Perpetually Perplexed

Water crisis is approaching all of us very soon. Already some where in Africa people are killing each other for water So we need to find a way  of conserving water. Water still is a machine which converts saline or dirty water into drinking water by distillation. Yes, we in India have large coastlines, and if necessary we can use sea water. But the costs are very high and are not affordable to rural poor. The people who need it most. An entrepreneur Garbiele Diamenti has designed a solar still which does not need electricity or any expensive parts.   This still is called EliDomestico. It works like this. " Pour water into the spout at the top and walk away. Thanks to the circular top, no matter the time of day, it's hit by maximum sunlight. The heat turns the water into steam, which travels down through a nozzle and condenses against the lid of the bowl at the bottom of the still. At the end of the day, the bowl is full of safe, potable water." The s...

I thought I will atleast create a poster with some body else's funny quote. Nope. I will take them from google

I have been watching some TED talks for the last few years. No, that has not made me a great scientist or an artist. But as long as I am watching them, I feel pure happiness - happiness which is not encumbered by greed, desire, guilt. It is a happiness of hope - for the humankind. So today when Ted talks India is being telecast in Star Network, I watched it. And I am happy, I watched the program. The speakers were, Shubhendu Sharma who creates forest within cities, in your backyard, and a scientist  from California who has made microscopes from papers, another engineer who is creating ink from pollution among others. So the idea is that the world is not filled with all bad people. There are good, intelligent people who strive to make our country and our world a better place. And TED honors these people and gives them a platform to share their ideas. So do not miss the show - Ted talk India - a nayi soch. I remember I had blogged about Satyameva Jayate too. Anyway we wat...

As is my habit, I was tweaking my ubuntu laptop and I deleted one unused partition. Then I continued working on the system. After I while I turned off laptop and went to TV. Coming back, I realized my system won't boot. Leave along booting, it was not even showing boot menu - the grub menu. Instead it was going to some grub rescue. Grub is a program which shows the OS options when you switch on the system. Yes, it is called grand unified boot loader. But currently it was not able to find the partition. After some googling, I came to know that I should find out the partition in which grub is present using ls command, then insmod something called "normal" and then execute normal command. And it worked, I did get back my boot loader. And hence could boot the system. So I keep thinking about this, many people like me may post the question about grub rescue, but who has the time, inclination and dedication to answer these? But there are. There are plenty of good Sam...

I hear this Kannada song in Soundcloud, which has lines    anu rEnu traNadalli paripUrNanu nInu    kshaNakshaNake avaguNagaLa kukarmi nAnu which roughly translates to    you are perfect in each and every molecule    but I am full of defects and am a bad person Some how, the song touches my heart. By the way it is a devotional song and I can not remember how it starts. So this perfect God has created men and women in his form and he made some of them like light, some of them like dark, some of them speak one language, some speak another language. May be he gave one religion to some people, another religion to some other people. So that people can hate each other and in some cases kill each other? Doesn't sound right! But this particular grouse of mine is not related to aptrard, siculars or any other adjectives here. I have gone global. I am watching this serial "Shots fired" and being troubled by its storyline.

I went out today because I had some work in the bank. Then? Then nothing. I went and finished my work and came back. Why am I telling you this? I thought it was important - me going out. Because everyone around me thought so. So I thought that too. Or may be they are wondering how do I still manage to get outside the house in spite of their slandering and mean intimidating. Is it?

I read a few days ago about a seminar for elderly regarding smart phone usage in Bangalore. A kind of workshop which was conducted on weekends. It was a good move. A very good move. But I feel these workshops have to be conducted in all towns in the state. See, our parents are compelled to use smart phones. And many of them struggle. They are afraid what may happen if they press the wrong button. They do not realize that the wifi on the phone should be switched on to receive whatsapp messages. So may be either the government or some NGOs can take the initiative and start conducting workshops - workshop on smart phones for elderly. In fact the attendees don't even mind to spend some money on these. And it will be an opportunity for them to get together. When did I become all preachy? Yesterday.

Today is the fourth day of sanyas from coding. Why is it? For how many days? Don't ask such meaningless questions. If you haven't understood so far, then you won't understand. So things are going good, I can say. Because TV is there. And it is OK for me to watch TV, I think. So I saw this movie today "Three musketeers". The story is that of young boys who leaves his small town in search of musketeers and wants to become one. He is bright, courageous and a little bit cocky (- only on Tuesdays, so he says). In Paris he meets the original three musketeers - Athos, Parthos and Aramis - a bunch of disillusioned warriors who have fallen into drinking and brawling. Because apparently they have not much to do. D'artgan, I think that is the boy's name - name is quite long and difficult, brings out the soldier in them back. They together fight with Cardinal's men. And are arrested for that. This Cardinal is de facto ruler because the King is very yo...

Articles are appearing about master plan for the city of Bangalore. There is a need for citizen partnership in this huge plan for our city. As we have seen this year like previous years, city struggles with lack of water and when it rains the streets are flooded. Few years ago, people would have found the idea of flood in a city with no rivers or seas ridiculous. But not now. Now every city in India shivers when it rains. Why? Why is the much anticipated rain becomes a curse? Because of our craze for cement. Every inch of the roads and houses and courtyards are cemented and there is no place for the rain water to percolate. What can water do, except to flood. There was a talk about rain water harvesting being compulsory few years ago. Is the rules still there? Is it being implemented? Is it being implemented in large corporate buildings? Government buildings? If all the possible buildings harvest rain water, many of them become self sufficient. And the pavements. They ...

Almost convinced that people are accessing my system and trying to find ways to stop them, I spent more time on various linux commands. And as I should have expected the terminal stopped working. I tried going to dash and again searching for terminal, shell, sh etc. I even went and checked whether I am running some script instead of original bash. bash, dash, sh no. I can not go to tty1 and run commands and come back to graphical ui every few seconds. I tried, tried and finally gave up and went back to TV. Luckily for me nothing interesting was running. So I half heartedly googled about no terminal. There it was. I should have looked at nome terminal. Not shell program. So I checked the location of that terminal program. And there was a python script in place of exe program. I corrected it and got back my terminal. Now I am even more convinced of rogues and rogues accessing my system. Ha ha.