Plans and dreams

There was a time when I thought no ordeal could be as taxing as hearing Rebbecca Black singing (Justin Beiber came very close). I was naive.

My college loves its Humanities. The people here believe that making kids go through weird and complex moral science stuff, where most of them are - if not physically - mentally asleep is supposed to help them in later life. And at the end of first sem, you have a hardcore 4 day/36 hours Jeevan Vidya camp which is basically a crash course on the "weird and complex moral science course". One thing's for sure, the topics discussed, their absolute irrelevance, the mental exhaustion that accompanies them, the lack of sufficient time to have fun just after end-sems, seems like the type of thing Kingfisher would sponsor to get students drinking. (Well, you can't find Vijay Mallya for plotting evil schemes to get his babes, he already has a hard time maintaining his planes).

On a more relevant note, I have plans for two projects I hope to execute in near future. A portable USB charger, and a notebook cooler (both DIY, d-uh).

For the uninitiated, DIY means Do it Yourselves. DIYers believe in trying to do their stuff themselves before handing it over to professionals. If you can't figure out what's the fun in that, it's probably not for you.

None of the devices mentioned require any extreme engineering. Equipment, maybe. Lack of which may prevent me from actually implementing them.

The portable USB charger would run of batteries and charge any USB powered device. No biggie - just connect a 9V battery to a 7805 and connect the output to a female USB port. You could add capacitors to both the input and output to handle any spikes that may occur. Problem? A 9V battery can't deliver a lot of current - barely enough to keep the battery level constant. And I have a feeling that it won't be very sufficient - a 500 mAh battery would only charge 1/3rd of my phone and then drain itself. Still a handy accessory, I suppose.

The laptop cooler project is also pretty simple. I've been feeling the need for one when I put my lappy through heavy workload - gaming being one of them. I just need to get 2 fans that run off 5V and join them to an acrylic sheet. The power comes from USB ports.  Lock and load. Problem? I don't have a Dremel. Again, for the noobs, Dremel is the god tool for any kind of DIY/modding. In one line:-

Grinder : Super Food Processor :: Drill : Dremel

It's expensive too. Last time I checked, it started from 4k, and has a lot of accessories available which seriously affect your wallet.

I also learned some things about game ripping from a friend of mine - Nehal. He created a game rip in Class 9! Beyond awesome. Turns out it just involves re-encoding the audio files to ogg and reducing the bit rates and compressing them. You create a batch file that automatically reverses the process which you call your setup file. And it produces pretty awesome compression results too. And I've been told that the difference between sound qualities of the original and compressed audio files is barely audible. Of course, this only works for games which do not use proprietary formats/advanced protection techniques. UHARC is the most popular and a very powerful compression tool. Command line version FTW. You also need to have a good understanding of Windows Command line scripting. I hope to try out a game in a day or two.

Hopefully, by the next, or the next-to-next post I'll have something more concrete than wild theories and plans. See ya around.

PS: Two days to train, and 4 days to home. Hurray!!! Can't wait to drive the PB**AE-5**6 (My Activa). I also plan to buy skates (confused between roller and inline). Any advice? Leave in the comments below.

Of tablets and gates

Good Mornin', fine folks. It's 6 am and I'm awake. Wide awake.

I've been seeing a lot of 6 ams lately. Not because I wake up early, but became it's usually the time I sleep. Not today, I have a DLP exam in 3 hours - and I'm hungry as well. One of the bad things about IIIT is the lack of eating options from 2 am to 12 pm, excluding the morning breakfast.

Anyway, since this blog is supposed to be more tech-oriented than a personal diary rant, I'll talk about the Aakash tablet in this post. We had Prof. Vijay from IIT Rajasthan visiting the institute yesterday. He gave a brief introduction of the tablet (which I missed, thanks to me assuming that events in IIIT will be their usual unpunctual self, and reached 30 minutes late). And then there was a hands on demo. I couldn't lay my hands on the device.

I did, however, stay for 30 minutes after I came, and observed. The tablet hardware is nothing to write home about, a 350 Mhz Conexant processor, a 840x400px screen and other standard stuff - nothing amazing. What's amazing is that they managed to produce these devices for ~Rs. 2,000. That's one-fifth the price of the cheapest tablet I know of, the Kindle Fire. The government isn't wrong in prioritizing arming citizens with productive tools over a Super AMOLED+ screen. If you're keen to know - the touch was pretty basic (resistive) and the screen looked somewhat washed out.

From what I saw and heard, the professor who came for the demo wasn't very well-versed with the tablet and it's development. I'd have loved to ask him if the tablet would allow me to play with custom ROMs, but he didn't seem the right kind of guy to ask. Let's hope Koush and other fine folks at xda-developers get interested in this device and at-least, figure out how to unlock the bootloader. I love playing around with my Nexus S - it's currently running on a custom ROM, Cyanogen Mod 7.1 - but for a newb like me, risking a 20k phone is pretty scary.

That reminds me, I'll put up a blog post on rooting my Nexus S sometime soon. I know I promise a lot that I fail to deliver, but my end-semester exams are almost over (the last exam is Computer Programming, and there's not a lot to study in it).

Wish me luck. Good day!

EDIT: I also had some thoughts on startups I want to share - I saw the guys from MyDrona (a IIIT startup) talking to the prof after the interaction. Maybe sometime later. :). This was more of a personal reminder.

PS: Don't count on the specs and stats used in this post to be accurate. This is not a news report. They're approximate enough to convey the feeling/idea.

The Customary Introductory Post

Hi!

Welcome to Bit Mechanics! Your one-stop blog for err...nothing? Umm, yeah - I'm not exactly sure what I plan to post here. Probably just the regular stuff. Anyway - (I'm the kind that gets pissed off if you use anyways, or wierd or....let's save this for another post.) - here's something about me.

My name's Ankush Jain. I'm a 17 year old guy from Patiala, Punjab, India, a state with the maximum wannabe-hippie/square km ratio. I'm currently studying Computer Science at IIIT, Hyderabad - an institute with a very specific focus on Information Technology.

I love all things tech, and spend a significant percent of free time doing various stuff on my lappy. It's a HP dv6-6165tx with i7-2670QM 2.2GHz processor, Radeon 6770M GPU and 4 gigs of DDR3 RAM. And, it's a huge-huge upgrade from my ex-PC (I loved that box, but it was time to move on) with its AMD Athlon 2400+ processor, onboard graphics, 1 gig of DDR1 RAM, which now lies at my home, hardly unused.

I'm also a movie buff, music buff and food buff. And books buff. That seems like a lot of buffs, but trust me, there's a lot I don't like. Like animals. And insects - especially insects. And sports. It's impossible to suck at sports more than I do. This one year, I was supposed to play volleyball at school for a whole year, and the number of times I managed to contact the ball is limited to three. We actually had a celebration the first time I hit it (my classmates didn't mind me having in a team, except that I was picked last). Not that I mind. Sure, sports gets you a lot of girl(friend)s, and I've been lacking in that department, but all it is is crazy people chasing balls.

I've been called everything from an asshole to a real-life version of Sheldon Cooper to cute [;)], so that's a pretty wide spectrum. I'm sure that this blog's (yet imaginary) readers will figure me out. :)

PS: Wait up for the next post, which will probably be on my lappy - why I bought it, and the challenges I faced (and am facing) while installing Linux on it, and stuff like that. As Barney Stinson would say, it's gonna be LEGEND..... - wait for it - .....DDDDARY!