Affordable Medicine and diagnosis through radical innovation

Disclaimer: I am affiliated with none of the following orgnaizations/individuals/innovations/inventions, etc. & I am neither responsible for the contents of the websites herein linked, the results of accessing the same nor the results of following any procedures or usage of the products/services here-mentioned.

1. 50 Cents Microscope that folds like origami (Manu Prakash)
   https://www.ted.com/talks/manu_prakash_a_50_cent_microscope_that_folds_like_origami
   http://microcosmos.foldscope.com/
2. 5 Dollar Punch Card Programmable Microfluidics Chemistry Set (Manu Prakash)
   http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0115993
3. OScan Oral scanner for oral scanner(Manu Prakash)
   http://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2012/04/17/stanford-bioengineers-create-an-ultra-low-cost-oral-cancer-screening-tool/
4. Lab the size of a postage stamp
   http://www.ted.com/talks/george_whitesides_a_lab_the_size_of_a_postage_stamp
5. Better Breast cancer screening using Gamma Rays
   http://www.ted.com/talks/deborah_rhodes
6. BioLab on a MicroChip
   http://www.ted.com/talks/frederick_balagadde_bio_lab_on_a_microchip
7. A warm embrace that saves lives (Low cost replacement for incubator)
   http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_chen_a_warm_embrace_that_saves_lives
8. Vaccine patch - Yay! no painfull needles
   http://www.ted.com/talks/mark_kendall_demo_a_needle_free_vaccine_patch_that_s_safer_and_way_cheaper
9. Liquid filled adjustable glasses
   http://www.ted.com/talks/josh_silver_demos_adjustable_liquid_filled_eyeglasses
10. Diagnosing Cervical Cancer with Vinegar and ingenuity http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/27/health/27cancer.html?_r=0
11. http://www.sustainablebrands.com/news_and_views/social_enterprise/gsk-building-better-business-inside-out-bringing-low-cost-diagnost
12. Plumber fixed the plumbing of his own heart
    http://realcleverscience.tumblr.com/post/2945497662/awesome-british-engineer-designs-own-heart-valve
13. Many of the lab-on-chip devices are low cost 
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lab-on-a-chip
2. http://www.gizmag.com/tag/lab-on-a-chip/

Ideas for Face detection application in daily usage.

I had posted this idea on Feb 14 2009 halfbakery.com . After that, It has almost got a life of it's own. I just made a backup/snapshot here for people who go through my blog.

This post has been edited to remove halfbakery post actions (like edit, add, flag , etc.) . Comments have not been included as the posters might want to edit them on the site.

Face based presence sensor, Auto-brightness and tilt for laptop screen & more!! use that integrated webcam for more than it was designed for.

[Update 6: Since I posted this, I have regulary come across stuff that uses head tracking, every time increasing my hopes that all these ideas are coming closer to reality .. See links]
[UPDATE 5: added another idea 8) ]
[UPDATE 4: modified idea 7]
[UPDATE 3: added another idea 7) ]
[UPDATE 2: added one more contributed idea and changed main title and title of 1) of so that Jutta does not get thrown off ;-)]
[UPDATE: added 2 more ideas 4 and 5. also added a contributed idea]
***** ***** Idea begins here ***** *****
Most new laptops,netbooks come with integrated webcams on the top. I can immedietely think of two really usefull ways of using this.
1) Replace input device activity detector with face detector for sensing user presence.
Instead of relying on keyboard and mouse activity, rely on availability of face for activity sensing. No face in front for more than 1 minute? lock screen, show as away on IM. Face came back ? show "unlock" password prompt. This is especially usefull if you are watching a movie or reading a long article using auto-scroll. The screen won't lock/go to screen saver mode in the middle of it.
2) Auto tilt.
I sometimes use my laptop when I sleep on my side to read really long pages. As I use GNU/Linux, I just issue the command xrandr -o 1 or xrandr -o3 depending on which side I am sleeping on. As far as I can remember many recent Windows graphics drivers, even some old ones register Ctrl+Alt+cursorkey to change orientations.
My idea was to use the web cam to detect which angle your face is on.
There are enough face detection softwares out there. Even good open source ones. If someone who can understand all the code can make it extract the angle of the face, then the angle can be fed to another piece of code which uses simple heuristics and time outs to change the orientation of the screen when the user is seeing the screen at 90 degrees.
3) Auto-brightness
At least in linux, its quite easy to change the brightness of the laptop screen, you just write your brightness level to a special file and done. if you can find out the ambient brightness from the camera, then just simply adjust screen backlight brighness appropriately through code. done.
4) Could also be an interesting input for gaming. Though it can be a pain in the neck if the game gets too continuous or fast paced. But the possibilities are interesting.. [a] In a FPS you can use it to control the head of the charector (to look around). [b] In a flight simulator, you could use it to control the pitch, roll, etc
Even better: If you look away from the screen for more than 2 seconds the game can pause itself!
5) [ok.. ideas are getting a bit crazier now]
Hands free! Use it for alternative input for dialogs.. Nod your head around x axis for yes. nod your head around y axis for no. Hands free!
Hands free browsing!. Firefox plugin and extension which can be switched on while having lunch. The plugin that knows where you are looking and automatically scrolls it to centre (very very useful if you have the habit of reading slashdot or other news while having food). A left wink can bookmark the page and position for rereading. A right wink can bookmark the page and position for commenting later on(after lunch).
6) Sleep pause
If you are watching a movie and doze off, the movie should get paused, and the laptop can go to low power mode. ( I am confused whether I should be really adding this idea in the "contributed" section as i got the idea from [bigsleep]'s nick :-)
7) Boss / kids / wife detector.
Saves a lot of embarrassing moments ;-)
8) Guesture based reading of cards (Visiting cards, barcodes(?) semacodes, etc)
If I point at an object (near the camera) edge with an index finger, it should try to find text/barcode/semacode on it. OCR it and present in a dialog. After I confirm or correct and then confirm the input, operations follow suit - URL is bookmarked/launched, visiting card info is stored in my addressbook, etc.
The cam of my EEE Pc is 1.3 megapixel and so I guess all newer notebooks carry good enough cameras.
Contributed ideas:
[2 fries shy of a happy meal]
".. detect how far a persons face is from the screen and change font size accordingly.."
[bigsleep]
".. if one of a number of faces disappears[while watching a movie] it could press pause."
[supershnitzel]
augment speech recognition with face detection. just like hearing-impaired people do.

