Flickr’s camera stats is an enormously humbling resource for me. It would be the most powerful message for newbie photography enthusiasts - creativity rules technology any day, so stop thinking too much about your camera. The kind of amazing photos taken using basic point-and-shoot cameras by talented photographers from around the world, keeps me firmly rooted to the ground while I lug my bulky Rebel Xti wherever I go.
I just saw the update on Lessig’s blog - he is actually considering running for Congress this year! You can find more at http://lessig08.org/.
Lessig’s announcement last year of the shift of his efforts over the next decade had significantly changed the way I look at myself. I had been involved in LUGs and FOSS advocacy for almost eight years by then. But I suddenly realized (and perhaps there are quite a few people out there who always felt that way about me) that I am nothing more than an armchair activist.
Dummyhead recording
I was recently introduced to the world of binaural recordings, and was blown away with the dramatic experience.
What is special about binaural sound is that you are totally immersed into the sound. No, the sound isn’t around you like in 5.1 channel surround sound. Rather, the sound is almost within your head, as if your ears were there, and the sound is moving all around you … so realistic that every one I introduced to this magic, spent the first few minutes in disbelief.
This has got to be the funniest stuff I have read. I have seen some bad translations, but this confidently beats everything I have seen.
Read May I take your order?
Wasp attacking the roach
This is probably one of the the most chilling of wildlife stories I have ever read. And the video in the article was as scary.
The wasp, which lives in tropical regions of Africa, India and the Pacific Islands, relies on cockroaches for its grisly life cycle. But unlike many venomous predators, which paralyse their victims before eating them or dragging them back to their lair, the wasp’s sting leaves the cockroach able to walk, but unable to initiate its own movement.
Really nice quote in an article of the current issue of Time. I had never looked at the differences in this way before. The actual comparison here is done between Islamic societies and the west, but you can mostly replace “Islamic” with “Eastern” over here.
“That’s the big difference between us,” he shrugged. “You Westerners make love in public and pray in private. We Muslims do exactly the reverse.”
The author raises a very important question in this article:
Very embarrassingly, after a spate of reinstalls, crashes, backup of wrong copies and my policy of destroying old backups in the house, I discovered that I have lost the secret keys of my GPG keypair(I had not used them for a while). The revocation certificate, printed on a scrap of paper, was lost during my relocation to Bangalore.I was always procrastinating its re-generation, and I seem to have paid for this now.
The only major issue that I have felt in my use of Ubuntu till date(and to be fair, this is not ubuntu specific) is the problems I keep having with wireless setup. I can live with any of it’s other flaws.
In earlier releases, the problem had been WPA support. The default install didn’t have wpa_supplicant, and to install wpa_supplicant, you needed to have network first, dammit! So I had to run around looking for a network cable, sit next to my AP, patiently download the package, figure out the unnecessarily verbose documentation and finally set up the stuff(in two terminals, one keeping an eye on the messages of wpa_cli).
This Slashdot comment probably summarizes the difference of intent between and BSD and GPL as succinctly as one can. Every person who is unclear about the licence to use in his code, or has been a blind follower (“Should be the right one, because everyone seems to be using it”), should keep this at heart.
… when the only two ways to release software are BSD and GPL, the GPL will no longer be necessary, but we are not there.
Just upgraded my notebook to Gutsy a couple of days back. It is still in beta and would be released on 18th October.
I recently changed my desktop over to Gnome from KDE. I have been a Kubuntu/KDE user for years, but the look and feel of KDE has remained tacky for a while now while Gnome had a very clean efficient look about it. But this also meant that I had the complete Gnome and KDE stack on my notebook, so I had to download about 1.