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A lot of people ask me why the hell did I buy the N9? It won’t...

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 23:29:14 +0530

A lot of people ask me why the hell did I buy the N9? It won’t be supported going forward, there are no apps available, and it’s a ~~dying~~ rather a dead platform. I completely agree but I find N9 to be stunningly beautiful. Not just in hardware but more so on the software front. You might say what’s so special about a swipe gesture based user interface. Well ask any user experience designer he would tell you the most simplest of UI’s are the most difficult to envision and implement but once you arrive at the perfect solution everything becomes utterly obvious and things start to fall into place. The perfect solutions are the most simplest and elegant and it’s difficult for an end user to fathom the complexities of arriving at that solution. One such example is the smart cover designed by apple for the new iPad it’s a brilliant idea to have magnets inside the body of the iPad and in the cover itself that align the cover and hold it in place. The smart cover covers the iPad perfectly without adding any bulk to the device. That is the perfect solution, it is simple and elegant and once you arrive at that solution you can’t think of a better way of doing it and that is exactly what happened with Asus. Asus wanted to design a cover for their transformer tablets and I am sure they would have thought of all other possibilities but apples solution was in front of them and they couldn’t better it so they basically copied it.

With all this I am not saying N9’s User interface is a perfect solution for today’s smartphones but it was a step in the right direction and given some time it could have evolved into something really good and buying the N9 is my way of appreciating it.

Airport extreme with a USB drive. This is the first step towards...

Sun, 28 Aug 2011 22:28:06 +0530

Airport extreme with a USB drive. This is the first step towards setting up Airplay in my home. The final system would contain an Apple TV connected to my home theater, an airport express connected to speakers in the bedroom, the entire movie and music collection would go on a USB drive connected to the airport extreme. For airplay to work across all this devices you need to keep a iTunes server running. I looked into a lot of NAS drives which proclaim that they have a iTunes server built in but as it seems the only thing they support is that the NAS drive shows up as a shared drive in iTunes for you to choose that as a location for your iTunes library.

So for the iTunes server you need to keep a mac running. I would be getting the mac mini as desktop; I would need to keep this running with iTunes for airplay to work.

You can argue that to keep a machine running just for serving up your library is a big wastage of power. But as it happens the mac mini is the most power efficient desktop available. It consumes less than 15 watts of power when idle and less than 2 watts when in sleep mode that is less than a typical NAS drive which registers about 18-20 watts. The mac mini also support wake on demand so it can be in sleep mode and using this feature can be woken up to serve music or movie demands.

I have a problem of USB drive spinning down when not in use and not waking up when required. I need to figure out a solution for this. May be a NAS drive with wake on LAN feature.

Regarding the streaming from USB drive over Wi-Fi seems adequate for 720p with multi channel audio although it was a little jerky for 1080p video. And for the copy of Avatar I have which is full high definition with DTS-HD master audio which requires more than 22mbps of bandwidth it was very jerky.

Apple TV, which I would be using to stream video, is a wireless n device, which works over 5ghz that should give me a decent enough bandwidth even for 1080p video.

Regarding the signal strength in my home theater room form the airport extreme, which is kept in my bedroom shows a signal to noise ratio of 15-20 dB which is a little on the low side but lets see if needed I can use the airport express as a network extender. I am yet to get a mac mini and apple TV, would post how this goes after I get them.

I hear someone laugh; it’s pretty faint like coming from a...

Sun, 26 Jun 2011 21:06:00 +0530

I hear someone laugh; it’s pretty faint like coming from a distance. Some voices “Hey why are you so down?”, “What’s the matter?” I try to concentrate, pretty hard at that. Still some more “Hey dhaval what’s up? ”, “Why aren’t you eating?”, I recognize the voice, it’s bhupesh and he is looking at me. I feel like I am in a state of trance. Am I high already? Am I so wasted as to not recognize what’s going on around me? I only downed a glass of rum. Something‘s wrong with me. I feel very depressed. Is it the rum or is it my thyroid. I answer bhupesh that nothing’s wrong, it’s just that I am not feeling so good. He doesn’t seem too convinced but doesn’t push it seeing by obvious reluctance to talk. I again go back to my state where there is consciousness but very fragile, completely shutdown from the surrounding.

It doesn’t matter, the reason behind my depression. I am depressed for no reason. I am like that all the time. I had been that way for so long that it’s almost second nature to me. I am so good at it that I can get depressed whenever I want to. Isn’t that cool?

Anyways coming back to my state of diminished cognition, the cause of which is not known even to me, I hear some more voices, this time I am not able to put a face to the voice. I try very hard, all I see is a faceless crowd, all wearing a suit with a hideous tie. No it’s not a crowd; it’s actually four people, faces of which I don’t recognize. And they don’t seem to be talking they seem to be singing. It goes like this

                             Hey jude, don’t make it bad.
                             Take a sad song and make it better.
                             Remember to let her into your heart,
                             Then you can start to make it better.

In a desperate attempt to make sense of what’s going on, I push really hard. Some more neurons fire in my temporal lobe. It’s the Beatles. What the hell are they doing inside my brain? I don’t even like them.

But the day before I did listen to one of their song, what was it called? Ya right Hey jude. But I can’t seem to relate or rather rationalize what the Beatles go to do with my state of depression. I again overburden my already depressed brain, some neurons fire in my cerebral cortex and I remember my conversation with amit. I was telling him grunge rock is not for me, I prefer fluidity in songs rather than a rough guitar. Amit retorts with saying, people who have experienced sadness, sadness in its real, unadulterated form appreciate grunge. So am I sad? Beatles in my head do seem to suggest so. But I do like the song now, it’s not like I hated it the other day but I really seem to appreciate it at this very moment. I think I am experiencing sadness.

With a sudden jerk the Beatles are replaced by faces of bhupesh, kunal , amol and rikin. It’s time to go, I suppose, the bill is already on the table.

In this day and time when amazon sells more kindle editions than...

Sun, 19 Jun 2011 23:50:00 +0530

In this day and time when amazon sells more kindle editions than hard copies, isn’t it ironic that content ( theoatmeal and xkcd ) which is freely available online I bought hard copies for that content.

Recent trip to delhi-manali-shimla was fun, I was hoping to get...

Sun, 29 May 2011 01:56:06 +0530

Recent trip to delhi-manali-shimla was fun, I was hoping to get some awesome photos but as you can tell by looking at my flickr stream it was kind of disappointing. I haven’t yet reached a level I want to.

Palm Pre 2 - WebOS is a real iOS contender but in the hands of...

Mon, 25 Apr 2011 00:28:00 +0530

Palm Pre 2 - WebOS is a real iOS contender but in the hands of HP I can only pray.

This would be my photography blog. No I won’t be talking...

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 23:02:00 +0530

This would be my photography blog. No I won’t be talking just about photography. I would be talking about everything but it would have a photograph to go with it.