Kindle Under Your Nose

Using Design to Surpass My Experience of Reading A Book

Attention to detail. Carved out a notebook handcrafted in India, into an Amazon Kindle book-cover for myself.
Attention to detail. Carved out a notebook handcrafted in India, into an Amazon Kindle book-cover for myself.

You use your nose to read a book.

The faint smell of ink mixed with that sharp note of glue, and of course the woody smell of paper. Your fingers love the assuring texture and of paper as you unfurl your mind and curl up your body with your favourite book. When you finally close your droopy eyelids, you love the book resting on your chest, as if in a gentle embrace, while your imagination expands into your dreams with the fantastic worlds conjured by the living words of the book.

No such magic happens when you read an eBook.

The plasticy feel of the Amazon Kindle clutched in one hand is a barren, stark experience. Geeky perhaps. But shorn of the aesthetic breakthrough Gutenberg achieved with his first printed Bible in hot metal type. Even today, Gutenberg’s Bible is considered a marvel of design, typesetting, and illumination. So what is it that Jeff Bezos lacks with the Amazon Kindle?

Amazonian Jungle of Design

I carefully studied the user-interface design of the Amazon Kindle, now in its 7th incarnation with a touch-screen, 6-inch ink-display. The initial simplicity of design over this Linux-driven device peeks through. Just a screen with text typeset to the font and size of your liking, with margins you can choose, and with a single long-press to look-up the dictionary or a wikipedia-entry. Convenient and intuitive. A gentle tap on either side moves to the previous or the next page. However, with each new feature and extra option added over versions, the patchy, shoe-horned approach to design begins to show its signs. Even after three months of heavy use, I tend to get as lost and bewildered in the rabbit-hole of menus and options, as Alice in a Matrixed-wonderland.

Are You Experienced?

One evening, after the first session of one of my Design workshops, I sat alone, visualizing how I would overhaul the user-interface design of the Kindle for the third decade of the 21st century. Lots more can be achieved by not doing, and by leaving things out, in design. But is it all about the UI bass, no treble? Curious, I called some of my friends who use the Kindle. The response was universal. Each felt disappointed by eBooks and expressed something lacking with reading pixels. That may explain why sales of eBooks have suddenly plateaued across the world and printed books have rebound.

Aha! Here then, is where user-experience is the real bottleneck. I can’t fix the user-interface design of the Kindle as Amazon has locked it all away. But I can certainly fix the user-experience. All I need to do is to focus on the nose.

Hina Khan with the hand-crafted book-cover she made for me.
Hina Khan with the hand-crafted book-cover she made for me.

Notebook by A Student

I got in touch with Hina Khan, one of the students I have been mentoring in design since several years. In the past ten years, Hina has come to me every few years, just to sit and learn over several months, some aspect of design, color, photography, and more recently, typography. Hina is quite a versatile creative-professional, dabbling in many disciplines of art, design, and creativity. So when she ambled in one fine morning for her mentoring session on the complexities of free-culture, I gave her my DRM-ensnared and restrictive Kindle as a side-project.

The brief was simple. Let’s take a beautiful, handmade and organic notebook or diary which is made in India. Carve out the inside pages hollow and glue them, to form a cavity into which the Kindle tucks in. Hold it down with elastic or a thread or something. Embellish the design at will. And here, ladies and gentlemen, is how and what she crafted.

Diary of An Amazonian Madman
Diary of An Amazonian Madman

Hina caught the Delhi Metro to Chandni Chowk to deftly skip back in time by three centuries. She scoured the small by-lanes in search of a handmade notebook or diary of the required size and aesthetics. Surprised at not finding anything worthwhile, she did shop for a variety of exotic hand-made papers and art-supplies for her other various projects. Hina then searched the more artsy Khan Market  where at last she spotted just what she wanted. A notebook with screen-printed inscriptions in Hindi and Urdu, some quite incomprehensible, but nevertheless beautiful in its calligraphic style.

 

Don't judge this book by its cover
Don’t judge this book by its cover

She bought this silky azure ribbon and handed it to a tailor to carefully stitch it around the border.

 

Kindle Book-cover
Kindle Book-cover

From her collection of wood-block prints, Hina stamped a paisley design on front-side of the notebook, and then meticulously painted it in by hand.

 

Illustrated inside-cover of the Kindle book-cover
Illustrated inside-cover of the Kindle book-cover

Why tweet about a book when you can have a birdie in the inside front-cover? Yes! an original illustration by Hina drawn and traced onto that red paper, and then glued to the inside-front of the Kindle cover. The hollowed-out pages of the notebook were glued together and stuck into the inside-back, and then painted orange.

 

Opening an eBook, the organic way
Opening an eBook, the organic way

The final finish of the book-case, with the Kindle embedded.

Niyam Kindle
Niyam Kindle

Hina braided this cord, then punched two holes into the back of the book-cover and tied it in. We noticed the cord holding the Kindle in was a bit bulky as well as loose, causing the device to often fall out of its crevice.

 

Improved design of the Kindle cover
Improved design of the Kindle cover

So Hina promptly replaced it with two elastic bands in white.

