Planet Manipal

February 17, 2012

I haven't written for a good amount of time. And if I have, it has been at the behest of others - friends and family who insisted I not lose touch.

I have resisted writing. There was a time when what I wrote was pure fiction - the characters, places, situtations were unrelated to my own experiences. Now, I find myself unable to do so. Rather, the act of conjuring a character from thin air seems very fake. I do not wish to try too hard to bring a character alive.

To write, I believe, you need to have a very strong sense of yourself. In a sense, I have been in a transition period for the past few years, unsure about the stillness of my thoughts and ideas. Many an idea has drifted in and out, before being dismissed as unworthy. And even the process of thinking of an idea has been forced, knowing that I can write if I really want to, that I will be able to force a story out of myself if I sit down and stare at a Word document long enough.

I started off by enjoying the process of writing. It wasn't a chore. Slowly the thought of unravelling the layers of a character seemed like a tiresome job, one that was just solely for the reader's pleasure.

I also got really self-conscious of my writing. Nothing I wrote pleased me. It was felt childish, plotless or plain uninteresting. I got harshly critical.

I wanted to escape from writing so badly, that I never publicised or gave myself credit for having written a few Junior Amar Chitra Kathas. Some were mythological stories that I retold and some were fiction. Nope, it wasn't that big a deal either, but precious few of my friends have even heard about it. It was the first time I saw my name next to the words, "Written by". Yet, it all seemed too less, and not the Pulitzer prize winner that I hoped to write, in my own head.

To sum it up, I lost the ability to write honestly.

Perhaps, I am ready to write again.

by Jayashree Bhat (noreply@blogger.com) at February 17, 2012 01:00 PM

February 16, 2012

Varun Thacker (BE-2k8)

Installing Ubuntu 11.10 on my new HP DV6-6165tx

Well I recently bought a HP Dv6-6165tx. Firstly it’s FAST.

My windows experience was really good. This is the first time I was using a laptop with multi gestures. It’s pretty cool. The Beats Audio sound system is amazing.

One thing that annoyed me was the function button needed to be pressed to use fn1-fn12. According to me it should be the other way round. So there is a simple option in BIOS where you can change it.

In the BIOS menu go to System Configuration --> Action Keys Mode option -->Disable it. Save and reboot.

Once done with playing around in Windows it was time to install Ubuntu on it. That is what I’ll be spending the majority of my time on.

I installed the Ubuntu 11.10 64 bit version. A lot of workarounds were needed to get everything working. It was fun searching for the solutions.

Firstly the partition table. What a mess HP gave it in. Someone has described the partitioning in detail so I’ll just point to the link:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/49465/installing-ubuntu-broke-my-windows-install

Secondly the ATI Radeon 6770m would be useless in Ubuntu. The Intel Graphics card would be more than sufficient. So I used this tutorial to disabling my ATI card in Ubuntu. BTW I don’t think switchable graphics works yet with this card in Linux. And without this workaround the fan would be on continuously in Ubuntu.

http://help.stedman.net.au/2011/10/xubuntu-1110-on-hp-dv6-6023tx.html

Well I like Multi Touch gestures. I’ll be using this tutorial to enable them.

https://code.google.com/p/touchegg/wiki/ConfigureDevices

For the Sub Woofers to work

Just add this line to the end of the conf file,
options snd-hda-intel model=ref

In this file :
sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf

And restart your computer

And here is a link to what you might to after Installing Ubuntu:
http://www.webupd8.org/2011/10/things-to-tweak-after-installing-ubuntu.html

Well thats about it for now. Happy computing.

by Varun Thacker at February 16, 2012 10:48 AM

February 14, 2012

Aamer Aslam (BE-2k7)

Premier League Special – TRASH CORNER

Please click on the Premier League tab for the new article – AVB for the bin.

Coming up – AFCON Special – Emergence of Zambia.

by Archy at February 14, 2012 03:10 PM

February 07, 2012

Abhimanyu Kumar (BE2k7)

Quadrocopter - Part 10 - I find your lack of faith disturbing.

It is possible i might be overdoing it with the Star Wars references. If you find a better name for the next post (which will probably be the first flight) let me know.

I worked the whole of last Sunday and finally got the model now ready. So here it is. This time the whole model weighs only 1396 grams. A 19% improvement on the old model.

