The very first funny Cat Video? (Video)

Just watched yet another funny cat video on Internet. I wonder when our fascination with funny cat videos began. It turns out that the earliest cat video dates back to the birth of motion pictures. Thomas Edison the consummate commercializer of his innovations made earliest movies to promote the motion picture camera "Kinetograph. After the initial popularity of these penny movies (penny was the cost of ticket) of humans moving, dancing and sneezing waned. He moved on to man's furry friends. In 1894 the boxing cats motion picture was hit among the audiences at the penny arcades.

Shenzhen: The Silicon Valley of Hardware (Video)

Follow maker and hacker extraordinary Andrew 'Bunnie' Huang to Shenzhen, China. This Wired.com documentary provides a rare insight into Shenzhen,the silicon valley of hardware. Understand what makes Shenzhen produce such innovative products at an incredible speed.

For me, the one most striking highlight of this documentary was to learn about 'Shenzhai' culture, it is akin to hacker or maker culture. I believe the values of open design, sharing of technical know-how and healthy dose of hubris defines Shenzhai culture. It drives the innovative product design in Shenzhen. Today this culture of design and easy availability of manufacturing facilities is attracting designers, makers, hackers and entrepreneurs.

I hope you'll enjoy this documentary and hopeful make your way to Shenzhen in near future.

Capturing Time-lapse with Sony RX100 II Camera

Few people asked for information about the time-lapse photography in my last blog post about 3D printing hamster castle. In this blog post, I'll share how to do time-lapse photography with Sony RX100 II camera.

The setup

1. Sony RX100 MKII camera
2. Android device Timelapse app
3. Tripod
4. Two power chargers with mini-USB cables

The Sony RX100 MKII doesn't have a built-in intervalometer. So we'll use an Android device with Timelapse app to take photographs at regular intervals. Also we'll power the the camera and the Android device with a wall charger so that they don't run out of battery during the long time-lapse recording. The Sony RX100 MKII can be charged directly using a standard mini-USB power adapter. That means I don't have to replace the batteries during the long time-lapse.

First, let's turn off the power saving mode on the camera. This prevents the camera from going into sleep mode. To control the camera using a Android device, navigate to your cameras 'Control with Smartphone' menu option. Once selected, the screen will display camera's Wi-Fi SSID and password (Read the Sony documentation about Wi-Fi Direct here). Now go the WiFi settings on your Android device and connect to 'Direct-XXXXX' WiFi access point with the password displayed on your camera. Once connected, Open 'Timelapse' app and select 'RX100 mk2' from the camera model drop down menu. Next you can select the interval for your time-lapse (I used 10 secs for this time-lapse) and start your recording. Please make sure that the Android device is near to the camera to avoid losing the WiFi connection. The camera takes the pictures and saves them to SDCard. What's next? You can now use a video program of your choice to turn this time-lapse photographs into a video on your computer.

Please don't forget to share your experiences doing time-lapse photography.

Jeffrey Zeldman: 20 years of Web Design and Community (Video Documentary)

Who is Jeffrey Zeldman? The "Miles Davis of web design"? "Godfather of the web"? Or simply "your friend on the Internet"? For people who make websites, Zeldman is all of these and more. He's been a guiding voice in web design since the earliest days of the Internet, leading the charge in the fight for web standards. He's an educator whose businesses—A List Apart, An Event Apart, and A Book Apart—are extensions of his basic instinct to share his best ideas. He's also a community leader that other designers look to for inspiration. This film is an intimate portrait of a man who has helped shape the web but isn't recognized by most of the people who use it everyday. Learn how he evolved his influential mailing list, how he convinced Netscape and Internet Explorer to support HTML and CSS, and what he's doing to pass the torch to the next generation.

Watch more documentaries like this at lynda.com/vimeo.

Jeffrey Zeldman: 20 years of Web Design and Community from lynda.com on Vimeo

AEGIS project video

AEGIS is an EC-funded FP7 project that seeks to determine whether 3rd generation access techniques will provide a more accessible, more exploitable and deeply embeddable approach in mainstream ICT (desktop, rich Internet and mobile applications).

You can now view the AEGIS project video online here.

Handbrake : Video Encoder For Everyone

Just discovered HandBrake video encoder. It is free software encoder that allows you to convert your videos into various video formats. Whether you are sharing videos on Youtube, Vimeo or transferring them to portable devices like iPod, iPhone and Android based devices. HandBrake is the tool for you and its cross platform video encoder that also available on Windows and Mac.

