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‘Hobbies’ Category

  1. Summer holidays: projects, Kolkata visit and shopping

    July 27, 2014 by Sunit Nandi

    So friends, I’m back again with a new post. It has been quite a while since I wrote on my blog. In this post I’ll be describing how I spent my summer vacation. So here it goes.

    My 4th semester exams got over and what followed was a summer break. I was finally free to do whatever I liked to and wanted to. The first thing me and my parents did was offer a special puja for my dad at the Navagraha temple. It was a really long process that lasted for two hours. On another day, we went out for shopping to the city and had our lunch at Chinatown. The most surprising part about this is that, I met Loya ma’am (Mrs. Loya Agarwala, a student counselor serving various institutions) there. I had a long chat with her. My friends from Faculty H S School would be very happy to know about this.

    In the meanwhile, I joined two projects at IIT Guwahati. The first one is related to speech processing while the second is a student tracking system based on RFID tags and ZigBee PAN backend. Both are still underway, even though my holidays are over now. The speech processing project required me to get my BeagleBone Black ready with Archlinux ARM, ALSA, XFCE desktop and Linphone to act as a IP-phone. I’m using an audio cape extension on the BBB get audio-in and audio-out to it. Hopefully, things should be getting into shape soon. Here are a few photos I shot while setting it up:

    IMG_20140620_121209 IMG_20140620_122226 IMG_20140620_122239 IMG_20140620_123252

    I’ll be writing several articles on the BeagleBone Black on Techno FAQ as soon as I get some free time.

    The other project is still on paper and will take much longer to get a physical implementation.

    I spent the first two weeks with parents in Kolkata. We were there for some family errands. But during this time, I had the opportunity to visit the Birla Planetarium and also do some shopping.

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    Also, behold the other random photos.

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    Some pictures of our new flat at New Town, Rajarhat:

    IMG_20140704_182429 IMG_20140704_182924 IMG_20140704_184331

    I spent 3 days at Digha, my hometown, and so was able to see the ulta (reverse) – Rathyatra. Here are some pics.

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    After returning back to Guwahati, I finally had my new workstation ready (a custom-built HP Z420), which I’ll be using for video editing, graphics, app and OS development and gaming.

    IMG_20140612_124924 IMG_20140612_195237 IMG_20140710_155716

    The specs are:

    • 8-core Intel Xeon E5 @ 3.6 Ghz
    • 4×8 GB DDR3 ECC 1600 MHz RAM
    • AMD FirePro W7000 GPU (4x DisplayPort interfaces)
    • Intel C602 chipset
    • 1 TB 7200 RPM Toshiba HDD
    • 4x USB 3.0 ports, 4x USB 2.0 ports
    • FireWire port
    • 1 Gbps gigabit ethernet port
    • DVD-RAM / DVD+-RW drive
    • HP EliteDisplay E221
    • HP USB keyboard and mouse

    I got my workstation ready with Windows 8.1 Pro and Manjaro Linux. Right now, I’m looking for a good secondary HDD on which I can try out Hackintosh.

    With all this, the holidays came to an end. The 5th semester has started and classes have begun with full steam.

    Right now I’m playing around with PC-BSD. It is kind of hipster approach to learning Unix.

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    I’ll be writing again soon with more stuff on my blog and interesting articles on Techno FAQ. Please stay tuned.

    Take care.


  2. Wrapping up the 4th semester

    April 13, 2014 by Sunit Nandi

    The 4th semester has been more of staying at home due to illness rather than going to college. And that also meant spending more time with experiments.

    However, the time at college is not unaccounted either and college felt unbearable. I was unable to understand what was being taught in class and half-slept during the lectures and practicals. I felt extremely bad about myself and felt like I was wasting time. On top of that a girl buddy’s boyfriend decided that making my life hell was his top priority because he suffers from insecurity and keeps getting into fights for all sorts of trivial things. Ahh!

    Coming to the tech front, many new things have happened. My BeagleBone Black setup is ready for use and I’ve even got the board housed in an enclosure.

    image

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    Very soon, I’ll be getting to active ARM development and also see if I can make interesting electronic circuits.

    On the web, things have been bittersweet. On one hand, my CloudFlare account now has the option of using Railgun to speed up delivery of uncacheable content (all thanks to my webhost). On the other hand, my AdSense account got finally approved after 6 months of wait, only to get click-bombed and disabled a week later (for reasons I’m unsure about). Now, I’m just trying my luck with other ad networks to see if anything else can be done.