 

Magnum opus of design for user-experience
Magnum opus of design for user-experience. Proud of the design and craftmanship of Hina Khan.

 

The New User-Experience of Kindle

Here at last was a Kindle with a spine. That was what was missing in the experience all along. The feel of a real and more importantly, organic, hardbound cover. The flourish of calligraphy with Indic scripts. The touch of silk. The smell of real paint-inks and not just printing inks. And the feel of handmade paper inside.

Now I find offset-printed books too mechanically perfect, machine-made and precisely trimmed. A product of an industrial age that dehumanizes, scales monstrously in the name of economy, and ravages the environment. A machine-made book is not compatible with the new value-systems of the more sensitive 21st century. Why sacrifice a tree for just one, and usually expensive and disposable book, when you can just make one hand-made book-cover, and read thousands of books-as-software inside. All this while enriching and enhancing the ‘real’ experience of reading a ‘real’ book.

 

Free Culture

Speaking of free-culture, should you wish to replicate the design of this ‘Kindle book-cover’, be happy to know it is published under a creative-commons license, specifically the cc0 license. The design of the original handbook may be subject to copyright by its author. What this means is that you may freely replicate this design, modify and adapt it, to make your own Kindle-cover or iPad cover, a book-case or a hide-out case or piggy-bank or anything else you can conjure up. You may choose your own colors and materials, improve upon this, use a different handbook or even a hardbound or paperback book, and kickstart a cottage industry around this. A few are already doing this around the world.

I’d be happy to see your designs. Please share them by posting them on my FaceBook page on design here: fb.com/niyamdive 

So get yourself a Kindle or any other eBook reader, and make this Earth into a lotus-paradise.

 

Autobiography of an Android Yogi

Why I’ve Stopped Using A Smartphone, And So Will You.

Autobiography of a Lenovo Yogi
Why I stopped using a smartphone. While being irreverent to one who is irreverent. With my Lenovo Yoga 2 tablet and a Moto 360 smartwatch, circa December 2014 onwards.

 

The increasing momentum of my digital life, personal and professional, was suddenly hurled over a precipice into a beep-less, soundless, vacuum. All thanks to my Samsung Galaxy Note. One moment it was an artsy, smartsy phablet. The next moment it frapped into an inert, lifeless brick while in the middle of a battery-recharge. As abruptly simple as that. The experience reminded me of one of my favourite meditation techniques: The Stop Exercise by the mystic master, Gurdjieff. The great aspect of the Stop! Meditation is when you re-emerge from it, something intrinsically changes in you. Maybe that explains why I wish to explore a new way of living and working digitally without a traditional smartphone.

 

Yoga: The Alpha and the OMG!

What’s better than using a smartphone? In fact, what is it that a smartphone aspires to be? A tablet, of course. So I immediately started researching on the most suitable tablet for my needs, one which can also handle voice-calls and SMS-texting. That immediately ruled out the Apple iPad. Try this experiment for yourself: Look at the price of an Apple iPhone 6 plus. Then look at the price of a 7-inch iPad. Do you realize a 7-inch iPad is nothing but a larger 5.5-inch iPhone, with similar or same features, the same iOS, the same apps, but with voice-calling disabled? It still has cellular network connectivity, mind you. So then exactly what is it that merits an iPhone to be so expensive? Your hypnotism that a smartphone is meant to be expensive, while a tablet is meant to be a cheaper alternative to a laptop. If anything, the iPad should have actually been more expensive than the iPhone 6 plus, given the larger screen. Yet in a rather twisted way, the top-end iPhone 6 plus can be 250% to 300% more expensive than the price of an iPad mini. Emphasis on the hundreds of percent here, for the same tech.

 

The other thing I want is freedom. The freedom to have a micro-SD card in which I may freely drag-and-drop all my music, photos, and videos, and carry it around. Good luck with that shiny Apple thingie. First, you don’t even get a micro-SD card. And forget about the woes of using iTunes. I love the simplicity of using a pen-drive or a micro-SD card to manage my music-collection. My way. The lack of a micro-SD port on the new Google Nexus also puts it to shame, and out of this race. Again, do note how much you pay for a 32GB or 64 GB microSD card or pen-drive. Then take a look at how much Apple charges you for moving up from a 16GB Apple iPhone to a 64GB one. Har! Har! No wonder they don’t want to offer you a micro-SD port.

Okay, so everything I need in a smartphone, I have here. Rear and front-facing cameras. GPS for navigation, audio-jack, microUSB, sensors, Bluetooth. The battery especially is impressive at 6400mAh which can even be used to charge your other devices. The greatest joy is I get to install all my favourite apps from the Android store. Can you imagine the experience of WhatsApp, Telegram, FaceBook, web-browsing, Google Maps, on a gigantic 8-inch screen at full HD resolution? You may never want to look at your scrawny 5-inch smartphone screen again.

