily allowed me to use it in my work.  They just wanted to know where I was using them.

Picasa Web Albums:  Picasa is also a good place to search for images with Creative Commons attribution.  Go to Picasa Web and on the top right corner, you will see a search box.  Search for the image you are looking for and then clock the “Show Options” on the top left corner.  At the bottom, you can see a section called “All licenses”  Choose the one of three licenses available according to your needs and you are done.

Now, I think you got an idea where to search for free images for your website.

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