This is a simple tool I wrote a few months ago to turn Pidgin, everyone’s favourite multi-client Instant Messenger (works with gtalk, msn, yahoo, aim etc), into a customized answering machine (and more) when you are away from your computer. Basically it allows you to divide up your contact list into groups based on email IDs and execute actions based on when someone from a particular group messages you while you are away. e.g. For general friends, you can keep a message like “Will talk to you later when I come back”, or if someone from office IMs you, it’ll send them your phone number “Call me at XXXXXX if urgent”. And if you boss is the one pinging you, you could direct the message towards your twitter account so that you get it as an SMS on your phone immediately.
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.
Project: Shantz Webcam Autolocker
Sometimes I do some things that even I can’t explain why I did ’em. Did this one in one of those times as well. This is a simple script to monitor motion in front of your PC, auto-lock it when you are away and auto-unlock it when you come back. Did it just because I was really bogged down by the shitload of work that I’ve been doing for the past few weeks (and even weekends as well), so wanted to take a break for a few minutes, and just chanced over my own “Home Security Using a Webcam and Twitter” post, so thought of doing something related to motion detection again.
Shantz Webcam Autolocker
Sometimes I do some things that even I can’t explain why I did ’em. Did this one in one of those times as well. This is a simple (and useless) script to monitor motion in front of your PC, auto-lock it when you are away and auto-unlock it when you come back. Kinda useless cuz there is no security aspect (read face detection etc) and any kind of motion triggers the unlock. Did it just because I was really bogged down by the shitload of work that I’ve been doing for the past few weeks (and even weekends as well), so wanted to take a break for a few minutes, and just chanced over my own “Home Security Using a Webcam and Twitter” post, so thought of doing something related to motion-detection again.
Fixing The WordPress Drain Hole Pugin v2.1.3
If you use the awesome download manager plugin “Drain Hole” for your WordPress blog (A short review here), and upgraded to the latest version 2.1.3, you must have noticed that it doesn’t scan and add new files to the download repositories now. Well, this is a quick and short post to tell you how to fix it in less than a minute.
Steps:
Go to your wordpress folder and then navigate to wp-content/plugins/drain-hole/models.
Hi BIOS! My Name Is “Linux”, Or Is It?
A couple of days ago, I read this on Matthew Garrette’s blog, where he tells us about a vendor’s BIOS trying to figure out the OS type/version and setting things around on deciding the OS it is running. The call in question was _OSI(“Linux”). He goes on to say that the action the firmware takes, on finding out if the OS is linux, was probably inaccurate and it was good that linux kernel DOES NOT identify itself as “Linux” and returns false for the _OSI(“Linux”) and instead returns true when probed for Windows.