Anas Ismail Khan

On Feb 18, I posted about Slax – A Plug and Play OS, which is absolutely free, but often, some people who are not much into computers, have trouble installing it. The simple + quick method is:

1. Download Slax. ZIP or ISO doesnt make much difference but personally, i prefer ISO. (and if you are not sure whether ur computer supports 64 bit or not, just download  the 32 bit version, which is recommended.)
2. Download and run the Linux Live USB Creator.
3. Choose the USB key, and select the ISO file.
4. Persistent data; leave it to the reccommended settings.
5. Check the options you want, and click on the lightning button to start the process.

That’s it! you are done. Once it has completed, just restart the computer and boot from the  usb. When it asks you for the user name and the password, input the following credentials

• username= root
• password= toor

Let me google that for you

LMGTFY is a tool, or more like a sarcastic search spider, that tells google to search for whatever keywords you input. The actual idea behind it is that some annoying jerks keep on asking you stuff every now and then, without bothering to research (at all) themselves, and finally, there comes a time when you give up and tell them to google whatever it is that they want to know.

LMGTFY generates a link, that you can send to any such jerk, and it actually googles the query for them. Confused? eh?

Here’s an example (click on the following link):

http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=Anas+Ismail+Khan

Built by Romotive, a team of nerds, Romo is a small, and affordable personal robot which uses an iDevice as its brain. In itself, it is nothing but a set of wheels, but place your iPhone or iPod on it, and it’ll come to life. Romo wanders about, talks to u, plays with you, and it learns from its surroundings. He even tilts his head back and forth.

Romo can also be remotely controlled by a mac or just another iDevice, and you can also invite your friends or family from all over the world to control Romo through a private url.

Once they download the SDK, users can create and distribute their own apps for Romo, using a simple graphical-programming interface.

The First Lego League National Championship was held on Saturday 2nd March 2013, at the Lahore University of Management Sciences(LUMS), and everyone was expecting a lot from us, The Aftershocks, and who wouldn’t, after seeing our performance at the Regional. 😀

But we didnt live up to the expectations 🙁 , cause due to some reason, our bot went mad, and we didnt have the time nor the resources required to fix it, so the first two rounds at the robot game went terrible, but before the start of the very last match, of the very last round, we tuned up our bot a bit, and scored over two hundred. This brought us to the seventh position, which was a great deal for us, seeing as we were an underdog team, the last, in the first two rounds. The Robot Game Trophy was awarded to Musa’b School, with a high score of 280.

Now, coming to the Project. Well, the judges did really like our idea, which was a device, the “Comfort-Sole” that can be fit-ted inside any shoe, and would spray aerosol on the person’s heel whenever the pain-intensity-sensor gets a value over 60, but maybe it wasn’t good enough for the trophy, so the Project-Research Trophy went to the Team Lego-Core from Generations School Karachi.

And now (skipping over core-values) to the RObot Design. Ever since the other teams arrived at LUMS, and we saw their bots, we knew that the Robot Design Trophy was ours for sure 😎 , seeing as none of the other bots were anything close to ours, and guess what? We were right!

That leaves the overall championship, which was awarded to the Team Roots Pakistan from the Roots School Islamabad.

Well, overall, the experience wasnt that bad, and I should say that the LUMS Rausing Executive Development Centre (REDC) is quite some place to stay. 😉

You are familiar with the term plug-and-play; if not, well, just google it 😉 Anyways, we use countless plug and play devices, but ever heard of a plug and play Operating System(OS)?
Slax is just another one of the countless linux distros, but the best thing about it is that it’s plug and play. Just boot using a Slax live CD or USB, and it’d start up. The initial setting-up processes hardly take a minute, and no install required.

It’s quite stable and pretty useful, plus the total size of the disk image is just 210MB, now isnt that efficiently coded!

Here, grab your own copy of slax and give it a try, and i assure you that it won’t at all mess up your existing OS as no installation is required.

It’s a project, led by Google engineer Sebastian Thrun, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and co-inventor of Google Street View. No need to tell you what its about as the name says it all.

Well, Thrun’s team did succeed in making this award winning vehicle called Stanley, and this happened back in 2005 and this car won some DARPA challenge.

This is a simple but useful trick for hiding folders in your phone without any special software/tool. This works in almost all phones, at least it did in every single one i tried.

Well, thats all you have to do.

1. Name the folder “anything.jad“, at first this would be visible, But that’s normal.
2. To hide it, all you have to do is, create another folder with the same name but  replace the last bit, i.e. the extension, (which in this case is jad,)with .Jar. That’s it.
3. Now the Jar folder would be visible but the jad one wont.

Its not exactly the best choice, as the “.jar” is visible in the folders name, but still, its the quickest and easiest way, plus, not everyone knows about these extensions.

Note: To un-hide that jad folder, just delete the jar one.

Raspberry Pi is a credit card sized computer that you can plug into a tv and a keyboard. It uses an ARM processor and can run various llinux distros like Debian, Ubuntu and even some version of android, and is capable of almost anything that a normal pc, belonging to a normal user does.

Yo, today was our robotics competition, The First Lego League(FLL). Dont ask what FLL is, just google it. The bots were built using the Lego Mindstorms NXT 2.0 kit. In the competition  we were judged on four things: The Robot Design, Robot Game, Core Values, and Project. Core values was all about how well you cooperate with your team members, while in the project, we were supposed to think of a problem faced by out elders, give an innovative solution for it, and present it in front of the judges. Our Team, “The After-Shocks” was the best in Robot design, and the game. Core Values too went well, however not the best. Project was a complete catastrophe as our solution to blindness (for that was the problem we chose) was nowhere near innovative. But it was the game and the design that we really rocked at. All the bots, but ours looked almost exactly the same, ours was the only one somewhere near innovative.

Now, to the game. Well, just before the competition, we were going awesome, the bots, not just ours for this was the case with everyone, went wacky. In the first round, we score 140. Second place, highest was 165. But in the next round we score 210 and then it seemed as if the other teams had no chance of catching  up, but then Team Lightning Strike score 202, and this clouded our chance of winning. The last round dint exactly go as well as it was supposed to, cause on the practice mat, the score was somewhere over 300, but on the competition, we only scored about 150. Even then, we were the best.

The trophies were made entirely out of lego, and we got two of them, for the design and game. The overall champion was Team Lightning Strike, as they were the only ones with a  successful presentation.

Often you might have come across websites that have been blocked by your ISP, an example is youtube, which is blocked in Pakistan. To access such websites, you can use a proxy server. There are dozens of sites offering free web proxy; ONLINE. The most popular one is 12345proxy.net, though in my opinion, the best one is Umer Rock’s Proxy Server.

But using such services can be tiring, the other option is to use some Software,  this one is slightly more preferrable and preferred.

Now, the thing is that not all of the proxy sites and tools work on Youtube. About an year ago I was fine with ultrasurf, but now if i use ultrasurf, i am able to surf Youtube, but it displays an error whenever i try to play a video. Same goes for many others.

If you wanna go for some software, then the best option is to download and install Hotspot Shield. It integrates with your browser automatically, just make sure it is connected.

So, the conclusion is that if you wanna use some online tool, go for Umer Rock’s Proxy Server, but if you wanna use some software, go for Hostpot.