Indian EPaper Downloader now in Android Market! Get it now!

Hi All,

Now time for a big announcement. I have finally published the “Indian Epaper” (name changed) app to the Android market. The UI is amazing and is completely intuitive. You will surely love it. The app gives you access to the epapers of your favorite cities for the last two days, directly from your Android phone/tablet. You can use it on Kindle Fire too, as I will be publishing the same app in the Amazon App Store.

Also, I will be discontinuing the distribution of the previous apk and the other jars. Their links will now take you to the Android MarketPlace where you can make the purchase for just 99 cents free. As you know, I have spent a hell lot of time and effort in this and the result is amazing. I have kept the price at a nominal 99 cents app completely free. I am sure this app will be of a lot of help to my users out there. Please make the purchase to keep the development going.

Android Market Link

Few screenshots :

Times of India adds captcha security :P ..

SO the integration of TimesOfIndia to my cloud application is gonnna be tougher. Sometime in the last week, TOI decided to add captcha everytime you want to download a pdf! Also they moved their PDFs to their private directories. So no more direct linking. If you try to access their page directly, you should something as follows :

This also means that the previous versions of my software will break for TOI. 😦
Anyways, nice they have taken some initiative towards more security. I will check to see if something can be done to bypass this.

Till then .. .

Epaper Downloader v1.0 – Complete Web Version – http://ipaper.cloudfoundry.com/

First of all, Thanks everyone for the tremendous support. I have been continuously receiving emails about the software wrt to feature requests, bugs, etc. It really feels great.
So, I have been working on a new version for quite sometime now (although I didnt blog about it). I wanted to move the entire software to the cloud and after a lot of hurdles, I have finally done so. I present the completely new version of the Epaper Downloader, build from scratch with stability and extensibility in mind. Currently, It only has DNA support, but will add TOI in the next few days (shouldnt be difficult).

http://ipaper.cloudfoundry.com/

It should work on most browsers and devices (phones, tablets, too). (I had some problems with Chrome. If you have too, try using IE/Firefox).

Important Note: After the epaper is generated successfully, the link will be alive for the next 5 mins only. So make sure to save the paper to your device 🙂 ..

Waiting for your comments. ..
Till then ..

Screenshots:

Upgrading to Froyo – AT&T Captivate – Mini Kies “unregistered device” error

I know there are many people who are getting this error when trying to upgrade to Froyo firmware using Samsung KIES. I was gettting this error and after 2 hours of efforts, I could finally figure out what was wrong and I could flash the firmware!

So what was wrong?
Two things:
1. If u have installed custom roms (Honeycomb) , then chances are your IMEI number was overwritten.
2. Also chances are your product code is also overwritten

To get these back, Refer to this post : http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=881162

Once it is done, you product code should now be i897ZKAATT
If its not, go back and see what you missed. Dont continue. It will not work.
After this, REVERT BACK TO STOCK -> factory reset -> THIS IS IMPORTANT
Lastly, after your phone is reset , connect back to KIES and the upgrade should successfully complete now!

Next thing on my mind for epaper Downloader..

A quick post. Just to let my fans [: ) ] know the next thing on my mind for the app. A way to view the paper in your browser without downloading! Click on the embedded content below to read in full screen. But this might take some time and will cost me! Let me know if you like this idea. Leave comments about this or on Facebook (if u r my friend i.e.)..

ePaper Downloader – Now includes TOI and Mint !! Improved UI! Improved Stability!

So its been quite some time since I have updated the app. But I have been busy with my studies/research/job interviews and such. But I have finally finished with the new version of the app and it’s up for download.. Fellow NRIs! Rejoice! No need to pay for TOI epaper. You can download it free using this app :).

Download Links :
Web version : Get it here.
Desktop version : Get it here.

What’s changed :
– Times of India and Mint added. Previously included Hindustan Times, Hindustan Dainik & DNA.
– Improved UI : Progress indicator much more reliable now.
– Much more stable than the previous versions.
– Now you can automatically get the latest version if you use the web version. However the downside is that the app will be downloaded from the web on every launch. If that is a problem, use my desktop jar version and keep checking this blog for updates :).

I have received more than 500 downloads, which is much more than I initially anticipated.  Also received a couple of fan mails. Thank you for the continued support!

Credits: Many thanks to Dhruv Arya for letting me know that TOI epaper is still free (when visited using an Indian IP address).

Till then!

ePaper downloader has been updated to include DNA!

Hi all,

Thanks for the awesome response for the application.. Considering the same, I decided to update it and add DNA India ePaper to the list, taking the count of newspapers to three (HTimes, Dainik and DNA). 😀

Again, find the browser runnable version here.

The desktop jar version can be found here.

Until then!

Get Hindustan Times/Dainik Full ePaper as PDF!!

