Few years back, I had heard of this fusion band called Antaragni and remember having liked their stuff a lot. Now the band's frontman, Raghu Dixit, is being promoted by Vishal-Shekhar with an album The Raghu Dixit Project, and has deservedly become very popular. I've liked all the songs I've heard so far, on TV and on youtube and am planning to buy the album.
Meanwhile, one talented kid has created a qawwali version of Iron Maiden's Hallowed Be Thy Name. This is by far the most bizarre and unimaginable combo - a metal song being played on harmonium. Its brilliant!
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Friday, April 25, 2008
Internet in my pocket!
To the left: a new mobile phone (a Nokia E51) which I bought myself sometime back. Quite a contrast there with its slightly high price and my frugal tastes. But then I'd prefer to call it an investment rather than an extravaganza.
For a long time, I was content with the extremely basic model of phone I had. I felt the needs for an organizer when I found myself forgetting scheduled meetings, birthdays and other events causing acute embarassment. That made me go for a business phone.
Then there was the need for storing music and video clips, to provide some entertainment during travel. I found that carrying a digicam everywhere was cumbersome, so throw in a cam too.
Bluetooth, Browser, Email - hell, bring 'em all, I told myself. The prime feature was WiFi - now I could check email and browse the Internet wherever I find a WiFi spot (and there are quite a lot around!). The idea was to keep all features handy for long term use, since I'm not the kind of person who changes mobile phones regularly.
I found that this phone has much more utilities than I could think of before. Chores to be done are prioritised in the To-Do list which is easily maintained, and there is a bit of satisfaction in crossing out the completed tasks on time.
A good quiz question that pops in my mind immediately goes into the Notes. An interesting show on TV in the coming week is immediately scheduled. A bit of entertainment in recording candid moments during fun times. I've found innumerable uses of the handy digicam: finding where I parked my bike in a big parking lot or a busy main road, remembering contents of a notice/flyer/pamphlet, instantly saving interesting sights and so on.
More fun, yet to come...
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Same lyrics...
...but different artiste, music and completely unrelated music videos.
Check Rabbi's Bulla ki jaana.
And Junoon's Bulleya.
Which one is better?
Check Rabbi's Bulla ki jaana.
And Junoon's Bulleya.
Which one is better?
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
Picking the pics
For those who came in late: Last year I participated in a badly made TV quiz show which most of us know know as "Nat Geo Genius". I do plan to write a detailed scathing report about the show and its format, but that'll be kept for later. The plus points of participating in the show was that it allowed me some travel to a new place and gave some new experiences.
As usual after a lot of procrastination, I finally managed to upload some of the photos I clicked during my Delhi visit here. At first glance, they seem very less, since I've selectively uploaded only a few good ones. Many of the clickable sights couldn't be captured due to many reasons - no permission (TV studio, metro stations), bad lighting (Red Fort, streets of Noida at night), lack of time (Chandni Chowk) and so on.
A few more random snaps were taken (flora and fauna, people, funny signs and billboards) which I'd rather maintain on my flickr account. (I think it is a good idea to put up compiled albums on to Picasa and random snaps on Flickr.)
One of the many reasons for the delay in uploading was the laziness in picking of the right snaps and trying to reduce the file size by reducing quality with JPEG compression. Until I discovered a very cool software called Imagemagick. Easily installable, it provides a command-line tool 'convert' to reduce the size of an image to the desired quality level / compression value.
It took a couple of minutes to select the uploadable photos and write a small script to process the selected images and there! - I was done with converting a bunch of 1MB photos to 200KB without any apparent loss of quality in a few seconds.
Next on the to-do list: Tinker around more with Imagemagick and Photoshop to enhance the quality or beautify some of the flora-fauna-people photos.
As usual after a lot of procrastination, I finally managed to upload some of the photos I clicked during my Delhi visit here. At first glance, they seem very less, since I've selectively uploaded only a few good ones. Many of the clickable sights couldn't be captured due to many reasons - no permission (TV studio, metro stations), bad lighting (Red Fort, streets of Noida at night), lack of time (Chandni Chowk) and so on.
A few more random snaps were taken (flora and fauna, people, funny signs and billboards) which I'd rather maintain on my flickr account. (I think it is a good idea to put up compiled albums on to Picasa and random snaps on Flickr.)
One of the many reasons for the delay in uploading was the laziness in picking of the right snaps and trying to reduce the file size by reducing quality with JPEG compression. Until I discovered a very cool software called Imagemagick. Easily installable, it provides a command-line tool 'convert' to reduce the size of an image to the desired quality level / compression value.
It took a couple of minutes to select the uploadable photos and write a small script to process the selected images and there! - I was done with converting a bunch of 1MB photos to 200KB without any apparent loss of quality in a few seconds.
Next on the to-do list: Tinker around more with Imagemagick and Photoshop to enhance the quality or beautify some of the flora-fauna-people photos.
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