Department of Information Technology, Government of India initiated the TDIL (Technology Development for Indian Languages) programme with the objective of developing Information Processing Tools and Techniques to facilitate human-machine interaction without language barrier.
Government is all set to provide the following products and solutions in public domain over the next one year:
1. Free fonts (TTF and OTF) and word processors in all Indian languages.
2. Optical Character recognition (OCR) in all Indian languages for information extraction, retrieval and digitization.
3. Internet access tools for Indian languages like Browsers, Search Engines and email.
4. Speech Interfaces for Systems such as Railway Information, Healthcare, Agriculture, Disaster Management and other public utility services.


I installed the Tamil word editor available in their website and it is pretty decent. I think this is a very good start by GOI in the right direction. Even if few of their above mentioned goals are realized in the immediate future, it will definitely make in a difference in taking IT to the common Bharatvasi.

| posted by Ramki @ 11:22 PM

There are a lot of cool Google tips and hacks floating around, some of which I've mentioned in my weekly e-column. (For example, you can use Google as a dictionary by typing "define:ersatz," or whatever.)

But here's a nice, tidy list of all of them in one place, some of which are new to me. Bookmark this baby!

| posted by Rajan @ 11:26 AM

An orderly visit of Extraterrestrial Federation in 2012 representing 88 star constellations – the world is getting ready for the most spectacular event

"The world is getting ready for something spectacular in 2012. According to researchers, the Federation of the Universe representing all the 88 star constellations will officially visit earth in 2012 and reveal themselves. It will bring an end to all UFO cover-ups in various countries.

In many countries all over the world the rumors are floating around that many Governments are being contacted at this time slowly to announce their presence and coming official visit."



[Via Jwalkblog]

| posted by Ramki @ 7:43 PM

Onion - dubbed as America's finest news source is a very funny spoof website on news and current affairs.
See how Onion will be in 2056. Also refer to our earlier post on Onion and Squooshy pineapple.

| posted by Ramki @ 9:51 PM

Unclear on American Campus: What the Foreign Teacher Said - New York Times: "Valerie Serrin still remembers vividly her anger and the feeling of helplessness. After getting a C on a lab report in an introductory chemistry course, she went to her teaching assistant to ask what she should have done for a better grade.

The teaching assistant, a graduate student from China, possessed a finely honed mind. But he also had a heavy accent and a limited grasp of spoken English, so he could not explain to Ms. Serrin, a freshman at the time, what her report had lacked.

'He would just say, 'It's easy, it's easy,' ' said Ms. Serrin, who recently completed her junior year at the University of California, Berkeley. 'But it wasn't easy. He was brilliant, absolutely brilliant, but he couldn't communicate in English.'

Ms. Serrin's experience is hardly unique. With a steep rise in the number of foreign graduate students in the last two decades, undergraduates at large research universities often find themselves in classes and laboratories run by graduate teaching assistants whose mastery of English is less than complete."

| posted by Rajan @ 6:49 AM

Nair changes pace and mood next spring to begin filming Gangsta MD, a caper about an African-American boy who lives a double life as a 'fake' doctor and a gangster.Gangsta MD, which is being written by Jason Filardi (Bringing Down The House) is inspired by a Bollywood film Munnabhai MBBS. Nair says she plans to cast Chris Tucker in the lead role, and some Indian actors - Gangsta MD's love interest, she says, will be an Indian girl. Also in the works are a sequel to the immensely successful Monsoon Wedding to be shot in Pakistan, and a film set in the crisis in the Middle East.

[ BBC article]

| posted by Rajan @ 8:09 PM

The Formula One president and CEO : "You know I've got one of those wonderful ideas ... women should be dressed in white like all the other domestic appliances." [article ]

Is it so difficult to NOT think of women as incapable ?? Men are incapable of so many things women are capable of. How come that is not commented on. Can such changes come within a single generation ? I guess not. It needs a lot of changes in the social and economic spheres of life. With the changes happening in Asia I hope social engineers can bring about some other changes in addition to the  economic ones.

