AEGIS is an EC-funded FP7 project that seeks to determine whether 3rd generation access techniques will provide a more accessible, more
exploitable and deeply embeddable approach in mainstream ICT (desktop, rich
Internet and mobile applications).
You can now view the AEGIS project video online here.
Just discovered HandBrake video encoder. It is free software encoder that allows you to convert your videos into various video formats. Whether you are sharing videos on Youtube, Vimeo or transferring them to portable devices like iPod, iPhone and Android based devices. HandBrake is the tool for you and its cross platform video encoder that also available on Windows and Mac.
Why use HandBrake, when you got powerful video encoders like mencoder, ffmpeg. Well, I find HandBrake interface far more intuitive, it does not expect the user to know a lot of video encoding or use arcane command line options.
You can get the HandBrake packages from John Stebbins HandBrake PPA.
# Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:stebbins/handbrake-snapshots
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install handbrake-gtk
# Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick
# Add a deb line to your /etc/apt/sources.list & Get the publickey
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/handbrake-snapshots/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install handbrake-gtk
The first step for creating audio description for movies is to extract the audio content. We can do this quickly using little bit of mplayer command line kung fu.
mplayer -novideo -quiet -vc null -vo null -ao pcm videofile
[ OR ]
mplayer -novideo -quiet -vc null -vo null -ao pcm:file=audio.wav videofile
You can easily join the extracted audio with the audio description track using the Mencoder (MPlayer's Movie Encoder). Right now I haven't completed audio description for a feature length movie yet. My Gnome accessibility works takes a large chunk of my time. If you are interesting in working something like that, get in touch with me.
Last week I traveled to Hyderabad to talk about 'Linux for Linguists' at the Sanskrit Computational Linguistics Symposium workshop. Department of Sanskrit studies, University of Hyderabad organized this national workshop titled "Sanskrit and Computers, Getting equipped to face new challenges".
Few years ago I spent sometime working with newly created department of Sanskrit Studies learning the fundamentals of computational linguistics. I return to the department every year to work with the researchers. They use Ubuntu Linux for their work, the Ubuntu logo kolam at the entrance of the workshop was a surprise. 
The event had yet another surprise in store for me. Thirumala Kulkarni introduced Linux in the Sanskrit, one of oldest language of the world. Can you match that ! .
The first part of my talk was a demo of Ubuntu Linux LiveCD and how to install Ubuntu Linux on their personal computers. In my talk I introduced Linux and its numerous toolset that can be used for linguistics research. The talk was peppered with humour rather than technical jargon and I ended my talk asking the research to contribute back to the Ubuntu Linux project.
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The response from the participants of the workshop was very positive and inspiring. The event did generate a lot of interest and hope it will help more people adopt gnu/Linux for their research work.
Few hours ago I heard that my friend Jawahar Patani finished the documentary about Rural Internet Kiosks(RIK) project. I have been helping this project for while now. I hope that this documentary would spread the word about this wonderful initiative.
Please visit www.ruralinternetkiosks.com to learn more about this project.
This short documentary features ICT development in Africa with emphasis on how the Rural Internet Kiosk (RIK) is changing the way rural Africa communicates. The Rural Internet Kiosk is 100% solar powered and is connected to the Internet via Satellite using Astra2Connect VSAT technology.
You can watch the part 1 and part 2 of this documentary on youtube.
I lived in Kerala for over an year now. Never had a chance of watching Kalarippayattu, the oldest fighting system in existence. Last evening I visited Thapovan to watch a demostration of Kalari.
Louis the cat caught on camera for the first time. Louis named in honour of Louis Braille, he showed up at the IISE campus one day and adopted us.
Just found out that this expensive piece of hardware has turned into a brick because it wasn't charged for a while (Damn!).
Why do we buy this shit anyway?
Allow me to vent my anger with this yet another great news clip from the Onion News Network .