 

Witnessing the Watch

For a phablet that large, my life has surprisingly become so hands-free. I feel freed from the tyranny of having to constantly clutch a smartphone, or pull out one about a hundred times a day to glance and respond to the constant stream of interruptions. I carry the Yoga tablet 2 in a smart and artsy sling-back, which was originally meant to be an iPad slingbag. Often, I just dump it in my laptop bag, or leave it aside on the co-passenger seat or even the backseat while driving. No more distractions. A discreet bluetooth headset perched on my ear allows me to make and receive calls.

The jewel is of course the Moto 360. All incoming calls, tweets, facebook messages, emails, WhatsApp and Telegram messages, SMS-texts, and several other types of notifications from many other apps, land straight on my wrist. Just a glance is enough, followed by a swipe or two on the watch screen. The battery on both devices lasts me a full day of solid work with no need to recharge. I pair my interaction with the devices using Google talk. It still has issues in recognizing Indian names to call, so am waiting for that experience to improve. A smartwatch is a winner of an idea. While people are predicting the failure of the Apple watch, am quite confident the market for smartwatches is going to explode. The smartphone does need a smartwatch. There are new paradigms at work here. Apple may emerge the top smartwatch maker in the world, but Android will have the largest marketshare by far. Don’t kid yourself about a smartwatch. This paradigm-shift is here to stay.

Suffice to say I get a complete 100% overlap of all the features and tasks I expect from a smartphone. Now comes the stimulating part, the extra and new experiences and discoveries I couldn’t even have imagined. And which take me into a new leagues with experiencing smart mobile devices.

 

Beyond The SmartPhone

The first experience which is completely new for me, is the lavish 8-inch screen on which to surf the web and watch videos, at full HD quality. It’s like moving out of a congested single-room apartment into a mansion with gardens. This is not an incremental jump from a 4-inch screen to a 5-inch one or 5.5-inch screen. My first Apple Macintosh computer, the Mac 512K launched in 1985, had a 9-inch greyscale screen, with less than one-fourth the resolution of this Yoga tablet.

Then comes the music. The Lenovo Yoga tablet 2 ships with large, stereo speakers built-in, and with Wolfson audio-processing and Dolby. The sound, though near-field and moderate in volume, has to be heard to be believed. At my table at work, the side-table at night, or even at impromptu moments, I just prop up the Yoga and play some music. When I wish. It’s so personal. Indeed, I bought the first Yoga tablet in April of 2014 for my mother, as a personal music-player and iPod-replacement. Take a look at the pic here, with the two Yoga tablets. The ease with which I can manage my music-collection, share files, look up and play music, find albums, just cannot be beaten by an Apple iPod or iTunes. That era is finally over.

Excellent replacement to an iPod. The external 64GB card holds a massive collection of music, especially music for active meditations and a huge selection of English and Hindi discourses from Osho. As well as eBooks and a smattering of videoes.
Excellent replacement for an apple iPod. The external 64GB card holds a massive collection of music, especially music for active meditations and a huge selection of English and Hindi discourses from Osho. As well as eBooks in both languages and a smattering of videoes.

 

The Lenovo Yoga 8 as a replacement for an Apple iPod goes further. Using the new dual-plug microUSB pen-drives, you know the types that have a standard USB plug on one side, and a microUSB plug on the other, I can effortlessly and seamlessly transfer music on-the-go back and forth between my tablet and my laptop and even to or from another smartphone. While listening to an Osho discourse, if I find the mp3 file suffering from audio problems, I can just launch the web-browser, and download a newer version of the file from the Oshoworld.com site. I’ve set up a sleep timer that switches off the music or the discourse automatically after 45 minutes. And auto-starts with a playlist of music with which to start the day early in the morning. I can freely create my own playlists with gaps of silence, for meditations when requested. Indeed, my mother uses the Yoga tablet without a SIM card, and as a dedicated music-player, which in her own words, has a gorgeous, large, and colorful user-interface and a user-experience that is far more delightful, and easier, to use than an iPod.

The cylindrical housing of the battery is a unique aspect of the design. It offers a better grip than the tiring one required to hold a razor-thin tablet or smartphone for longer durations. It feels like a curled book or magazine. Indeed, the Yoga tablet offers a great experience for reading eBooks.

I just finished reading ‘Autobiography of a Yogi’ on the Yoga. This is the book by Paramahansa Yogananda that Steve Jobs had willed to be gifted to everyone who attended his funeral. More on this book someday perhaps in another blog-post. I find reading books on Yoga a joy. Okay, that’s a pun, I obviously mean the tablet, not just the topic. Then there’s Zinio and the ability to read all my favourite magazines in a digital format. The large screen is just so much more comfortable.

 

The Path of Renunciation

There are still a few minor things to sort out. I still  haven’t found a suitable tablet-holder with which to affix my Yoga tablet in the car while driving. That’s also because I haven’t looked hard. But that’s the point. Google’s voice-recognition is still awkward and clumsy at times. For names it just can’t recognize, I memorize the numbers and then spell out the numbers alone to dial. Clumsy. The rear-camera does not have a flash though it can click in very low light. People did complain about the software being buggy, but that was at its launch. A couple of updates later the software works fine for my needs, but there are still a few annoyances which I’ve just taken in my stride for the moment.