[via http://brutalwomen.blogspot.com]

| posted by Rajan @ 6:52 AM

Apparently, the adults responsible for airport safety are so busy developing sophisticated and silly devices, they're leaving it to kids to come up with the obvious ones. A while back, an Eagle Scout in the US created a shoe scanner that interested people at Chicago's O'Hare airport. Now, a 12-year-old boy in Scotland has invented a device to monitor airport runways and notify pilots of debris that could interfere with landings and cause crashes. Basically, it's a camera mounted on a little platform with wheels, which rolls along the side of the runway. Folks at the British Airport Authority like the idea so much, they're working with the kid (and presumably some adults) to flesh it out into an actual product. Perhaps the young inventor is a precocious wunderkind, but you have to wonder what the adults have been doing all this time. The kid was inspired by the Concorde crash of 2000, which was supposedly caused by debris puncturing one of the plane's tires.

Aren't grad students kids too????

| posted by Ramki @ 11:18 PM

Remember all those nice cartoons like "Ek Chidiya", "Village Level crossing story", "Baloon's story"; all the news reels that used to be shown in Doordarshan and the nice National Integration songs that used to be telecast on DD... Well, all of them and many more videos are available from the Indian Films Division website.



The option to view the videos is not immediately available in the website. Select "Search" and within each category/option, you can see the different formats of the videos(wmv,realplayer etc) for viewing!

These videos really reminded me of my childhood days. Hope u also enjoy these videos! :-)

| posted by Ramki @ 4:14 AM

Wish Dubya's (and every leader's) head were not just a cockpit like this ;-)

| posted by Ramki @ 3:32 AM

A dictionary that displays the definition as it's typed in real-time. Each character narrows the possible matches until your term is defined.

| posted by Ramki @ 3:29 AM

Cells from human embryos are being used to develop human eggs and sperm that might eventually lead to the development of a human life in a laboratory .

The research was presented yesterday at the annual meeting of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology in Copenhagen.

Two research teams have announced similar findings – one from Melbourne's Monash Immunology and Stem Cell Laboratories and the other from Sheffield University in England.

| posted by Ramki @ 12:49 AM

An awesome show (spoof of a magic show). I could not find more details about the artists though!
Russian Candid-camera
Paris Hilton ad (NSFW)

| posted by Ramki @ 3:32 AM

In yet another cost-cutting move, Northwest Airlines said it would shut down one engine on each of its flights within the continental United States.

| posted by Ramki @ 3:14 AM

Is there anything Google won't eventually launch on its own? Wall Street Journal and Reuters are reporting that Google is getting close to launching a PayPal-wannabe payment system , nicknamed Google Wallet (not quite as fun as "G-Money" would be). The rumor is based on a panel discussion where an e-commerce consultant said some of his clients had been approached by Google about using such a system. Of course, Yahoo had their own PayPal wannabe for a while, called PayDirect, that they eventually shut down after no one used it. Even eBay had their own PayPal wannabe that no one used before buying PayPal. Despite that, Google certainly seems to be pretty good at getting people to adopt their offerings -- and if they can really improve on the PayPal experience, a lot of pent-up frustration directed at PayPal could drive plenty of users to the Google solution.

[Via Techdirt]

| posted by Ramki @ 2:10 PM

I guess this month is commencement month in many leading Universities and each of them seems to be making some news or the other.

This week's story: 'Massachussets grads go vedic at convocation':

 Sanskrit hymns reverberated across America's premier Massachussets Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, when over 2,000 students chanted the sacred words during their graduation ceremony.
  MIT's Hindu Chaplain Swami Tyagananda offered an invocation in Sanskrit and in English that reflected the large international crowd's spirit of unity and goodwill as 2,308 men and women received 1,107 undergraduate and 1,464 graduate degrees at the 139th MIT commencement exercises, the institute said in a report on its website.
  Also Swami Vivekananda's works were quoted during the June 3 ceremony.

