29 Mar 2008
Goodthings: The Greatest Invention since Bell's Telephone..
No, its not the iPhone, nor VoIP and forget the cordless phones.. A while back, shopping for a land line phone. I would ask the shop sales folks if they had anything which had:
- quick dial - i.e ability to directly dial a handful of numbers quickly (max one or two button press)
- mute button
- speaker phone
- no AC adapter or batteries
I am surprised that there are really advanced phones (phones with bluetooth, skype etc.,) which don't even have
quick dial settings. (I returned a good glossy black Philips Skype phone because it had no quick dial!)
At first it did not seem possible for me that such a phone could exist, because the smart sales folks at Fry's or BestBuy
told me that they had never seen aything like that. The closest they could get was a Panasonic
It did not have an AC adapter but needed three batteries.
Then recently I stumbled upon this GE phone at OfficeDepot. (There is also an Activa branded one which is exactly the same model) It provided all the features I was looking for without an ugly AC adapter or batteries. I couldn't believe it, I unpacked it in store to double check what it claimed on the carton. Apparently it is powered by the telephone line! It doesn't have glossy black designer finish, but it gets my nomination for the greatest invention in telephone hardware since Alexander Gram Bell's phone.
A cordless phone which adds two more cords at poor voice quality isn't an advancement, a 500 number phone book which gets erased every time the power gets disconnected isn't an advancement, but a phone which gives more features without retrogression is worth a praise.
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09 Mar 2008
Goodthings: Daylights
Things that deserve appreciation, should be appreciated, however trivial they are.
For what ever its worth, these notes of appreciation may help those in making decisions when needed.
I recently replaced all old electric filament bulbs at home with Compact Fluorescent Lights.
The prevalence of Edison era dim bulbs in USA surprises me.
Bulbs are rare in India, as most of Indian households use Fluorescent Lights. --> Insert Asrani's classic "Ram laxman Bulb dena " commecial here <--.
Even with Energy Saving CFLs with PG&E Rebates available in plenty harware shops, most give a dull yellowish light. Beware of the words "soft white light", it means "dim". The good lamps are those that say "daylight" or 5000 K+ ratings. Some shops don't even keep stock of them and PG&E doesn't seem to give a rebate on them. They may be couple of dollars more, but are worth for their natural light. Also look for lamps that say faststart or quick start, since ordinary CFLs take time to get to their full brightness.
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27 Nov 2007
Bank Robbery
8:30 pm at a deserted Bank of America ATM: as I drove into the parking lot, what I saw made my hair stand up. An old windowless car was the only one in the parking lot. Two people were dragging sacks of something hurriedly into that car. That made it look like a text book bank robbery, except they weren't wearing any masks, nor holding guns up in the air. Looking at the volume of the bag it looked like they would have emptied millions of dollars. Our robbers then accelerated past me, innocently smiling at me. They looked like senior citizens burgling banks for fun!
I got down the car and went towards an ATM and there is no sign of breakage or forced entry; all lights were on inside the bank and the scene looked perfectly normal.
What our thieves looted wasn't bank but the trash container!! It was completely empty as if the trash was cleaned up.
Either they were from a garbage pickup company which used cars instead of garbage trucks or they were the identity thieves trying to piece together account details from ATM receipts, or merely garbage thieves hoping to make money at the recycling unit. One thing for sure, I'll go get a good paper shredder tomorrow!
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27 Nov 2007
Special Limited Edition Fridge Magnets on Sale!
I hadn't experimented with any 3D things in a long time; lack of a supported 3D hardware on my Solaris laptop meant
ray tracing and
3D technologies stayed out of my horizon. Much of the my art work remained exclusively two dimensional.
Recently stumbled upon something called
polymer clay when I was scanning a local library for sculpting techniques. It is a wonderful technology where you can create colorful objects, shape them and bake them at home into hard plastic artifacts. My 3D graycells found a new avenue for expression. Over past few winter weekends scores of smiley faces popped up as fridge magnets.
All of them have a magnet embedded in them. You can use them as fridge magnets or stick them to office white boards. They sport
wiggly eyes which adds life.
Sun Employees can buy them on
Wednesday 28th Nov
at Sun's Menlopark Cafeteria (building 11) as part of Sun's Employee only Arts & Crafts Fair 11:30 to 2:00pm. This is limited special edition sale. Each piece in unique. If you want to buy them, be there early.
All are "on sale" except this one which is being auctioned!:
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16 Oct 2007
Night on the Royal Highway or El Camino Real (ell-ka-mi-no-rree-yal)
It was about 10:30 in the night. I was about to park my car inside our garage,
then the cool October night with a crescent moon tempted me to continue riding down the empty street.
El Camino Real or 'The Royal Highway' is only a furlong away from our house.
At night, while most of the shops were closed with lights off, few restaurants were still open.
There were people cleaning the footpaths and picking garbage like zombies; homeless people
pushing shopping carts in search of a place to sleep.
As a kid I had a BMX bicycle. While it was fun riding something that looked
like a miniature motorcycle, I never had thought that some people could be using them to commute to work.
All long the road there were many peddling down the footpath on a BMX bicycle.
Some may have been riding it for miles from affluent parts of the bay area towards slums.
Life on the The Royal Highway at night didn't look as cheerful and colorful as it looks during the day
when car showrooms sport balloons and real estate agents wiggle signboards like clowns.
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11 Sep 2007
Magic of Fading Windows and Shadows on Solaris
Solaris Express has had updated Xorg server for some time. It now comes with a
compositing extension. This extension needs to be enabled in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Make sure that xorg.conf has these lines:
Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Enable"
Option "RENDER" "Enable"
EndSection
It can be used to create special effects in the X11 windowing system.
Compiz is one window manager that utilizes the extension to create multitude of eye catching effects. However it needs a good graphics card to run. If you just need smooth shadows and dissolving (fading) effects when windows appear or get closed,
xcompmgr is good enough.
I run it with the following options:
xcompmgr -cf -D 5 -r 5 -t -6 -l -6.
It creates shadows behind windows. Menus, tooltips and windows appear and dissolve like magic.
Though overall effects are subtle and unnoticeable at first sight, it makes the Solaris user interface more polished. Also X11 applications which use transperancy appear as they were intended to be (see the clocks in the screenshot).
Note that the xcompmgr isn't very stable, it crashes often.
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Copyright (cc) 2004-2006 by Chandan