WhatsApp: Difference between Broadcast Lists and Groups

and how to use them appropriately?

Broadcast Lists in WhatsApp

The Broadcast feature lets you send a message to many of your friends at once, without revealing the recipients to one another and each recipient then has the option to respond to you individually.

What more? You can now create Broadcast Lists and save the list of contacts to whom you send Broadcast Messages. Broadcast Lists are saved lists of message recipients that you can repeatedly send Broadcast Messages to, without having to select them each time.

Note: In order to be able to send a Broadcast Message to a specific contact, that person must have your phone number saved in their address book. Just a way to avoid Spams.

Groups on WhatsApp

Groups on the other hand creates a common space where up to 50 participants can be added to chat and collaborate together.

• A maximum of 50 participants can be added to a group you create.
• You can create a max of 50 groups.
• Every group in WhatsApp has a group admin. If you create a group, you are the admin by default. Only the group admin can add people to the group chat.
• As a group admin you can control the participants in the group. If a group admin leaves the group, WhatsApp will randomly assign an admin to a remaining group participant.
• As a group member you can control your own participation in a group chat. You may wish to stay or leave the group when you wish.

WiFi calling on Apple iPhone 6 & iPhone 6 Plus

You will be able to make regular calls to people over a WiFi connection if and when you have a poor network reception.

What is WiFi calling?

WiFi calling uses WiFi to enable voice and SMS to provide better mobile phone coverage in low cellular reception areas.

How does it work?

Moving past the technicalities, WiFi calling is a phone related feature which can be enabled by navigating to Settings / Phone / WiFi Calling and toggle the switch to ON.

Benefits?

• Voice and SMS over WiFi
• Improved battery life since it's only using one radio connection
• Hop from one network to another seamlessly. Start a call over WiFi at home, then step outside and the call will switch to your cellular network automatically and seamlessly without disruption.
• Hi-def audio calling.

How would calls be billed?

This is going to be operator specific and we will need to wait to hear more on this technology and service plan parameters. 

Will this work anywhere in the world?

I wish this was a good news but this is only supported by selected operators around the world yet. Several operators around the world have WiFi calling services, including T-Mobile US, Orange UK and Rogers Wireless in Canada. We will have to wait until Apple ends up with a deal with Etisalat or Du in UAE or other operators around the world.

Is it iPhone 6 only feature or will it support all iOS 8 enabled devices?

9to5mac.com says "WiFi calling is one of several new Phone-related features in the pipeline for iOS 8."

gizmodo.com says "You'll be able to call people using your WiFi connection on the iPhone 6."

appleinsider.com says "T-Mobile confirms support for Wi-Fi calling on iPhones running iOS 8."

I guess it's a matter of time when we'll clear the hazy air.

Increase your iPhone 5 battery life

Here are some less known options (may be obvious) to improve your iPhone 5 / 5s battery life.

Turn off Location Services

You might only need this on Google Maps to help you with navigation. Other than that I don't see much use of it on any other app. Many use the check-in facility on Facebook but caution here, Facebook location service is a battery hog.

• Settings / Privacy / Location Service - Turn of for as many apps as possible.

Don't kill multi-tasking Apps

It turns out that the work your phone does to reload these apps into the phone's RAM is more draining on the battery than keeping them in the RAM if they are already there. iPhone does a good job of managing what is actually running. Seeing these apps on double-clicking the home button doesn't actually mean they are running.

Turn off AirDrop

Swipe your finger from the bottom of the screen, click on AirDrop and select Off. When you're not using it, its best to turn it off.

Turn off Automatic Timezone

Unlike some your daily commute might not span different time zones. You can turn this feature off and manually change it to the new timezone.

• Settings / General / Date & Time / Turn off Set Automatically

Turn off Background App Refresh

Turning off as much of the Background App Refresh as possible is a good idea.

• Settings / General / Background App - and turn off as many apps as possible, or all of them.

Turn on Auto-Brightness

In the midst of all the turn-off(s), here is something you can turn on. iPhone does a good job of adjusting the brightness so that it isn't unnecessarily bright when it doesn't need to be. The display is one of the most power consuming facet of your phone.

• Settings / Wallpapers & Brightness / Auto-Brightness On

Turn on Reduce Motion

This will take away some of the pretty animations in iOS 7, but I'm just staying true to the purpose of the post.

• Settings / General / Accessibility - and turn Reduce Motion to 'On'

Command to connect to Oracle DB

sqlplus "/ as sysdba"

How do you know your TNS Entry in Oracle?

I'm just consolidating what I found from various other web pages. It's easier to refer to than looking all over the web.

tnsnames.ora file in Windows can be found at:

%ORACLE_HOME%/product/11.2.0/dbhome_1/network/admin

Since I'm no genius in Oracle, I had to look for the ORACLE HOME directory. You would need administrative access to the server or PC since you need to fetch this from the registry.

• Open Start > Run > regedit
• Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE / SOFTWARE / ORACLE / KEY_OraDb11g_home1
• You will find a key ORACLE_HOME and it's value would contain the path

Unable to start Project Application Service?

When I started the Project Application Service, I was receiving the following error:

The password for the account [User] currently stored in SharePoint is not the same as current password for the Account in Active Directory. To fix this with Powershell, run Set-SPManagedAccount - UseExistingPassword.

The message also provides the resolution. So as stated, we opened the SharePoint Management Shell: Navigate to Start > Program Files > Microsoft SharePoint > SharePoint Management Shell and type the command.

Set-SPManagedAccount -UseExistingPassword

It asks for Identity and Password. Enter the ManagedAccount UserID and Password and start the service again. You should be fine.

If you are still reading this, may be you're not.

When we restarted the service, we came across another Error message.

This Project Web App instance is unavailable because there are no Project Application Service instances started to service this request. Contact the administrator to check that at least one Project Application Service instance is enabled on this farm.

For this just check the AppPool and start all the stopped App Pools.

Start > Administrative Tools > IIS > Application Pool (in the left navigation)

PS: I was using Microsoft SharePoint 2010

FAILED ON START (retrying) Workflow resolution might be easier than you think

When you click on FAILED ON START (retrying), it gives you a page which says "Error updating list item" and the outcome column gives "Unknown Error"

I noticed that the workflow (built using SPD 2007) wasn’t able to create a task for a SharePoint User and hence was failing with this error.

Looking into the SharePoint Logs (Workflow Infrastructure category) this is what I got:

Error in commiting pending workflow batch items: Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException: Invalid look-up value  A look-up field contains invalid data. Please check the value and try again. ---> System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException 

• I first check if this user had access to SharePoint Site. Positive.
• I then checked if the User had a valid SharePoint User Profile. Positive.

However when I tried to create a new user profile for this user, it wasn't able to find as shown below.

Just for the sake of testing I tried to use another valid user account (account_b) to assign the task to him (via the workflow). This user had access on the SharePoint site and also had a valid SharePoint User Profile. In addition to that, when I inserted (account_b) user into the Account Name above, it resolved to an Active Directory account successfully.

And to my surprise, the workflow ran successfully and was able to create the task. Now the workflow state is "In Progress"

Though this resolved the issue something still boggling my mind.

1. This user alalik (as in the above image) was already available in SharePoint User Profile and also had access to the SharePoint Site.
2. When I manually created the task for this user alalik (as in the above image), SharePoint successfully created it.

Why then did it not create the task via the SPD workflow?

Questions still prevails, but thankfully resolution was permanent. I would appreciate if someone can answer this in the comments below and I hope this helps many out there.