Collages

Urmi and I are big fans of doing creative stuff with our photos. We make scrapbooks, post them in galleries, and even make collages. Today Urmi sent me a program called Shape Collage which is pretty cool. I used it to put together the above collage from a bunch of our photos. Urmi will probably kill me for posting even such a small slice, but all the photos are already in our gallery, so I'm probably safe :)

Mimic Octopus

I'm not normally a Youtube person, but I've read about Mimic Octopi and this clip was just too cool not to post. Mimic Octopi are far and above the coolest animals I have ever seen. Be sure to watch the whole thing, as it shows the octopus in slow motion at the end. (Source: Wired Science 10 Fantastic Marine Biology Videos)

Kindle 2

(Source: Amazon)
So Amazon has finally unveiled their upgraded version of the Kindle. Urmi bought me one of the original editions of the Kindle and I absolutely love it. For me, it's well worth the price tag -- I read so much that I may actually be saving more than the Kindle's original (admittedly hefty) price tag. When you throw in free books available online (such as from Cory Doctrowow, the Mobile Read forums, and many more), ebook readers such as the kindle become even cheaper. However, I don't think I'll be upgrading unless my Kindle suffers some sort of unforeseen catastrophe. The new one looks great (check out the comparison with a pencil), but I like my current one quite a bit. I actually quite like the larger buttons and the wedge-shaped chassis. Etexts are small enough that I think I'm still well short of the original, built-in space, although I did purchase a 2GB expansion card for it. Anyways, I'll be excited to see what comes next for etext readers such as the Kindle. Maybe the Kindle 3 will be the etext reader that ends up cornering the market -- I don't know if the Kindle 2 will be able to do it quite yet.

MacBook Pro

So Urmi and I recently purchased new computers, upgrading from our dated and overloaded Powerbook G4 12" computers. We opted to buy 15.4" MacBook Pros, with the 2.8 GHz processor and 4 GB RAM. Let me tell you, as a first time Intel Mac user, these things are amazing machines. The screens are gorgeous and, for the first time in my life, I have a computer that responds as fast as I use it. Of course, I doubt the latter will last very long -- Moore's law being what it is and everything. There are a couple things I wanted to highlight about my new computer.

• The Trackpad
  The new MacBook Pros come with a multitouch trackpad with a plethora of new features. For one, it's possible to click anywhere on the trackpad, which makes single-finger use very efficient. It also includes a number of iPhone/iPod Touch features, such as pinch scaling, scrolling with two fingers, and a few new ones specific to the macbook. On the whole, the new upgrades are quite nice, but it sure would be great to have the ability to modify some of the new features. For example, sliding up on the trackpad with four fingers shows the desktop; it'd be nice if it could pull up Spaces, or something similar. Also, there's no way to disable any of the features. The rotation feature is particularly frustrating some of the time, and it'd be great if it could be selectively turned off. Unfortunately, Apple is notorious for not giving you the ability to disable some of their eye candy features (notably the coverflow "feature" on the more recent iPod Nanos, which would activate when stored in a pocket and prevent the UI from doing what it's supposed to; this was fixed in a recent update), so I'm not going to hold my breath on this one.
• The Screen
  The screens on the new MacBook Pros are absolutely gorgeous. Colors are perfect, the display is sharp, blacks look great, and the dimming of the backlight actually has a wide range. I'm a bit worried that it'll pick up a lot of oil from the keyboard, but it's been okay so far. Given that my last computer had a 12" screen and was stuck in a 1024x768 resolution (whereas my new 15.4" screen has a native 1440x900 resolution), the new screen real-estate is amazing.
• The Keyboard
  Apple changed the keyboard on their MacBook Pros to be more like the older MacBooks, with wide spacing between the keys. The keys feel somewhat different as well, but I've gotten used to that. The new keyboard features backlighting, which I guess would be cool occasionally. For now, I'm just trying to figure out how much battery life I'm losing to this feature.
• iLife '09
  One weird thing about our computers is that they didn't come with the latest version of Apple iLife software. Actually, we both had to order it separately for $10 each, which I thought was somewhat strange given that we ordered our computers weeks after iLife 09 was on the shelves. Oh well. This problem has apparently been dealt with, but we would've held off ordering our computers if we had known it was going to be an issue.
• Other Issues
  Apparently my MacBook has issues communicating with the VGA port on our Samsung flat screen television. Since Urmi and I use our computers to watch DVDs, this is somewhat frustrating. The word on the intertubes is that Apple is working on a firmware fix for this issue, but, again, I know better than to hold my breath.

In short, this is a pretty awesome machine that has just a few minor issues. I'm definitely glad that we've upgraded, although some of my favorite software (including Quicksilver and Journler) either became defunct, open source, or otherwise abandoned since I last checked into them.

News round up for 07 Feb, 2009

Warning, potentially geeky subject matter ahead.

• Road signs hacked to have humorous messages. More interesting than the hack itself are the chosen messages. I particularly liked the XKCD inspired RAPTORS AHEAD — CAUTION. Although, who else would hack roadsigns aside from XKCD readers?
• NASA to allow the public to select a Hubble Telescope target. This is huge. Time on the Hubble is priceless; astronomers wait in line for years to get time on the Hubble, and here NASA is letting the public vote on one of six choices for the next target. None of these targets have yet been imaged by Hubble. Voting must be done by March 1, so get to the, uh, virtual polls.
• Russian RORSAT Cosmos-1818 goes crazy, but is apparently not a threat. January was a particularly bad month for satellites in the mainstream media; the failure of Astra 5A was reported by SPACE.com, making it much closer to the mainstream media than most satellite problems get. As a member of this industry, it's amazing how much more frightening these sorts of failures seem to me. The Astra 5A failure is particularly interesting as it's moving along its orbit and could actually collide with other GSO satellites.
  

Erik's Interest Calculator 0.5 beta

So I've finally decided to release a preliminary version of my interest calculator. I'm going to first release the source code and then look into releasing a compiled binary specifically for OS X. This version is released under terms of the GNU GPL, as it was developed using Qt 4.4.3 (open source edition). Future programs that I develop (and, if I determine it permissible, future releases of this program) may be released under the terms of the Creative Commons licenses.

The source code is available here. Some form of Qt 4.x will be required; I've tested versions 4.4.3 and 4.3.5, but earlier (or more recent) releases may work as well. Obligatory disclaimer:

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

India and Nepal trip report

India and Nepal trip report

So it's been over two months since my last post. Between work and some government stuff we've been going through for my wife's green card, it's been absolutely impossible to get anything together to post. Today, however, I decided to sit down and push through all the photos we took on our last trip, which was a visit to India for a wedding reception with Urmi's family (delayed largely due to aforementioned government stuff...). While there, the two of us visited Kolkata to stay with Urmi's parents for a few weeks and a five day trip to Nepal with both her parents and brother as well as my parents and two brothers. It was fun, although I strongly recommend you don't get food poisoning during the winter in Nepal (my parents can second this...). We've finally posted all of our pictures, most of which are from the Nepal part of this journey. The full set is available here.

A few selections:

The Victoria Memorial (Kolkata, India) at dusk

A view of Nagakot (Nepal) at sunrise

Taken on the road from Nagakot to Pokhara

The Annapurna mountain range reflected in Phewa Lake (Pokhara, Nepal)

Urmi and I at the Bindhyabasini temple in Pokhara

We've also updated our Wedding website with photos from our reception. Here's a photo of the two of us from the reception: