This is the simplest way that I’ve found to make the background colour of an image transparent. Download GIMP Open your image. I’ll pick this one: Optional: Select Image – Mode – RGB if it’s not RGB. Select Colors – Colors to Alpha… Click on the white button next to “From” and select the eye-dropper. Pick the green colour on the image, and click OK The anti-aliasing is preserved as well. ...
There was a time when workers were searched when they left, to make sure they weren’t stealing. They were paid by their hour, and had to clock in/clock out. They had supervisors to ensure that they didn’t slack off. They weren’t allowed to make calls at work. After all, people were lazy and thieving in those days. Nowadays, we’re enlightened. We respect and trust our employees. Like a family. We don’t micromanage their activities. We don’t tap their phone calls. ...
Dear Tesco, I do like you. Really. Your products are invariably cheaper than I can find at most other places. I am a methodical, crazy gadget freak, and I find your gadget pricing impressive. I don’t always find what I want, but you often have the items I finally pick as the best value for money, and at very low prices. But. Your books are expensive. Of Amazon’s bestsellers, just 2 out of the 100 books are cheaper on your site. And this is apart from the fact that I’d get free delivery from Amazon on 37 of those books (over £5), while you’d give me free delivery on 5 (over £15). ...
I just put together this little demo that scrapes John Lewis’ site and creates a MediaRSS file out of it. CoolIris has got to be the best way to shop. Apart from being really pretty, it’s quite useful when you know what something looks like, but don’t quite know how to search for it. For example, I was trying to look for a headphone-microphone (you know, the ones that connect into an iPhone or a Blackberry). I didn’t have a clue what it’s called. (TRRS, if you’re interested. I found out later.) The only way I could get it was to browse the wall… ...
A cool thing about Google Spreadsheets is that you can scrape websites using external data functions like importHtml. It’s really easy to use. The formula: =importHtml("http://www.imdb.com/chart/top", "table", 1) imports the Internet Movie Database top 250 table on to Google Spreadsheets. Since you can publish these as RSS feeds, it ought to, in theory, be a great way of generating RSS feeds out of arbitrary content. There’s just one problem: it doesn’t auto update. There are claims that it does every hour. Maybe it does when the sheet is open. I don’t know. But it definitely does not when the sheet is closed. I wrote a simple script that logs the time at which the script was accessed, and prints the log every time it is accessed. ...
Comments Vinu 28 Apr 2010 11:25 pm: Nice ! what did you do? Manually erase the text? Knowing you, i suspect there is some automation at work here :) S Anand 29 Apr 2010 7:17 am: Oh, not quite. By 2006, I’d typed out all the Calvin and Hobbes (by hand, spending 6 years at it). This was just filtering all the strips that didn’t have any text on them :-) Vinu 30 Apr 2010 5:52 pm: Ouch. That’s a lot of typing. Surprised you did not crowdsource it… Perhaps for the next assignment? Asterix comics anybody?
Comments Saiprasad K S 25 Jun 2010 8:21 pm: Hi Anand, Not sure you will recall. This is Saiprasad ( Sai) was your neighbour at " The Presidency", TISL way back in 1996-97. I always knew you were a genius and a man of many talents. I had chanced upon your site sometime ago but while I was trying to get some facts on Ilaiyaraja chanced upon the section of Ilaiyaraja. I didnt pay attention to the name of the author as I approached midway realised this must be the handiwork of Anand and as I cast my eyes upwards found my guess was on the dot. Good work Buddy. May you continue to shine like you always do. I am still with IBM. My contact no is 9886678319. Realise you are in London. I was there too for a couple of years on a sales assignment. Now back to Blore. Shall write again. do write when you can. Take care…. Sai Eating more for less | s-anand.net 19 May 2011 7:12 pm (pingback): […] for less May 19th, 2011 How I do things Visualisation S Anand A couple of years ago, I managed to lose a fair bit of weight. At the start of 2010, I started putting it back on, and the trajectory continues. I’m at the […] Weight lines, again | s-anand.net 14 Jan 2014 2:04 pm (pingback): […] few years ago, I ended up losting weight, mostly by dieting. That worked out rather well up to a point: I lost about 20kgs rapidly. But I […]
Recently, I have ended up giving bits of advice to people recruiting at start-ups, and a few patterns have emerged that are worth sharing. Before I go ahead, I should warn you that I have no qualifications whatsoever. (All consulting advice should come with this caveat, perhaps!) You might be better off reading Joel Spolsky’s Smart and Get Things Done (read). I haven’t read it myself, but from what little I see of it, the thoughts seem similar. ...
