Hugin - Panorama Sticher

The great thing about Ubuntu (a Linux derivative, which is an Open Source Operating System) is it has got myriad of applications that are free and work exceptionally well. One of them is Hughin - Panorama Sticher. It is a great application which allows a person to create a panoramic view from a series of pictures taken in a panoramic sequence. Here is how the interface of the application looks like.

The interface is well laid out. It has got the Assistant window where one loads the images and thereafter creates a panaromic image in Tiff. It is easy to convert the Tiff file into Jpeg using another photo viewer application which I like very much, which is Shotwell.

There are other windows (like Images, Camera and Lens, Crop, Mask, Control Points, Optimiser, Exposure, Sticher, which allows a person to do specific changes to the output of the image file.

Here is a panoramic photograph I had taken today. Have a look at the quality of the image. This has been compressed from a Tiff file (70+ MB) to a Jpeg file (roughly 3.6 MB). You still wouldn't notice any loss of quality. The images were all taken using a iPhone 4S.

The link to the complete panoramic view with the original quality is here.

Welcome to the Open Source Community and Welcome to Ubuntu.

BTW, Hugin Panaromic Sticher is also available for Windows and Mac. However, the Windows version keeps crashing, which is not the case with the Ubuntu version. I will report the version on Mac shortly.

Would the RBI's move to deregulate interest rates on NRE/NRO deposits in RRBs really benefit the investors?

RBI has issued a notification on 19th December 2011 saying that the RRBs (Regional Rural Banks) can fix the interest rates for NRE/NRO term deposits exceeding one year. Would it really benefit the investors? I don't think so. My reasons are, (1) These interest rates of 7 to 8% which the banks like ICICI, HDFC, etc.. are offering are only for Rupee accounts and not on FCNR (Foreign Currency Non Resident) accounts, which are still at 3 to 4%. This would mean that with a falling Rupee rate, there is no real benefit for term deposits lasting a year. It appears that RBI has tacitly conceded that the Rupee rate will fall further by atleast 4 to 5% in the next 12 months. Thus, for those who want to invest in Rupee accounts for a year and want to repatriate the funds back to their country of origin, they would be no appreciation in the value of investment. (2) If the investors choose to use the funds in Indian markets or spend in India, the high rate of inflation which is hovering around 9% would mean that the money in a year's time would have approximately the same value as the day it was invested. Unless the conditions within the Indian Economy change for the better, which would strengthen the Rupee I don't think investing in the Rupee accounts for higher interest rates makes real sense at all.

eBook readers and why everyone should have one?

eBook readers and why everyone should have one is a very topical subject. eBook readers have come into vogue with the arrival of Amazon Kindle a few years back. Kindle is a nifty device which works on e-ink technology and so does other eBook readers like Nook, Sony, Kobo etc, which makes reading a pleasure. But would I subscribe to the overall experience of reading a book on a Kindle, is the big question?

I always like to use technology, which reduces the use of paper. Books and bills are one such means to reduce its use. I subscribe to getting all my bills electronically and I have started to read e-books instead of the conventional paper books. The downside of this method is one needs a computer with internet access to get the bills and access their books. Amazon has created a great framework, whereby one can access these books via a Kindle device (using Wi-Fi or 3G) or any other device like a computer, tablet or a mobile phone. This is smart thinking. The reason being one can read a book at any place provided the books are downloaded onto their device. I started to read books on a mobile device and a tablet since the middle of 2011. The first book I read completely from cover to cover was Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography by Walter Isaacson. I read this book on both the mobile phone and on a tablet and I found the experience very very revealing. I didn't have to carry a book with me all the time to read it. I read it wherever I chose to, at car parks whilst waiting for my children, at lunch breaks, at coffee breaks and wherever I found a spare moment. So far I finished reading four eBooks. Coming to the question of Kindle. There is always a feeling that reading eBooks does not give the same experience as one would get reading a conventional Book. I beg to disagree. Coming to the big question, whether Kindle or any other e-book reader gives one the experience that is different from reading on tablets with LCD or Pixel Qi display.  I agree partially that the display on eInk readers is superior for reading books, but the interface with keys is very clumsy. I find that quite off putting. For example, the Kindle Keyboard which I had a chance to read is not the one I will choose to read books for the simple reason that I need to press a button to turn pages and the page changes with a flicker of the screen, which is not the same as reading on a touch based device. Kindle Touch might be the answer, but this device is not available in the UK.

So touch based eBooks is certainly the way people need to adopt to read books. It could in form of a eBook reader or a Tablet. This would save cutting of trees for the use of paper. This year alone there were 1 million + new titles published around the world. Translating this into number of trees that must have been brought down to make paper, your guess is as good as mine. The effect this has on the environment is just unmeasurable.

