A gaping mouth was all I had when my 3 year ol’ Canon Powershot S1 IS’s LCD/EVF went blank all of a sudden a few months ago. Nothing could be seen, clicking the picture button resulted in blank pics. Googling about it revealed an advisory by Canon, stating that it is a known issue with the CCD image sensor. Canon impressed me by that notice when they said they will fix it for free, even for cameras out of warranty period, and will also pay to-and-fro shipping. Contacting canon support in India (support, in India? Is that a joke?) resulted in just their ignorance about any such advisory.
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.
Ubuntu TIP: Extending Nautilus, Scripting Your Way To UI Bliss
I’m back from my vacation and this is a smallish post before we return to our regular programming (I’m full of puns 
).
Rahul (my friend and guest author on this blog) introduced me to an old-but-useful trick a few days ago that I didn’t know about. It’s about customizing nautilus to display a context menu that has a few of your chosen scripts to weave their magic on the selected object. And the procedure to do this is summarized in just two steps:
Ubuntu TIP: Automating Package Installation – apt-get to the rescue
Admin Note: Rahul is a long time friend of mine, and is a well known geek amongst his friends and colleagues. I’m happy to announce that he will be enriching this site from time-to-time as a guest editor/author. First up is a small tid-bit of a script that he wrote to ease up his life between installations and reinstallations of everyone’s favourite OS: Ubuntu. Over to his post..
Have you ever had to reinstall your ubuntu installation, and then bear the pain of manually installing the applications you’ve come to love (i mean use :)) everyday? If yes, then cheer up buddy, because all you really need is some magic (read scripting), some typing and spend some time digging the package names of your favourite applications.
TIP: Automating Website Backups - Part III (Cron Made Easy)
The question that we will be answering today is: Q2: Cron? Using tar, making up the script file is enough command line for me. Isn’t there an easy way? Cron is a tool that can schedule any kind of tasks for you, and here we are using it to run our backup script automatically, so that we can concentrate on blogging. Now, most of us are phobic of anything that has anything to do with command line. And we already have enough of command line stuff in this series. So, you can breathe a sigh of relief for a few moments because atleast the cron part can be made Web/GUI based for you (The command line method for cron was given in the first part). The details that I’m going to present here are relevant for cpanel but it might differ for you (very minor to very major) as your webhost might have a different panel for you (e.g. vdeck) or even your cpanel might look very different. But the basic concept remains the same and with a bit of common sense, you can apply this concept to your site easily.
Games: Wormux Reporting to Action, SIR!!!
“Alpha to Bravo, over. Come in, Bravo, over.. We are under attack, over.. Send reinforcements asap. over and out”.
Well, if you dream about conversing like this, then you are better off playing something like COD4 or BF2, but if you are into a little bit less intense military warfare, and are a fan of games like worms, tanks, etc (I’m a convicted Worms World Party addict on my HTC Wizard) then you are in for countless fun-filled, sleepless nights. With Wormux.