I have been outside India for quite sometime now, but still I always love to read Indian News! There is nothing like it! Even more enjoyable is reading the epaper.. Times Of India used to provide it for free but now you have to pay to get the full paper. So I decided to switch to Hindustan Times. The epaper site of HT is good, but quite buggy at times. Some times it just stops responding or even worse spits out an SQL error! Luckily it provides a pdf version, but you have to go through their painful and extremely buggy registration process! Even after that you just get to download the pdf of a single page at a time! LAME!!!!

After fiddling a little with the site, I figured out tht the pdfs actually are jst static objects, located on their server and can be retrieved via a simple get request. Also, they follow a similar url construction pattern. This was enough information! Got down to work last night, eager to utilize my Java skills and the recently mastered Java Concurrent API !! The result? A GUI program which retrieves all the pdfs and merges them into a single  pdf, using PDFBox 😀 .. It doesnot end there. This program currently supports two languages (Hindi and English) and 4 cities per language! Plus you can get archived papers also.

Eager to try?

The Java Web Start version is available here. This will download the jar and run it. The jar is self-signed by me :).

The conventional jar is available  here. It is an executable jar. Just double click to run it. You will require Java Runtime 1.5+ installed on your computer.

 

Known Issues: You have to exit the program to start using the ePaper. This is a problem with PDFBox. Hopefully they should fix it in the next version.

Let me know if you run into any problems.

Edit: The paper is about 20 mb in size! So for users with slow internet connection, it will take quite some time! Have patience!

Watch Hulu outiside US, BBC One outside UK using Tor and your existing Firefox installation

Hulu and BBC One Iplayer are probably the best online video streaming sites as of today, but sadly they have certain restrictions. You can only Hulu if you are in US or you have a US ip-address . With Iplayer, you require a UK ip.  This post comes after multiple attempts with using free proxy server and free virtual private network providers, but neither live up to the requirements these sites require. Sometimes either flash is blocked or javascript or both.  Also the proxies sometimes stop working midway through the show!  Tor solves most of these issues. So what is Tor? Without getting into much details here, its a free software implementation of second-generation onion routing, a system enabling its users to communicate anonymously on the Internet. Yeah! Thats exactly what we want! So here’s a way you can configure your existing Firefox installation to use Tor and watch Hulu/Iplayer on Linux/Windows:

Step 1 : Download and Install Vidalia :  Installer can be found here .

Step 2: Install Polipo : Instructions for Linux can be found here . Make sure to replace the configuration file with the one provided at the link.

Step 3: Install TorButton addon for Firefox.

If you are using Windows , then all the above three can be installed together using the installer found here.

CHANGE END SERVER for TOR:

You now need to ensure that the last server your request is routed through is a server in the UK/US. Go to https://torstat.xenobite.eu/. Click on the pulldown next to “CC:” and select “GB” and hit “search”. Now click on the “>” under “Exit”. You now have a list of servers in the UK that are allowed to be used as Exit Servers. Take note of all the nicknames of the servers except those marked Unnamed.
Go to Start Menu and open All Programs -> Vidalia Bundle -> Tor -> torcc. This will open the Tor config file. Scroll all the way to the bottom and enter the following lines:
StrictExitNodes 1
exitnodes <list of the names you found in step 2 separated by commas>
An example of the second line above would be:
exitnodes anonion,anotherlink,colinwillsdorkyahoo
Save the file.

ENABLE FLASH : After the TorButton addon installation, go into its preferences>Security Settings and uncheck “Disable plugins during Tor usage”. Restart the browser.

Thats it. You are ready to use Tor.

Firstly Run Vidalia. After a few seconds, it should say “Connected to the Tor Network”. Then Start Polipo. Once this is done, start Firefox with Tor enabled.  Check that you’re exiting through a UK/US server by going to http://torcheck.xenobite.eu/index.php . Finally, go to Hulu/Iplayer and start enjoying the videos!!! 😀 !

Leave comments if you run into problems using this tutorial!

Rdp/vnc client for android

These days I have been quite busy with my studies.. have a lot to blog.. so will start in small chunks..
Just upgraded my galaxy s to perception ROM Beta 8… its sweet.. having been having some gps issues though.. the Gingerbread launcher/keyboard are the highlights.  Will post more about this in a seperate post. As of nw I just installed the wyse pocketcloud .. looked sweet on first look.  Nice interface. Its a remote desktop app fr android. On launching told me to install the desktop client, was very surprised not to find a linux client in this age. But anyways today I was working on windows fr sone reason,  so downloaded the client,  but it failed to start some services during installation .. too bad.. tried again with admin priveleges but the same error.. giving up on it.  Will look at their blog later to check if I am missing anything.  Till later ….