Fair winds, matey!

So long, and fair winds, matey!

How to rejuvenate an old PC with Puppy Linux

Got an old laptop or PC with 256MB or less RAM? Puppy Linux can help rejuvenate it for you.

Having said that, you'll need to be prepared to veer off the beaten path and work through challenges that come up.

Here's a few ideas to think about for your old comp:

• Set up a headless torrent client
• Lite browser version for guests and visitors
• Home media center streaming server
• Private home VPN

I picked up an old 1.13 Ghz IBM R31 that I purchased in 2002 and set up Puppy Linux. The four main things I had to do in order to get things working were:

• Partition: Split my 80GB partition to offer 1GB for Puppy, 256MB of swap space, and the rest for a shared FAT partition. Yes, you got that right - just 1GB. Puppy Linux is 100MB in size. I kept the rest of the partition FAT in case I decide to install Win7 in the future or share files with my Macs. With Puppy, you also have the option of booting off a USB dongle. Unfortunately, my R31 BIOS didn't support it and I had to install off a CD.
• Kernel boot params: On my IBM R31, I had to add i8042.nomux=1 in the kernel boot params to work around a Thinkpad mouse bug. Without this, the pointer ends up being all jumpy.
• Wireless: Unless you are lucky enough to have a card or dongle on this list, you'll need to scrounge around with the ndiswrapper layer. It took me a while, but I finally have a strong signal from my Airport Extreme.
• Apps: The pup may be a little lite for your preferences plain vanilla. I added on Firefox, Transmission, OpenVPN, Java and Skype. Grab a precompiled Skype binary from here.

Also look at: DSL, Amahi.

H1N1, Drought, and our Right to Justice

When I first heard of H1N1 a couple of months back, I seriously thought it was some new U.S. work visa category! It's now mid-August and panic about the virus has spread across the country faster than the virus itself.

While the underlying concerns are genuine, the media induced frenzy to buy masks and line up to get checked feels a bit extreme. I've received several dozen emails about various tips to avoid swine flu. Quick to take advantage of a situation like this, a number of alternative medicine touts have been broadcasting SMS messages promising to offer protection through tonics and protective oils. One SMS even claimed that fumigation of your home could keep the flu out.

I'm not in any way dismissing the impact the outbreak could have. Our poor medical infrastructure, thickly populated cities and lackadaisical approach to hygiene are a recipe for a healthcare crisis. But then, wait a minute. We already have a crisis, with several people dying of other diseases every day. My hope is that we take a more holistic approach to our healthcare situation instead of being reactive due to fear of the unknown, and ensure that we have a better longer term and sustainable plan.

Swinefluindia.com: I found a site which appears to be doing good job aggregating information about do's, dont's, symptoms, precautions, testing centers in various cities. Visit them at www.swinefluindia.com. They also offer to update their site with any additional information coming in - just follow the instructions below to send them your notes:

"Send the updated page to swinefluindia AT gmail DOT com and ensure that the Subject is “updated page” (all lower case). We use filters and labels to screen our emails, so a wrong subject line would result in an unnecessary delay. Also, copy and paste the change description you wrote in the page, in the body of your email so it makes it easy for us to understand what you have sent.
All emails received with “updated page” as subject will be given the highest priority. Please read these guidelines before you send anything. For technical issues and queries mail us with the subject "tech support""

Here's a page off their site with information on testing in Bangalore: http://www.swinefluindia.com/bengaluru.html

Also useful was the guidelines that have been provided to schools and colleges about H1N1. Until recently, students needed to produce a medical certificate to take sick time off. It appears that in an attempt to avoid closure of educational institutions, the guidelines have been revised by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.