More on the story from Rediff and Indiainfo. Do International newspapers ever cover such stories??? Just wondering !!!

| posted by Ramki @ 1:45 PM

20Q.net - Play 20 Questions against the computer with this artificial intelligence version of Twenty Questions. "Everything that it knows and all questions that it asks were entered by people playing the Game." (The computer is well trained. Try real tough ones and you will be surprised with how it narrows it down).

Game theory suggests that the information (as measured by Shannon's entropy statistic) required to identify an arbitrary object is about 20 bits. The game is often used as an example when teaching people about information theory . Mathematically, if each question is structured to eliminate half the objects, twenty questions will allow the questioner to distinguish between 2²⁰ or 1,048,576 objects. Accordingly, the most effective strategy for Twenty Questions is to ask questions that will split the field of remaining possibilities roughly in half each time. The process is analogous to a binary tree search algorithm in computer science.

| posted by Rajan @ 1:17 PM

Football scores with networks: "A senior Nimbus official confirmed the bid amount. 'Many eyebrows might be raised but there's no denying that we have bid Rs 504 crore. Make no mistake, we have specific plans. But I can't divulge anything more at the moment. We're waiting for the AIFF's verdict,' he said.

| posted by Rajan @ 7:39 AM

Intel may invest in India testing plant | CNET News.com: "Intel manufactures its chips in plants located in the United States, Israel and Ireland, stable countries with fairly extensive electrical and utility systems--key factors chip companies examine in determining where to build a fab. (Local tax breaks are the other big factor.) Because most fab operations are controlled by robots, low labor costs are typically a minor consideration in this decision.

By contrast, labor costs are a greater consideration in testing and assembly facilities, which are more low-tech. As a result, Intel has located most of these in developing nations such as Costa Rica, Malaysia and China, among others.

Testing and assembly facilities also cost less than fabs, which can cost $3 billion to build.

Indian officials had lobbied Intel to build a fab in India. The country is also trying to woo more hardware manufacturers to build in India, putting the nation in competition with China and Taiwan.

No major manufacturer has a fab in the country, although a Korean entrepreneur has laid plans to create a foundry in Hyderabad, according to sources. To help build India's chip-manufacturing industry, the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay has created course curriculum around semiconductor design that it currently is trying to port to other universities, according to Sunil Sherlekar, the head of the embedded-systems group at Tata Consultancy Services."

| posted by Rajan @ 9:29 AM

'Mactel' Desktops May Offer Triple-Threat OS: "While Apple developers initially looked upon Apple's choice to move to Intel processors with mixed feelings, the ability of the new Macs to also run Windows-a practice long since adopted by some Mac users who run virtualization software such as Microsoft Virtual PC-may be the fulcrum for the company to gain some new customers, ranging from computer enthusiasts to businesses.

So far Apple hasn't discouraged the idea of running Windows on its forthcoming Intel gear. Meanwhile, Microsoft, sources familiar with the company's plans said, is considering how and whether to support Windows on the forthcoming Apple hardware as well."

| posted by Rajan @ 11:47 PM

Raped, Kidnapped and Silenced - New York Times: "I've been sympathetic to Mr. Musharraf till now, despite his nuclear negligence, partly because he's cooperated in the war on terrorism and partly because he has done a good job nurturing Pakistan's economic growth, which in the long run is probably the best way to fight fundamentalism. So even when Mr. Musharraf denied me visas all this year, to block me from visiting Ms. Mukhtaran again and writing a follow-up column, I bit my tongue.

But now President Musharraf has gone nuts.

'This is all because they think they have the support of the U.S. and can get away with murder,' Ms. Jahangir said. Indeed, on Friday, just as all this was happening, President Bush received Pakistan's foreign minister in the White House and praised President Musharraf's 'bold leadership.'