—	kamathln, Feb 14 2009

Dual spectrum Eye Recognition dual-spectrum_20eye_20recognition
got any laptops with IR cams ? [kamathln, 25 2009]
(5) implemented by opera!!! http://my.opera.com...log/face-the-future
(seems to be april fool though :-( ) [kamathln, Apr 01 2009]
CamSpace http://www.youtube....watch?v=v0srY37kkMw
Comes close to (4) [kamathln, May 02 2009]
Sixth Sense http://www.ted.com/...he_sixth_sense.html
Comes close to 8 [kamathln, May 02 2009]
smert.net http://smert.net/20...-beta/#comment-2805
Implementation by Jason [kamathln, 02 2009]
Presence sensor *almost* baked! http://www.pcworld...._cant_get_here.html
not on sale in the US yet though... [DIYMatt, May 19 2009, last modified May 20 2009]
Mousetrap http://live.gnome.org/MouseTrap
Gaze based cursor control [kamathln, Jul 02 2010]
John Underkoffer's hand gestures demo http://www.ted.com/...with_a_gesture.html
21 Quest 's suggestion :baked? Just have to adapt it to Laptop :) [kamathln, 04 2010, last modified Jul 06 2010]
same UI Chat_20Enhancer
for text-based conversation [FlyingToaster, Jul 04 2010]
HandVu http://www.movesins.../HandVu/HandVu.html
Hand Gesture Recognition using OpenCV [kamathln, Jul 07 2010]
Auto-dimming TV http://www.gizmag.c...watching-you/15330/
[comes close to (1), but on tv and not on a computer. Samsung Bravia TV dims/switches off when you are not looking [kamathln, 15 2010]
Ubuntu getting physical http://design.canon...9/getting-physical/
[kamathln, Sep 16 2010]
Compiz head tracking http://ubuntuforums...thread.php?t=952895
[kamathln, 16 2010]
Proxemic media player concept http://www.youtube....watch?v=OHm9teVoNE8
Comes close to the string of ideas in comments that came about thanks to idea #6 [kamathln, 01 2010]

Surprising Old Tech

[The theme of this collection is gadget/tech concepts that we feel "current technology", but has existed for a long time. Of course, this list is definitely not complete. If you know anything that matches the theme but I have missed, please suggest them in the comments. The main reason they are more widespread today is because of falling prices and advancements in processor speed and storage, making it more feasible. But if companies coming up with current products based on these old concepts act as though they inventted the concept, please send them a reminder.]

 

Driverless bus [1976]

https://youtu.be/wOPnSgTtSOQ

Apples' first Iphone? [Apple's secret Iphone design, 1983]
http://mashable.com/2011/12/30/apple-iphone-1983/

Seiko UC 2000 Wrist computer [Early smart watch, 1984]
https://www.inexhibit.com/case-studies/seiko-uc-2000-1984-the-dawn-of-wearable-computers/

Epson RC 50  [Early Smartwatch with touchscreen, 1984]
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4IlGIryo8KU

IBM Simon [First Smart Mobile phone. 1993 Also the first smart mobile phone with touchscreen]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon
Dont miss the Full view of the UI(big file)
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/IBM_SImon_in_charging_station.png

EO personal communicator/Penpoint OS 1991 (its 50 mins long, but its
just superb considering its from 1991, so please make time to watch.
you can skip first 8.5 mins if you are in a hurry):
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9140399149118885327
The dev tool demoed in 1994 is not less awesome:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zh1yCHn8hvE

The "Mother of all demos" from 1968 . [more than just the mouse, it was the data management ideas that I liked. We could probably call it one of the first crude "mashups"]
http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html

First hand writing recognition was partly mechanical , Nov 1914 (yes, 1914)
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/1117184.pdf

 

