The Painted Pot

This is the latest of Padmaja's experiments with painting pots. The pot was first painted orange and then Padmaja went to town with her box of paints.

Click the thumbnail below for photos. 

Album 48 - The Painted Pot

 

A Slide Show of the Pot Photos :-)

 

Bablu's Experiments With MS Paintbrush

Bablu loves to play with the computer. When he is not playing games, he is drawing pictures with MS Paintbrush. I showed him how to save his paintings and he hasn't looked back since then. These are a few samples of his work

Resurrection! The Home PC Is Alive Again :-)

Raghu (RR Peripherals) came over this morning to change the motherboard. It took about 30 mins for the entire process. I realized that I need a new SMPS. My current one is 300 Watts and the new motherboard needs 400 Watts. Anyway, it works for the time being and should be able to take the current load but I will change it as soon as I return from Rourkela (Munu's marriage) next weekend.

I had to spend another hour reinstalling all the key drivers (network, audio, video etc). Otherwise everything works like a charm. And the new 1Gb RAM makes it feel smoother than before (I had 512 Mb then).

Bablu came running to me half an hour ago asking if the "Computer Is Okay Now?". I grinned at him and said Yes. At this he ran back into their bedroom and triumphantly informed his elder sister - "I Told You So!". It seems he recognized the startup sounds that the PC makes on starting (Windows XP Pro) but could not convince his sis.

My Home PC Died, Long Live The Home PC

My home PC died yesterday night. It was a peaceful passing. The motherboard folded up, most probably because of CPU overheating. The CPU cooler has been giving me problems for a while now. I have to regularly clean out the heat sink vanes.

Luckily I had setup a wireless router last month. So I still have my Internet connection (on the laptop). But the home surveillance system is out of commission along with the web & FTP servers.

Raghu of RR Peripherals sold me the PC a couple of years ago. I contacted him this morning and he helped me identify the problem. He also directed me to a supplier for a new motherboard, Intel P4 chip and 1 Gb of RAM. He has promised to replace the motherboard etc tomorrow morning. I should be back in business by lunch tomorrow.

Battery Operated Laptop Light

Sometimes I need to work late and I prefer to curl up in bed with the laptop rather than sit in the study. For one, the bedroom is much cooler and infinitely more comfortable. The only problem is lighting. It is too dark to see the keyboard and the screen glare hurts the eye.

I solved these problems recently! Found this neat little battery powered light with a flexible cord that can be clamped to the side of the screen such that the light shines on the keyboard. It is bright enough to illuminate the keyboard without effecting the screen.

The little thingy takes 3 button cells which are typically Rs 2/- each. I have been using the light for well over 3 weeks now without having to replace the original batteries. That is about 2 hrs daily for about 15 days. I bought the light at Begum Bazar in Hyderabad.

Check out some action shots on my photo blog (taken with a Nokia 6600 camera phone).

(Posted via Thinga Web)

New Table Lamps For Mamli & Bablu

We recently bought a new study table for Mamli. I took her old table to use as a computer table and gave my computer table to Bablu. Mamli had a nice florescent tube earlier but the new table was too tall for the older lamp. I had to device a new lamp setup for her. This time I decided to be a little creative and built her a lamp from a L angle and an old plastic kitchen container.




Padmaja has made a nice little cloth fringe for the new lamps. I don't have a photo of that now.

Bablu's new lamp was in blue.

Help! I Just Received A Message From My Wife

I think my wife is trying to tell me something but I just can't figure out what! She sent me the text below in an email. Can anybody decipher the stuff and send me the message hidden in there?

Looks like plain old English to me. Every third letter perhaps? Or first letter of each word?

Grrr... Why can't women just tell you what is on their mind?

Anyway, do give it a try. if you decipher it I will be glad to hear from you!

Why Women R so Special...............

Mum and Dad were watching TV when Mum said, "I'm tired, and it's getting late. I think I'll go to bed."