So, Mr. Bush, how about asking Mr. Musharraf to focus on finding Osama, instead of kidnapping rape victims who speak out? And invite Ms. Mukhtaran to the Oval Office - to show that Americans stand not only with generals who seize power, but also with ordinary people of extraordinary courage."

| posted by Rajan @ 9:13 PM

In a marketing tactic used primarily by spyware and adware companies, Google has begun bundling its Google Toolbar and Desktop Search software with the popular WinZip archive utility. The move comes as Google begins to expand its bundling effort with a number of leading software applications. [ article ]

| posted by Rajan @ 3:49 PM

"Your time is limited so don't let it be wasted living someone else's life," Jobs said to a packed stadium of Stanford graduates , alumni and family during their annual commencement yesterday.

| posted by Ramki @ 2:02 AM

The new developments in the Apple world has everyone startled. Apple going with Intel has created ripples in the industry, nobody is quite sure what the future holds for Macs with this new development. But being the maverick he is, Steve Jobs must at something to come up with this plan.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/06/12/business/apple.php

--Holla

| posted by HollaMan @ 6:36 AM

An interesting flash..


[Via brainblog]

| posted by Ramki @ 12:53 AM

Very creative, humorous depiction of the plight of public bathrooms.

| posted by Ramki @ 12:43 AM

Warning: The Hydrogen Economy May Be More Distant Than It Appears - Popular Science: "Unlike internal combustion engines, hydrogen fuel cells do not emit carbon dioxide. But extracting hydrogen from natural gas, today’s primary source, does. And wresting hydrogen from water through electrolysis takes tremendous amounts of energy. If that energy comes from power plants burning fossil fuels, the end product may be clean hydrogen, but the process used to obtain it is still dirty.

Once hydrogen is extracted, it must be compressed and transported, presumably by machinery and vehicles that in the early stages of a hydrogen economy will be running on fossil fuels. The result: even more C02. In fact, driving a fuel cell car with hydrogen extracted from natural gas or water could produce a net increase of CO2 in the atmosphere."

| posted by Rajan @ 10:40 PM

A French shoe manufacturer, which enraged Hindus by selling designer shoes with images of Lord Ram, has taken the product off shelves.

The Hindu Forum of Britain has asked Hindus worldwide to boycott all French goods and participate en masse in the protest rally outside the French embassy in London on Sunday.

The forum has also asked Hindus to stop flying by Air France and write to the International Olympic Committee suggesting that the selection of Paris as a venue for the 2012 Olympics 'will not be' in keeping with the ethos of human rights and religious freedom.



Apparantly it is not the first time that American and European companies have tried to use images of Hindu Gods to promote their product. Watch this slideshow from Indiatimes which lists few such instances in the past and how the companies reacted to Hindu protests.

Following are images from the slide show:

Ganesha Beer

Holy Bikini!

Sacred Seat

Its interesting to see how all the companies reacted to the protests from a billion strong Hindu market.

| posted by Ramki @ 6:11 PM

CAUTION: This video link is not for the light-hearted. It shows the pathetic state of treatment of animals in animal farms and slaughter houses. The Video is even gruesome than Taliban videos of humans being beheaded. I strongly recommend all the light-hearted to look at other entries in lazydesi.

Man is indeed on top of the food chain. But watching this video made me think that there should be Dinosaurs or godzillas trying out all these acts on the human kind as well. Greed for the money coming from animal meat has really made Man a ruthless animal!

Make sure you watch this video in full-screen mode. PETA-TV is an online animal rights television channel.

[Thanks Lad]

| posted by Ramki @ 5:56 PM

The Web is learning new tricks every day. These surprising sites and services will help you solve problems and save time--and one might even make you a star.

| posted by Ramki @ 12:16 PM

One day, little Toby decided to visit RIM (Research Institute of Mathematics). As he knocked on one of the doors, he found a scatterbrained mathematician who was mumbling for himself something like: "100110 is 1*(-2)^5 + 0*(-2)^4 + 0*(-2)^3 + 1*(-2)^2 + 1*(-2)^1 + 0*(-2)^0, i.e. -30". Suddenly the mathematician noticed Toby, got very scared, ran away, and locked himself in the hydrant. read on

Interesting small programming challenges like the one above and their solutions are available at the Norwegian Informatics Olympiad website.