Voder - The First Electronic Voice Synthesizer  1939

https://www.whatisthevoder.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsdOej_nC1M

 
Aspen Movie Map 1978 was street view 30+ years before Google introduced street view
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf6LkqgXPMU

Etaks Car Navigation System  1985 was a navigation system that does notuse satellite aid, and instead relies on dead reckoning.
https://www.fastcompany.com/3047828/who-needs-gps-the-forgotten-story-of-etaks-amazing-1985-car-navigation-system

 First Watch calculator 1977 (dont miss the advanced features)
 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-01

First digital camera 1975
http://www.retrothing.com/2008/05/kodaks-first-di.html

17000 mile journey on a modified cycle with a solar powered laptop back in 1983
http://hackaday.com/2009/09/18/vintage-video-computing-across-america/

First HDTV (monochrome, 819 lines) came in 1949!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/819_line

Patent of iPod like device back in 1979
http://www.kanekramer.com/html/development.htm

Multi-touch, Multi-pointer UI, And some concepts like magic lenses which are not yet in today's world! 1982 - 1997 . These need not necessarily be invented by the people who demonstrate them in the video.
http://www.billbuxton.com/buxtonIRGVideos.html

Xerox Alto :[Desktop , 1973]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto
Screenshots:
http://toastytech.com/guis/alto.html

Xerox Star:[Desktop, 1982, dont miss screenshots .. search on youtube too]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Star
Screenshots:
http://toastytech.com/guis/star.html

ATT Viewtron [an older try at Internet/www 1981]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6DVBPmo4Co

Digital Desk by Pierre Wellner, 1991. Some of the "Envisionment" simulations were also implemented in the EuroParc during this project.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8lCetZ_57g

Touch Screen, [1982]
https://youtube.com/watch?v=JAcZpQCLb4E


And now let us take a detour from the digital world

P1 electric car by Porsche 1898
http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1089994_first-ever-porsche-turns-out-to-be-an-electric-car
http://www.wired.com/autopia/2014/01/porsche-first-car-electric/

Disclaimer : these were a bunch of stuff I came across by searching on the internet. I have not researched thoroughly about them, nor have I confirmed these. Though these info have been got from somewhat reliable sources, I do not give any kind of assurance that the data/information is correct. I only added items here which I got impressed by the age of the claim and quality/geekery.

JqS5 Slide show and bookmarklet.

I just loved JQS5 (jQuery Simple Standards based Slide Show System) for the simple beauty that it is. If you just have a bunch of points to put across, and you are fast at html, you can throw together a slideshow in about 2 minutes.

Start writing a normal html file, put the main title in <h1> tag, your name in <i> follow it by a bunch of lists of points, each headed by an <h2>, load it in the browser and you are ready to hit full screen.

"Oh wait .. dont you have to add the css and js" ?

Oh yeah!, or you could just let these 2 bookmarklets to do that for you .. drag these bookmarklets to your bookmarks toolbar:

Load JQS5

and

show

"Load JQS5" inserts the the js and css .. Dont worry if not much happens, the js is not "activated" - only loaded. Click the "show" button. and let it do the rest for you.

These bookmarks load the js and css from the JQS5 website itself, which I discourage on 2 counts.

1. We are using JQS5 website's bandwidth
2. It will be faster to load it from the local machine.

Inkjet Printer hacks

Hacks are fun. Hacks are also usefull. Wierdly, I suddently stumbled upon 3 hacks back to back that use inkjet printers. So I started to list those that I find. If you know more, please leave a comment


Direct to cd printer used for printing cirquits
http://hackaday.com/2009/09/02/direct-to-pcb-inkjet-printing/


Inkjet printer used to "print" several different medical tests on paper based, postage stamp sized, "lab" (watch the whole vid, its included somewhere)
http://www.ted.com/talks/download/video/8556/talk/760

Inkjet printer used to "print" out a set of living heart muscles. (watch the whole vid, its included somewhere)
http://www.ted.com/talks/anthony_atala_growing_organs_engineering_tissue.html

Inkjet printer used to "print" out other organs like kidney, bladder etc.
http://www.ted.com/talks/anthony_atala_printing_a_human_kidney.html

GIMP : 2 Layer Dialogs trick

1) Locate the Dialog's special menu
2) Add a second "layers" menu. (not this is not possible from the Image's "Window>Dockable Dialogs" menu).
3) Drag resulting layer dialog tab outside.

4) Disable Auto Image switch for the dock.
5) Now use the two dialogs like you would use a split pane window manager.

Tip: You can use the scroll wheel to quickly switch images using the image selector at the top of the dock window.

Elinks, the best browser for text consoles

[ This was an old email ( though still valid) that I had sent to the internal mailing list at the previous company I worked for. I used elinks in xterm, so you can skip xterm related stuff if you use it on plain text console]

I have started using "elinks" for most tasks.. It is much better than
I thought. Only a few defaults are amiss. I just feel the following
tips will make you like elinks.


Tips in using "elinks":
Note, I use it in xterm.
1: First, make yourself familiar with settings up options
manager. To get the Options manager, first press Esc on
the keyboard, or the top row of the terminal using mouse.
In the resulting menu, Go to options manager.