    My friend Manohar started his new personal blog very recently where he promises to write about his life and his thoughts. Do follow it at: http://manoharofficial.wordpress.com

    Right now, Rongali Bihu holidays are on. I’m here at home trying to study whatever I can for the upcoming end semester exams from 6th of May so that I don’t perform poorly. 6th of May? Oh well… birthday ruined.

    The 4th semester is finally wrapping up in this manner.

    I will be writing again soon. Till then, take care.


  3. Hardware development begins here

    March 5, 2014 by Sunit Nandi

    The first mid-semester exams are over. Things seemed to have settled down. At college, everything is just as any other day, with boring lectures and uneventful moments.

    What really kept me motivated was constant experiments and new ideas. That’s pretty much what keeps me active even at the worst times.

    I learnt a little bit of the Cisco router’s command line and am manage the network interfaces with it, by just random fiddling around when I got bored.

    Then Manjaro Linux 0.8.9 was released with a huge number of bug-fixes and improved hardware support. To add to the great news was that Manjaro now officially supports KDE and 0.8.9 release has an official KDE variant. So, just because I was bored, I installed KDE desktop and the K Display Manager and got rid of XFCE, LXDM and the optional GNOME components. And guess what? KDE actually runs better than what I had expected. The system-wide proxy settings are automatically pulled from the environment variables (set with /etc/profile.d/proxy.sh script). Also, it would be worth mentioning that the BlueZ 5 bluetooth stack works flawlessly with BlueDevil in KDE. Back then, in XFCE, BlueMan had stopped detecting my laptop’s bluetooth adapter after I upgraded to BlueZ 5 from BlueZ 4. Rest of the features work fine, and I’m very satisfied.

    I got myself an Arduino Mega 2560 R3 microcontroller board so that I can build circuits and DIY (do it yourself) electronics. At present, I’m learning the Arduino code.

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    Arduino Mega 2560 R3

    I also ordered Beagleboard.org‘s Beaglebone Black as I am very curious about single-board PCs.

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    Beaglebone Black A6A

    Right now I’m looking for a HDMI-to-DVI/VGA adapter so that I can hook up my old display to it and a externally powered USB hub to attach peripherals to the board. Hoping to get cracking and experimenting in a week or so.

    My workstation, a customised HP Z420, is going to arrive soon. So I have one more reason to be excited.

    Coming to blogging and WordPress, I have noticed an interesting finding. If you are a user of the WordPress HTTPS plugin, uninstall it as soon as possible. This plugin has a poorly written page filter than significantly degrades page loading performance and causes regular timeouts in the admin panel. For a month I was unable to figure out why the admin panel was working poorly on technofaq.org, until I disabled the plugin. Also, its interesting to note that trying to secure the admin panel with HTTPS and serving the site over plain HTTP can be a real pain. I’m not saying it has problems serving pages. What I am trying to say is that, if you are securely connected to the admin panel and are making a new post, any new image or media attached to the post will load from the secure site even when the site is served insecurely. This is an undesired behaviour. In my opinion, WordPress should integrate HTTPS options properly into the GUI so that we do not have to depend on tweaks and third-party plugins to secure the admin panel while serving the site as it is. For now, I stopped using HTTPS, until I find a proper fix.

    Right now, I’m writing my General Proficiency report for college.

    Also, Pyrokinesis, Assam Engineering College’s annual fest is on, and I might be attending it when I’m free.

    So its finally time for me to lift my hands off the keyboard. I’ll be writing again soon. Take care and have fun!

    Till then, enjoy this sandwich. 😉

    image

    Sandwich


  4. Starting off with the new year

    February 9, 2014 by Sunit Nandi

    I think many of you may have been wondering where I’ve been for such a long time and why I haven’t written anything. There’s a reason for that which I’ll explain later. But before that, let me tell you what I was up to.

    After the new year celebrations back in my hometown, we returned to Guwahati on 8th of January. Due to the temperature difference between Digha and Guwahati, I caught cold, cough and breathing difficulties. Assam is a few degrees colder than West Bengal, and that’s obviously a no-brainer. I spent a whole week in bed, unable to move or talk properly. As if that wasn’t enough, my digestive system decided to revolt, making me unable to eat anything. There were several visits to the doctor and another week of no activity.

    After the whole illness drama got over, I was too weak to go to college, so I spent my time at home perfecting my coding skills and watching movies. During this time, I got myself a MicroTik RouterBoard RB-751, because I had this sudden urge to study routers and networks. I flashed a couple of firmwares, tested various routing options and attacks in simulation. But then, I felt I wasn’t doing anything practical. So, I tried to do what I wanted to do in the last 3 years: build my own home streaming network. It was successful in the end, and felt like a dream come true. I documented the steps and made a video out of it for TechnoFAQ TV.

