Get directions, know about events and more

When planning a trip you would want to know how far the destination is, how to get there exactly and be sure not to miss the turn. So, you can get a GPS device and install in your car. But, if you don’t have a GPS device, then you will consult the map. Here is an amazing site that simplifies your work of getting directions. Fresh Logic Studios is a site that allows you to find directions in a very easy manner. Also, you don’t have to sign up with them to use this service. In the homepage, click on atlas where it takes you to a world atlas. This is simillar to the Google maps but it is more interactive. Of course, it must still update a lot for India, but you have enough locations to use this service. When you are on the atlas page, there will be a menu on the top with options such as directions, tools, etc.. Click on directions and a box will open up on the left side. This is where you enter the location. As shown in the snap below, I have entered Bangalore  and a lesser known location called “Sagar”. There are two sagars and the app will ask you to choose which one. After that click get directions and you will get the detailed directions with where to make the turns and the distance (in miles) and estimated time to reach that location. You can zoom in and see and also print this on a paper with the print option shown in the red circle be on the third snap. Cool isn’t it?

The basic view of the atlas

Get Directions

Showing detailed directions

The events in Bangalore

Not only that, the basic menu also has the find location to find any location in the city. But it still needs to update its database. Although it shows the roads, it cannot show it in the atlas, it can show it on the satellite images. This can be enabled from the satellite menu in the right corner below the top menu. Refer the 4th image in the gallery for this. There are more options in the advanced tab as well. The events option will list the events that will be happening in the city. It works only for major cities. I tired Bangalore and got quite a few results. Click on the one you want and a new box opens up giving a little details. To know more just click event in this new box and it will open the relevant site. Really nice tool. The rest of the options still need updating. But the site is really cool and is functional for the Western countries. Also, on signing up you will get 1 GB space to store your files and you can make friends and update your location on the atlas. Also, there is the experimental section where the users’ tweets are displayed real time. Do check it out.

The world as I see it by Albert Einstein

The following is an essay written by Albert Einstein in which talks about his ideas and beliefs about life. Read on

“How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people — first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving…

“I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves — this critical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would have seemed empty to me. The trite objects of human efforts — possessions, outward success, luxury — have always seemed to me contemptible.

“My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a ‘lone traveler’ and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude…”

“My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. It is an irony of fate that I myself have been the recipient of excessive admiration and reverence from my fellow-beings, through no fault, and no merit, of my own. The cause of this may well be the desire, unattainable for many, to understand the few ideas to which I have with my feeble powers attained through ceaseless struggle. I am quite aware that for any organization to reach its goals, one man must do the thinking and directing and generally bear the responsibility. But the led must not be coerced, they must be able to choose their leader. In my opinion, an autocratic system of coercion soon degenerates; force attracts men of low morality… The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.

“This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor… This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism — how passionately I hate them!

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery — even if mixed with fear — that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man… I am satisfied with the mystery of life’s eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence — as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.”

Source : Center for History of Physics

The Ecological Footprint Calculator

So, you have heard about the whole global warming and carbon emitting thing. I was recently browsing and came  across this site called footprint network that talks about the issue. There is something called foot print calculator that caught my eyes. Click here to open the site. Footprint, or more precisely “carbon footprint” is the total amount of greenhouse gas (Carbon oxides) emitted by you. So, by knowing the amount of these gases that we emit, we can try and device the methods to reduce it. It is not necessary that you have to be directly responsible for emitting the carbon by riding a bike or lighting a fire. You can be indirectly doing it when you use electricity coming from burning coal or using water that is pumped using the electricity that is due to burning of coal. So, this site takes all that into account and tries to estimate how much your footprint is. Its a flash application and will take some time to load (Worth the wait). There are currently only 3 countries that are added to this. But that shouldn’t stop you from taking the test. Basically it will give you a rough estimate of how much your footprint is. There are two tests, faster one and a more detailed one. A series of questions will be asked regarding your lifestyle and based on that and the other data available to it, it will give you your personal ecological footprint. Along with the results, it will give you some pointers as to what you can do to reduce your footprint. Really good site, must have a look

Be Funky- Photo Effects with one click

Now, here in this post I will tell you about a fabulous website to apply ultra cool effects to your photos. Want to see your photo scribbled or cartoonized? Read on for these and more….