The points that follow start with the option to
change. When changing the following settings, make sure you
read the accomponying text.

2: Document->Cache->Ignore cache-control info from server
Set it to: 0
Description: Cache-control header item is usually set by CGIs
to hint that the content must not be cached. When it is
ignored, it ends up as a huge nuisance.

3: Document->Default color settings->Use document-specified
colors
Set it to: 2
Dont worry, in a short while we will be disabling
transparency. :-)

4: Document->HTML Rendering->Underline Links
Set it to: 1
Well, Experiement. I liked with Underlines. Though it can get
nasty in webmail.

5: Document->Browser->Forms->

External editor
Set it to: your favorite editor.
When focus is in a text area, and it is in edit mode, press
F4 to open the content in text editor.

6: Under "User interface", play as you like. I liked the
following:
i. Clock
ii. LEDs

7: Terminals->xterm->colors
Set it to: 2
Actually, the correct way would be to set TERM environment
variable before starting elinks .. But I dont want to bother
myself with that, as I dont think my X is gonna get set to
monochrome all of a sudden.

If you don't like the document specified color for a
particular website, you can always cycle through color
choosing algorithms using %. It will become second nature
sooner than you imagine.

8: Terminals->xterm->Transparency
Set it to: 0


Other than these tips, remember, the mouse works just like in firefox
for so many things.
1. Left click to open
2. Right click links to get more options
3. Right click inside document to get yet more options
4. Middle click a link to open in new tab.
5. Middle click a tab to close the tab.
6. Scroll wheel works for vertical scrolling.
7. Scroll on the tabs bar to switch tabs.

Tips for using forms:
1. Press enter on a form's entry field before typing anything
into it. You can see the the mode in the status bar.
2. Press enter again to submit the form. Again, the status bar.
3. Press dot (.) to enable link numbering .. when this mode is
on, you can type a number to go to that link. Even the form
elements are treated as elinks, so you can jump between form
elements quickly using this.

Other tips :
1. To follow elinks, press enter or press right arrow key.
2. To go back, press the left arrow.
3. To go "forward" or "unhistory" as elinks calls it, press "u"
downlaod any link target using "d"
4. Press '/' to search stuff on the page
5. Use [ and ] to scroll horizontally. Too much text off the
screen? Use 'W' to switch wrapping.
6. Use '<' and '>' to switch between tabs.
7. Press t to open new tab. c to close, Ctrl-r to refresh.
8. Press g for location dialog.
9. Type a number before a shortcut key to repeat that key so
many times. Usefull for jumping 3 steps back in history.
10. Press "h" for history manager
11. Press '\' to see source
12. Press '=' to see info about the current object loaded .. like
URL,etc.
13. Press '|' to see response header.
14. press D for download manager.

Squirrelmail and Gmail look good in elinks.

15. Press q to quit.

Web experience enhancing "semantic web", "standards" and "API"s.

This is a preliminary list i could think of immedietely.. I am going to add urls to each of them soon. Please comment with any that i missed (make sure that you give a link to the standard's official descriptions page when you do, or failing that, the best page that describes the format)

It need not be specifically a data format or and API as such. Any specifications that, when adopted by the web developer, enhances the usage of the website can be listed.

• rss
• favicon
• opensearch
• open-collaboration-services
• microformats
• sitemap.xml
• oembed
• bookmarklets
• blog pingback
• social graph, foaf, XFN
• GRDDL
• APML

CHDK Fun

I have been recently playing a bit with my camera these days.. And thanks to CHDK, I have been having great fun. Check out my flickr page http://flickr.com/photos/kamathln . And my videos page http://kamathln.homelinux.net/videos/ , available only if my laptop is online.

GNOME and Firefox in Kannada

Just installed kannada and got basic apps in kannada. Note: openoffice is something I use once in a bluemoon so did not bother about it at all.

I am running Debain lenny recently apt-get updated and installed. I got these quirks sorted out.

1) got Kannada Unicode to render properly on Firefox, after spoiling it badly.
2) got to type Kannada properly on all places
3) got Firefox translations for kannada
4) set kannada as preferred language in Firefox ( Firefox tells websites about this. The only website that honoured the setting was google, but i was pleased)
5) Get the whole gnome in Kannada

1) Kannada Unicode rendering on Firefox :
This really should not have been a problem at all. This was my own stupidity. Even before I started out to go to some Kannada website, I airily set a few fonts too Freesans. Then i saw that pages dont render properly, after I tried different stupidities franctically and vainly , I thought I will just reset all the configuration. To do this quick, I just entered about:config and researched for freesans, and "reset"' the values to defaults. This fixed the rendering and I was back in business.

As Sans-Serif is a magic font, it chooses the right kannada fonts magically.

And obviously, before starting off with anything ttf-indic-fonts were installed.

2) Kannada typing in all places.
This was simple. After a bit of googling (I wish I hadn't erased the history of Firefox) I found a page where a Japanese guy had solved the same problem like this :

GTK_IM_MODULE="scim-bridge"

in /etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d/scim .

This worked like magic, I could use SCIM in all places, after I used im-switch to set scim as my default Input module.