The one negative aspect that I truly dislike, is the apparent renunciation of Yoga for MHL support. For the uninitiated, MHL stands for Mobile High-Definition Link. That means, with a nifty little adapter, you can mirror what’s on the Yoga tablet’s screen on to an HDMI-enabled device like a large LCD or LED screen, or an overhead projector. Most needed for a guy like me into professional and corporate training and workshops around design, design-think, and creativity. So far, tech-support in India seems clueless about its support, and the few adaptors I’ve tried don’t work. I do know the previous version supports MHL so am hugely disappointed this one does not.

I hope Lenovo fixes these problems in the next version, while Google refines its voice-recognition considerably, as am probably going to stay on the path of Yoga for sometime.

 

So that’s it. That’s my story. Hidden in this is of course the concepts of design-think used to find a creative approach to selecting my next smartphone. I love to think of everything as a design problem, and try to use a creative approach to find an alternative solution each time. So why don’t you read this post again, this time from the perspective of design-think. Makes the journey more rewarding.

I’m Hiring. Do You Understand Design?

I’m looking for a graphic-designer willing to work with me full-time.
You should be young, hard-working, and you wish to work and grow because you love design. You are going to work with me at the cuttin’-edge of design, as we move away from the creative restrictions of the 20th century, into the brave new-world of design and creativity as it unfolds before our eyes in the 21st century. You therefore have to be willing to study and work on your own, learn and grasp new concepts and paradigms, and follow design-trends and analysis.

Graphic Designer ( 1 or 2 openings)

You’re going to work with me on my projects in:
  • Graphic-Design
  • Logo and Branding design
  • Web-design
  • User-Interface design (UX)
  • Illustrations, info-graphics, and imagery.

Your Location:
Delhi.

Your Qualifications:
Minimum: a certificate, diploma, or a degree in design, web-design, graphic-design, or fine-arts. Those with a diploma or a certificate must also be a graduate with a degree in any discipline.

What’s Your Experience:
None? One year? Two? Even more? Okay, I’ll let that pass if you have a real kick-ass portfolio.

Your Skills:
Have a fundamental understanding of the four pillars of design, Yes, you will be quizzed, and your portfolio evaluated on these:

  • Color
  • Typography
  • Illustration
  • Photography

In addition, you must have:

  • A good command over spoken English. Your pronunciation and fluency over English should reflect your refined cultural-background and the polish of your education.
  • Your written English should be devoid of SMS-spellings, free of grammatical mistakes, and easily comprehensible.
  • You should be able to handle cursory sub-edits.
  • Those with a flair for creative-writing will be preferred.

Your Software Skills:

  • GIMP: for photo-editing and pixel-imagery.
  • Inkscape: for arm-twisting those beziers.
  • HTML, CSS.
  • [Just in case you want to know: rigid, legacy, and proprietary bloatware like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, are so last century. Move on.
  • Note: It’s okay if your existing skills and portfolio are based around Adobe and/or Corel software. However, I do want to see work you’ve authored that shows you’ve dabbled around, and kicked-some-tyres in Inkscape and GIMP, and optionally the software mentioned below.

Your Optional Skills That’ll Get You Noticed:

  • Understanding and use of UI-widgets as a designer, like JQuery-UI among others.
  • WordPress theme-customization.
  • Ability to learn how to customize the look-and-feel of any CMS.
  • Having taken Bluefish-editor or Kompozer out for a spin
  • Basic video-editing.
  • Basics of 3D modeling and animation. Familiarity with Blender3D software preferred.

Your Gear:

  • Digital Camera: point-and-shoot would do, but a dSLR camera even if an entry-level model, preferred.
  • Your own Laptop. Any mainstream brand: Dell, Lenovo, HP, Toshiba, Acer, Sony…, whatever catches your fancy. The model should not be more than two-years-old. Must support a resolution of 1440 pixels or higher. Candidates with an Apple laptop will have a definite advantage, you’re a designer, right?
  • If you have an Apple laptop, your Mac OS should be an updated Leopard, Snow-Leopard, or Lion.
  • If you use Windows, your OS should be authorised, updated, and secured.
  • If you use GNU/Linux, I’ll buy you the first round of coffee. In Linux, any variation or flavour of Ubuntu or Debian preferred. The release should not be more than a year old.
  • If you don’t have Linux installed on your laptop, you must have it installed before you commence work with me.
  • Roaming internet datacard. Those with a broadband connection preferred.
  • Wrist-watch that shows the accurate time. Your internal time-clock should be calibrated to Delhi’s traffic so you stay punctual. Surprising how many ‘five-minute-distances’ in Delhi have slowed down to take 15 to 20 minutes.
  • Would be good if you have your own vehicle.
  • Mobile-phone. Ideally, it should be smart enough to do a little more than just voice-calls and SMS.
  • You should have an interest in gadgets that are impacted by graphic-design. Over time you may have to dabble with iPads, iPhone apps, Android-tablets, eBook readers, higher-end smartphones, and whatever else blends with culture and technology.

