DYPC on Radio Active Community Radio 90.4

Radio Active - Community Radio

Cross-posted from DYPC blog.

One of the volunteer’s at DYPC, Aman Jain presented us with a nice opportunity to talk about DYPC on Radio. Aman is dynamic youngster, apart from his day job and his social initiative The Zav Foundation, he is also a RJ at the Community Radio station called Radio Active. It is being run by the Jain Group Of Institutions in Bangalore and has a impressive listener base. Aman is hosting a program series called “Youth in Action” and he offered to cover DYPC as one of the youth initiatives.

The show is a bilingual and targeted at both english and kannada speaking audience. So, we had to find one person who would be able to field questions in Kannada. So, I roped in Jayashree (my wife) to be the one to speak in Kannada.

On Saturday (26th Sept)  morning me and Jayashree along with our 18month old daughter Gargi started off at around 7:45 am to be at the recording studio in the Jain University Centre for Management Studies. Aman was already there waiting for us. He showed us the studio and also explained us about the show he was hosting and the motivation for having a community radio station. We also met Ramya, who manages the recording studio.

The recording took around half an hour and Gargi had a nice time looking around the radio studio and was very co-operative not to disturb us.

Meeting Aman was a nice experience. We discussed a lot about the good work he is doing as part of the The Zav Foundation and how we could help each other.

The show will be telecast after 15th October. Will update with the exact time and date once I hear back from Aman.

goodOS on virtualbox

In my search for a lightweight OS for a spare laptop which has fairly minimal resources to run a full OS. I tried installing goodOS on my virtualbox and am quite happy with the initial experience.

The process was fairly straight forward. Just downloaded the iso from http://gos1.losslessrecords.com/gos/gos-3.1-gadgets-20081205.iso. The download did take sometime though.

And used the iso to boot a new vm in virtualbox. Found it good. Will give it a try on the old laptop sometime next weekend. I might face some driver issues. Lets see.

Some screenshots below from running it in virtualbox.

goodOS1

goodOS2

Looking for an intelligent feed reader

I use google reader to read most of the RSS feeds that I subscribe to. Last week I got hooked on to twitter and am now following few friends and few other people who tweet interesting stuff. Now here is my problem.

Most of the tweets are not simple sentences. They are usually a few words followed by a small url (from bit.ly or tinyurl or some other url shortener). To be able to read the stuff I need to open the browser and read through the article. I may or may not like the article. So, sometimes I end up spending time reading atleast 10-15% of the article which I might not like.

What I need is an intelligent feed reader which can parse my RSS subscriptions and twitter feed and provide me a summarized view of the stuff. It should also have a way of recording my likes or dislikes for the article that I read. Over a period of time it would have a fair amount of idea of whether I would like an article or not and prioritize the display of the feeds based on my interests.

Not sure if someone is already making such a tool or if such a tool already exists.

DonateYourPC is now on twitter.

Follow DonateYourPC.in on twitter at @dypc

Installing apps on Live Android

After playing around with the liveandroid instance on my Virtualbox VM, it was time to try out installing some apps.

Few basic things first:

1. For switching to the console mode / terminal screen press : Alt-F1
2. For switching back to the GUI mode from console mode press : Alt-F7

I read about how to install apps here.

Android apps are files ending with .apk. And all that is needed to install the app is to copy the *.apk file to the /system/app folder. Image-1 shows how my /system/app folder looks like after I have installed a few apps.

So the only task remains is downloading the apps and copying them to the /system/app folder. For downloading apps try any of the following:

1. Download the AndAppStore Client – and use this client to browse and install apps. I find this as the best way.
   1. Either wget http://download.funkyandroid.net/SoftwareDirectory-1_3_0.apk
   2. Or, click on http://andappstore.com/AndroidApplications/apps/125845!download
   3. Ensure that the SoftwareDirectory-1_3_0.apk is copied to the /system/app folder
   4. Switch back to the GUI view (Alt-F7) and go to the menu screen, and you can see the AndAppStore Client – Seen as Software Directory (See image-2)
2. You could also browse apps at http://www.cyrket.com/
   1. Download the apps directly from the browser
   2. The apk file is downloaded to /sdcard/download
   3. Switch to console mode (Press Alt-F1 )
   4. cp /sdcard/download/* /ststem/app/
   5. chown 1000:1000 /system/app
   6. Switch to the GUI mode (Press Alt-F7) – That is it, you should be able to see your app !

image-1

image-2

How to increase the main text area of your blog on wordpress

Well this might sound pretty simple for people experienced with setting up blogs. However, since I faced this issue and was unable to find a straight forward answer to it, I thought this post might help others when they face such issues.

If you are unable to understand what I mean. See the screenshots below :

image-1

The image-1 is a blog which has wide sized text area, making it easier to have longer posts and also media (photos/viodeo clips) placed conveniently. However, the image-2 is a blog with a very narrow main text area which makes things a little diffucult for making longer posts and placing media.

So, with wordpress there are two ways to get the kind of view in the image-2.

1) Buy custom CSS upgrades from wordpress, and use your CSS skills to modify the CSS code to reflect the changes you want to. This will cost you depending on the amount that wordpress wants to charge for the custom CSS upgrade.

2) The other simpler option can be to use a Theme which allows flexible-width. This is free of cost and the only downside is that you need to use a different theme, and that there are not too many themes with flexible-width option. But then if you are not too keen on spending money to get this done and are able to find the theme that suits your liking and also also allows you flexible-width blog, then this is the way to go. I have used this option !

If you would like exploring more on how to chose the theme for your blog, there are many posts out there already. Just google “how to chose the right wordpress theme”.

90 Degrees Internet : Travel Search Site

I came across this very cool site for travel planning and thought I should write about it.

90 Degrees Internet is very nice. You can get to know of all the means of transport from point A to B, with the cost, availability of seats, routes etc. in just one search and that too for Tran, flight and Bus.

I really like the concept and feel they will do pretty well.

(PS: I am in no way associated with the 90di.com guys)