I got myself a Microtek 800VA UPS (MDP800+) a couple of weeks ago to save my PS3 from the frequent power outages that we are seeing in Hyderabad but the purpose was rather lost when I found that it worked fine only till the mains power was on. As soon as there was an outage, it couldn’t stop the PS3 from an abrupt shut down. I ran around the pathetic Microtek customer service for days and they finally sent an “engineer” down to my place (after a week) to diagnose the issue and he couldn’t say anything more than that the UPS is meant for a PC and nothing else. All logical discussions to tell him that PS3 is essentially a PC but in a different form were kind of like pouring water on a well-oiled rock and hoping it would stick.
Greetings, Earthling 🖖
I’m Shantanu, aka Shaan.
Your friendly neighborhood co-inhabitant of this tiny speck of dust, I maintain this site as a stochastic log of my calculations towards the futile aim of weeding out the anomalies from the equation that gives me my “42”.
In my Clark Kent mode, I spend my day at The Trade Desk, trying to crunch through petabytes of data and trillions of queries every day to understand the human behavior and make the advertising technology world a little bit better.
Before that, I spent a couple of decades in the Semiconductors world at Qualcomm and Google, building processors and AI accelerators, tinkering with chips, operating systems, device drivers, human interface devices, security et al.
When the lights go out everywhere, I like to don my maker hat and build stuff that no one wants.
I like to make and break things around me ranging from my smart toaster/TV to my web and phone apps to my car, strumming a bit of guitar, 3d printing stuff, and of course, shit-posting on twitter @shantanugoel.
Sometimes I post some of my travel and 3d print outputs on instagram, because I’ve been told by my gen-z interns that that’s a thing to do.
Do check out some of the other subdomains that I run.
Why You Should Not Upgrade to Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope (9.04)
Update: It has come to my notice that many people do not know about this (and other problems listed in comments of this post). Please digg and reddit this post so that more people can be made aware of it before they upgrade unknowingly.
You should not upgrade to Ubuntu 9.04 (aka Jaunty Jackalope), released a few weeks ago, if:
You have an older ATI graphics card (prior to R500, .e.g xpress 200m)
TIP: Perforce - Sync Files In A Label Without Deleting Previous Files
If you have used perforce, you’d have definitely come across a situation where you wanted to sync files belonging to two different labels, but as soon as you sync the second label, the files from the first label get deleted. P4 help suggests the following ways to achieve this:
p4 sync @label1,label2
or something like
`p4 sync @label1,@label2``
But I’ve found that depending on the perforce version you are using, the above commands might not work. So, here is a tip that will always work for you irrespective of which version you are using:
Project: Figlet Online - Text To ASCII Converter Tool
Figlet is a brilliant tool to convert text to amazing ASCII Art that I have used for many years. This weekend I thought of creating an online version of it, so that anyone can use it even if they can’t install it on their systems. It is pretty easy to use. The drill is just to choose the font you want (and there is a very extensive collection of more than 250 to choose from), input the text that you want to be ASCII’fied, press a button and you are done.