The website is BE FUNKY – Photo effects with one click.

I used one of my favourite photos and used all their effects. The results? Fantastic.

There are 37 different types of effects you can put on your pictures in 9 categories. These are Cartoonize, Warhole, Charcola, Patirotic, Infiky, Line Artopia, Stenciler, Sunburst and Scribbler.

You can save the photos on your desktop or into a gallery. Click on “more options” for adjusting brightness and color detail. You can even rate each effect. Now here are different effects on my phtos. I have uploaded one (the best) from each category. Click on “goodies” for different frames, shapes, appearance, graphic text, speech bubbles, writing text and warping. It also has a “make it real” feature which you can opt for getting your now modified pictures on Cups, T-Shirts, and as Photo Prints.

The South Park Studio

Recently I have taken up learning online imaging. So you would be seeing some posts on that. I think everyone must be familiar with South Park cartoon. It’s a very hilarious cartoon in which 4 kids are shown stuck in between all the politics and trends of America. The Animation is all 2-D, but who cares. It’s AWESOME. If you live in India, try to catch it on Vh1 Channel (A part of MTV).  Even if you didn’t see it, use this to create funny characters. It’s fun.

So, intrigued by the different style of South Park characters, I thought to make one of my own. Thus, enter the SOUTH PARK STUDIO. It is a German site. It takes a few seconds to load on your PC. And then you can create create characters in a minute. It has a variety of options of all kinds. Hats, Hairstyles, eyes, skin colour, clothes, and even stuff like pets, musical instruments, shirt motifs, backgrounds, etc.

I started using it. And THAT WAS FUN!!! I made different characters for myself. I even made a group of 15 such characters to tag them as my friends on facebook. There is one small problem though. The “SAVE” option was not working in my case. So I used Printscreen button and pasted it in MS Paint (yeah! I still use it) and then chipped away useless portions.

How to make a PCB at home

I think this is a redundant topic. But what the hell, cyberspace is being wasted on useless subjects, so repetition of something useful wouldn’t hurt. Breadboards are the best way to learn or test a circuit. Then, you want to make a more permanent circuit, so you go for one of those general purpose PCBs. I dont have anything against the general purpose PCBs, but as the circuit becomes more complex, you become entangled in a mess of wires that can drive you crazy. Completely nuts. Debugging the circuit will become very difficult, irritating and time consuming. To give you some example just look at the pictures below. The breadboard has a circuit to generate 38 kHz IR signal for modulated IR sensor explained in my previous post. The second picture is a part of LDR sensors I made for my line follower robot. The picture has a comparator circuit and a motor driver circuit and you can see the mess the wires have made. It still has the LEDs and the LDRs going around the robot. The best way to eliminate this mess is to make your own PCB so that you can eliminate the wires and make really compact connectors from one board to another. So, lets see how this process goes

IR Tx on breadboard

General purpose PCB mess

First of all, you need to design the circuit to draw on the copper clad plate. I personally feel that ExpressPCB is good enough for this purpose. Lets face it, even though there is an option for double side design, we hardly use it. Soldering SMDs is a bit more complicated so a single side design is more than enough even for moderately complicated circuits. You can freely download the software from here and use it to design the circuits. The software has both a schematic and PCB designer. You can make a schematic in ExpressSCH and generate a netlist and then import this to the ExpressPCB to generate a PCB design. But I think its better to design the PCB ourselves so that we can optimize it better. Few tips to help you make better designs

• Keep the connecting paths about 1 mm so that they remain intact when handled roughly.
• Use as less space a possible. This is one of the prime reasons we make PCBs in the first place
• Start designing with the copper in top layer and make the PCB in the normal way. After it is completed, transfer it to the bottom layer to obtain the mirror image of the circuit.
• After you design the entire circuit, you will be left with a lot of empty space. Fill as much of this space as possible and connect that huge area to the ground point and/or the Vcc. There is also an option to just fill the empty space without connecting it to anything else. This is done to reduce the amount of Copper that needs to be etched. Less the amount, faster the etching process will be. Also you will save the etching agent. An example circuit is shown below. Its for 4 modulated IR transmitters with its own power supply and switch