My Hiring Process

  • Send me only a PDF-file of your C.V. Please note if you have your C.V. authored as a *.doc file, then you must convert it to PDF before sending it to me. A filter in my mailbox will delete your *.doc file and your application will be automatically rejected.
  • In your mail and your PDF, please share links to your online portfolio. Please don’t send me your portfolio via attachments or even on a disc. If you don’t yet have your portfolio online, this job is naturally not for you.
  • I’ll just glance at your qualifications, experience, and references, but go with a toothcomb through your portfolio. Tutorials and exercises are okay, but for artworks and design authored by you, will check your work for plagiarism. Yes, when I say I want sincere and genuine people who have a love for design, I mean it.
  • Am looking for a portfolio that shows a high-level of creativity and innovation, shows your ability to solve design problems, and resonates with your sense of aesthetics and design.
  • If you do get shortlisted, I’ll call you over for an interview, and if you look promising, you’ll have to sit for a short 30-minute test of your skills. So bring your gear.
  • If you qualify, I’ll sign you up for an initial probation-period which should lead you up to an initial 6-month contract.

So Why Is My Website Looking So Tattered?

Get hired. There are dozens of projects to complete.
This one is just one of them.

Sync Your Mobile while Saying Bye-Bye to MS Outlook

I just bought myself a Samsung Wave mobile, a stunningly beautiful phone with engineering that’s even more delightful. I had my wallet out of my pocket, seconds away from buying a Nokia E72, when I spotted the Samsung Wave. Wallet back in my pocket, went home to research if the Wave is as promising as it looks, or should I look for a third option. First stop, the reliable review-aggregator website alatest.com that showed both the Nokia E72 and the Wave were equally matched. Next stop, YouTube, where I checked reviews and hands-on demos by geeks and reviewers. Then I went through the official website, and then scoured through the Samsung Apps website to check for available software for the smartphone: samsungapps.com. The underlying platform, called Bada, is indeed open-source and totally rocks.

Wave Goodbye to Nokia

My only worry though, was how to transfer my contacts and calendar from my old and battered Nokia E61i, to the new Wave. For the record, I use Ubuntu Linux 9.04 on my MacBookPro laptop, which also has Mac OS X installed separately on the hard-disk. No Microsoft Windows on my machine. The Wave ships with a software called ‘Kiet’ that syncs contacts between the mobile and MS Outlook which obviously only runs under Windows. Digging deeper I discovered FoneSync, a Euro 19.95 utility from Nova Software that syncs the Wave with the address book and the calendar of Mac OS X. A few users’ comments elsewhere on the web alluded to some bugs and issues with it. Hmmm. No support or software or hack for Ubuntu Linux users. Time to shift to the cloud.

First, I used a free plug-in for iSync under Mac OS X, that syncs contacts and calendars between the Nokia E61i and the Mac OS X. Once I got the data into my laptop, I then opened the Address Book of the Mac, and exported all my contacts into a single file, once as a *.abbu file, and again as a *.vcf file which is a vCard file. Similarly, I exported all my calendar events as an *.icf file.

Booted into Ubuntu Linux and imported these into Evolution, which is a free, muft-and-mukt alternative to MS Outlook for Linux users. Now I could happily deposit the E61i in the new ‘ecology-recycle’ bins dotting every good mobile-store in Delhi. If you have old mobile power-adaptors and phones, please do consider depositing them here rather than throw them away with regular trash. Anyways, back to the cloud-sync.

I then opened my Gmail account, clicked on the ‘Contacts’ link in the left-pane, and then clicked on ‘Import…’ to pull in all my contacts into Gmail. Similarly, imported all my calender-events into Gmail’s Calendar. So now, apart from backups on my Mac OS X and Ubuntu Linux partitions, I also have my mobile data backed up in the cloud. I can connect into it from anywhere and sync any of my devices whenever I wish.

Finally, on the Samsung Wave, here are the steps to follow:

1. Press the main-menu button to display all your software and applications.

2. Press the ‘My Accounts’ icon.

3. Press [Exchange ActiveSync]

4. Type your email ID “xyz@gmail.com”

5. User name will appear as “xyz”

6. Type your password

7. DO NOT enter anything in domain field.

8. Press [Done] and let it process

9. Type “m.google.com” for server URL

10. Enable “Use SSL”

11. Press [Set]

12. There you go, select anything which you want to sync.

I’ve compiled these steps from the helpful info provided here: http://www.google.td/support/forum/p/Google+Mobile/thread?tid=1b80c29b961dfa61&hl=en
This obviously assumes you’ve got internet-access activated on your mobile-account, or else have access via Wi-Fi.
Cleverly enough, the Samsung Wave links multiple records of the same person into one consolidated entry in the phone’s address book.
Plus, for the first time, I can see just how hyper-connected I’ve become: click on a contact’s name and view all calls, sms-messages, facebook messages, tweets, direct-messages on twitter, emails, and IM chats, in just one place.
The Samsung Wave GT S8500 is a great phone. I especially love it’s voice-quality and ability to hold on to weak signals. My ears feel better since I’ve switched. And of course, the touch-screen experience on a vibrant AMOLED screen is sensational. It’s 5 MP camera, and HD-Video capture is impressive. A built-in video-edit software can also add captions to video-segments, and an optional cable outputs to a TV. Everyone, from little children, grandmas, Blackberry-enthusiasts, iPhone-users, to uber-geeks I’ve shown the phone, appreciates the beauty and design of this phone. The only thing that beats it currently, is the Samsung Galaxy, and the newer and newer models of top-end Android smartphones, which of course, cost a great deal more.
[ends]

