An MD11 in front of the Sun

NASA’s Astronomy picture of the day, Jan 29 2001:

Sometimes, good planes come to those who wait. Experienced solar photographer Thierry Lagault had noticed planes crossing in front of the Sun from his home in suburban Paris. He then got the idea for the above photograph, but had to wait through many near misses. He got his wish: a jet crossed directly in front of the Sun when his solar imaging equipment was set up. The resulting image, shown above, was taken in a specific color of red light called Hydrogen-Alpha, and the picture's contrast has been digitally enhanced. Dark prominences can be seen lacing the Sun's busy surface. The airplane is an MD-11.

Not half as spectacular, here’s my version of the pic from Jan 19, 2005:  :)

From Favorite Pictures

This was captured on NH8, from a moving bus, on my way to work. I was using burst mode on a Canon A75. If you click on the image and zoom in, you’ll notice the reflection of the camera on the left side of the image.

View original post here.

Mixtape #1!

I’ve had this collection of mixsets from 2007 that when played together last about 5 hours in total. Now, that’s a lot of music, and there’s very little in there that I truely enjoy.

So, I ripped out 7 tracks I love and slapped them together into one very awesome set of my own. :)

It took considerable effort to mix them in seamlessly, and I still think I could do much better with more time.. but, for my first mixset, this’ll have to do :

MiamiMix by aakash81

Also included below is a 2-minute “preview” that includes short clips from all 7 tracks. If you like House or any kind of Dance music- this download comes highly recommended! Leave me a comment if you like what you hear..

Direct Downloads:

• MiamiMix-Preview (1.66 MB) – 128kbps – 2Mins
• MiamiMix (33.40 MB) – 128kbps – 37Mins

Next project: A “Best of Eric Prydz” set- I think I already know what tracks to put on there. :)

del.icio.us Tags: house,music,mp3,audacity,prydz,mixtape,set

Koi Pond

 

On Thursday, October 29th 2009, NBC aired an episode of The Office titled Koi Pond. Now I’d never really heard of the term and while watching the episode last night on Hulu, instinctively googled it and came across this helpful definition:

Water gardens, also known as aquatic gardens, backyard ponds and garden ponds, (that) have become popular in recent years.

I carried on watching the episode as normal until afterward, when I got curious if that term was used commonly enough or if it were just me who’d never heard of it.

Well, thanks to Google Trends, turns out, there were quite a few among us out there who felt the need to look it up right after or during the airing of the episode 2 weeks ago:

The search term spiked 7.5 fold on the 29th and lingered upto a week later as people caught on. Makes you think how search technology is making its way straight into the living room and our lives. And how I’m not the only one who googles everything I have a question about. :)

Related: The analysis of the US presidential inauguration speech google published back in January.

Custom boot logo for the iPhone

Used pwnagetool 3.1.4 last night to upgrade my iphone 2G from 2.1 to 3.1.2. My baseband is unlocked at bootloader v3.9 and the bootneuter step from the pwnagetool merely verified that. I chose not to upgrade the baseband to v4.6 for now. Rest assured, the tool works and I’m still unlocked! :)

These are the custom boot and custom recovery logos I slapped together quickly last night. You should be able to download and use the images directly:

 

The trick to getting them to load correctly is:

1. The file should be saved as a PNG- only RGB or Grayscale.
2. The PNG needs to have transparency turned on. Just leaving the check box checked while saving doesn’t really do it right:
   
3. Zooming all the way in and deleting a 1x1 pixel from the image ensures the transparency is retained when the file is saved in photoshop:
4. Dimensions need to be less than 320 x 480 and the image needs to be a single layer.
5. Though not the case for the above, the iphone has a ppi of 160, not the usual 72.

I think the result looks pretty cool. :)

OSX internet connection problems

My first time on a mac proved rather cumbersome- while I could connect to the wifi network at home, I somehow just could not connect to the internet. It turned out that the issue was that the DNS server was not configured.

Thanks to everyone at aardvark who helped with the problem- http://vark.com/t/c40068

However, what made the problem worse was that each time I made any changes to the DNS settings, they were never saved.

After a *lot* of digging around, was able to find a preferences.plist file that was actually set to read-only for my account (the account is admin!).  I don’t know why OSX would behave this way, but I reset the permissions on the plist and then assigned the default DNS under network settings- this time they stick. :)

Firefighters deal with not just the fire...

From oddee.

Motion Portraits

I found this amazing tool that lets you convert a picture into a moving portrait!

I'm sure this thing has been around for a while, its just funny how it can process most pictures you throw at it. I picked this one up from a random google search for mugshots. I'm quite impressed with the results!

The tool lets you control eye movement with the mouse, as you'll see in the video below. Reminds me of how ground-breaking the HL2 facial movement engine was when they released the first G-man videos (see here).

Try Motion Portrait here.

Jon Brion's Songbird artist bio

..is not really very accurate now is it? Mashtape needs editing?

Cars ‘06 - ‘08

Thanks to my workplace, I had been driving rental cars for almost 2.5 years between July’06 and December’08. Sometimes, a rental would stay with me for several months before I felt a need f0r change. Sometimes, I’d hate the car within the first day and switch it out for something better.

Recently, I was going through all invoices I’ve filed for expenses since the time I started renting and took the opportunity to compile this list of cars I’ve driven / rented / borrowed or just simply taken for a spin in these 2 and a half years.

I went ahead and plugged the list into an image search and here’s what the results look like (hover your mouse over the image to get the car’s name). Again, this is not a list of what I would like to drive, just what I’ve had an opportunity to drive here.

There were the ones that I hate:

There were a big bunch of no-names, cars I don’t particularly remember anything to write home about!

            

Then there were a bunch I liked because of their size (!) :

And the one’s I loved because of their drivability, comfort or speed (from good to better, in order):

  

 

But the best ones were the ones I fell in love with, and that’s what this post is really about!

The Chrysler 300: I absolutely love the grille! I think this car looks great! Yes, it’s got its flaws while driving, but it looks & feels great.. 

The Dodge Charger: Love the shape, and it truely lives up to it’s muscle-car image!

 

And ofcourse, the C-class!

  

 

In the end, I think I’ve driven over 30 different types of cars , for a distance of well over a 100k miles (wow.. calculate the carbon footprint of that!) -a small feat, given that public transport is pathetic in Atlanta & its suburbs.

In any case, driving has always been fun and I only have the company I work for to thank for this great experience! I finally chose the BMW 328i earlier this year – the best I can possibly afford right now (don’t know for how long though! :p )

 

 

(All pictures are copyrighted with their original owners- none of these are mine!)

Atlanta is flooded! :-/

http://picfog.com/search/%23atlflood