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    Here is the video:

    In the meanwhile I ordered myself a Cisco Linksys X3500 ADSL2+ home gateway from eBay to replace my ageing DLink DSL-G604T. It was shipped but the courier (Blue Dart) decided to “cache” my shipment and delayed the delivery.

    I began going to college, but classes were a hit or miss. Some were held and some weren’t, but being among classmates again felt wonderful.

    In the beginning of February, my X3500 shipment arrived. I unboxed it and set it up, replacing the DLink and RouterBoard with a single device. It didn’t seem anything special at all, but the performance was epic. My DSL speeds were greater than 9000 Kbps, whereas the DLink would average at around 7000 Kbps. The X3500, being a dual-band N access point, performed better than both the DLink and RouterBoard combined. Now I get pretty good WiFi signal in my bedroom, the garden and toilets (heehee!) too.

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    One day later, Alcheringa 2014 at IIT Guwahati began. I enjoyed the Saturday and Sunday to the fullest with my friends. I won’t be describing the events here as they are widely popular and published in the newspapers.

    This was followed by Saraswati Puja. I spent the whole day at college with friends, hopping from hostel to hostel. Out of compulsion, I had to have the bhog (feast) 4 times at 4 different hostels. After the whole day, I was tired of eating.

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    And the award for the best looking lady goes to:

    misssaraswati

    Okay, that’s enough, I guess. 😛

    After that classes begin at full steam and labs start.

    I also managed to set up OpenVPN despite being behind a proxy and firewall and was able to route some of my home traffic via Japan just for testing. My Android devices which could not play live streams like ShoutCast before could do now. So its music, music everywhere.

    Screenshot_2014-02-05-21-31-12

    Also I installed Mac on a non-Apple machine, a.k.a Hackintosh. So far, its pretty good, but the graphics drivers are not properly loaded and the video performance is poor.

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    Now, I’ll come to the point where I’ll tell you why I haven’t written anything in a long while. Well, for some reason, the WordPress admin panels on all my hosted blogs were timing out for some reason or the other. After a whole day of troubleshooting alongwith the webhost’s staff yielded nothing in particular about misconfiguration or heavy resource usage, I made the plunge by requesting them to backup, delete, recreate and restore my userspace. We all thought that would not make any difference, but on the contrary WordPress was running stably again and I am now able to blog.

    Before I left for my hometown in December, I made sure static content on my site be delivered from Amazon S3 and CloudFront. After 2 months of testing their service, I realised it was not worth it. CloudFlare serves static content faster than CloudFront, atleast in India. So I rolled back and deleted my S3 buckets.

    SOVIC is an NGO that is based in my college. This NGO runs several child welfare schemes. They requested me to build a website for them, which is now live at sovic.in.

    So, this is what life has been till now.

    I’m waiting for my upcoming new camcorder and a workstation so that I can make awesome videos.

    Till then, take care. I’ll be writing again soon.


  5. 3rd semester over

    December 15, 2013 by Sunit Nandi

    After a long 1 month streak of end-semester exams, the wave seems to have finally calmed down. Its holiday time now, and I have devoted myself to learning Python with the book Learn Python the Hard Way. I’ve managed to reach chapter 26, and I have another 26 more :notbad: :D.

    In the meantime, our 3rd semester CSE batch had mini-project submission. Well, that was just yesterday. I had coded a very simple PHP web interface for the GNU Compiler Collection that lets anyone test the output of their C and C++ on a web browser, nothing fancy. I and Kirtiman Mishra submitted it as a mini-project. I am working on adding more features, while my friend Akshit Tripathi is working on improving the UI. The source is now on GitHub. 🙂

    Maybe, in the later half of this month we will be going to our hometown for giving our relatives a visit.

    Hopefully, by the end of this month, I will be proficient in Python and Java and develop something nicer and cooler. 🙂


  6. My friend Shravya starts off her blog

    September 17, 2013 by Sunit Nandi

    What came as a pleasant surprise today, was the launch of a new personal blog by my friend Shravya Gunipudi. She is well-known for writing heart-touching short stories on various online magazines. But her blog left me surprised as it was something quite unexpected.

    You can view her blog on http://shravyagunipudi.wordpress.com and not surprisingly, it has really good write-ups. I suggest everyone to give her blog a read and give her feedback.

