Category: Tech

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Tech

Running Spotify Premium in India

Update: [26 Feb 2019] Spotify is now officially available in India!

After trying almost every other music streaming service available in India, I couldn’t help myself but go back to Spotify. Honestly, I did try hard enough.

The only challenge was that I could not get a Spotify Premium subscription in India. I tried a few hacks to pay and upgrade to Premium, but nothing really worked. The only thing I didn’t try was buying Spotify gift cards in the U.S. or U.K. It seems Spotify is coming to India soon, but there’s no official word on it, yet.

Spotify in India

The easiest way to play Spotify outside of the countries it’s officially available in, is to use a VPN and signup for the service. Install the app, and you’re good to go. Every two weeks, Spotify logs you out, and you have to turn on the VPN to log back in. That’s the drill to play music on Spotify’s free plan, which has certain limitations.

The moment you try to upgrade, Spotify will tell you that the payment instrument you’re using doesn’t belong to a country where Spotify is currently available.

Thanks to the Spotifree app for Mac, I could listen to music and mute the ads for several years. But, today, a friendly soul on Reddit, pinged me with a method that did work! I’m doing my bit by spreading the word.

Note that this is not a hack that saves you from paying Spotify to get the Premium subscription. It’s a workaround to let you buy it. 

Here’s how you can run Spotify Premium in India;

1. Switch to a VPN that lets you browse the Internet with the Philippines as your country. (There are many Chrome extensions for that), or visit the Philippines. 😉
2. Sign up for Spotify and install the app on your computer and phone.
3. Disconnect the VPN (you don’t want to make a transaction over an unknown VPN).
4. Go to MOL.com and switch your country to The Philippines using the drop-down on the top right. Sign up for a MOL account (it’s free).
5. Once you’re logged in, search for Spotify, and choose the subscription pack you want to buy – 1 month, 3 months, or 6 months.
6. Top up your MOLPoints using PayPal (or a VISA card) and use the points to buy the Spotify subscription pack. You’ll receive a PIN in your email.
7. Go to your Spotify account and click on “Redeem”. Enter the PIN, and you’re done!
8. Enjoy Spotify Premium across all your devices.
9. Spread the word and ask Spotify to come to India soon. 🙂

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Tech

Your Mac is probably eating your Internet bandwidth (and you don’t know about it!)

Last week, my monthly quota with my ISP got exhausted much before the cycle got over. Yes, I was FUP’ed.

60 GB isn’t a lot when you have a 20 Mbps hose, but I seldom hit that mark at home considering I travel a lot, and home broadband is one of the many internet connections that I use to stay connected / work.

Driven by curiosity, I logged on to my account and noticed that I had used over 6 GB of data the day before. That came in as a surprise because I had barely used the internet that day — no big downloads and minimal music streaming — even though my computer was on for several hours.

I almost freaked out, thinking that someone else is latching on to my home WiFi network. Little did I know, it was Apple, not Pandey ji.

The next day at work, we were chatting about how the new Mac OS X El Capitan is a 6 GB download, and I offered my colleagues a USB drive that had the installable on it.

The conversation went on and our Rocket Singh mentioned about this creature called nsurlsessiond that he found is always on and keeps sucking the bandwidth. I looked up at the Activity Monitor (under the network tab) and boom! This little daemon was eating up a big share of my quota, and it didn’t seem to stop, no matter what! Here’s how it looks,

nsurlsessiond

A quick search and I found various hacks to stop this. The good news is, you don’t need any of those, nor do you have to read through the entire thread. Just check your spotlight preference and turn off Spotlight Suggestions and Bing Web Searches, that’s it. Don’t forget to click on the “?” at the bottom right corner of the Spotlight Preferences window.

Thank me later. 🙂

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Tech

Switched to Linux!

Just moved to Linux. After several ups and downs, hassles and solutions, problems and fixes, I finally have Ubuntu as the default option on the Grub boot loader.

It was an all day workout for setting up the box, differentiating between Debian and Red hat based packages (.deb and .rpm), understanding apt-get, et al.

Updating the sources.list file repeatedly to get the latest packages is a bit tiring. May be I started off with wrong initial steps, but then, it was a fun experience overall.

I have finally managed to  connect to internet  using my ADSL modem and BSNL’s broadband connection over my Linux machine. I have successfully installed xmms {equivalent to winamp for windows!} and VLC player for GNU/Linux.

I also ordered for the latest version of Ubuntu Linux. If you feel like trying, you may order or download it from here.

Will keep posting my experience of using Linux with time. Ta!