Prakash Advani's Blog

Making your own herbal tea can be fun and keep you healthy too. Here is Herbal Tea-HOWTO. Herbal teas  boosts your immunity, maintain general good health and can be useful in curing common cold, cough, allergies and indigestion. For best results drink early in the morning.

Ingredients

• 5 Lemon Grass  – Good for Digestion and cold.
• Slice of Ginger root – Generates heat in the body, good for digestion, cold and throat, heart and prevents arthritis.
• 10 mint leaves (pudhina) – good for digestion.
• 5 tulsi leaves (holy basil) – good for immunity and memory.
• 5 whole pepper corns – good for throat and cold.
• Ajwain (thyme) – induces hair growth and provides relief from stomach problems.
• Honey for sweetness – good for throat.
• 1/2 Lemon – rich source of vitamin C. Provides cooling since we are using many hot herbs.
• 1 1/2 cup water.

Optional Ingredients

• Black Cardamom – it is very hot, useful in fighting cold, congestion.

Procedure:

• Wash the lemon grass and mint leaves thoroughly. Cut the lemon grass into smaller pieces for easy handling.
• Mix all the ingredients except the lemon and honey, which will be used later.
• Cover with a lid, Bring to a boil, reduce the flame.
• Boil on low flame for 30 min till it gets reduced to 1 cup.
• Strain, add honey, lemon and serve hot.
• Drink and Enjoy!

I installed AWN Manager on Ubuntu, following the instructions here.

Here is what I liked.

• It looks cool
• Can auto-hide, giving you more desktop real estate.
• Has cool applets like fortune which I enjoy reading and reminds me of bash days.

What I didn’t like

• It crops up when you don’t want it to.
• A little buggy, it doesn’t show when you want it to! and sometimes the icons goes missing, a refreshing of the screen fixing this issue.

If you have a point-and-shoot and long to have more professional features, you don’ t need to buy expensive new cameras yet. You can just enable many new features:

• With this tool, you can enable advance features in any Canon Camera.
• Supports advance features such as RAW support, additional to jpeg. This makes it easy to change white balance and other settings.
• More versatile shutter speeds from 1/60,000 to 34 Min
• You can write your own scripts or use ready scripts for motion detection and other features.
• Live Histogram capabilities allows you manage exposure correctly.
• Completely open source and GPL.
• And yes many other features.

Check the CHDK (Canon Hack Development Kit) website

My earlier post on this.

Please make sure your camera is supported before you mess with your firmware and yes, this may void your warranty or could make your camera paper weight, so standard disclaimer applies

See some really cool sample images created using this.

1/60,000 shutter speed.

Hummingbird.

Lightning captured using motion sensing.

Nikon has released P90, which is a prosumer camera, featuring functions found in professional cameras. This is a good alternative if you need more than a point-and-shoot but are not yet ready for an SLR.

Many people buy an SLR and then they continue to shoot in auto mode because they don’t know how to use the other features. Or once they start using those features, they don’t have the means to buy all the lenses.

A very good alternative is the Nikon P90, which has several features found in an SLR with the only limitation that you can’t change the lens. The need of which may not arise as the lens included is quite versatile.

What I liked.

• 24X Optical Zoom
• 12Megapixel camera
• Vari-angle LCD
• Image Stabilisation
• 3″ LCD
• 2.8 Aperture
• ISO 64-6400
• Electronic View Finder
• Option of Manual Mode, apart from Program model, Aperture/Shutter priority
• Face detection and Smile mode, automatically releases the shutter when the person smiles.
• Blink warning, warns you if the person has blinked.
• Macro mode
• Li-on battery
• SD Card
• 460g Weight
• Shutter speed upto 8 seconds, wish they had more
  

What I didn’t like:

No RAW mode.

I compared the hardware requirements of a popular Linux Desktop: Ubuntu 9.10 with Windows 7  both of which were released last month.

Ubuntu 9.10 remained a modest 265MB memory with 300MHz computer. Also Ubuntu can run on lesser hardware as well, if you have 128MB Memory, you can still use Xbuntu (a variant), or if you have 64 MB you can use LTSP and run Ubuntu off a central server.

Now Windows 7 demands 1GB Memory with 1GHz computer.

While Windows 7 required 16GB of space to install, Ubuntu can be installed on on less than 4 GB of space.

Some people may argue that hardware is getting cheaper by the day, however there are millions of PCs around in the world which won’t be able to run Windows without an upgrade. If the use Ubuntu, they will save on upgrade costs and hurt the environment less by not having to throw away their old computer.

Some interesting findings: Ubuntu’s hardware requirements has not changed in the last 8 releases over the last 4 years.

Even thought Vista Basic  claimed that it requires 512MB RAM and Vista Business claimed 1GB. Both crawled on 1GB of RAM and required 2GB to run effectively with 15GB of disk space.

Sources:

Ubuntu Release Notes
Windows 7 System requirements.
Windows Vista System requirements.

After all the megapixel race where camera manufacturers were increasing megapixels with each new model, Canon is the first to reduce 14.7 megapixel to 10 megapixel.

I have been saying this all this while, that megapixels don’t matter any more and I am happy that Canon is doing the right thing.

When Canon came up with a new model of G11 which replaces the G10, they decided to reduce the megapixel and improve the image quality. What they found was that while increasing megapixels was making the customer feel that they are getting something better, it wasn’t adding any much value other than increasing the file sizes. In fact it was generating more noise at higher ISOs, resulting in poor photo quality.

Here are some key features of G11, which is a professional quality point-and-shoot. Designed to be as a backup camera for professionals.

• 10 Megapixel camera
• 5X wide-angel optical zoom
• Optical Image stabilisation
• 2.8″ swirl LCD
• Support for RAW
• 2 Stop advantage over G10, due to reduction in megapixel and increasing sensor sensitivity
• VGA Movies
• HDMI connectivity
• Lithium Ion battery
• Built in flash
• SD/SDHC card support

Looks like a good option of you need better photo quality and features, want to move up from a point-and-shoot and are not yet ready for an SLR.