Living with Multiple Versions of Ubuntu Linux: Breezy Badger, Fiesty Fawn, Hardy Heron, UbuntuStudio

Moving My Computer from an Animal Farm to a Wild Jungle

As a computer consultant specializing in digital creativity and new media, I don’t use Microsoft Windows at all. Yes, it’s possible to meld creative freedom with true digital freedom. So, instead of MS Windows, I use what is known more simply as ‘Linux’ by ordinary folks, though GNU/Linux is more appropriate. I’ve been dabbling in GNU/Linux since circa 1997 and started using it as my regular workstation since circa 2001. Unlike Microsoft’s proprietary offerings, Linux comes in over 400 different flavours and counting. The most popular flavours of these are called Red Hat, Ubuntu, Debian, and Knoppix, to name a few. Impressively, some of these flavours are frequently upgraded within six to nine months, giving me a shining new feel and features with which to surge forward with my work every time. Blokes who just use Windows can’t appreciate the joy and thrill of this rejuvenating experience.

Multi-Boot System

To appreciate the diversity and capabilities of GNU/Linux, at any given time I’ve usually got about 7 to 10 different GNU/Linux flavours and versions installed on my computer, each usually resides in its own separate ‘partition’ on my hard-disk. Mine has 14 partitions. My favourite flavour so far is Ubuntu, which is extremely easy and intuitive for ordinary non-techie Desktop users. In fact, absolute newbies who’ve never used a computer before, take to Ubuntu like a duck to water. Yes, it’s much easier to use than MS Windows.

Normally, you could just buy yourself a laptop or desktop that comes pre-installed with Ubuntu or any other flavour of Linux, and just get down to your work without any anguish or steep learning curves. But I like to tweak and experiment. Ubuntu comes in various versions, updated every six months. I’ve got the following versions installed in different partitions of my hard-disk denoted as ‘hda’. Ubuntu Fiesty Fawn which was released in April 2007 (hence the shorthand: 7.04). It’s installed on hda2. UbuntuStudio, which is a special flavour for authoring sound, music, audio, video, and graphics, on hda3. I’ve used UbuntuStudio for composing, arranging, and producing music professionaly, as well as for graphic-design and video-editing for professional assignments. It’s installed on hda3.

I never hastily delete an old version of a Linux flavour and overwrite it with a new version. Instead, I leave the old version in one partition while installing a new version in another partition. This way, I can test and gradually migrate to the new version and fallback to the old one in case something doesn’t work properly. So, I’ve got Ubuntu Breezy Badger, from 2005, installed on another partition, RedHat 8 on another, Debian Sarge on hda 11, and another multimedia-authoring flavour called Agnula.

Gone but not forgotten from my hard-disk, are ancient versions of Knoppix, Mandrake, PCQLinux, and Fedora. I might just play with Knoppix and Fedora again, some sunny day. I badly wanted to go beyond using Fiesty Fawn to the latest version of Ubuntu, Hardy Heron (8.04) as well as newer versions of Fedora and others.

Linux-Swap: How much is enough?

Alas, my existing desktop only had 256MB of RAM. The newer versions needed about 380MB+, with 512MB preferred. So I finally bought 1GB of RAM, to get a total of 1.256GB of total RAM. In case my system would need more, have configured it to masquerade 512MB of space from my hard-disk as RAM, or virtual RAM. This is called ‘linux-swap’. Most websites clalim you need to set double your RAM size, as your linux-swap size, but this is simply not true. It merely augments your existing RAM, so if you’ve got 2GB or 4GB of RAM, you could even just add 256MB of linux-swap space. I’ve added just 256MB of linux-swap, and have been monitoring the system’s use of swap. It hardly touches it. No wonder my machine appears to respond faster, since RAM is faster than hard-disk.

Now let’s get to the nitty-gritty. When my computer switches on, it presents me a simple menu, allowing me to choose which linux-flavour to boot into from all the choices available on my hard-disk partitions. The software that runs this magic is called GRUB, for Grand Unified Bootloader. Normally, GRUB installs in a special area in the computer, called the MBR, for Master Boot Record. I’ve stored my GRUB settings in hda7, this is where the GRUB on my machine stores the entries into its menu of choices.

Everytime I install a new flavour or version on any partition, I copy the menu-entries from the latest install’s GRUB-settings, into the actual GRUB that I use from hda7. It’s worked beautifully since 7 years, except last evening, when I installed Hardy Heron.

Problems with GRUB and the latest Ubuntu

On the hard-disk known as hda, I found I hadn’t booted into Debian Sarge for some time, so I could replace it with Hardy Heron. Debian was on hda11, the eleventh partition among fourteen on my hard-disk. I deleted the partition. All subsequent partitions moved one step ahead. So the existing hda12, became the new hda 11, the earlier hda13 became the new hda12, and so on. The hard-disk showed 8GB as free space. I selected this, set it to the filesystem of ‘ext3’, and marked it as Hardy Heron’s root space, denoted with a simple ‘/’.

