Anirudh Sharma

After a lot of misery I thought no device is worth respect more than a device. Lol! not true. The reason was my bad home button. right, its the only button on the device. - I happened to take a sharp swivel knife and pop my iPhone's case open. The shown grounding strap had rust on it and bent slightly upwards apparently from the pressure of the tightened screw. Upon the whole back's removal, I noticed how the main control board where this tiny grounding strap fastens on to, has a contact ring(the wheatish circle in the pic) somewhat larger in diameter than the hole where the screw fixes in.  Makes good sense that the area where actually the rust had culminated is not sealed to prevent humidity, and the sweat and condensation from getting inside due to carrying it in pockets and or sudden changes in temperature. I've stayed a lot in Rajasthan , hot days and cold nights were so common there!  The task wasn't easy- emotions, fear, memories, a lot was at razor...

I am waiting to see what happens to the indigenous Notion Ink Adam and Apple iPad. Will it even turn out to be a war? Both are not released yet- but the coming summer isn't far away too. Should i quote "breathless anticipation usually reserved by nubile nymphets for rakish rockers." :-P Adam beats iPad hands down in all hardware specs- the hardware - the software( Yay! Android and Ubuntu combo is superawesome) but yes we know of the Apple's marketing strategies. Remember how the tech-blogs like engadget, gizmodo and macrumours assured that the Apple iPod will be a failure! Lmao! It took over the walk-man. Portable music is somewhat defined by it! Let's see how Apple and Adam fare in terms of Tablets. I am seriously not interested in HP-Slate running Windoze 7, as per the leaked specs on gizmodo :D Adam touted on its website about them releasing their own SDK. Following thoughts and questions pop-up: - It'll run Ubuntu and Android whose SDKs pre-exist. W...

Around a week back while playing around with a friend, i took some photographs from my iPhone that were one of the most inseparable ones to me. Due to a stupid backup method, I happened to accidently delete and lose them in a jiffy. The odds to recovering them were low, and i took some precautions like minimally using my iPhone so that disk Read+Write sessions do not overwrite the data permanently. I started with Googling methods to recover the data off the iPhone, but found NONE working. The softwares that I downloaded from those keyword stuffed websites were total rip-offs. What worked for me after several experiments was: - Jailbroken iPhone - BSD Subsystem and OpenSSH installed on iPhone - Terminal (or MobileTerminal) installed on iPhone - An SSH server installed on computer. I tried installing OpenSSH on Windows first, it didnt work maybe since 'dd' ain't natively supported on Windows. Fedora 12 worked fine for me. So using Fedora/Ubuntu box is the best bet h...

Long time for this post too! eh. mugging for the exams is quite a shakle to breakaway from :-P The reason I am writing this post amid the tests is being overwhelmed by Rahul Motiyar's new multitouch monitor mount hack. The thoughts from the B'lore trip and the above work culminated :-P I happened to visit and take a look around HPL India B'lore. The way gesture keyboard solves the problem of indic languges was sure eye catcher. Its a tablet with a Stylus input interface using which a computer newbie can type in Hindi almost with zero learning curve. A big boon over the present Hindi keyboards, which work fast- but only for a very specially trained people.  The HPLab's Gesture Keyboard A generic Hindi keyboard The way it works makes Devnagari entry a breeze. I happened to think about some extensions that could be done with this interface. "Why not make a simple computer screen work like a gesture keyboard with almost zero hardware mods" The point i...

Duh! Long overdue for this post. Almost 500 students attended the FOSS Fest during Sakshama :-) Mostly undergrad prefinal and final year engineering students. We started barely 20 days before and managed to finish everything right in time! quickfire way :-) Most of us wishfully had almost none or less than 2-3 hours of sleep for the 3 days of the event, it was fun! - Reason: The days were reserved for the FOSS talks, and the mid-nights for Hands-on DIY sessions. Thanks to: Leslie and Ellen from Google Open Source Office, Rahul Sundaram and Shankarsan for Fedora goodies, Kinshuk for the help he provided in managing the event, kunal for the t-shirts printing, skbohra , niyam , paras, manu , chits, jdk, zugard team and all the juniors who worked hard together to make the event success :-) The experience can't by described in this short sleep deprived post. :-) Till the longer version, a small Flickr Stream of some photographs.   Here's the FOSS GN09 Report ...

We've planned a FOSS event in college from 28-31st October. We'll be talking to people about enhancing their contribution to the commnity, code, and the spirit behind. Probably we'll be having Niyam Bhushan . So we'll be talking and doing an unconference on Human Computer Interaction, Multitouch, programming gestures, why a programmer should consider design while writing code etc. We've also planned to do a hackfest on how to build a DIY multitouch table with junk hardware etc. and writing some gestures code in AS3 Other planned talks are about the future internet and Disaster management using Sahana (by skbohra), etc. Detailed plan can be seen here in the brochure that I designed yesterday :-) FOSS

I happened to stumble across a gesture pad devised by Shekhar Borgaonkar. Needless to say, its one of the most wonderful innovations as per inputting Devnagri(Hindi) script is concerned. Due to its complexity, the Hindi based keyboards used today aren't user friendly at all. A beginner cannot think of using the same for text entry. Interfacing the same to a touchscreen/stylus-input make it intuitive, and hence cut down the learning curve required to type hindi into Computers/cellphones. Exactly as Shekhar says "I think this will benefit India because many people will be able to interact with computers for the first time in their life. " The demo of the concept is downloadable here