The World in FFWD>>

I am not very consistent with my blogging, I am working on a project that I am really excited about and I want to share that experience with the world. I probably should apologize for not blogging for such a long time but then I probably wont be able to come up with a good enough reason to convince anyone so I will skip that and get right to the matter at hand.

I have been fascinated by timelapse photography, not the kind where you shoot video on a video camera then speed it but the other kind. I have been diligently shooting timelapses for close to three years now. How do I do it? Well I use my Canon EOS 400d DSLR, I shoot in the region of about 200 images which I then stitch together into a timelapse. I will have to give a full explanation of the whole process in another post.

I have now collected a few clips that I intend to put together into a movie, at this stage I am not sure how long I want the movie to be. I am thinking in the region of about half an hour. I intend the document the sights of the city I live in right now, Kuala Lumpur. I have already done one short clip that I have put online which I will place here as my first post. I will be posting in the coming weeks and months ahead every clip that I take and that will culminate in the edited movie hopefully by the end of this year.

Some of the clips I will post will be rough, with no sound. I am not an expert at this and would appreciate your input and advice. I will especially appreciate ideas of locations that you may want to see in the movie.

Enough said, here is my first post. Enjoy…

Life in FFWD from Nathan Kavumbura on Vimeo.

Gift Exchange

Nurul,

Collect your gift from Nathan.

Nathan

Liberkey and Old USB Keys

I have always had trouble with technology dying. I had no problem when 3.5″ floppy drives went extinct, they weren’t much good anyway, they were slow, the drive mechanism was noisy and they failed rather notoriously. I enjoy embracing technology but I have always wondered if there was something you can do with old tech items when they are pushed out of the limelight with newer, sleeker and shinier technology.

I have found one use for old flash memory. Many years ago I started to use Windows Mobile Smart phones, in those days they were fantastic, they came with a either an MMC or SD card slot, the cards that came with the phones are not much to write home about now but they served their purpose well. Like most people I have kept some of these cards, I have 128MB, 256MB, 500MB and 1GB cards all over the place.

I have two major computers that I use, my work computer is less fancy and does the job, after all its supposed to just be able to read documents and access to email and that about it. I have a home laptop which if you ask me is the real deal. I dual boot Windows and Ubuntu and have a ton of open source software on it in both operating systems. I love to use Firefox or Google Chrome. I don’t like when I go to work and I am forced to use IE due to IT policies that seem to have been cast in stone despite computers technology changing almost as fast as we can blink. So if you are in a situation like mine there is hope.

I found Liberkey in one of my Internet escapades. Liberkey is a collection of free and open source software that is bundle all ready to be installed in one go. So all you need to do is download Liberkey, there are three versions depending on how much software you want and how much space you have to put it on. After downloading the installer run it and install it anywhere you like, this is where all those old cards and USB keys come in. I first installed Liberkey on a 2GB thumb drive and it worked like a charm, then I needed to format the drive and installed it on my 100GB hard drive that I put all my music on at work. Then I found I had a mini-SD card that I was probably never going to use, so I installed Liberkey on it. I now run all my favorite software from Liberkey on my mini-SD card.

The card stays in my card reader and so without waging a war with the IT department I am now able to enjoy my work and not have to use archaic software. I run Liberkey Ultimate and that version comes with 202 very useful applications.

Haze in Kuala Lumpur

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about how bad the haze gets here in Kuala Lumpur. Today I am posting two pictures that I took from my vantage point on the city. One was on a moderately hazy day and the other on a fairly good day.

Something needs to be done about this, we can’t kill our planet like this. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Click on the image for a bigger image or go here and here

Evernote

Today I write about something that I have been meaning to write about for a very long time. If you know me even just a little bit you will know that I love trying out new things especially new software and gadgets. Almost a year ago I discovered Evernote and immediately downloaded a copy and installed it on my home PC. At the time I didn’t have an iPod Touch so my only option was to install Evernote on my windows mobile phone. I immediately fell in love with Evernote. Once in a while I find software that is good, with Evernote I don’t think good is the best word to describe it, its more like brilliant. I now cannot live without Evernote and I practically live inside this program.

The makers of Evernote claim it will become your second brain, I agree totally. How many times have you thought of something, you need to write it down but you don’t have a piece of paper. Or maybe you do have a piece of paper but then you forget where you put it. That has happened to me on more than one occasion.

So what are the main things I use Evernote for well here is my list;

Ideas

This is probably the best thing that I use Evernote for. I use Evernote to record those bright ideas that I get when I am far away from a piece of paper of a computer. The good thing is that even when I don’t have an Internet connection I will still have access to the note of that world changing idea that I had while I was taking pictures on some mountain somewhere.

Parking spot

I am not one who quickly forgets where I have parked that car but I do this just in case I get too engrossed with the shopping that I forget where I parked the car. I will take a picture of my parking spot with my camera phone which will automatically get sent to Evernote, when its time to pick up the car I will go back to Evernote to check where left my ride.

Web Browsing

Many times I go on-line and bump into a gem of a site. I will clip the whole page and send it to Evernote, that way I know that I will always be able to find the site.