IR PCB

Once you have your PCB design, you can print out that circuit. Make sure it is inverted (Mirror image) as you can see in the picture above. After the circuit design, there are two processes that can be followed. In this post I will describe the one with the iron box. For this process, we need to get the print out of the circuit on a paper. Glossy paper is preferred, but even normal white paper will do. The most important thing is that the printer must be a LASER printer. This is vital because, we will transfer the ink on the paper to the copper-clad plate. To transfer the circuit, follow these steps

• First, properly clean the copper surface so that there is no dust or any other impurity and completely dry it.
• Carefully place the circuit on the copper and place a hot iron box on top of it. As soon as you do this, the paper will stick to the copper.
• Keep ironing the paper for about 10 min. Dont be in a rush, let it take its time. After about 10 min, gently peel off the paper. If done properly, the circuit diagram will have transferred onto the copper plate.
• Use a black marker to fill out any places where there is little ink. You may also want to draw the lines that look dim. Be careful near the holes. The finished product will look somewhat like in the picture below

dirty copper clad plate. Needs to be cleaned

Circuit transferred onto copper plate

After transferring the circuit you need to remove the excess copper from the plate. This process is called etching and we will use Ferric Chloride as the etching agent. Its easily available salt and should be carefully handled as it is very corrosive. Keep all the good dishes away from it and use some old plastic trough. Make a solution of ferric chloride in the trough. The concentration of the solution need not be precise. Just mix the salt in little amount of water till the solution becomes opaque and reddish brown (colour of rust). Dont use a lot of water, it will be just waste of the salt. If possible, warm the solution a bit. This is not necessary, but it will speed up the process. Dont heat it, just warm it. Then insert the Copper plate into the solution and eep stirring it. Normally it will take about half an hour for the copper to come off. Be patient and keep stirring, it will speed up the process. After the copper is etched, you will get a PCB something like the one shown below

After etching and drilling

After the etching is done, we need to drill the holes to place components. I used 0.8 mm drill bits to make the holes. The above picture was my first attempt and you can see that I have messed it up. But, its really not that difficult. You may need one or two practise rounds. But, you need to be really careful when drilling the holes belonging to ICs. The holes must lie in a straight line else you will have a really hard time placing the IC. Trust me, I know from experience. Now, these drill bits are definitely available in the hardware shops, but a bit difficult to find. If you live in Bangalore, then you can definitely find it in SP road. Thats where I bought them. You cannot use 1 mm drill bit, it will be VERY big. You can see the hole above C3 in the PCB. Thats from 1 mm drill bit. Use 0.8 mm, its optimum. To get an idea, below is the picture of those bits and to compare, I have place a 0.5 mm lead between them.Also, I used these bits with the normal heavy duty Drilling machine without any problem. They will fit correctly and be careful as they can break if not handled carefully

0.8 mm Drill bit with 0.5 mm lead in the middle

With the drilling, you have now come to the final stage. Not it is soldering time. You can follow my soldering guide to solder the circuit elements. Always use IC holders in the circuit. The finished product will look as shown in pictures below. I have not soldered everything, but you can see how neat and organized the circuit is. This circuit holds 4 modulated IR transmitters along with its own power regulator.

Soldered PCB (Bottom Surface)

Soldered PCB (Top surface)

I really apologise as all the snaps are not of the same PCB. I did not take any snaps during the maing of the last one. So, I had to use the older pics. But it gives you the idea of each and every step. Please feel free to share anything other than what I have put up and please do ask for any clarifications.

There is one more process; the one using UV light. I have not yet tried it. I think I will try it and share the outcome

The Face Transformer

Now here is something REALLY interesting. I have worked for days on this one. This is my best post YET.

You see, I found this Face Transformer developed by University of St. Andrews. With this app, you can transform your face into your “Old” self, Manga Cartoon, Botticelli Painting, East Asian self, etc. Now I really like all this stuff. Though I so hate Horoscopes. I mentioned horoscopes because this app can show you your future self. I mean how could it be that all “Leos” in Delhi “are likely to initiate something on the domestic front and will have favourable luck”? OR, how could it be that everyone with sunsign Sagitarrius “will have financial gains” on the same day?