    I’m hoping earnestly that, at one point of time, it replaces my practice of reading story books. 😀


  7. Dastan-é-blogging

    August 17, 2013 by Sunit Nandi

    If you guys have seen my posts already, you may have noticed I have been blogging here for over 5 years by now. In this post, I’ll be telling you about my blogging journey and how I finally reached to where I am right now.

    Back in 2002, I was studying in Chatsworth International School, Singapore. I’d give the credit to one of my classmates there named Hugh Bullen for introducing me to the world of web design by showing me how to write in HTML. He was pretty pesky, annoying and awkward to most people, including our class teacher. But to me and a couple of other guys, he was quite friendly. It’d be right to say he was moody. One fine day, he wrote a basic “Hello world” page on a piece of paper and after that, I gazed at the paper for a few minutes, trying to understand the whole meaning as he explained the tags. Later that day at home, I was looking up guides on HTML and practicing.

    I didn’t know where to host the files and I was pretty much confused at that point. Then an ex-student of dad named Parlapalli Madhusudhana Rao “Madhu”, set me up to use Yahoo! GeoCities for the webpages and Yahoo! photos for the photo gallery. After that I spent a lot of time learning HTML and made a simple website for the family.

    Back in India in 2003, I finally got bored with the 15 MB storage limit on GeoCities. Then another friend suggested me to try Tripod by Lycos with 20 MB hosting. It was on that host I first started blogging. Now comes the ‘how’ part. I was once going through their CGI scripts section. I saw a ‘web log wrapper’. Curiously, I applied it, and bingo, I had a nice blog with a WYSIWYG editor. I was never serious about blogging then and hardly felt with maintaining it. But the idea was damn fascinating.

    During the time 2004 to 2005, Google began to expand, launching GMail, Talk, Google Pages and then buying out Blogger. Someone suggested me to move to Google Pages for hosting the site. There was a storage limit of 100 MB and the WYSIWYG editor with nice templates was very superb. However, I wasn’t really comfy with Blogger in the beginning, so I used Windows Live Spaces to blog instead. I liked their nicely done ‘notes’ feature and used it for almost 2 years. 

    While all this was going on, I’d share URLs of my sites with classmates enquiring about their opinion. But, I was often always laughed at and often called nerdy. Some even said I was doing a pointless job.

    In the meanwhile I switched to a good reputed free web host (I don’t remember the name now) which then recently began offering 5 GB of space plus PHP and MySQL databases. I was new to the Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP (LAMP) method of hosting websites, so initially I tried to make a basic webpage for family with MS Frontpage and embedded PHP scripts in the syntax.

    In 2006-2007, our school started off a Ecological and Environmental club and then they appointed to make their website. While I was in the process of doing so, I came across the WordPress blogging platform for the first time. WordPress had just reached its v2 state. After some initial discussion, we decided to go forward with it. The school, however, refused to grant us hosting on their own server. So we had to buy our own hosting to get it working. I learnt a lot working with WordPress in the process.

    As this was going on, the free host I was on started leaning towards bankruptcy. They began asking for donations to run. Soon afterwards, they had to shut down. Then after that, we had Live Spaces deprecating their notes feature, so I moved over to TypePad. I loved TypePad for its simplicity, and back in those days, it beat both Blogger and WordPress with their design. I wasn’t still a serious blogger. I just blogged about life events, few ‘yay’ posts and random stuff.

    After days and days of searching on the internet, I finally found x10Hosting. Their free plan gave away a whole LAMP stack with 2.5 GB of space. I thought it was too good to be true, but still signed up anyway. My account took a whole week to get approved. I was at the verge of giving up, but when I tried it, I was impressed. It turned out to be better than the paid host our club was using. TypePad then decided to go paid, making me leave their service. Then I got a .co.cc free domain name and with my hosting account I rebuilt the family website and also installed WordPress 2.2 to serve my blog. And since then, history was made as I never changed this set up ever again.

    Then came the blogging buzz in India in 2008-2009. Bollywood stars like Aamir Khan and Amitabh Bachchan began to blog. It was heavily publicised in the media, with articles on how to start a blog being printed on every other newspaper. Blogging was on everyone’s lips. The people who once dissed me for ‘pointless efforts’ began creating their own blogs like there was no tomorrow. I had one of the greatest LOL moments of my life then. It just seemed that the public memory is just like a beach. You make a mark on the sand, very soon its washed away. However, when the tide comes up, it stays there a while before leaving, making the beach appear like it isn’t there. Here the beach is the public, and the sea tide is the media. People only accept what the media says, not what you as an individual say.