For getting easy Kannada typing, I needed to install scim, scim-m17n and itrans packages and these also pulled some dependencies. After that, itt was smooth sailing with kn-itrans option available under Kannada.

To get the language list, just click the little keyboard icon in the system tray. ( After first installation, you need to re-login to get it). Note:you need to Left click on the system tray SCIM icon(little keyboard), not right click, which would give you setup options.

3) Firefox kannada translation
This one was easy

$ apt-get install iceweasel-l10n-kn
$ LANG=kn_IN iceweasel

The LANG=kn_IN iceweasel can be kept in a script and the panel launcher's properties could be set to launch the script. Anyways, Item (5) must obsolete it if it succeeds.

4) Preferred web content set to kannada in Firefox.

Again, pretty Simple:

Main Menu->Edit/Tools-> Preferences->Content->Languages

Or if you already followed item (3):

ಮುಖ್ಯ ಮೆನು->ಸಂಪಾದನೆ->ಆದ್ಯತೆಗಳು->ಒಳಅಂಶಗಳು->ಭಾಷೆಗಳು

Once you add Kannada in the list of languages, dont forget to move it to the top(order indicates the priority). Once this is done, you must find that google presents itself in Kannada.

5) GNOME in Kannada

I searched for kannada packages for GNOME for a long time. Then an angel from #kannada on irc.freenode.net made me realize that Kannada was installed with GNOME
all along! Stupid me. Just checked /usr/share/locale/kn/LC_MESSAGES/ and they were all there. But LANG=kn_IN gedit, LC_ALL=kn_IN gedit, all failed to present in Kannada.Then the same angel hinted me to run

dpkg-reconfigure locales

That reminded me that I was presented with the same UI during installation, and I had neglected it. Damn! Well, it re-generated and configured the languages I chose. after that LANG=kn_IN gedit just worked. So If I am not wrong, a re-login should add Kannada to the list of languages at the GDM login screen, and all the LANG=kn_IN should be unnecessary.

I will be writing to the GNOME's Debain package manager asking to include dpkg-reconfigure locales as a menu item in system->administration :-P.

Update:
I have rebooted and here is a screenshot :

Telescopic display support for laptop

This is an illustration for an idea i submitted to halfbakery. You can view the idea here.

I am not a good artist or a technical drawing guy, so please only appreciate the main idea, and don't analyze it under a microscope :-) .

The base extension is actually thinner and can be fit into a groove on the sides so that even when it is extended, the laptop will maintain a flat level.

E17 wishlist

1. Saving customizations of a theme. In "advanced" part of the theme manager, after a lot of customizations - setting different borders, fonts, etc., if you want to try out a complete new theme, you have to lose all previous customizations. This is a pain.. Allowing a simple "saving" of custom sets will help avoid a lot of frustration.
2. Automatic GTK/QT Color settings according to current e17 theme.
   - Just like KDE does to GTK.
3. Restart theme setttings app along with e17 when you press "apply" in the theme manager.
4. Some old effects from dr16 (especially transparent move and resize ).

Very small audio streamer ( serves only one client at a time)

Serves whatever is coming from your recording source

Ingredients:

• tcpserver


• arecord


• speexenc

Method:

#!/bin/bash
cat <<EOH
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/ogg

EOH
beep -f 3200
arecord -r 8000 -t raw |speexenc --8bit - -

Power saving on GNU/Linux laptops

1. Forget all snazzy desktop stuff. Especially those that update the screen unnecessarily.
2. Try this: http://lesswatts.org .
3. If you have a IBM THinkpad check out this one too: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_reduce_power_consumption

Then also try these tips :

1. In Firefox: disable prefetch. For that :
   
   • In urlbar type about:config
   • In the resulting table.. type "prefetch" in the search box to filter out those keys that have "prefetch" in them.
   • In the result, set "network.prefetch-next" to "false".
     
     • If you have Stumbleupon installed, disable it's prefetch too. stumbleupon.somenumber.prefetch
   • Unless you are a heavy user of gmail, use the simple html mode.
2. Use text based browsers unless the page demands a GUI browser. Elinks is an excellent choice.
3. Disable anything that blinks/ updates the screen. This makes X wake up the CPU on every update.
   
   • Disable blinking cursors. Many terminals allow a way to disable the blinking of the cursor.
   • Disable the "seconds" indicator on the clock. Really, are you on a race track ?
4. Disable "system monitor" "battery monitor" and such other applets. Configure key shortcuts that run a command like "uptime" "date" "acpi" or somthing like that and pipe it to xmessage or something like that. Also havea script that .. every 30 seconds call these commands and checks for dangerous values. If any, popout a xmessage.
5. Have a decent amount of RAM. This reduces the kernel having to wake the hard disk often to play with the swap.
6. Remove anything unnecessary. Unnecessary daemons, Unnecessary devices, Unnecessay drivers, etc..
7. I dont know if this works: Try using small flash based drives to store frequently used small documents, music, etc. This brings disk usage to a minimum.
   

Firefox div height relative to viewport works!

If you were trying to set the height of a div or any other object for that matter relative to the height if the viewport, This might be a solution. [ Blogspot eats up html.. even in compose box.]

