Prakash Advani's Blog

Motorola has announced Motorola Defy which is Water Resistant, Dust Resistant and Scratch Resistant. Which is excellent if you had kids around who like to throw phones into the water!

Here are some interesting features:

• 3.7″ touchscreen  display
• 480X864 resolution screen
• 5 Megapixel Camera with Video recording
• LED Flash
• 2 GB Internal Memory
• MicroSD Card slot for additional Memory
• 512 MB RAM
• Dual Band 3G and Quad Band 2G
• WiFi
• Bluetooth
• MicroUSB
• 3.5mm standard headphones jack
• AGPS and Digital Compass
• Accelerometer, Proximity Sensor, Light Sensor
• Android 2.1 with Flash player

What would be nicer:

If It has Android 2.2 update available which Motorola hasn’t announced yet, but is likely to come.

Nokia has serious competition with Videocon, Mcromax, Acer and Motorola launching sub $200 (Rs. 10,000) phones in India.

India already has the 2nd largest number of people accessing the internet from their cellphones.

Android should fuel this market as:

And yes it runs Linux

Nice article from PC World.

I have been using Torrents for Ubuntu downloads, do you?

From a Newsweek article:

What began as a trickle now has turned into a tidal wave. In August Google announced it was activating 200,000 Android phones each day. On at least one day since then, that number surged to more than 250,000, Rubin says. Android now has leapt past Apple to become the biggest smart-phone platform in the United States, the third-biggest worldwide, and by far the fastest growing.

Microsoft last week sued Motorola, alleging its Android phones violate Microsoft patents. Similarly, Apple has sued HTC over its Android phones, and Oracle has sued Google, alleging Android itself violates Oracle patents. If nothing else, the lawsuits demonstrate that rivals recognize Android has become a serious threat.

If you are planning to run torrent on a remote computer which you want to control using a browser, then TorrentFlux is for you. It allows multiple users to use one system as a torrent server.

I am running TorrentFlux on the Plug Computer, it works well. Its also easy to use and manage. Its available on standard Ubuntu repository so you can set it up on any desktop/netbook running Ubuntu.

Once Installed, just go to the IP address of the computer where Torrent Flux is installed. Eg.

http://192.168.0.1/torrentflux

Where 192.168.0.1 is the IP address of the computer where TorrentFlux is installed.

Here are the list of features.

• Upload Torrents via URL or File Upload
• Start, Stop, and Delete Torrents with a click
• Advanced Torrent start options (encryption, ports, speeds, etc.)
• Multi-user interface
• RSS Feeds, download Torrents files with a click
• View Download Progress of all torrents at a glance
• View drive space at a glance
• View Torrent file meta information
• Built-in User management and Security
• Private Messaging between users.
• Themes (selectable per user)
• Upload History
• Detailed User Administration
• Admin Searchable Logs
• Advanced Torrent Search (many major sites included)
• Cookie support at the user level for private trackers
• Queue Manager
• Maketorrent — supports making torrents
• Language Support
• Open Source (GPL)

TorrentFlux official website.

I am highly fascinated by the Plug Computer, ever since I got one (courtesy Marvell). Since its small, consumers very little power (2 watts) hence environmental friendly and can do a number of things like downloading latest Ubuntu  over night

I was trying to get Reliance Netconnect data card to setup on the Plug Computer, to be able to download during the night when its more cost effective to download. I have the plug sitting around for a year now but I finally thought of putting it to some use. The plug computer was pre-installed with Ubuntu 9.10, that runs an older kernel on which my data card was not detected. Hence I decided to install Debian.

I followed These instructions:  Installing Deiban on flashi.

Note: It is a long process to install, so attempt if you have ample amount of time and know Linux reasonably well. And yes are willing to burn the midnight oil

Most of the steps given on the wiki worked well. Here are a few suggestions based on my experience in installing.

• You can monitor the progress on another laptop, just connect a standard USB cable into your computer and plug the other side micro USB slot into the Plug Computer. Now start any terminal client (such as putty) and configure with the following settings:

Connection Type: Serial

Port: /dev/ttyUSB0

Speed: 115,200

Data Bits: 8

Stop Bits: 1

Parity (Bits): None

Flow Control: None

On Ubuntu,  I just start terminal and type

screen /dev/ttyUSB0 115200

This will show all the bootup messages  on the plug.

• You need an empty SD Card/USB pen drive plugged in. Without this, you will go through the installation process and then at the final stages it will not be able to install. This is because Debian first installs on an external media, and then you can copy the image to internal flash. Note: Ensure that you have 512-1GB free and its a blank SD Card/USB drive with no critical data as it will need to be formatted. I used

• I first tried to start the boot loader from a pen drive but I had all kinds of issues. I tried different pendrives/external drives, etc. But none of them worked. I tried formatting as fat32 and ext2, but no luck. I finally setup a tftpd server and that worked well. My suggestion is use a tftpd server. You can easily set this up on another Ubuntu system on the network. You will also need to open your firewall port for tftp to boot. Note: The standard tftpd server document is outdated, so better to install any other tftpd server such as atftpd or tftpd-hpa. I tried the atptpd and it worked well.

After going through the whole process, I was rather surprised to see that there was no wvdial,  so I used pppconfig, which took sometime to setup but worked with my 3G data card.

Ubuntu 10.10 is finally here. This new release is more  consumers focused and does numerous usability improvements.

Here are the download links. I have provided both Torrent links (which I prefer) and directly downloads:

Other Downloads.

Ubuntu 10.10 Videos demonstrating what’s new.

While looking for presentation tools, I came across PDF Cube. To use this, you need to convert your presentations into PDF. OpenOffice.org already has this feature of exporting your presentations as PDFs.

You also need to install this utility. On Ubuntu its already there in the  repository, for other Operating system you can download it.

Once your presentation is in PDF just go to terminal and type:

pdfcube filename.pdf

Replace filename.pdf with your actual file name.

Now the keys to use to see the effects during the presentation:

c : Will go to the next slide using a cube transition effect.

z : Will zoom in the center of the slide.

h : Will zoom in the top left part of the slide.

j : Will zoom in the top right part of the slide.

k : will zoom in the bottom left part of the slide.

l : will zoom in the bottom right  part of the slide.

The application is under development and expect to see more effects in the future.

The Canon Photoshot G12 is targeted as a backup camera to professional gear like DSLRs. These have a lot of features found in professional cameras in a compact form factor.

Canon was the first to reduce the megapixel with the G11. The reason for reducing megapixel was that with each increase in megapixel, there was a drop in image quality. Hence Canon decided to focus on improving image quality rather than increasing megapixel. If quality matters to you in a compact camera, then this camera is for you, if megapixel matters to you, then you need not read further

Here are some key features of the G12 which are carried over from G11:

• 10 Megapixel camera
• 5X wide-angel optical zoom
• 2.8″ swirl LCD
• Support for RAW
• HDMI connectivity
• Lithium Ion battery
• Built in flash
• 28-140mm (35mm equiv)
• ISO from 80-3200 (the G12 has more ranges)
• Weight: 355g

New features over G11:

• HD Movie mode (new addition)
• Hybrid IS (better image stabilisation)
• Support for SDXC cards.

My suggestions: If you don’t need the additional features, go with the G11 as you may get a nice deal.