Perpetually Perplexed

Many changes have happened in the the past few days. So I am almost unable to access to net on my laptop. But anyways. So I was thinking, what is the reason my "Hundred" app is not getting popularity it deserves (ha ha). Is it because of lack of publicity? Or quality? Or UI? So let us revise the app all over again. Here is the link to its webpage https://hegdeapps.wordpress.com/shataka/ Hundred as the name indicates is a game where you need to place the numbers in a grid so that each horizontal line and each vertical line adds up to 100. It is quite simple but it hones your brain. Why don't you give it a try? and download the app?

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.

Today I was sad. No, this is not going to be another one of my endless stories about my "victimhood". No, I was sad because "Pretty little liars", the TV serial was over. May be for 100th time. Out of which I may have watched 50 of. We have shared so many meals together. Me, Aria, Hanna, Emily and Spencer. No, not Alison. I don't like her. She was wicked, once. Correction, I would bring in my meals and sit with Zee cafe. The story is about 5 childhood friends from a small town who are being harassed (!) by an anonymous 'A'.  A would ask them to do bad things failing which their dark secrets would be reveled. They are unable to find out who this A is, and why is she "harassing" them. For over 8 years!!! Alison, one of the liars goes missing presumed to be dead. But the turn of events convince the girls that "A" is Alison. After many episodes, Alison reappears, who is also a victim of A. Then there is a blind but vicious girl...

She was a little girl and had dengue. When the small clinic she was being treated advised, her parents took her to a very large hospital - part of huge network. She was kept in ICU for two weeks. Parents unable to understand anything would stand outside ICU praying. Many a times, no doctors were available. But her situations was getting terrible. When the father saw that her skin was all blue and wrinkled looking, he asked the hospital to discharge her. They did not agree. They wanted to do some "plasma transplantation" which would add another 10 lakhs. Finally she was discharged but with "against medical advice" tag from hospital. The original clinic tested her now and declared her dead. And the sad thing is the parents could not save their daughter even after spending 18 lakh rupees. No, I am not copying from some "crime story". This is the story of little Adya from Guragaon. I saw this in youtube channel akashvani and he was saying TV channel...

When I visit my parents, I will have a feast waiting for me. Literally and figuratively. I get to read various left leaning kannada magazines. So in one of those magazines I read about the famous quote by Kanakadasa "naanu hodare hodenu". I may go? Well the backstory goes like this. In a meeting of many poets like Purandaradasa, Kanakadasa etc., someone asked a question. "Out of all of us, who may go to heaven (after death)?" And Kanakadasa said "naanu hodare hodenu". How arrogant is he? He thinks he is the only bhakta (devotee, not in its current form). But he meant that if we leave our pride, self centered behavior, we will go to swarga. But I think, we don't even need to do that. We just need to stop thinking about others. Feeling jealous about others, anger, hatred, revenge all these feelings are our worst enemy. They not only stop us from reaching heaven (we are not so worried about that). They make our present life hell. But we say tha...

I have posted about this song earlier. But I do love the song very much. As it is much more relevant in these disturbingly divisive times. So please watch this video by Colonial cousins And here is the lyrics of the song.   

Before I was obsessed with these motivational or satirical quotes which are some times lame, I was interested in design ideas. No, I was not an entrepreneur then, nor am I now. But still I would look at those pictures and be "awed" by them. Now I don't even remember the site I used to visit. Today I went back to old hobby. And got some of them in pinterest. Do you like this mobile and pen stand? How about this scissors with its holder? And this cozy looking cave bedroom! Wow, who wouldn't want to sleep here? Get these colored showers in your home and your children will be too eager to take a bath. How about these beautiful bowls for chips and dip? Pool table cum dining table! Red chairs which hide the entire table. If only we knew carpentry and build at least one of these!  You would certainly want to buy this for your child. Doesn't matter if your child is all grown up and adult now.

Simon was a popular game in USA in 80s and 90s.  The device has four colored buttons, each producing a particular tone when it is pressed or activated by the device. A round in the game consists of the device lighting up one or more buttons in a random order, after which the player must reproduce that order by pressing the buttons. As the game progresses, the number of buttons to be pressed increases. There are some apps in google play which try to replicate the game. So does my my app - memorypro. As this is also memory colorful and melodious (almost) memory. Here is me playing simon game in my memory pro - not so well.  Well, I personally like playing Simon game as it appeals to one more sense, that of auditory. You can see and decide by downloading the app from google play

Thoughts From A Secular Humanist April 20, 2012 by Anita Jose  I have no invisible authority I am not mentally enslaved, I am not an unworthy sinner Who is waiting to be saved. My actions are my own Responsibility for which I will take, Credit for the good and penalty for the bad The payment for my deeds only I can make. I’m not the innocent, confused child; ‘Humble’ messengers try to find, I’m a skeptic with adult reasoning Who has left Faith behind. The answers gifted by logic and reason Are far more appealing to me, I keep searching for the still unknown Not fitting baseless assumptions dishonestly. Morality for me is not derived from an ancient book With tiring tales of brutality and occasional verses of love, To be good and to care for my fellow beings I don’t need promises of gifts from above. The knowledge and wisdom accumulated by science Sincere and provable, without disguise, Is what I find more comforting and reality revealing Tha...

I have written so many times about people trying to malign me in so many different ways. Now there are some people sitting across the road with their mobiles and I don't know maybe with the laptops. Do they  get connection to my computer?  I know you call me paranoid. But this is what happened since their "hiring". And they go away when I switch on my TV in the hall. They can not certainly hear the TV noise from so far. What is happening? And today a new situation has come up. Since this morning, all our land line calls are getting redirected to some other number. I am phrasing it wrong. They are not getting redirected, but they may come via some other number. Phone rings, when I pick up there is no sound. And when I check up the logs I see some unknown land line number. And the call was coming from my parents. Wow, things are only getting better. Now I do not  understand the situation, but I may have some idea behind the motives. I need to find a solution. But I a...