I was actually facing the same problem.. few google searches, jumping between a few IRC channels later, I was about to give up. Then just out of thin air .. I tried the above .. And it worked.

If this solution existed somewhere else, please let me know.. so that next time I can use better search params.

Sudoku solver

I had been working on a small sudoku solver.. Did not finish it though. It goes into infinite loops for difficult ones. You can check it here [ If my laptop is on - look at the status box at top right of my blog]. (Will upload to github when I Can)It is published under GPL license. My interest waned as I worked on it, people are most welcome on using it. At a rate of 1 to 10 for coding, I rate myself at 2.5 . So yeah, feel free to say my code sucks.

Please do anything with it under the GNU GPL.

Reverse Engineers will stop at nothing.

Or may be not even at nothing. I am too disoriented to know. I am dumb struck by the ingenuity and cleverness of these people. The below "title"s are mine. The original articles have other titles.


Canon! Show me your code!
http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/Porting_the_CHDK#Hardware-software_solution

Oh sweet iPod, sing your code to me!
http://web.archive.org/web/20060204000118/ipodlinux.org/stories/piezo/

Time Lapse Video using CHDK

As mentioned earlier, I own a Canon A570 and run CHDK on it . Using a script I took a Time Lapse Video . This is how you can do it using CHDK. This is how they turn out.

And this is how mine turned out.



You can also download High Resolution [786 x 516, 10.00 fps] [if my laptop is switched on. Look at the status box on the top right of my blog] it. It has 76 frames taken at an interval of 20 seconds and runs at 10 frames per second speed. I used mencoder to encode the series of photos into a movie.

Update:
Made two more timelapse videos





Original High resolution videos can be found here .

Baraha to UTF8 (Kannada) pre-release

There is an incomplete preview of my Baraha to UTF8 converter available at http://www.fontmatrix.net/kamathln/brh2utf8.tbz . I am grateful to Pierre Marchand of fontmatrix for providing me the space. My current logic is somewhat too generic and am falling into lot of troubles.

A session on #fonts opened my eyes to a good amount of resources on the internet on Indic text processing especially in unicode. I think I will be spending a lot of time on it for the next few days.


I will paste interesting parts of the chat transcripts down here (Resource links are available at the end if you are too busy to read the chat scripts):


kamathln: Anyone from India ?
kamathln: I want to know a good resource for parsing indic UTF8
Popolon: kamathln, fontmatrix ?
amathln Popolon: fontmatrix ?
Popolon can be used without gnome
kamathln what does that do ?
Popolon fontmatrix is a font manager
kamathln ok.. does it have a good parser ?
Popolon it works very well with every indians fonts I have installed
Popolon It classify fonts
Popolon write them well
Popolon which kind of parser ?
kamathln Popolon: your knowledge of indic scripts ?
kamathln Popolon: can you comprehense the words "half vowels" and "half charectors" "ottaksharas" ?
kamathln that kind of parsing .. :-P
Popolon limited, I know that's alpha-syllabic
Popolon scriptures
pierremarc Depending of what you want to do, look at Harfbuzz, ICU or m17n
pierremarc All deal with shaping non-latin scripts
kamathln pierremarc: already looking at ICU .. but I guess m17n might have what i want .. dont know what harfbuzz ..will check .. thx so much for your input
pierremarc kamathln: Can we know what you are working on?
pierremarc TBH, I?m in the process of preparing some Indic support in Fontmatrix
kamathln there is an old kannada encoding format "baraha". I am trying to convert from it to unicode..
pierremarc http://www.infitt.org/ti2002/papers/64RAGHUV.PDF - I have not read it yet but it could be of some interest
kamathln i have written a simple match and replace based converter.. but when there are multiple half consonants or half vowels attached to a main full consonant, the utf8 comes out wrong .. and i am trying to fix it using a utf8 parser
kamathln http://www.baraha.com/web_docs/glyph_codes_kan.htm
pierremarc Is it the rendering of the resulting UTF string that is wrong or the string itself?
kamathln is the baraha glyph map
kamathln unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0C80.pdf
kamathln is the unicode..
kamathln they dont match one to one
* kamathln checks http://www.infitt.org/ti2002/papers/64RAGHUV.PDF
kamathln pierremarc: string itself comes out wrong
pierremarc And what results give regular tools such as iconv?
kamathln pierremarc: iconv is for transliteration right ?
pierremarc encoding conversions
kamathln !
kamathln must check..
kamathln never knew about it..
* kamathln bangs head on the wall
pierremarc But since "baraha" seems to be a private mapping over ASCII, it can be possible that iconv can?t do nothing for you
kamathln pierremarc: guessed as much .. but still i must have known abt iconv which i didnt
pierremarc Here "iconv -l | grep annada" gives nothing :(
kamathln pierremarc: okie then.. my hard work is not a waste ..
kamathln i will put up my converter up somewhere and get back here ..
kamathln it will be under GPL
kamathln pierremarc: do you have indic fonts installed ?
pierremarc Yes, I must have ones :)
kamathln ???????????? kamathln pierremarc: cool.. did you see a charector with dotted circle ?
pierremarc nope
kamathln it must be the second character..
kamathln ?
kamathln this one ..
pierremarc But I can try with another font
kamathln okies.. no problem .. the point i am trying to make is my app is not generating the correct output
kamathln pierremarc: my main logic is quite straightforward ..you may find it usefull
pierremarc Have you read the paper written by Y. Haralambous about its work on Indica?
pierremarc I?s my starting point for my own work in FM
kamathln pierremarc: no.. iam kinda noobie in this ..
pierremarc Could you mail it to me and I push it on fontmatrix.net in a private area?
kamathln oh sure!
pierremarc pierremarc at oep-h.com
pierremarc kamathln: http://omega.enstb.org/yannis/pdf/indica-santa94.pdf
pierremarc http://www.w3.org/2002/Talks/09-ri-indic/indic-paper.html
pierremarc http://www.fontmatrix.net/kamathin/
pierremarc oops, let me change the "i" into an "l"
kamathln pierremarc: thx :-) .. I owe you
pierremarc http://www.fontmatrix.net/kamathln/
kamathln wow.. that indic paper was really usefull.. I think I am gonna do a lot of research and coding in the next few days :-0
pierremarc kamathln: If at some point you want to participate in this part of FM, you?ll be very welcome
kamathln pierremarc: thx .. i think i will.. though not immedietely .. currently busy searhcing for a job
kamathln pierremarc: fontmatrix is somehting i have been longing for .. God bless you..
Popolon kamathln, scim too ?
Popolon it includes uim + m17 interfaces as sub methods
pierremarc I got to go now. We?re aall a gang to hang on #fontmatrix channel, don?t hesitate to come
kamathln yeah.. but scim is a monster for a newbie like me ..
Popolon I don't know if it contains itself indian methods
Popolon ok
Popolon I use it for chinese typing
kamathln Popolon: it does .. thats how i wrote that kannada word if you scroll up a little :-)
Popolon as it's definitivly the best in this domain
Popolon sorry I was at phone
kamathln Popolon: yes.. and yudit too!
kamathln Popolon: you dont need to..


