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:
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.
Also, behold the other random photos.
Some pictures of our new flat at New Town, Rajarhat:
I spent 3 days at Digha, my hometown, and so was able to see the ulta (reverse) – Rathyatra. Here are some pics.
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.
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.
I’ll be writing again soon with more stuff on my blog and interesting articles on Techno FAQ. Please stay tuned.
Take care.