[Via Jan's diary]

| posted by Ramki @ 12:11 PM

Scientists from the U.S., Britain and France have proposed that the kilogram, a random measure officially represented by a cylinder of metal housed at the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures near Paris, be replaced by a more precise measure based on natural phenomena like a quantity of light or atoms.

The proposal has precedence -- the other six of the seven basic units of the international measurement system are defined by natural phenomena. The second, for instance, is defined as 9,192,631,770 cesium atom oscillations, while the meter is defined as the distance light travels in a vacuum in a 299,792,458th of a second. In contrast to these unchanging definitions that can theoretically be measured anywhere, the kilogram cylinder, a physical object available only a single physical location, is subject to slight mass changes due to contamination or surface loss.

In other precision-measurement news, physicists, engineers and statisticians at the National Institute of Standards and Technology are nearing the end of a four-year effort to provide standard rulers for the extremely small. The rulers use the spacing of atoms within silicon crystals to measure the dimensions of structures as tiny as the individual logic gates of microprocessors. The new rulers are accurate to within 2 nanometers -- about the span of 20 hydrogen atoms.
[Via Smalley's Research Watch]

| posted by Ramki @ 11:45 AM

Many of us, who have ordered HP or DELL laptops get it shipped from Shangai. Take a look at the bigger picture and try to decide where exactly parts of your laptop were manufactured.

[Image source WSJ]

| posted by Ramki @ 11:29 AM

Dr. Eric Schmidt (M.S.'79, Ph.D.'82 EECS), the CEO of Google was the commencement speaker at Berkeley :

Eric began his talk on Technology, Leadership and Passion (link to video) by acknowledging the "awesome debt I owe to Berkeley," recounting that almost everything he has accomplished in the 29 years since he left Berkeley is derived from what he learned on our campus. Eric urged our new graduates to take risks, make mistakes, and look to one another for support:

"When you think of what you are going to do, when you take the wonderful skills that you have and this amazing platform your predecessors have built for you, do it in the context of what is most essentially human, the good things about humanity, things that matter. Devote yourself to making the world a very, very much better place. You will be able to do it."

[ More berkeley multimedia]

| posted by Rajan @ 3:43 PM

An Israeli inventor has developed a way for divers to breathe underwater without cumbersome oxygen tanks. His apparatus makes use of the air that is dissolved in water like the gills of a fish. The product is covered by patents in USA and Europe. An interesting invention though!
So folks, watch Animal Planet and National Geographic. Try to mimic nature's working. Bingo! You've got a patent !!!
(Via slashdot)

| posted by Ramki @ 9:49 PM

Apparently, the Wall Street Journal's offices had a technical glitch sometime recently that left them without email for a day or so , resulting in reporters discovering what it's like to do work without email. Obviously, it wasn't that long ago that everyone worked that way, but it still shows just how much people have come to rely on email these days, and how people learn to cope without email.  Of course, we're still waiting to see if the concept of email free workdays expands beyond the few companies that have tested it out.   
(Thanks again to Techdirt)

| posted by Ramki @ 9:32 PM

There are some nutty entrepreneurs out there. There are plenty of perfectly normal ones as well, but apparently even the top VCs have difficulty telling them apart. Michael Moritz at Sequoia recently spoke about some of the crazier entrepreneurs he invested in including the one who tried to kill a co-founder by driving a truck through a plate glass window. And people wonder why investors want to do some due diligence? If you're around Silicon Valley you start hearing plenty of these stories over time. Of course, sometimes, it's just not possible to realize how crazy someone is until pretty far into the process. Still, what's funny is that even the craziest entrepreneurs will still be able to raise money the next time around if they helped some VCs make a ton of money last time.
(Via Techdirt)

| posted by Ramki @ 9:29 PM

Since many friends of Lazydesi's - Ramp, Maggi and Shankar are getting married this month, thought this article might interest'em!

| posted by Ramki @ 9:31 PM

The Indian government is to outlaw all images of smoking in Bollywood films and television shows in a move praised by campaigners as a "sensible step" but attacked by film-makers as a curb on artistic freedom.

