Anas Ismail Khan

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.

501: Not Implemented
502: Bad Gateway
504: Gateway TimeOut
505: HTTP Version Not Supported

When San Francisco-based blogger Maneesh Sethi realized he was wasting too much time on Facebook, YouTube and Reddit, he resolved to change his work habits.

His solution: Pay someone $8 an hour to slap him when it appears he’s wasting time on a social network.

The full Craigslist ad reads:

                        Hey!

I’m looking for someone who can work next to me at a defined location (my house or a mission cafe) and will make sure to watch what is happening on my screen. When I am wasting time, you’ll have to yell at me or if need be, slap me.

You can do your own work at the same time. Looking for help asap, in mission, near 16th mission BART.

Compensation: $8 / hour, and you can do your own work from your computer at the same time.

The ad, unsurprisingly, received about 20 responses within the first 60 minutes.

It just develops exciting new random features.

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.

A digital Clock comprising of a number of scroll bars. Just click the link below and u’d know.

Scroll Clock.