Blogging

Most of my blog posts start out in Evernote, this way i have access to them from anywhwere so when I have that shrt minute to write something in the departure lounge of an airport I just open up Evernote either on my iPod Touch or my mobile phone and add a few lines.

There are many more things I use Evernote for such as keeping track of shopping lists, taking meeting notes at work, I also scan my minutes of meetings into Evernote so I always have all my minutes right there when I go for any meeting. I scan or take pictures of business cards I receive into Evernote and since Evernote can recognise text I can quickly search for business cards and find them in flash. I have entire project proposals inside Evernote, all my writing ideas live in Evernote. I really use this software as my second brain, my meat brain isn’t very adept at remembering things, Evernote never fails me when it comes to filling in for my bad grey matter.

I use the free version of Evernote, I wish I could afford the Premium version but for now I think the free version is more than adequate. I have never gone beyond 20% of my monthly upload allowance. As a tool to increase productivity I highly recommend you install Evernote. I have it installed on my work laptop, home laptop (in both Ubuntu and Windows), Windows mobile phone and iPod Touch and the good thing is that all these notebooks are perfectly synchronised.

Smoked out

Image courtesy of The Star newspaper (Malaysia)

The past few weeks have been really bad with regards to the quality of air in Peninsula Malaysia. A few months ago most cities around the world switched off their lights on Earth Day to try and combat the effects of global warming. It was a good deed indeed but my question is how much will that do to heal the planet. The air in Malaysia gets particularly bad this time of the year, we are told that it is a result of farmers burning their fields after the harvest in Indonesia. I am not an expert on environmental issues but I do know that this is not a good thing, we cant live like this all the time.

I have noticed more and more people are taking a day off work becasue they are sick. How can this be stopped, can there not be a collaborated efffort by Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia to try and get rid of this haze? Its almost as though we are in a smoke machine and we are being smoked alive. I think we need to do more than just turn off lights for one hour once a year.

Do you have any idea how hard being President is?

P060709PS-0186, originally uploaded by The Official White House Photostream.

I just loved this picture of Barack Obama and thought you may enjoy it too. You could come up with so many captions for this shot.

For more Official White House Photos go here

Paris Pictures (Part 1)

I had another chance to go to Paris last month and as always I took a lot of pictures. I am still sifting through some of my images but you can see the first batch while I work on the rest. See the rest of the pictures on my Flickr Page.

Imagine a Windows Upgrade for $29

One thing I love about Apple is how much they give us the illusion that they are trying to please us the customer in every way (their goal is really to take our money away from us). That’s why people always look forward to events where Apple give a presentation. Yesterday was one such day at their World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) and Apple didn’t fail it growing number of followers, there was something for everyone.

A new iPhone was unveiled, which I am not particularly super excited about. I am more excited about the new update to the iPhone software to iPhone 3.0, it comes packed with a ton of features like copy and paste finally. I don’t think I will use it everyday but its nice to know that when I do need it, it’s right there. Apple also unveiled a new laptop, well they really upgraded one of the laptops in their line and re-branded it from simply a Macbook to Macbook Pro.

What got me super excited was the upgrade of the Mac OSx from Leopard to Snow Leopard. This is where I really drooled. When Windows has an upgrade the new OS is priced out of this world but I think that Microsoft should take a cue from Apple and give their new version of Windows away for next to nothing. The new Mac OS upgrade will only cost Mac users a whopping $29, imagine a Windows upgrade for just $29. If Microsoft could do that then they would have such a huge following, I cant believe that Microsoft still cant get it in an age when Apple almost gives away its OS and Linux is free.

This just makes me more envious, the grass not only looks greener on the Mac side but it really is greener. I guess I will have to be content with looking over the fence and admiring the lush green grass from the desolate land of Microsoft.

More Cyber Wars: Wolfram|Alpha vs Google Squared

First we had the infamous browser wars, back when people thought the browser would be the most important part of the Internet experience. This war led to the rise of Netscape and eventually led to the famous Firefox that we all know and love today.

Then there were the “search wars” and in the ring at that time were parties such as Google, Microsoft, Altavista (remember that one), AskJeeves and Yahoo. We all know who was crowned undefeated heavyweight champion in that fight.

Today we seem to be on the threshold of yet another war. It seems as though searching for data on the web was not enough, now we need to have that data delivered to us in a more organised way. Enter Wolfram|Alpha a few weeks ago with a revolutionary new way to computing the worlds data. Some thought it was a Google killer but this was quickly thrown aside because Wolfram|Alpha was not a search engine but a computational database. Now just today we hear of Google launching Google Squared which seems to mimic some of the features of Wolfram|Alpha. Now I stand to be corrected but it seems to me that Google is taking the fight to Wolfram|Alpha and so it is that we find ourselves watching from the fringes as yet another battle begins. This time its a battle over who can calculate the world’s data better.

Its early days and Google Squared looks like a product that managed to escape the oven before it was time. I am sure that this Google product it will evolve into a competitor for Wolfram|Alpha. I must say though that Wolfram|Alpha is light years ahead of the game, that is until Google Squared can figure out how to integrate and differentiate.

I am looking forward to the real war of the computational engines when it hots up.