The ban, the most comprehensive of its kind in the world, will outlaw shots showing cigarette packs and advertising hoardings. Foreign movies and serials, increasingly popular especially when dubbed into local Indian languages, will have the offending images electronically blurred.

"Bollywood's biggest star, Shah Rukh Khan, is a singing, dancing, chain-smoking actor whose films are clouded by cigarette smoke. And with a production line bigger than Hollywood's, Indian movies have in recent years moved away from soppy romantic musicals to ape the west's blockbusters, where bad and good guys are seen smoking heavily."

| posted by Ramki @ 9:20 PM

Researchers from Stanford University and Cornell University have put together a projector-camera system that can read a playing card that is facing away from the camera.

The projector beams black and white pixels at a scene and the camera captures the way the light bounces off objects in the scene. A computer algorithm monitors the data and changes the patterns to gain the needed information.

For example, how can one read a playing card that is facing away from the camera? "In the card experiment, the camera cannot see the card directly, but it can see the surface of the book [behind the card]; the light from the projector bounces off the card, then bounces off the book and hits the camera," said Pradeep Sen from Stanford University.

[Via attu]

| posted by Ramki @ 4:33 PM

Awesome Flash version of Prince of Persia. Must play!

| posted by Ramki @ 2:29 PM

"One man hitting a Golf Ball across Mongolia covering 1234 miles in 90 days with 12170 shots"
Reason: Like Forest Gump, he just felt like Golfing!!!
(Via J-walkblog)

| posted by Ramki @ 1:54 PM

Glenn Honiball's Image Retouching. View before-and-after shots, using a very nice interface.

Retouching artist Glenn Honiball has an old masters eye for understanding light and knowing where the shadows should fall. Coming from a family of commercial artists, he has spent the last 20 years developing both an eye for subtle detail and style that is so natural the images don't appear to have been retouched at all.

| posted by Ramki @ 1:44 PM

Take the Celebrity Lovechild Quiz.

Using state-of-the-art computerized gubbins, we have merged together the faces of 20 random celebrity pairs to discover what their illegitimate offspring may look like.

(Via J-walkblog)

| posted by Ramki @ 1:39 PM

What's common between these words? - These are the new domain suffixes approved by the ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers).

What's interesting in this list is that Porn Industry gets its own share of the Internet thro the xxx suffix. The reason for having a seperate suffix for adult-oriented sites is that this will allow greater protection for children, because filters will easily be able to exclude any sites with xxx suffix. I don't if it really can help protect children as these companies will have their domain mirrors in other suffixed addresses as well.

Soon, we might have a seperate domain for ads and spams - with the claim that filters can filter them better!!!

| posted by Ramki @ 2:39 PM

It's no secret that folks in South Korea are quite a bit more connected than most other places in the world -- with much wider spread adoption of high speed wireline and wireless broadband technologies. Many companies have gone to South Korea to see how people there are using these technologies to get a head start on how others around the world are likely to use technologies after they catch up in the connectivity department -- and companies with experience there are looking to spread that knowledge elsewhere as well. Because of this, it's not at all surprising that you can find lots of cool new gadgets in Korea first -- but what might surprise some people is that they're not all from Korean companies. Instead, plenty of foreign gadget makers are releasing products in Korea first, as a test bed, before pushing the products out around the globe.  Of course, that foreign competition leads to some patriotic complaints from local companies -- but, as the article notes, that doesn't seem to stop many from buying iPods or other foreign gadgets.
(Via Techdirt.)

| posted by Ramki @ 2:20 PM

Meaning "Number place" in Japanese, Sudoku is a very popular newspaper puzzle in Japan.
The objective is simple: " Fill in the grid so that every row, every column, and every 3x3 box contains the digits 1 through 9. "

That's all there is to it. There's no math involved. The grid has numbers, but nothing has to add up to anything else. You solve the puzzle with reasoningand logic.

Sudoku became a rage among the Japanese in the late 1980s but it was not until 2005 that it caught the fancy of the rest of the world.