    Soon enough Twitter took the world by storm. In India, it was more of a hurricane. Again the media went maniac over it. Then our nation’s honourable ladies and gentlemen joined Twitter. The common man made his account to follow them all. I watched the whole drama unfold itself like a poor joke. News and music channels began to display those ‘elite’ tweets on their scrolling tickers. I laughed at the whole stupidity of making a mountain of a molehill. I wasn’t inclined to join Twitter because I did not have a proper reason to actually use it. It’d have just been another unused account, like most old Twitter accounts that were created by humans of our nation.

    I finally got the message that the people around me were just trying to be hippie kewl dudes and babes by keeping up to the trends, and they weren’t the right guys to ask for any sort of opinion. I realised I needed to find the right people to discuss with.

    Its year 2011. My friend Farhan Hussain, a senior at school, was very much into web design and web application projects. His activities were quite popular, and got immense support from numerous friends. His only problem was that he never did anything for long terms. He used to start a project, develop it, maintain it for a month or two and then move on. This attitude of his was rather irritating to me, and we often had ego clashes and exchanges of harsh words took place. To be really honest, we never looked like friends to everyone else. Even though we had differences, we still started Techno FAQ with couple of other friends, and it turned out to be quite successful. Then Farhan left school and within a year, joined a college in Bangalore for a course on Mass Communication. Finally, according to his nature, he wanted to shut down Techno FAQ saying, “Dude this is just a technology group, the fact that has progressed this far is something significant. Now I think its time we move on and deal with more important things in life.” I vehemently refused to let it shut down when it had already come this far, and that I had made a whole new circle of friends because of it. Plus, I had my own plans of extending Techno FAQ. We again had fights over it. He first made me quit the group and asked me to build my own. But a week later, he asked me to join it back and he himself left it for ever, for reasons I don’t even know till now.

    This is year 2012. Now that Techno FAQ was in the care of the remaining members, we added a whole lot of new members in the management to take the group forward. As it was expanding, we decided that a website was necessary. To fulfil the requirements, I upgraded my hosting plan to premium paid hosting. The web host promptly moved to my account to their premium servers. technofaq.org was bought and started our site and began some serious tech blogging. We also joined Google+ and Twitter to make a presence.

    A few months later, I decided it was time to resume building my personal websites too. So I bought nandifamily.in and moved all my sites from the old domain to the new one. Then I imported all old posts from the older blogs I once had and imported them here. Finally I shut down all other other blogging accounts. After a little bit of touch-ups, this blog was ready, and I was finally ready for some serious blogging. Also a point worth mentioning is that I finally have people around who love blogs and are willing to read what I write. I hope to maintain this blog for as long as possible, and make it close to a personal diary as far as possible. Hope you guys continue reading it.

    I also joined Twitter as I had enough friends to tweet to and enough topics to tweet about.

    In case you want to read my old posts, you are free to do so. This blog has posts dating back to 2007.

    With this I end my post. A few words I wish to tell everyone is: No matter what anyone says or if anyone stops you, do what you love to do. Any good activity that is going to benefit you or people around you is worth doing if you love doing it. Don’t listen to negatives. Remember that all people will not be able to appreciate your work. Just carry on and find people who will actually love doing things with you. The world will seem much better and happier.


  8. School starts again

    August 15, 2011 by Sunit Nandi

    Now our school starts again. Back to activities and studies again. Boards are coming up in March, so studies are on in full swing.

    Life isn’t that good now. One cellphone is sent for repair and the other confiscated. Waiting for both of them to return. 🙁

    I just pray everything turns out fine. Will write again soon. 😀


  9. Class XII goes on as usual

    May 16, 2011 by Sunit Nandi

    So Class XII seems to go like usual. We are having tests every Monday on a different subject every week. Also, we are having practicals on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Coincidentally, I am having weekly tests on Mondays at Brilliant Tutorials too, which means Monday is a busy day.

    Hope these 6 months end soon. Its kind of sick schedule.

    Also getting time for the web is a tough job. Video encoding is also tough as encodes take a long time and I don’t get to keep my computer on all day.

    Lets see what happens.


  10. Class XI Annual Exams over

    March 19, 2011 by Sunit Nandi

    So, finally one year comes to an end. Annual exams over. Only one year left for the school leaving exams. Makes me feel a little sad because I have to miss school life for my entire life. Too bad because Brilliant Tutorials is back again and they are gonna take another test this month. Tiring stuff. Leaves no time to write a blog. Till the holidays are on, I will try to upload more pics of the family and fun we had during this year. Hope to write again soon. See you again!