The motor (EMAX CF2822) along with the propeller (8"x4") and the bullet connectors (3.5 mm)

The Quad Control Board - http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbycity/store/uh_viewItem.asp?idProduct=19534

Luke !!!

Battery - Tied down with Velcro.

Pictures by Rahul Krishna Upadhayaya.

Link to more posts on the Quadrocopter.

by Abhimanyu Kumar (noreply@blogger.com) at February 07, 2012 10:56 PM

Quadrocopter - Part 9 - A New Hope

There have not been any updates from my side on the quadrocopter for the past 6 months. This is partly because i was working on other stuff but mainly because i got lazy (really really lazy). So one fine day about 2 weeks ago i decided that i have to finish this project. I ordered a quadrocopter control board as i was getting one at a very reasonable price (details later) and i did not have the time to build one for myself (as earlier planned - i might do this sometime later). I did make some changes to the design changes.

Firstly this time i went for an entirely wood construction instead of the aluminium and acrylic combination(what the hell was i thinking??). There are a few reasons for this. It is easier to work with than aluminium. Wood reduces the vibrations of the motors. Wood is cheaper (was able to get material for building 4 quadrocopter for 280 bucks !!!!) and most importantly it available near my house unlike aluminum rods (laziness FTW).

Secondly i purchased some matching clockwise and anti-clockwise propellers hence i will not have to work at compensating for the angular momentum by tilting the motors.

Finally i decided to do away with the nuts and bolts that hold the main structure and go for screws. This was easier as i was going for wood instead of aluminium. This also helped reduce the weight.

The quadrocopter control board - Ordered from www.rchobbyaddict.com ..... More info on the board at http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/uh_viewItem.asp?idProduct=19534.

The materials

Plywood (1/4"x6"x6" pieces).

Birch wood (1/2"x3/4"x13").

The completed assembly.

I also used a lot of bullet connectors while building the model and they require a lot of soldering (which im not very good at - mainly because i keep on burning my finger and at times my eyebrows) so i decided to make a bullet connector soldering stand. I was later told by my friend Mudit Gupta that people have already though of this.So i looked it up and people had indeed thought of this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnldHRtjre8 (There goes my patent). Anyway here is my attempt:

Link to more posts on the Quadrocopter.

by Abhimanyu Kumar (noreply@blogger.com) at February 07, 2012 10:53 PM

Manish's Tech Blog

Privacy and Activity Manager (Zeitgeist) Release

We all love privacy and we take it seriously. Most of the people whom I have met are pretty much vigilant about their data and which makes complete sense to have a tool which can you can use to fine tune your privacy settings. Till now most of our experience with Privacy Settings are related to Facebook which makes me feel like

Layman control center?

If you are a Zeitgeist user, it is pretty expected to expect a Privacy application. Yes, we have it. Today we are releasing it. The first release was a hastily assembled up together application using pygtk (gtk2) which served it’s purpose well for the time being.

Older version of Activity Log Manager

Soon it was decided in Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando that Activity Log Manager will be included in Ubuntu Precise to provide greater privacy controls to user. We improved the looks based on the design provided by the Canonical Design Team.

The interface was kept as simple as possible. This first release lacks a few things as of now and some more UI polish is pending including localization support. Both of them will land sooner.

It has been integrated in Gnome Control Panel (which works only on Ubuntu). In distributions where it cannot integrate in Control Panel, it runs as a standalone application.

Here is how it looks

Entry in GNOME Control Center

Blacklisting Applications

Files and Folder blacklisting

Activity Log Manager History tab with Icon

Activity Log Manager History tab with the Icon

The Zeitgeist Team worked on it and ported the application to gtk3 and vala in a few weeks which was a pleasure (and I finally learnt vala. Finally!)

Geeky Juice:

The release is named “Friendly Dolphin” 0.9.0 and can be downloaded from here.

This application would be made available in Ubuntu Precise soon.

If you are building it yourself and want Control Center integration, then pass –with-ccpanel to the configure script.

./configure --with-ccpanel

This would work on all the Linux distributions which derive from Ubuntu and don’t change the gnome-control-center packaging since this integration relies on a Ubuntu specific patch for control center.

Please log any bugs which you come across. To make sure that we are able to help you, please provide detailed explanation of what led to the issue. You can file your bugs here