Leapfrog - Tag

Imagine this:

You have a pen in your hand, which when touched on a specific word reads the word out for you. Touch it on a picture, it says something about the picture. Touch it on some predefined images and it asks you questions for which you could answer by touching your pen on some figure.

And now imagine what ease of learning would it bring to your kid. Imagine its ability to ease up pronounciation and spelling to the kid.

Now, that's exactly what this 'toy' from LeapFrog is all about. Do check this link:

http://www.leapfrog.com/tag/ and this demo: http://www.leapfrog.com/tag/demo.shtml

To get into the technicalities a little, the pen consists of a infrared image sensor that is used to identify the words. The books are special - they are printed with a special technology that will enable the infrared sensor to recognize the words by checking 'em against a dictionary of words and generate appropriate sounds by mapping them to a dictionary of sounds. These dictionaries need to be uploaded to the pen through a USB connection to a PC. The pen uses AAA batteries for its power. The books can be purchased separately - that's how Leapfrog makes money.

Got to experience it firsthand when Keya, my neighbor's kid, brought it home to show me her new toy that her uncle gifter her. And must admit, was totally fascinated. 

Obviously, its on my shopping cart. Just waiting for some friend to tell me that he is returning from US.

Me.

Touchbook - Netbook based on ARM

Came across this 'Touchbook' - a netbook based on ARM platform - recently.

So what, you might ask? Well, one - its OpenSource - based on OpenHardware and ofcourse, Opensource software. Hardware - specifically, the Beagleboard and software - Angstrom distro. More on this here.

The Touchbook has a plethora of features:

Dimensions: 9.4" X 7" X 1.4"
Weight: 2 lbs with keyboard
Storage: 8GB micro SD Card
Display: 1024 X 600; 8.9" Touchscreen
3D Accelerometer
Wifi 802.11 b/g/n
10 to 15 hrs of battery life
speakers, microphone and headphone slots
6 USB slots
Formfactor capable of using the device in multiple ways: as a laptop, handheld gaming device, video player etc.
Two modes of operation - one that uses keyboard and the other that uses the touchscreen.

More about the features - here.

In Me's opinion - this is one helluva device. Needless to say, one that Me'll target to buy in the recent future.

--
Me.

My first deb

Yes, am done with my first deb creation! All it took was a simple control file to be under the directory containing all your files needed for installation and a simple command: dpkg -b . first_all_0.1.deb.

Somehow, first_all_0.1.deb comes up as a hidden file. Need to read more.
But, am feeling good.

p.s: first_all_0.1.deb is not the actual name of the deb I made ;-)

14 Mokos at once!!!

Pictured at Karlsruhe openmoko meeting by Joachim Breitner http://www.joachim-breitner.de/blog/ :)

Tag Cloud

One thing that Me found very useful with blogs, e-mails etc., was tags and tag clouds. Irrespective of the volume of the blogs/ e-mails, tags provide a easy way of categorizing and accessing data.

A tagcloud, elaborated more in this article on Wikipedia, is a cloud full of words, the font size of each word and/ or color indicating how importance of the tag. Each tag, typically is a hyperlink that lists out all the items with that tag on them.

Now, Me really wished google provided a gadget for generating tag clouds on blogs hosted on www.blogger.com. Nevertheless, Me found this link, containing good instructions about how to create tag clouds on blogger hosted blogs. 

Me liked his implementations so much, Me had to leave a note on this site, to give him his due credit, hence this blog post.

Further reading:

Developing a tag cloud using PHP: http://www.lotsofcode.com/php/tag-cloud-v2.htm

Designing tag clouds on LAMP stacks: http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2006/06/08/designing-tag-clouds.html

Design analysis of Tag Clouds: http://www.joelamantia.com/blog/archives/ideas/tag_clouds_evolve_understanding_tag_clouds_1.html

--Me.

wget -P /path/to/alternate/dir something.ogg

I found out that one could use the -P option to download to an alternate location in wget. That's really neat. There's a python script sitting in the /srv/www/cgi-bin folder which downloads to a share in the openfiler here.

In the open source, we begin by putting all the blocks together! Think of something and its probably already there in the open source!

web programming in python

A while back, Prasad and I managed to do some web programming in Python using the tutorial: http://webpython.codepoint.net/. We dived directly into mod_python and hacked up a python script that took a link it and downloaded it to the home folder. We used wget -c to do that.

When we wanted to download torrents, we came across aria2c that could handle all kinds of downloads. We tried putting it in place of wget, but somehow, it did not work. It is been quite a while since we got back onto that.

From 2 days, I have been trying to get the openfiler to give me the same functionality, but could not succeed using mod_python (though I downloaded it from the openfiler conary repository; Apache complains of a version mismatch). So, I went the CGI way and got some basic scripts working.

Have multiple ways to do web programming is a big boon! What next?

WebDAV in openfiler

I could get the WebDAV working on openfiler to view the share thanks to Nautilus, the gnome file manager.
Here's how it looks:

To access a WebDAV share from Nautilus, goto File, Connect to server, choose WebDAV in the combo box on the top and enter your settings like:

openfiler configuration from forums.openfiler.com

I found this pretty useful to configure the openfiler: https://forums.openfiler.com/viewtopic.php?id=2491

NFS up and running on Openfiler.

today morning, I was able to setup a client on my laptop running ubuntu to connect to the NFS server running on the Openfiler.

A while back, I had created a share on the Openfiler from the shares tab. I had to give access to the share using the network configuration. I tried giving 192.158.0.* so that all machines on my network could access the share, but don't know why it did not work. So, I created a specific entry with my laptop's ip address, gave it rw access for NFS.

Then, I used the configuration specified on the ubuntu forums for NFS and could copy a big video into the share after i 'mount'ed the share on my laptop.

I seem to have a problem on my laptop with the version of libc it is running, so, I had to manually pick up the nfs-common and the related debs and install them via dpkg.

So, this looks good so far.