Tech Talk

I have this age old machine in my hostel room. It is a 800MHz Celeron with 256M RAM. That is a good combination for CLI guys like me. It runs debian sid. Its primary purpose is documenting work over night, practicing a couple of scripts, occasional programming and movies. I use the gui only when browsing shares over dc, internet and movies. For movies I use no window manager. Default WM shifts between icewm and fluxbox.

I have installed iceweasel and dillo from the repository. Using iceweasel used to kill my machine. I can’t open a second tab and the machine resource monitor graph is mostly clamped to the top 98%. So, you know what time I spend on the internet after I get to my room.

Anyway, last weekend I downloaded firefox 3. Believe it or not, I am able to run firefox 3 along side django test server and emacs without saturating the machine resources. And even otherwise, I am able to have at least 3-4 tabs simultaneously open on my machine. I almost can’t believe this. Now I am really wondering if I ll update my firefox 3. I am just scared it might become memory hungry when they finally release it.

Tags: firefox_3, debian, resources, efficient

Had no internet yesterday. And this is not the first “no-internet” days after I changed my ISP. Incidentally, I changed the ISP because of “no-internet” weeks. Anyways, this no-internet day seems to do me some good. I was really wondering how people on the move with laptops and mobiles for internet manage to blog, if they do that is. There had to be some offline editors such that you can publish when you have a connection..

I was not alone and there are people who have thought on these lines. Some links I found are here and here.
And with google I found these tools.

• Qumana
• Drivel
• Bleezer
• ScribeFire

Each has its own set of goods and bads. Just trying out drivel, bleezer and scribefire. Qumana is for Mac and Windows, neither of which I use now! Should see what I end up with. Wondering if it is any good to try and write my own offline blog editor, for the heck of it ?!

Blogged with Flock

Tags: blog, offline, links, rambling, web

Got this link from digg.com. A robot from coat hangers. I hope I have the time to try this out! Here is the link
http://www.streettech.com/robotbook/walkerFinal1.htm

Got this from Make Blog. Quite a few interesting stuff feature here. I wouldn’t say I am a regular here, but today I found this rather interesting robot that can draw (or write, whatever). Thats a real cool idea to try. Here is the link. Cool, ain’t it?

No, these are not videos from some “star trek” kinda movie (at least I hope they aren’t). Well, I found this interesting. Its a robotic leg and has almost all movements of a human leg. More from the same company here. The second bunch are of a robotic arm. The first video is also on their site, here. I think you will like them too.

Hey People,

I do not know if you are into podcasting at all, but more recently after I got my video iPod, I ve become some fan of the whole idea. I set out searching for some interesting stuff on robotics, when I landed here. I ve got all three episodes on my pod and I would suggest you try this too. I am just beginning to listen them. But I am just not going to review anything. The idea is blessed and it should help a lot of enthusiasts. So, no reviews to bias them!

I got another link from a google group on Robotics that I had recently subscribed to recieve some mail. It is here. Maybe you already know about it!

Last post on New Age Ideas is now kinda making me feel dumb. How could I have forgotten Bluetooth and think of WLan?? I have also managed a bunch of developerWorks links for some high level design ideas. You can find some of them in the robotics tag here.