Got to be careful here. The new partition now appears at the end, as hda14. Within 25 minutes, I had Hardy Heron installed on my machine. Now the tricky part. I delberately wrote GRUB into hda14. Later, I booted into Fiesty, and copied the menu entries from here into my venerable GRUB in hda7. Bad idea! It did not work. I spent about 4 hours researching into what could have gone wrong, until some tech-forums pointed to the solution.

The version of GRUB installed on hda7 was 0.42. The latest versions of all Linux flavours, can only work with GRUB version 0.47 or later. So I backed up the menu-configurations of the old GRUB on hda7, and installed the latest GRUB 0.47 straight to the MBR. Cleverly enough, this new version of GRUB sniffed through all my partitions, pulled out all the linux-flavours and versions installed, and automatically populated its own menu of choices for use when the machine switched on. Brilliant.

However, it turned out to be quite unusable. I could only boot into Hardy Heron. Trying to boot into anything else would lead to an initial burst of text-info on the screen, a long wait, and then the terse: “Alert! /dev/sda2 does not exist. Dropping to a shell.” Elsewhere on the screen “Check root=bootarg cat /proc/cmdline or missing modules, devices. cat /proc/modules ls /dev”

Eh!

Took me another several hours before it finally dawned on me what’s gone wrong. The earlier GRUB version 0.42 denoted hard-disk partitions as hda12, hda 13, etc., where the ‘h’ stands for hard-disk. The new GRUB version 0.47 denotes partitions as sda12, sda13, etc., where the ‘s’ stands for SCSI or perhaps ‘storage’. So, I opened the menu-entries to GRUB, stored in a file called menu.lst, and manually changed the erroneously marked ‘sda’ to ‘hda’ for all other entries. Also add ‘ro quiet splash’ to each kernel entry, so I could get the much nicer graphical screen with a simple scroll-bar while booting, rather than a blizzard of text outputs.

Whew! Everything works. Have finally got my old and new Linux flavours working together again. Next step: have to get into Hardy Heron and fix it’s screen resolution from 640×480 to a much-higher resolution. Have found some tech-forums and read several pages on how to do this. So far, nothing’s worked, but will eventually find a solution. Will then install several of my favourite applications and software, and further tweak the system. Until it’s time again for the new Linux flavour, and a newer version.

John Lennon, Steve Jobs, and Poor Children of the World.

Lennon Inspires. Even Today.

The word ‘Apple’ means many things to Steve Jobs. It evokes Newton and science; knowledge and the forbidden fruit; it is rumoured to pay homage to Alan Turing, the father of the modern computer age who committed suicide by consuming a cyanide-laced apple; and finally, it symbolizes one of the greatest influences and inspirations for Steve Jobs: The Beatles, especially John Lennon.

The Beatles formed their own company, based on a phonetic pun, called ‘Apple Corps’ with the Corps pronounced as ‘Core’. Steve Jobs was deeply inspired by the vision and humanistic attitude of Apple Corps, and sought permission from the Beatles to label his company as Apple as well. At that time, neither party could have foreseen Apple Computers’ eventual foray into digital media, music, films, and entertainment.

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he launched the ‘Think Different’ campaign, saluting the heroes of his life whose visions he hoped, would inspire the new Apple. One of the ads featured John Lennon and Yoko Ono, with the Apple logo and the slogan ‘Think Different’ on the top-right. A few years later, when Apple launched dedicated Apple stores, they were simply called ‘Imagine.’ You can spot an ‘Imagine’ store in Delhi’s Ansal Plaza mall near South Extension as well.

Somewhere along the way, and despite those ‘Think Different’ ads, Steve seems to have lost sight of his vision of humanity, of playing prometheus across the digital divide, of hurling a sledge-hammer in an act of defiance against Big Brother. Currently, all Steve seems to be interested in, is creating increasingly snobbish products, in a rather autocratic manner, with increasingly snobbish and overpriced tags. Not good especially during a global financial meltdown. It is almost shocking to see Steve completely switched off from the revolutionary world of ‘muft and mukt’ digital culture. Steve has also lost the plot on the Netbook revolution, ultra-affordable and small-sized laptops, sweeping across the industry.

It seems to take Nicholas Negroponte from MIT Media Labs to really ‘Think Different’. He launched the netbook revolution in the world, with his One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative, which he insists, is not about a laptop, but about education for poor children across the world. To promote his OLPC, the project has just launched a new ad, with a digital re-incarnation of John Lennon. Okay, it’s a bit cheesy, the voice and accent are quite fake, but the message is strong and somewhat inspiring.

For good or bad, John Lennon as the new unsung hero of the computer revolution merits a thought. And hope some day, Steve does consider publishing an ad with Negroponte’s photo for his ‘Think Different’ campaign. While you watch the video-ad of OLPC and John Lennon here, I leave you asking yourself the question: “Can Steve Jobs think of making a difference in the world with computers and technology that touches the lives of ordinary and even poor people, finally making a real dent in the universe?

