Mobilink's GPS in Pakistan

Mobilink has recently launched MobiTrack which provides GPS services in Pakistan. If you have a GPS enabled cellular phone, you can easily use MobiTrack to find locations and get directions to those locations. I found it very useful as it has the latest data of GPS in Pakistan.

The support is limited to particular handsets only e.g. Blackberry curve 8310 is supported but Blackberry curve 8520 is not supported. You can check for handsets compatibility here. And for more detailed information, you can checkout the Trakker NAV website for MobiTrack.

The GPS services include finding a location, the search is pretty good and it has good coverage of areas at least in Karachi. I tested it to find "China Town", Clifton and it even has the blockade information near Bilawal house. The directions are voice enabled and very accurate. You can also view the maps of different areas of Pakistan and you can search for a location by typing it in search box or locating it on the maps.

I'd like to see other GPS services in Pakistan with latest data, especially during these times during which one cannot find many things which doesn't disappoint us Pakistanis.

Furniture shops in Karachi – Part 2

Almost a year back, I was searching for furniture shops in Karachi to build my kitchen, get furniture for drawing, dining, living and bed rooms. I had a budget and I managed to maintain it with the desired quality. One year down the road and I am satisfied with my choices. Below are my suggestions to help you out, if you have an above-average budget and require good quality, giving you some ideas on furniture shops in Karachi:

• Kitchen
• You have a choice to hire a carpenter to construct cabinets. This will be less costly but requires a lot of your time. But, if the carpenter is good enough, you can control the quality and I found this the most suitable within my budget. You’ll also have to manage polishing. If you like to be very selective in terms of best wood and design, plus other apparels, this is the best option for you.
• Order kitchen from Ashary’s, Clifton (expensive), Interwood, Tuaheed Commercial (expensive), Italian Kitchen, Shaheed-e-Millat (moderate), Habitt (moderate) etc.
• If you go for a carpenter, appliances such as Built-in Oven or normal Oven, hob (stove), hood (chimney) and microwave will be managed by you; plus electrician and plumber for respective sockets.

• Bed room
• Well, you have a lot of choices here. As per my limited knowledge, the best bedroom furniture in Karachi market is available at International (Tipu Sultan) and Victoria (near Abdullah Haroon road). International’s quality and service is excellent. They provide life time support at your doorstep and have a very skilled team. Though furniture is very expensive, but when you see it, you’ll know the worth, especially if you want to own it for over 20 years!
• Wellcome furnishers (near old sabzi mandi) has a lot of variety as well and they also provide good support, but again it’s expensive. You can also have a look at Habitt (Nipa, Tipu Sultan, etc.) which is less expensive and ready-made.
• The furniture market in Nursery, Karachi is the cheapest of all I’ve mentioned

• Drawing room
• Wellcome Furnishers is the best value for this kind of furniture. The price is moderate as compared to the expensive ones and obviously you’d not like to spend a lot on drawing room where you don’t spend your time that much. They have the right variety to satisfy one with a above-average budget. If you have a higher budget, you can visit International and Vicrtoria.
• Kalamkaar (Clifton) is another option, I found their way of showing the catalog great. The price is above-average, but they have good choices. They even hand over a CD to you for your brief reviewSam Abbas (Tuaheed Commercial) is another choice, but I didn’t find a lot of variety there.

• Dining
• Again, Wellcome is the best value in terms of quality and price. Kalamkaar has good choices as well
• Nursery is another option which is less expensive

• Living room
• Nursery. Why? Because I’d like to have my living room furniture replaced after 3-5 years. Habitt is another good choice balancing the price and comfort. But, I’d go for cheaper furniture because living room is very roughly used. Just ensure that you get the right material keeping in mind Karachi gets pretty hot during summers.
• If you like to go for higher value choices, International, Wellcome and KalamKaar might be worth looking.

In addition to this, you will need to buy curtains, manage lighting, doors and other appliances. I’ll be writing on the same in the near future.

Small Tutorial on Torrents

Torrent (or BitTorrent) technology is arguably the best; if you need anything ranging from games to movies to songs, you can download through very easy and simple steps. If you are new to it, here's how easy it is:

• Download a torrent downloader software. I find uTorrent quite easy and feature rich
• Goto a torrent site. I usually access isohunt
• Search for anything you want to download, click on download and it'll open up uTorrent automatically
• Save it to your desired destination path

Just ensure you get the torrent with right language version from the website.

As for uTorrent, it also has features like controlling bandwidth (upload and download both) plus scheduler mode as well, using which you can easily turn it off during various timings, if you require more bandwidth for web browsing or other applications.

Chatroulette

Chatroulette is a website that pairs random strangers from around the world together for webcam-based conversations. Visitors to the website randomly begin an online chat (video, audio and text) with another visitor. At any point, either user may leave the current chat by initiating another random connection.

The Chatroulette website was created by a 17-year-old high school student in Moscow.

The website uses Adobe Flash to display video and access the user's webcam. Flash's peer-to-peer network capabilities (via RTMFP) allow almost all video and audio streams to travel directly between user computers, without using server bandwidth. However, certain combinations of routers will not allow UDP traffic to flow between them, and then it is necessary to fall back to RTMP.

However, one has to be beware of controversial content while accessing the site, as there're multiple possibilities of the same.