Now returning to our Face Transformer, this thing is fun. First, click or find a picture of your face. It should be straight, symmetric, and should only show your face. Or you will have to zoom it using their tool. Save the trouble. And don’t edit it much with photoshop. Crop if you want to. No problems there.

Having fulfilled these conditions, your photo is now ready to be transformed. Choose picture, fill in the small details. And the process will take you there.

Now transform your photo into different kinds. Note that this is not accurate or the truth. This is just for fun. Don’t be sad if your adult version doesn’t look what you wanted it to be (Here you can guess what happened with me. GOSH! I am really scared with my older me.). Know what? Choose the child version, now did you look like that when you were small? No (like me)! Right? If you did, well…… um….. It’s only a tool…. I guess. Here are my transformations (No comments allowed on those).

The HITCH: Now there’s a very irritating problem with this transformer. It is too imperfect. Some photos will give you good results for some types of effects, some will give for some other types of effects, and most  will not give you any sort of good results. I had to experiment with 5-6 photos (including a photo of Elvis Presley) to obtain the results I have put online. So choose the picture wisely, and you will have to work on it if you want something good to show to your friends.

Top of the Tubes

Top of the Tubes is a great site (topofthetubes.com) to view amazing and awesome videos on the net. It displays videos from majors like Metacafe(My Fav.), Youtube, DailyMotion, LiveVideo, Yahoo and eBaumsWorld. Also, there is a drop down menu on the home page where you can select from 15 websites and you can view the Director’s pick & Top 20 too.

Click on any of the 2 images to enlarge.

See the featured, most popular, recently viewed, recently added videos. Also see the most watched videos of the day. What’s more? There’s a tag ‘cloud‘ for suggestions. I really like clouds. For those who don’t know, a cloud is a mixture of names (recommendation) in different sizes in a small area. In the gallery above, there is a music cloud. I’ll tell you about this one soon. Note that this cloud is not a part of “Top of The Tubes”. I gave this image just for an example. Plus, you can Signup & Subscribe to the site.

The New Author

Hello Readers,

This is Abhijit writing. Cognoscis (Anoop) has invited me to write on this blog from now. Thank you for that dude. I am really honoured. Hope you like my posts. Thank you for your notice. By the way Anoop, WordPress has really improved. It’s so much as compared to what it was when I made an account 2 years ago. I did not like it at all. But the girls at WordPress took it to the heart I think .

Abhijit.

Google launches Google Squared

Google turned on Google Squared on Wednesday, letting the public test out its attempt to present search results in grid format. A project of Google Labs, it was first demonstrated in May in the Google’s Searchology event. What it does is that it finds webpages that the been indexed, simillar to the regular search, and presents them in grid format. This is very useful for someone doing research or a small kid trying to do homework? . I gave a simple search of “Indian Prime Ministers” and came up with the following result

As you can see, there is an option to increase the numbers “Add next 7 items” Even after adding them, you wont have all the PMs of India. That is why there is the “Add items” bar below the first column. There, it will give you more suggestions and you can add them to this list and increase the rows. Similarly, you can increase the number of columns by adding more categories like “Date of death”, “Succeeded by” and so on that it suggests when you click in that empty bar. Not only can you add the suggested rows and columns, you can type in your own category or person’s name. After making all the changes you need, you can save your square if you are logged in with your Google Account. I gave another search as “IPL” and the result is shown below

IPL search

The original result did not have the “captain” and “coach” columns, I added them. But, the result somehow included Middle East . You can click on the “Description” field and visit the source site and you will know that

Arab Digital Distribution (ADD) has won a 10-year exclusive television coverage right for the Middle East and North Africa for Twenty20 cricket.

Hence, that was relevant and was included. Had I typed in “IPL teams” then that would not have been included. Even now, we can remove that from our results by clicking on the cross mark left to it. That said, this is a very good way yo consolidate your web searches. But ofcourse, this still needs refinement and as you can see, it did not give any results for Deccan Chargers’ (My favourite team) captian. Anyway, I hope this will be improved more and will come in handy when I do some research work

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