Tech

What I am about to discuss here is not a basic need. It is more of a luxury, good to have setup. Nobody quite misses it now, but maybe it will become essential in the future. Or maybe not. During the formative years of the foetus, parents get to see their baby(-ies) take shape through the months with the help of the ultra sound scans that the doctor uses. For the first 6-7 months, the baby is still not very active. But around 7 months, it becomes quite active and is almost able to listen to sounds from outside and maybe also responds to them. Usually, you would have to be in luck to see this happen during a regular checkup visit. And not a lot of us would be that lucky. ...

I attended the Singapore MiniMakerFaire this weekend at Tampines. It was fun. I had to keep it a short trip for other reasons, but am happy that I didn’t miss the faire at least. Next year, I really should present something or volunteer at the least. One of the things about attending this event is, it kinda puts me to shame. I can give you reasonably detailed steps on how to make most of the stuff in display. Yet, I haven’t made even a simple four wheel bot on my own. Shame on me. ...

I sometimes wonder if I should just enroll and do a certificate course in UX. UX, not UI – my visual sensibilities are a tad retarded, but I am good at spotting failures. And I love research. I may not be the best guy to talk to people yet, but I haven’t tried that first hand as well. So maybe I can learn. I think UX is a very interesting topic. A good understanding of the principles and knowledge of how to apply them to a system/product/solution/problem at hand is an immensely useful skill to have. Of course, I don’t think it will fetch me any salary to start, but maybe I will be good at it. And If I am good, then I think I can get closer to the design field that I believe is the next most important horizontal going forward. ...

I got this idea as I was in the middle of my yoga session. I have this app called “noizio” installed in my mac. There is nothing special about this app and there are many variants on this app as well. It can generate ambient noises like being present in a cafe, beach, grass, etc. You can choose if it is raining, windy, thunderstorms, riverside and others. It works quite well, especially if you like to work in a noisier environment. I don’t, but I just installed it for seeing what options I can get 🙂 ...

I wrote about needing a good exercise timer here. I am using the yoga timer app that I downloaded and am reasonably happy with it. I hate quite a few things about that app. I could give feedback and make it better, but the app has a paid version. So chances are the paid version has these fixed already. Besides, it doesn’t do many things it claims to. So am quite unhappy with it. ...

Our house has a weird problem. There are 4 air con units in the three room house and some aircons are so close to each other that if you need to turn one ON without turning the others ON, you will need to defy the laws of physics, and sometimes even the laws of quantum mechanics and/or law of conservation of energy. Usually we end up switching one air con ON and then take a trip around the house to see what else got turned ON and then turn them OFF using our own algorithms. ...

I have recently got on an exercise regimen to fight my back pain problems. It is sort of like Yoga but in a controlled manner. I don’t know if its fun, but it definitely helps to keep pain away. Typically, I’ll need to do 4-6 exercises twice a day. Each exercise is repeated three times and lasts 30 sec each time. Pretty simple, right? You need to keep aside about 30 minutes twice a day to take care of this. So far I am able to keep up. ...

Honestly, it’s more painful than pleasant to have one. I have a one wish for my smartwatch: There should be a one tap snooze for all sorts of notifications: social media has the worst timings for conversations. And the time usually coincides with your work that needs all your concentration. Apart from that, it is quite nice. There is a huge cry around why Apple watch battery sucks. Some of the most priced watches from my grandpa’s age required to be ‘key-ed’ every 24 hours for it to show the right time. In fact, it is worse than that. You had to give an exact number of turns for it to keep the correct pace. And those were very priced. Things improved quite fast from there. So we could expect the same for this piece of technology as well. ...

Apple announced it watch last year. And it decided to ship it from next month, this year. Of course, as a fan boy, it is a fab gadget to own. As an electronics engineer, it is a piece of marvelous engineering and worthy of owning. What follows is not a review, not a rant and definitely not a promotion. This is just an observation. Apple watch is a first in many things for Apple. For the first time, Apple announced a non-shipping product in its annual meet. For the first time, Apple could not predict the exact date their watch would ship. After a long time, Apple dropped the proverbial ‘i’ from its naming. For the first time, Apple is venturing mention-ably into the fashion industry. For the first time, Apple is releasing a multi-variant product line. For the first time, I am scared of what Apple is doing to itself. But why does that last line matter at all? ...

2015 indeed started on a great note for me. I managed to get a 1-1 meeting with the Harnhua – Co-Founder at Plunify, a startup specialising in FPGAs and cloud computing based solutions for this space. Well, technically, they aren’t a startup anymore, just a small company. But from my talk with him, I understand that they are pretty much the startup that they set out to be. And probably have all those startup problems 🙂 ...