The following photograph depicts the display of text on three devices, Amazon Keyboard Kindle, iPhone and Adam tablet. The app on both the Adam tablet (Android) and iPhone (iOS) can be viewed on black background with white text or white background with black text.

Satellite Navigation

Satellite navigation (SATNAV) for surface transport especially for cars has been around for many years now. My earliest use of electronic maps was about 6 years back. Back then, I was using HP IPaq handheld device for navigation. It  had TomTom Route planner maps loaded for navigation. I used this device to navigate around UK, Netherlands and Portugal. My first true device for Satellite Navigation was Garmin Nuvi 270. The reason I bought this device was it had both Europe and US maps pre-loaded. The countries I navigated using this device were UK, Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Spain (with some nervousness as the maps were outdated and many new roads just didn't exit, thanks to the drive by the European union to have roads across EU states to be of similar standard) and US. This device is fairly solid and gave very little aggro. I didn't have any major mis-routes so far.

In this post, I will try and present a test I ran using three devices whilst navigating from Birmingham to Aberdeen. Based on the success I had with Garmin Nuvi 270, I bought the Garmin app, touted as the best navigation app on iPhone. As people might have noticed, iPhone GPS in its current state is unusable with Google maps. Its lock on location is off by atleast a few tens of metres. But with Gamin app, the GPS worked like a treat.

Coming to my test, I used three devices, (1) Garmin Nuvi 270, (2) Garmin App on iPhone and (3) Google maps on ZTE Skate. Garmin Nuvi costed me a few hundred bucks a few years back, while the Garmin app costed me £34. The Google maps on ZTE Skate though was free. 

As two of the three devices has a common provider, Garmin, the comparison is more between Garmin and Google Maps. 

I was most impressed with the Garmin device. The Garmin display (even the old one) is very good and the battery drain rate is very reasonable. On full charge it would last atleast 4 hours of driving time. There are a few glitches with navigation routing and even the latest update of the maps missed a few fixed speed cameras in Birmingham. I am very certain that the latest devices by Garmin would be far more advanced than the one I am having and would make navigation more easier.

I was impressed with the Garmin app for iPhone. This app is a good middle solution as it would save one carrying a separate navigation device. However, this device stopped warning about speed cameras mid way through my journey. The routing by this app is very accurate. Furthermore, its prediction of the final time of arrival is fairly spot on. The battery drain rate was ok. A full charge would last me a couple of hours of driving. Not ideal but passable. One needs to carry a in-car charger to charge in case the battery runs out. For Garmin app, I need to buy an addon extra to get live traffic updates, which is not ideal. 

I was also impressed with the free Google maps navigation software. The plus side of this software is it is free. Furthermore, it warned me about traffic hotspots via the 3G network. Its used more traditional and widely used routes. It failed to route me through less congested routes to avoid traffic. However, the battery drain rate was the highest on this device. It barely lasted more than a hour from full charge. The ZTE Skate was running the latest ICS ROM, which my son ported onto this device after painstaking hours of work. Android OS still needs to get its act together with regards to battery drain on its mobile devices.

My winner in this test is Garmin Nuvi 270 for obvious reasons, good display, accurate routing and long battery life. Here are photographs of the three of them side-by-side.

Chrome Webstore

Google have taken another step closer to making their netbook operating system Chrome OS more main stream with Chrome Webstore. Screenshot of this Webstore looks like this. 

It has twelve categories and each has its share of apps that are good. For example, I occasionally like to visit the Times of India Website. I really don't like the layout of the website as it seems drab and using the Web store app, I get something like this, which is neat and cool.

The potential I see is immense. It all depends on how Google wish to play this out. Though lot of the apps are currently only weblinks, Google could have apps per se stored on their Servers (in the Cloud) and people can access them by logging into their Google account the way it is done now. These apps need to be synced so that one doesn't need to install across multiple devices. These days tablets seem to have taken the place of netbooks for those who are looking for a portable handheld device that is not a laptop and at the same time has a smaller screen (sub 10"). Netbook market though  nascent a few years back, was very buoyant. Every PC manufacture (except Apple) have dipped their hands in the netbook pie. It has however seen a dramatic decline in the last year or two mainly because of their weak processors and poor graphics display. People these days are turning towards tablets like iPad, XOOM, Transformer to take care of their internet browsing needs on the couch. There is still a market for powerful laptops  (for more intensive tasks like programming) that are truly portable and it appears that Ultrabooks may be the answer. Having access to Chrome Webstore to these Ultrabooks is quite crucial because it saves crucial hard disk space (SSD) by not installing apps natively on the users machines. It is like having a laptop experience with added impetus from Cloud. We shall see what the future holds for this wonderful webstore.