(i) Any student or staff member showing flu like symptoms such as fever, cough, running nose and difficulty in breathing should be allowed to stay at home for a period of 7 to 10 days.
(ii) Educational institutions should not insist on production of medical certificate by the student/staff.
(iii) Educational institutions should monitor the health status of such students/staff who might have come in contact with a suspected case of Influenza AH1N1 to see whether they develop flu like symptoms. In case they do so, they should be allowed to stay home, as outlined at (i) above
(iv) In case of students staying in Hostels, the educational institutions would not only monitor the health status of the students, but also that of care providers. It has to be ensured that the care providers wear face mask and wash hands regularly. It might not be advisable to send the boarders back to home, as it would spread infection further.
(v) Educational institutions are further encouraged to report such cases to local health officers for further monitoring.
(vi) Given the current magnitude of the spread of AH1N1 infection and the fact that the current virus is fairly mild, closure of educational institutions on account of any student/staff member falling ill with flu like symptoms is not recommended.
(vii) In the first place, the schools should discourage the excursions of the students to the affected countries.
(viii) In case if the students had proceeded to affected countries on unavoidable tours, then on their return, if some students show flu like symptoms of fever, sore- throat , cough , body ache, running nose, difficulty breathing etc. they should be advised to abstain from attending school and be allowed to stay at home for a period of 7 to 10 days.

Drought: In a recent broadcast, NDTV highlighted that this years acute drought is likely to affect our country much more than H1N1. The impending famine, shortage of food products and price rise threaten to affect our large rural population and worsen malnutrition. In Vidarbha, Maharashtra where several farmer suicides happen every year due to drought, the rainfall is 80% less compared to the same period last year. And the bad news is, this isnt likely to be a one off drought year - satellite imagery has shown that the water table in our north western states has depleted significantly. Unless the government launches a program to drive more awareness about the impending water crisis, ways of planting crops that utilize less water, more efficient irrigation techniques, and leverage of the extensive river network so it isn't flood in one state and famine in the other, we may be talking about mass migration of our population.

While the future looks gloomy, the response of the government to the challenges faced inspires confidence. They have moved swiftly to handle the H1N1 situation without getting too caught up in the mass panic. The regulation of food prices and relief packages for drought hit regions are going to be key to helping revive our markets. The newly announced tax code is a huge bold step forward, and deserves a whole separate post. And today, I read about Manmohan's message to everyone in the judicial system:

“Like Gandhiji’s common man, the focus of the judicial system should be to wipe every tear of every waiting litigant,” Dr. Singh said, adding that “unless we meet his or her legitimate demands and expectations in letter and in spirit, we cannot rest in peace.”

I'm just hoping this turns out to be more than a quickly forgotten political statement. Most of us in India do not turn to our courts since we see them as just not being worth the hassle. Our slow, inefficient, and bureaucratic system takes ages for resolution of most issues. If this changes, all of us would finally be able to cherish a fundamental right - the right to justice.

Evernote, Spotify and Amahi

I've been using Evernote for over a year now as my primary note taking app. It does a fantastic job keeping my notes in the cloud so I stay in sync between work, home and on my mobile. But it's "killer" feature is its handwriting recognition. Often enough, I end up taking notes on the go either in my notebook or on post-its. I just scan them and sync to Evernote, and its sophisticated script recognition searches the images. For business cards, Evernote just uses my Macbook's iSight camera to grab a snap. Now, I can check back at my notes anywhere anytime to find what I need - even from a cybercafe through their web interface.

Over the last week, I've taken the power of Evernote and applied it to a pretty mundane task - eliminating the clutter in my study (#7 on my 'list'). I've taken every flyer, receipt, statement, document and printout and sorted them into three categories:

1. Trash. Heads straight for the bin. This category was about 20% of the junk that had piled up.
2. Soft storage. I scan a copy, upload to Evernote and trash the paper. This category was larger than I had imagined. 80% of the papers lying around were things I didnt need hard copies of. This made a huge difference in eliminating a lot of papers.
3. Permanent storage. I scanned the copy, uploaded to Evernote, and categorized the documents into manila folders for archival in a closet.

I've used a dozen different note taking tools in the past - from OneNote to Treepad, but I dont think any of them come close to Evernote. I would highly recommend giving it a try!

While on the topic of useful software, here's two others to check out:

• Spotify - Forget Last.fm and Pandora. Get onto Spotify for listening to music. You'll need to use an online proxy to work around the country restrictions and use it in India.
• Amahi - Take an old laptop/desktop and convert it into a media center that streams your home collection of movies, music, and files. Plus, access it from anywhere using the inbuilt VPN (based on Open VPN). Currently runs on Fedora.