My Technophilic Musings

My Sites: My Blog | My Tech Blog | Follow me on Twitter
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If you think that all geeks do is walk around wearing thick glasses, code in unreadable languages and make weird gizmos from parts scrapped out of your junkyard, well you think wrong. We do like to have our share of fun. And what better to begin the day with a nice hot cuppa along with some geeky humour. Folks, here it is, the 5 comic strips that I love the most (in no particular order):

1. Dilbert: Our friendly neighbourhood engineer is in town. Have fun reading through his daily life’s traumas. Of course, his tragedies couldn’t be as funny without the able support of the likes of Wally, Asok, dogbert, catbert, and yeah the “pointy haired manager”.

2. XKCD: Don’t know if this is the abbreviated form of something but the author calls it a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language. You’d be frowning at your monitor screen right now, trying to understand the relation between these things but you know the saying, There is the biggest order behind the biggest chaos (or something, I just made up that saying just now )

3. Userfriendly: This is a story about a small ISP with your regular, average joe, sys-admins having a fun time at the expense of their unsuspecting management and, of course, about Pitr who has bigger plans for world domination than even google.

4. Ctrl+Alt+Del: Your last resort on Windows is now your daily appetite in the form of this little story about (mis)adventures of a group of nerdy friends who just love to get into trouble, all while playing that game of Halo with one hand (and that too tied behind their backs).

5. Penny Arcade: If you are a gamer, you can’t miss this. Even “Jack Thomson” couldn’t, so you know, this one is a keeper ;-).

So, go and have a nice time and yeah, don’t forget to tell me about what are your favourite tech comics.

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Quote of the day: Homer: [drunk] Look, the thing about my family is there’s five of us. Marge, Bart, Girl Bart, the one who doesn’t talk, and the fat guy. How I loathe him.

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: Comics, ctrl+alt+del, dilbert, fun, geeks, humour, penny arcade, tech comics, userfriendly, xkcd

My Sites: My Blog | My Tech Blog | Follow me on Twitter
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Worried about someone breaking into your house in your absence? Or just need to keep a tab on who enters your room while you are away? Well, all you need is a webcam, a linux PC/laptop and a twitter account. And you are set for real time updates through twitter about all that goes on at your abode behind your back (can even receive a text message/sms on your phone). Keep reading for the very simple setup you need.

1.) Download and install "motion" on your computer. For ubuntu users, this is as simple as running

2.) Setup your motion configuration file. (Usually at /etc/motion/motion.conf). There are quite a lot of options available. You might want to tweak it a lot according to ur needs later on but the most important ones that you can begin with are (leave the rest untouched for now):

2a.) Add/edit the option "target_dir" to point to the directory where you want to save the images of the event when motion is detected.

2b.) Add/edit the option "locate" and set it to "on" so that you get a nice square box around the detected moving object/person.

2c.) Add/edit the option "webcam_port" and set it to, say, "8000". Motion includes a mini http server so now, you can use it to view the actual images of the happening when you get the update and check for false alarms.

3.) Now, comes the most important part, about getting the update. Continue reading »

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Quote of the day: "Human beings may not be perfect, but a computer program with language synthesis is hardly the answer to the world's problems." - JC Denton

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: fun, linux, motion, motion detection, real time updates, sms, thieves, Twitter, ubuntu, webcam

My Sites: My Blog | My Tech Blog | Follow me on Twitter
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Did you know that instead of installing special software to view your webcam video, you can simply use mplayer for the same purpose, and with a lot of fine control. e.g. try running the following command with your webcam attached to your computer.

And you can use mencoder to capture and encode video from your webcam:

Have fun playing with the huge number of options available. You could even cat the test.avi file into a folder of your web server and have instant streaming video .

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Quote of the day: "When due process fails us, we really do live in a world of terror." - JC Denton

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: fun, linux, mencoder, mplayer, stream, video, webcam

My Sites: My Blog | My Tech Blog | Follow me on Twitter
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If you thought that a webcam is just for getting in visual touch with your distant friends, then you could not be more wrong. There are many other uses e.g., making videos, rudimentary security systems, etc. But I didn’t know that it’d be as simple as a a few keystrokes and a couple of clicks, until I stumbled across this article on Linux.com – Five fun ways to use a Linux webcam. It lists out the following five things that can be achieved ever so easily with a webcam and your linux box:

• Record Yourself
• Make a Video Streaming webserver
• Monitor your house
• ASCIIfy your image
• More fun with your videos and stills

Do check it out at the aforementioned link.

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Quote of the day: "Bravery is not a function of firepower." - JC Denton

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: convert image to ascii, five fun ways to use a linux webcam, fun, fun with videdos, house monitor, linux, record, security, video streaming, webcam, webcam fun, webserver