Then the discussion went a little offtopic and almost came back .. but it was fun :-)


i

Popolon pierremarc: doesn't render in my xchat display window, but in my xchat input text window
Popolon kamathln, that's used in srilanka tamoul ?
Popolon isn't it ?
Popolon I used yudit too before scim :)
kamathln srilana uses a bit of tamil
kamathln SriLanka*
Popolon it's fun for this handwritten hanzi recognition
kamathln Kannada is used in karnataka .. a south west part of India .. but not as south as Kerala
Popolon because at a shop, in my street, there is a tamoul and a srilanki they both speak tamoul
Popolon ah ok
Popolon I mixed the names because of the K...a.a :)
Popolon Don't know well the names of the states of india
Popolon The tamoul is from Pondicherry
kamathln wikipedia.org/wiki/kannada
kamathln it is Tamil
Popolon sorry Tamoul is in french
kamathln you mean you call Tamil "Tamoul" in french ?
kamathln cool :-)
Popolon yes
kamathln there is a state called "Tamil Nadu" in south east of India.. If you remember the map of India, the south of india is an upside down triangle surrounded by sea..
kamathln well.. i think it is better to look at a map than me explain ;-)
Popolon yes
Popolon I remember the shape of the india, look for maps in wikipedia
Popolon I know most of chinese province, next to learn india states :)
kamathln Popolon: cool.. u r a GK guy..
Popolon GK ?
kamathln General Knowldge
Popolon Puducherry => Tamil Nadu
Popolon ok
kamathln yes.. Pondicherry is in Tamil Nadu
Popolon Not really, In fact, I like, Indian & chinese culture :)
Popolon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_India#Political_geography
Popolon exactly what I need
kamathln http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bd/India-states-numbered.svg
kamathln is what I was abt to offer
kamathln which was wrong anyways.. :-P
Popolon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:India-states-numbered.svg
Popolon hihi , that's the same file
Popolon wrong ? There are errors ?
kamathln 12 is karnataka
kamathln no.. i cant see the names of the states .. only numbers
Popolon http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Maps_of_India
kamathln 24 is Tamil Nadu
Popolon there are names in my link (en.wiki)
Popolon as this is SVG it's easy to add names in several languages
Popolon I worked at grouping svg files in SVG category tree on commons few month ago
Popolon will have to add
kamathln Popolon: cool
Popolon it's possible to add 'translation of this map' in the file page itself
Popolon this is the case in some biological svg
kamathln oh nice!
kamathln biological ? like "parts of the body " file ?
Popolon http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:SVG
Popolon yes
Popolon parts of body
Popolon animals
Popolon etc...
kamathln oh nice ...
kamathln interesting ..
Popolon http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:SVG_%E2%80%94_anatomy
Popolon there are numbered SVG
Popolon empty
Popolon and with translations
kamathln cool1
Popolon http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Baleen_Whale_Physical_Characteristics.svg
Popolon here an example, how to do other translations of this picture on the page
Popolon you can download SVG
kamathln nice concept .. might be usefull somewhere else
Popolon edit it with inkscape (free software)
Popolon http://inkscape.org
Popolon and upload the translated one
kamathln i know of inkscape..
Popolon cool
kamathln used it to create a few icons for my prev company
kamathln Popolon: i was wondering if we can create a new xml based font standard ..
Popolon kamathln, there is already SVG fonts :)
kamathln !
kamathln cool.. checking out
Popolon http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/fonts.html
kamathln already on it
kamathln :-)
Popolon they can use several layers
kamathln WoW
Popolon allowing multi-colored fonts (as in type 3)
Popolon this could be interesting for indian languages where some shapes are reused ?
Popolon in chinese there are about 50 basics caracters
* eimai [n=eimai@49.0-200-80.adsl-dyn.isp.belgacom.be] entered the room.
Popolon the (about 50000 ???) other are combination of these few
Popolon combining basic element with transformation matrix could save lot of memory :)
