Vivek's Blog

Just wanted to share my experience about applying for a UK standard visitor visa from Chicago. This post does not start with the usual stuff every other website has (check if you're eligible for a visa on arrival, check if you even need a visa etc etc). It is just an 'express' post that just answers some basic questions. If you're a non-resident salaried employee in the US and you'd like to travel to the United Kingdom as a tourist (or to visit a friend) with you yourself funding your visit, this post is for you. There are 4 steps to follow: Complete your application online - Fill a separate application for each of your family members. As part of the application itself, it'll take your payment and schedule your biometric appointment with a USCIS Application Support Center. ( Edit 1/23/20: Some readers have commented that these days they also require you to upload soft copies of your supporting documents on the VFS site after filling up this application)....

iTunes does a good job of backing up and restoring all your iPhone data, settings and purchases. It backs up everything that couldn't be downloaded again. There are two ways you could backup your data using iTunes: Transfer purchases to iTunes - This is a very crucial setting that can affect a lot of things. If you don't want to login into each of your apps again after the restore, make sure you say yes to this question (this question will popup as soon as you start your backup process). Saying yes will encrypt your backup with a password. This is where things get tricky. I must have chosen a password the first time I backed up my phone and when I chose to back my phone up again after an year with the transfer purchase option, iTunes somehow did not ask me for a password (it may have remembered my old password). While doing a restore, when I selected that backup, it started demanding the password from me. I had erased all my data and settings from my phone after backing it ...

I have never understood why (contract free) people pay 100s of dollars on their phone bills being on of the Big 4 cellular networks in the US, namely: AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon and Sprint . Talking to some of those people, I realize they don't even know they have an option, namely an MVNO. MVNO stands for Mobile Virtual Network Operator. These are carriers who supply their own plans to customers but use one (or more) of the  Big 4  networks I listed. In other words, you do stand to save money on your monthly bill and that too, without losing the network you love! Sounds too good to be true, so what is the catch? Well, the catch is that customers using one of these MVNO plans may be deprioritized by the  Big 4  in moments of network congestion or their data may be throttled when they reach a specific threshold in comparison to customers who are directly using the  Big 4 . But, for all practical purposes, you won't feel a difference. I can say that having t...

This post is for salaried professionals who just have income through salary and bank/FD interest. Also, if you are a DIY person like me :) Tax season is finally here! People are busy scrambling for their Form 16s and figuring out if they have everything they'd need to file their ITRs. Well, I just filed mine so thought I'd share my experience and some knowledge, that I gathered in the process, here. First, some common questions everyone has: Difference between Financial Year and Assessment Year:  Just remember - you are assessing your financials that took place in the last year! So if today is July 25, 2015, the Financial year was 2014-15 while the Assessment year is 2015-16. Difference between ITR-1 (Sahaj) and ITR-2/2A:  For our purpose, we could use either of these forms but the overall differences are listed out  here . Difference between ITR-2 and ITR-2A:  They are almost the same, just that ITR-2A is a simpler version of ITR-2. Also, ITR-2A ...