She went to the kitchen to make sandwiches for the next day's lunches. Rinsed out the popcorn bowls, took meat out of the freezer for supper the following evening, checked the cereal box levels, filled the sugar container, put spoons and bowls on the table and started the coffee pot for rewing the next morning. She then put some wet clothes in the dryer, put a load of clothes into the washer, ironed a shirt and secured a loose button. She picked up the game pieces left on the table, put the phone back on the charger and put the telephone book into the drawer. She watered the plants, emptied a wastebasket and hung up a towel to dry. She yawned and stretched and headed for the bedroom. She stopped by the desk and wrote a note to the teacher, counted out some cash for the excursion and pulled a text book out from hiding under the chair.

She signed a birthday card for a friend, addressed and stamped he envelope and wrote a quick note for the grocery store. She put both near her bag Mum then washed her face with 3 in 1 cleanser, put on her Night Solution & age fighting moisturizer, brushed and flossed her teeth and filed her nails.

Dad called out, "I thought you were going to bed."

"I'm on my way," she said. She put some water into the dog's dish and put the cat outside, then made sure the doors were locked and the patio light was on. She looked in on each of the kids and turned out their bedside lamps and radios, hung up a shirt, threw some dirty socks into the hamper, and had a brief conversation with the one up still doing homework. In her own room, she set the alarm; laid out clothing for the next day, straightened up the shoe rack. She added three things to her 6 most important things to do list. She said her prayers, and visualized the accomplishment of her goals.

About that time, Dad turned off the TV and announced to no one in particular. "I'm going to bed."

And he did...without another thought.

Cleaning Out The Home PC

I decided to clean out the home PC this weekend. The cabinet has accumulated a good amount of dust, the CPU cooling fan is clogged and the key board is filthy. I see that Bablu has left pieces of his dinner on the keyboard.

The CPU fan is the most troublesome. Dust clogs the heat sink vanes and the fan can no longer cool the chip. If CPU usage crosses 50% the fan starts screaming. The noise is quite loud and very distracting. I have had a couple of system shutdowns because of overheating. The trick is to open the case and clean out the cooling vanes with a vacuum cleaner or a brush. I use a brush and a blower to get the worst of the dust out.

I also want to give over the entire hard disk to Windows XP. I had a dual boot with EduBuntu but I don't use Linux these days. My Home Security software runs under Windows and hence the PC is always up with Windows XP. I am running out of space on the hard disk. What with home security videos, web cam snaps shots etc, I have to keep cleaning up the older surveillance records every week or so. The 30Gb currently under Linux would be nice.

Well, I must backup all the required stuff, save the basic configuration before I nuke Linux and remove the dual boot. It is going to be a busy weekend.

An Inexpensive Home Surveillance System

I have been remotely monitoring my home for about a year now. I started with a small setup covering a single room and now have a complete system that covers all the main spaces in my home. Both my wife and I have access to the images when we are at work and this gives us a great sence of security. Also, all images from the system are archived on the home computer's hard disk for later viewing. Knowing what is happening at home with your kids and the maid while you are away at work is worth the money and effort invested in putting up a surveillance system. This post describes how I setup my system. It is fairly straight forward. But I did have my share of teething trouble :-)

My setup is fairly inexpensive and does not require high end surveillance gear. You can have a system up and running for a few thousand rupees.

Images from my Home Surveillance System

Components:

• Webcams: I have three cams running
  
• USB Cables: I use a mix of passive and active extension cables. More about this latter.
  
• A PC with a broadband Internet Connection: I use Iqara's "Unlimited" plan. It is useful is you have a static IP.
  
• Software on the Home PC: You need a Web Server & Web Cam software. I use Apache
  Tomcat for the server and VisionGS.
  
  

How much does it cost?

• Webcams: About Rs. 1000/- per cam.
  
• USB Cables: Passive cables (5 meters) come for about Rs. 150/-. Active cables cost about Rs. 1300/- each.
  
• Webcam Software: About $ 30/-. Credit card payments in Indian Rupees will typically attract a 3% fee.
  
• Internet Connection: Rs. 880/- per month for Iqara's Unlimited plan.
  