Recently Indian Newspapers - The Hindu, Hindustan Times, Deccan Chronicle and The Asian Age have started carrying Sudoku puzzles in their puzzles section and the puzzle seems to be catching up with the Indian public as well. I am wondering why Times of India is not following suit!

| posted by Ramki @ 1:42 PM

'Geocaching' - Global GPS Cache Hunt. I thought it was interesting, people were playing with GPS. I remember having a lot of fun playing treasure hunt when I was a kid. An example of web clues on finding the cache can be found here.

What is Geocaching?

Geocaching is an entertaining adventure game for gps users. Participating in a cache hunt is a good way to take advantage of the wonderful features and capability of a gps unit. The basic idea is to have individuals and organizations set up caches all over the world and share the locations of these caches on the internet. GPS users can then use the location coordinates to find the caches. Once found, a cache may provide the visitor with a wide variety of rewards. All the visitor is asked to do is if they get something they should try to leave something for the cache.

Are there any other names for Geocaching?

The GPS Stash Hunt, Global Positioning Stash hunt is interchangable. Geocaching has become the standard for the game, however.

The word Geocaching broken out is GEO for geography, and CACHING for the process of hiding a cache. A cache in computer terms is information usually stored in memory to make it faster to retrieve, but the term is also used in hiking/camping as a hiding place for concealing and preserving provisions.

So what's the big deal? You gave me the coordinates so I know where it is. Seems pretty easy.

It is deceptively easy. It's one thing to see where an item is, it's a totally different story to actually get there.

How much does a GPS unit cost, and where can I get one?

GPS Units can range from $100 to $1000 depending on the kind of capabilities you are looking for. Use a Garmin eTrex , which runs for around $100, and can get you to within 20 feet of any geocache (depending on the location). The next step is one with a built-in electronic compass, has topographic maps, more memory, etc.

How do I use a GPS unit for Geocaching?

If you need to get a basic instruction on how to use a GPS unit, try the book GPS Made Easy : Using Global Positioning Systems in the Outdoors .

To play, you'll need to know how to enter waypoints into your GPS unit. We're currently working on instructions for each particular GPS unit. In the meantime, your GPS should come with instructions on how to enter a waypoint. If you have any problems, try the online forums . There's always someone to help.

What are the rules in Geocaching?

Geocaching is a relatively new phenomenon. Therefore, the rules are very simple:

1. Take something from the cache

2. Leave something in the cache

3. Write about it in the logbook

Where you place a cache is up to you.

| posted by Rajan @ 1:57 PM

And just when one started assuming that Russia had once again become a democracy, comes this one :

Brief Background : Michail khodorkovsky was the undisputed oligarch in Russia only 2 years back. With billions of dollars in his privately owned company Yukos, he represented the new and emerging Russia to capitalistic West. Not for long, yesterday he was handed a nine year sentence for tax evation. Essentially Kremlin doesnt like anyone challenging its authority and will ruthlessly clamp down upon them like a criminal gang. From what I have read, this seems to be more a case of vendetta justice than justice for the poor people. With all the bad things people have to say about US, I think it has a far fairer justice system than any in the world. No dont even bother to talk about India, if ever your case gets heard in Supreme Court, there is a chance. However SC cannot move on its own and must act upon the evidence presented in front of it. And this is where the culptits can manipulate their way to a scot free life.

http://www.mosnews.com/commentary/2005/05/31/khodorkovsky.shtml

Recently I have been following another story on the sentence to former Australian beautician held in Indonesia for drug smuggling. While the normal sentence for those having smuggled much higher quantities was 0-5 years, in this case thanks to the jingoism displayed by the Australian media about the quality of Indonesian justice system, Schapelle Corby was given a very harsh 20 year sentence. Its best to avoid these poor nations which dont have a real concept of democracy or fairness.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,15481770%255E2702,00.html

The latest update on this has been that the Indonesian embassy has attacked by bio terror, very shameful for both countries if true.

| posted by HollaMan @ 9:42 AM