Why use HandBrake, when you got powerful video encoders like mencoder, ffmpeg. Well, I find HandBrake interface far more intuitive, it does not expect the user to know a lot of video encoding or use arcane command line options.

How to install HandBrake on Ubuntu

You can get the HandBrake packages from John Stebbins HandBrake PPA.

# Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid 
 sudo apt-add-repository ppa:stebbins/handbrake-snapshots  
 sudo apt-get update
 sudo apt-get install handbrake-gtk

# Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick 
# Add a deb line to your /etc/apt/sources.list & Get the publickey 
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/handbrake-snapshots/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install handbrake-gtk

Ripping Audio With Mplayer

The first step for creating audio description for movies is to extract the audio content. We can do this quickly using little bit of mplayer command line kung fu.

mplayer -novideo -quiet -vc null -vo null -ao pcm videofile [ OR ] mplayer -novideo -quiet -vc null -vo null -ao pcm:file=audio.wav videofile

You can easily join the extracted audio with the audio description track using the Mencoder (MPlayer's Movie Encoder). Right now I haven't completed audio description for a feature length movie yet. My Gnome accessibility works takes a large chunk of my time. If you are interesting in working something like that, get in touch with me.

A Retort To Remember

Quickly recorded Sabriye's retort when Cornelia commented about my technical abilities 'But Arky should know how to do that right?'. Pat came the reply, you know what 'Arky doesn't know shit'
What a great way to start the new year with a compliment. :)

Have a wonderful New Year !!

Linux at Sanskrit Computational Linguistics Symposium workshop

Last week I traveled to Hyderabad to talk about 'Linux for Linguists' at the Sanskrit Computational Linguistics Symposium workshop. Department of Sanskrit studies, University of Hyderabad organized this national workshop titled "Sanskrit and Computers, Getting equipped to face new challenges".

Few years ago I spent sometime working with newly created department of Sanskrit Studies learning the fundamentals of computational linguistics. I return to the department every year to work with the researchers. They use Ubuntu Linux for their work, the Ubuntu logo kolam at the entrance of the workshop was a surprise.

Linux Talk In Sanskrit

The event had yet another surprise in store for me. Thirumala Kulkarni introduced Linux in the Sanskrit, one of oldest language of the world. Can you match that ! .

Linux For Linguists Slides

The first part of my talk was a demo of Ubuntu Linux LiveCD and how to install Ubuntu Linux on their personal computers. In my talk I introduced Linux and its numerous toolset that can be used for linguistics research. The talk was peppered with humour rather than technical jargon and I ended my talk asking the research to contribute back to the Ubuntu Linux project.

Linux For Linguists

q

The response from the participants of the workshop was very positive and inspiring. The event did generate a lot of interest and hope it will help more people adopt gnu/Linux for their research work.

IISE Christmas Greetings

Its Christmas eve, the IISE campus is now a very lonely place. We miss our friends who returned to their countries to pursue the dream projects. I hope this audio greeting would bring joy and many warm memories.
Merry Christmas !!

Documentary on Rural Internet Kiosks in Africa

Few hours ago I heard that my friend Jawahar Patani finished the documentary about Rural Internet Kiosks(RIK) project. I have been helping this project for while now. I hope that this documentary would spread the word about this wonderful initiative.

Please visit www.ruralinternetkiosks.com to learn more about this project.

About the Documentary

This short documentary features ICT development in Africa with emphasis on how the Rural Internet Kiosk (RIK) is changing the way rural Africa communicates. The Rural Internet Kiosk is 100% solar powered and is connected to the Internet via Satellite using Astra2Connect VSAT technology.

You can watch the part 1 and part 2 of this documentary on youtube.

Kalarippayattu Video

I lived in Kerala for over an year now. Never had a chance of watching Kalarippayattu, the oldest fighting system in existence. Last evening I visited Thapovan to watch a demostration of Kalari.

Traffic Lights Gone Bonkers

You don't have to hack traffic signals (remember Hackers movie?) in India, they don't work anyway. Video of traffic lights gone bonkers right in front the Police HQ. Sweet!

Louis The Cat Strikes Back

Louis the cat caught on camera for the first time. Louis named in honour of Louis Braille, he showed up at the IISE campus one day and adopted us.

Why Buy This Shit !

Just found out that this expensive piece of hardware has turned into a brick because it wasn't charged for a while (Damn!).
Why do we buy this shit anyway?
Allow me to vent my anger with this yet another great news clip from the Onion News Network .