Lennon ad for One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)

[ends]

JavaFX: Like Flash with Freedom

The Distant Thunder of Freedom Shall Liberate You From Flash

Do you watch videos on the web and stream them to your mobilephone? Are you addicted to YouTube, and love playing Flash-games on your mobilephone? Or like me, are you fascinated and work in the bleeding-edge discipline of Graphic User Interface (GUI) design of web-applications, or any other user-interface?

Time for you to taste the thunder. Discover JavaFX, the new and highly-sophisticated Flash-killer from Sun Microsystems. This will change the look-and-feel of everything on desktops, the web, and the mobile, ushering in a hopefully beautiful, rich, internet experience. This is going to be the future of New Media.

Check out the galleries of what it may do, here:
javafx.com/samples/index.html

So far, their kits are available for Mac and Win, though a Linux version may just come in anytime soon. I did manage to view the samples above in my firefox running Ubuntu Linux. Will write more about this soon. Stay tuned.

[ends]

Kiss Your TV Goodbye.

GISS.tv will transform India’s tv broadcasting and media. Forever.

Sarai is the perfect place for a kiss. Behind all the non-stop chatter and noise of television stations, I experienced a quiet revolution on a lazy, saturday afternoon in an almost-empty seminar room in Delhi’s leafy north campus. A revolution, that will eventually impact more than 500 million TV viewers in India, and reach out to the global population of the world far-ahead of conventional twentieth-century television. A revolution that will kiss your TV goodbye. Click on the photos below to discover more from the captions.

[flickr album=72157608313338533 num=5 size=Thumbnail]

The Hidden Dragon

The soft-spoken and unassuming Yves Degoyon, dressed in an old tee-shirt, bleary-eyed from his travels in India, commanded the stage. He walked the dozen participants in the room through his impressive giss.tv project. For ordinary mortals, giss.tv allows anyone, anywhere, armed with nothing more than a commodity laptop, to broadcast live video on their own internet-tv channel, and reach a global audience instantly. All for free, as in both free-of-cost, and more importantly, with freedom. Similarly, giss.tv also allows anyone anywhere to launch their own audio broadcasts instantly for the world.

The live broadcast is streamed into the web-browser of any viewer who tunes in, and does not require any proprietary plug-in like Adobe’s Flash, to run. The underlying technology is Java, which means it can run on any browser, on any device, smartphones, and who knows, you may soon have special devices that could tune-in as well.

This changes everything. In the spirit of freedom, all the software required to author, produce, capture live video and audio, and broadcast are also free and with-freedom, i.e. muft and mukt. Indeed, the impressive suite of software mimics everything that you may expect from professional tv production suites.

You can ticker-tape text at the bottom or anywhere on the screen, at any angle and direction. You can also record your final broadcasts concurrently to hard-disk for archives and for re-purposing. It can mix live video-broadcasts with pre-recorded segments. This is ideal for, say, a live TV news program that has to show video-footage on-cue. It can take multiple video-streams, fade and mix from one to the other, quite suitable for stringing in stories from correspondents or live-video from any geographical location. Yves does recommend it is easier to use a hardware video-mixer to spare current laptops and software the burden of processing, but still, it is a proof-of-concept that will soon become mainstream.

The Bliss of GISS
There are a few things that giss.tv can do, which I have not yet seen on any platform. For instance, unlike youtube or other video-sites, it works with live video, and uses absolutely no proprietary software or plug-in. That means, as stated earlier, everything is muft and mukt. GISS.tv also gives you, the author, complete copyright and ownership of your video, and encourages you to publish and broadcast using a copyleft or a creativecommons license. The server-space and all services are provided free. You can also design your own tv station and channel on the web-browser, and let viewers log-in and subscribe to your video-broadcasts. Unlike TV, giss.tv is also more interactive. Viewers can comment, blog, discuss, and interact, as they watch the video.You can also track viewers, and as each viewer tunes-in, you can lookup his or her location on a map, and the software and platform details of their machines.

Static Noise

What GISS.tv lacks currently, is a slick user-interface design and a bling-bling website. Indeed, it suffers from the looks of a typical, grown-at-home geeky project. Yves works almost effortlessly with his tools, but even the best nerds would quail at the sight of those intimidating software and tools that fill the screen. What the project needs acutely at this moment, is a complete re-do of their user-interface design, and a much more streamlined learning curve.

Nevertheless, I am so impressed with this project, that I have just authored an article in my FreedomYug column for the November 2008 of LinuxForYou magazine. Will publish a hyperlink to it once it gets published. [Update]: Here is the link: My TV Station.

Whether giss.tv eventually becomes successful, or whether it paves the way for a grander and significant paradigm-shift remains to be seen. No one can deny the time has come for twentieth-century broadcast-television, and especially the low-standards of news and tv-journalism we’re currently dished out, to be revamped. On this count, Yves hits the nail on the head. Read his raison d’etre for launching this project, his motivations for giss.tv.

To say it more simply: I am too sexy for TV.

So don’t talk, just giss….