Setup:

The first thing to do is setup your webcam(s). Most cams come with a driver CD. The drivers for the cheaper cams are not so good and are liable to crash at times. So the better cams like the ones from Frontech (Rs 1000/-), Logitech (Rs. 2000/- and more), though more expensive, are a better deal. The high end cams will need active USB extension cables because their power requirements are higher and a passive cable just doesn't work. Okay, back to the process; connect your cam(s), install the drivers and test the cam. You should be able to view full motion video from the cam. Now disconnect the cam and connect it back via the extension cable. Check that everything is working fine.

The next thing to do is to install the VisionGS software. VisionGS is the capture & upload part of the system. This is the piece that connects to your cam, captures an image periodically and uploads it ti whereever you specify (locall hard disk or FTP server). Installation is fairly straightforward. The application is easy to use and you can default most of the settings. After installing VisionGS, create a WebCam in it and set it to use your newly installed cam. Leave all settings alone for the time being. Just make sure you can see the full motion video from the cam.

Now comes the tricky part. If you have a static IP address then you can choose to run a web server on your home PC. Otherwise you will have to upload your cam images to a remote web server via FTP. If you have your own web site this is fairly easy to do. However if you don't then you will have to hunt around for a service that allows FTP upload.

Let us assume that you have a static IP. In this case download and install Tomcat. You can also use Apache Web Server, IIS or any other system you like. I use Tomcat because I like it; it is easy to use; it is free; it is stable; and I use Tomcat for other programming tasks too. Once you have your web server running, create a context to host your cam images.

Go back to VisionGS and open the settings dialog for your Cam. This has a long list of settings but the ones we are interested in are:

• Capture/Upload: Here you specify the duration between captures
  
• Archive: You need this only if you decide to archive images on your hard disk or a FTP server.
  
• Location: Here you specify where you want VisionGS to put the captured images. Locally on your hard disk (web server's folder) or via FTP to a remote web server.
  
• FTP Server & FTP Account: You need these only if you are sending images to a FTP server.
  

The VisionGS Device Settings Dialog

VisionGS has a whole host of other neat features that you can use but for the sake of this article we will restrict ourselves to only the basic ones as described above.

Now that you have your webcam, the capture software and the web server installed, you are ready to test the system.

Fire up your browser and point it at your web server. If everything is working fine then you should see the image from your cam. Note that you will have to keep refreshing the page manually to see the updates.

In order to have the images refresh automatically we need to do a little more work. The first screen shot above shows a small Java viewer program that I wrote for my own use. However you can also achieve the same result using plain vanilla HTML & JavaScript. I use two HTML files to view the cam images: A "Launcher" page and a "Viewer" page. This is what the HTMl
Viewer looks like:

HTML Cam Viewer

I have uploaded a couple of sample files that you can use to get started. They are available here. You will need to unzip the file to get at the launcher and viewer code. The HTML code is fairly straightforward and you can edit the required parts to point at your cam image. Note the meta tag to refresh the cam viewer. It looks like this:

<META HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH" CONTENT="20"

Note that this code will refresh the page every 20 seconds.

These HTML files do not need to be on your web server. You can run them off your local hard disk at work. Putting them on the server does mean that you can access them from any Internet enabled PC.

Thats all there is to it!

I hope this post will help you setup an inexpensive home surveillance system of your own.

(Posted via Thinga Web)

Jyotiraditya being Naughty

Jyotiraditya or Bablu, as we call him at home is growing up to be a handful. He is naughty and he is an angel. We love him a lot. Here are some pictures of his recent antics. Mamli, my daughter, gave him a crayon and a piece of paper because he was crying. The little tyke went and drew all over the dinning room floor. We had a really tough time getting the crayon marks off.

Jyotiraditya in a naughty mood. "I have a crayon!!! And the walls look lovely"

The floor was better than the wall. Look at those cute curves...

"Real cool, eh? Ya right." First time I had to rub crayon marks from a concrete floor. Ya right...

Sunday afternoon. One of those lazy, summer weekends when clothes are better off than on :-)

Jyotiraditya with mom, Padmaja.

With dad at Runway 9.