kamathln Popolon: abt Indian fonts : You have a point..
kamathln like ? and ?
kamathln and ?
kamathln all are similar
kamathln and even ? and ?
Popolon yes in french we have accents eéè
Popolon uüûù
Popolon about the same
kamathln ?????!
kamathln whups
kamathln yeah!
Popolon :)
Popolon could be 5000 not 50000 characters in chinese :)
Popolon 85 000 in some dictionnaries :)
Popolon but I think it's not 85 000 characters, but 85 000 words
kamathln Popolon: was actually wondering if "soundfonts" too could be encoded in a similar way for scripts like Indian where there is a one to one match between syllables and chars
Popolon (sometime combinaison from 2 to 4 characters
kamathln Popolon: Chinese seems to be a very complex language..
Popolon no, it's really easy language
kamathln Popolon: I wonder how they built computers at all !
kamathln Popolon: oh!
Popolon but writing is a little bit complex
kamathln Popolon: oh
kamathln lot of things happened today for me .. will be saving my chat log and blogging abt it..
Popolon there is no grammatical conjugation in chinese for example
kamathln Popolon: then ? how to percieve what is being spoken ?
Popolon the verbs are often composed of 2 simple verbs, often like in english
kamathln Popolon: ok
Popolon go in, go out, come in, come out, are the same in chinse :)
kamathln you mean one word for all of it ?
Popolon the guy that created esperanto use lot of chinese grammar because of it's simplicity
Popolon no like in english
kamathln ah! ok
Popolon 2 simple verbs to create a verb defining accent
Popolon action not accent :)
kamathln ah! simple once you catch the nack
* rahul_b left the room (quit: "Leaving(?????? ????)").
Popolon yes
kamathln hey! will svg fonts make OCRs simpler ?
kamathln can we add the "direction" charectors/ half characters are written in ?
Popolon ??= come in, ?? go in, ?? come out, ??, go out
kamathln cool .. thoise rendered nicely on my pc
Popolon :)
kamathln and what is this about "simplified chinese" and "traditional chinese" ?
Popolon ??man, ?= follow
kamathln wow! each char is a word ?
Popolon ?=arbre, ??wood, ??forest, often written ??
Popolon yes
Popolon often two chars are used together
kamathln a picture is worth a word :-))
Popolon as one char=1 syllabe, and there are two few different syllabs
Popolon this is for avoid confusions
Popolon ??arbre, ?=racine :)
Popolon sorry
Popolon ??tree, ?=root :)
Popolon the same before arbre in french = tree in english
kamathln ah!
Popolon ?=tree, ??wood, ??forest, often written ??
Popolon then
kamathln which means forest tree
Popolon ??little, ?=young
kamathln oh
Popolon in means forest, it's used if it's alone to avoid confusion
Popolon if you add some characteristic, you can use only the half
Popolon as in : ??
Popolon young wood
kamathln what if they want to write a word of another language ?
Popolon that's the name of the famous temple, ???shaolin :)
kamathln like they want to write "Laxminarayan"
kamathln which is incidentally my name
Popolon they translate it, or use prononciation similarities
Popolon Saddly, I don't know how it is pronounced
Popolon ??
Popolon I suppose rayan = something like this
kamathln LOL !
kamathln I was wondering what that is
Popolon ???? (ximalaya) = Himalaya mountains
Popolon for example
Popolon that's pronouciation translation
kamathln Hey.. I am off to dinner .. Will be back in half an hour
kamathln mom yelling
Popolon ?=happiness, ?= horse, ?=pull, ?=elegant
Popolon this is clearly for pronounciation purpose
kamathln And I am off
kamathln pierremarc: Popolon: it was a very informative chat session .. thx very much
http://www.fontmatrix.net/kamathln/brh2utf8.tbz
http://www.infitt.org/ti2002/papers/64RAGHUV.PDF
http://www.baraha.com/web_docs/glyph_codes_kan.htm
http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0C80.pdf
http://omega.enstb.org/yannis/pdf/indica-santa94.pdf
http://www.w3.org/2002/Talks/09-ri-indic/indic-paper.html

Slightly offtopic:
http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/fonts.html

Too much time on the computer

You know you are working too much on the computer when you attempt to switch off the monitor by trying to take the mouse cursor to the switch on your monitor.