The freaking IDD'07 watched a movie about a rebel and Baagi became a popular meme in the ground floor lobby of Saraiya hostel where we all dwell. What is baagi? I would say a misunderstood rebel. How to use this meme? Hangout with us and you’ll know :P
Jain is from Dholpur which is near the famous valleys of the Chambal and having seen a bunch of photos of him posing with some country made rifle he was bound to become the baagi of our gang. And after a Saturday night dinner, the gang decided to do something about it, like open a dhabha or something to do with that meme. Believe me the hobby of domain searching and buying is evil and I warned ‘em but they all wanted it badly (intended exaggeration), all 0x7 of them (except tintin kookdookoo) so I booked 'em a domain.
I had to come up with our first prank and as Baagis are known to wear awesome mustaches (real or fake :), I thought let’s take any picture and draw a moochh on it, programmatically of course!
And after a fun Sunday evening with python and opencv I hacked up our first prank, baagichhaap that takes in a photo, tries to detect a face (red squares), a nose (blue squares) and a mouth (green squares) and based on the obtained information it draws a moochh on it.
It even works with big images with large number of people in it, with some errors though, blame it on opencv. The above baagichhaap’d photograph was taken by ShowStopper’s DSLR last year, some of the folks in it really look like they own their moochh-es.
We have an IRC channel #baagi on freenode if you care to hangout and we log! The prank lives in our baagi repository.
I love computers! My primary computer is a heavyduty desktop which I’d custom built more than a year ago. I love to hack microcontrollers and I’m still waiting for my RaspberryPi. I’m not a big fan of laptops though. But, as long as any of ‘em can run GNU/Linux, I’m happy.
This morning I was going through some of my rarely used electronic parts (I’ve tons of electronic parts, and perhaps 100s of LEDs, buttons and all sorts of jumpers) which I’ve not used since last one year. Of them I found a UART controlled LCD display, a spare Arduino and bunch of sensors and I decided to make anything that adds some luxury to my desktop experience. A really small hack and this is the result:
A visual luxury to my desktop’s front panel which shows realtime CPU and Memory usage with average temperature of all the cores and bonus an audio visualizer. How was it hacked? It’s an Arduino board that is bolted inside my desktop and communicates with a python server to get the stats serially over an internal USB connection via a FTDI chip. I don’t know if hooking an alcohol or a LPG or a carbon monoxide sensor can be a good idea to implement an alternative method to (say) login. The server has its own fake REPL, the code can be found in my hacktools repository where I put silly hacks like this one every now and then.
So, what have you done lately to pimp your desktop?
I just realized I tend to write all my programs exclusively in Python first. After watchin' all those crazy animals talk in those Lang.Next.2012 videos, for me time has come to learn a new language which is 20+ years old ;)
It’s an unnecessary overhead to do a lot of things inside (http) proxies. For example you cannot use services such as git, ssh, email/smtp, ftp right away when the only allowed ports are 80 and 443. To use Github over HTTP proxy you may use corkscrew over HTTPS; just put something like the following in your ~/.ssh/config:
Host gh User git Hostname ssh.github.com Port 443 IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa ProxyCommand corkscrew 10.1.1.18 80 %h %p ~/.ssh/proxyauth
Put username:passwd in the ~/.ssh/proxyauth file. Now, simply use normal git cmds, such as:
git clone gh:rohityadav/recipes.git
In case you’re lucky and have access to a computer that has unrestricted Internet (maybe your personal VPS), use tunnelling and port forwarding over ssh to connect to a particular host; for example:
ssh -L 2080:cvmappi09.cern.ch:80 <username>@lxplus.cern.ch
ssh -p 2080 username@localhost
Or, surf Internet over a SOCKS proxy, for example:
ssh -C2qTnN -D 8080 username@myserver -p 1123
How do you use it in a browser, say Firefox? In Firefox open about:config set the network.proxy.socks_remote_dns field to true and in proxy setting leave everything blank and put localhost as SOCKS host and whatever port (8080 in the example) you used.
Assuming you’ve a socks proxy like the one above, you can use proxychains to force any application to use that socks proxy by configuring /etc/proxychains.conf, and setting a suitable DNS server in /usr/lib/proxychains3/proxyresolv (default is 4.2.2.2). Now $ proxychains vlc on bash and listen to that awesome Internet radio station.
During the last round of a recent interview, the HR person asked me why I like to do x, y, z and my answer was: all of them are cool; s/he failed to understand and said — you just don’t do things just because they’re cool. I got the job anyway :P let me tell you why you should do anything if it’s cool. Doing cool things gets you amazing experiences, skills and even knowledge, with which you can accomplish awesome things. And the fact that you can change and adapt, helps you survive.
It’s amazing to know how, which, why and what tools people use to accomplish a certain task. When I see something cool, I would give it a try. For example I used to use an (ugly) OS developed by some North Atlantic company which must not be named, but about four+ years ago I attended a Linux workshop and saw some cool stuff you can do with it, so I switched to Linux!
Let’s take another example of how people use Twitter. These days most of us are on one or more social networks, but it’s interesting to know how, why and what networks we use more. Many of my friends are on twitter and only some may use it. Various reasons can be because; it’s short and simple; their friends are on it; many public figures are on it; easiest way to share and communicate etc. etc. Many tweet using their favourite desktop/mobile/tablet app, via the main website while some simpletons use command-line tools.
I prefer to use bitlbee for tweeting with irssi inside a screen and other tools such as vim, git, cmus, mutt etc. in tmux. Usesthis.com has a great collection of interviews around the same questions. So, how, what and why do you use some cool things to get your stuff done?
Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It's intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.
arduino.cc
First thing: get yourself an Arduino board from one of the popular online electronic shops like Sparkfun or some in India such as Robokits India and Rhydolabz.
One may use avr-gcc and avrdude if they choose to program in C using barebone Makefiles, but the easiest way to program an Arduino board is using the Arduino IDE that is supported on Linux, Mac OSX and Windows. Once you’ve the IDE and the board setup, get some LEDs or perhaps servos or sensors and play around the tutorials listed on the project webpage.
The Arduino IDE is written in Java and based on Processing and mainly uses avr-gcc, avr-dude. A typical Arduino sketch is written in Wiring, an open source electronics prototyping platform derived from Processing which has a simplified C++ language, an IDE and used for a single board microcontroller. In a typical sketch a programmer is only required to define two functions; setup() and loop(). When you compile your Arduino sketch, it simply generates equivalent AVR-C code and compiles it into an Intel hex file which is uploaded to the Arduino’s microcontroller’s on-chip flash memory by avr-dude. Many Arduino hackers use Fritzing, a project that aims at providing tools for designing and prototyping the hardware, pcb layout. Now start hacking Arduino Like a Boss™.
© Rohit Yadav 2009-2012 | Report bug or fork source | Last updated on 17 May 2012