I wrote about SSH Tunneling through web filters using Amazon’s EC2 at 8 cents/hr. With Rackspacecloud, you can get that down to 1.5 cents/hr. This turns out to be a lot simpler than EC2 as well! Ingredients Rackspacecloud account (sign up for free – you won’t be charged until you use it) Putty (which may be available on your Intranet, if you’re lucky) Directions On the Rackspacecloud console, click on wordpress website hosting– Cloud Servers – Add Server and select Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala). Actually, you can pick any other instance. I’m going to talk through this using Ubuntu 9.10 as the example. Type any server name, pick a 256MB RAM instance, and click on Create Server. Once the server has started, you’ll get the screen below. Click on the Console to open a session. Your password would have been e-mailed to the account you registered with. Log in as root with that password. Now type the following: sed –i “s/^Port 22/Port 443/” /etc/ssh/sshd_config /etc/init.d/ssh restart ...
That dip there in response time is thanks to WP-SuperCache. My average page load time has dropped from 1 second to 0.25 seconds.
I just got a digital wattmeter. Had no idea about these until Google PowerMeter, but now, they’re all the rage. Mine’s a pretty simple model and all I plan to do with it is play around with a few household gadgets. My first target, obviously, was my Dell Latitude E5400. The statistics are interesting: Power … when… 0.3W Laptop is switched off. The adapter must be consuming the power 1.3W Laptop is on standby. 12W The lid is closed, and no applications are running. 18.5W The laptop is on, the lid is open, and no applications are running 25W The laptop is writing to the hard disk 34W One CPU is fully utilised 41W Both CPUs are fully utilised Looks like the display and hard disk each consume about 6.5 watts each, while the CPU consumes a whopping 15 + 7 = 22 watts. ...
Comments Laptop power usage | s-anand.net 7 Feb 2010 6:13 pm (pingback): […] lesson was that turning off the wireless had no effect whatsoever. (It worked quite well for my Blackberry, though. Increased the battery life quite a bit. I thought the same might apply for laptops, but […] Anil 16 Feb 2010 7:34 am: Can you see browse Hindi websites on Blackberry Bold 9700. Can you see Hindi/Devanagari fonts being rendered on Blackberry Bold 9700 (Blackberry OS 5.0). The old Blackberry Bold (Blackberry OS 4.6) does not render Hindi. pradip 2 Sep 2010 12:26 pm: I have also same problem do u have any idea how to read hindi on blackberry bold 9700 .which I am useing now. Pls reply Thanks Pradip
When I’m in front of my laptop, I usually forget the world around. Sadly, the world around has important things that need to get done on time. Like eating medicines, turning off the washing machine or the hob, etc. The one thing I’ve been lacking on my machine was a simple alarm system. I’d like to set an alarm to remind me to do something in 5 minutes, for example. And it should be dead simple to set up. ...
I’m totally hooked to portable apps now. You don’t need admin rights to install them. You can run them off a USB stick. They won’t make your machine slower. All the reasons not to install an application vanish. PortableApps.com is a good starting point. For what it’s worth, here are my portable apps by category (most used on top). Platforms Firefox. If you’re using IE6, please die. Lack of admin access is no longer an excuse. Cygwin brings you UNIX commands to Windows. Portable Ubuntu run Ubuntu as a window in Windows. Tiny utilities ...
You can defeat most web filters by spending around 8 cents/hr 0 cents/hr on Amazon EC2. (It’s usually worth the money. It’s a fraction of the cost a phone call or a sandwich. And I usually end up wasting that money anyway on calling someone or eating my way out of the misery of corporate proxies.) Most web filters and proxies block all ports except the HTTP port (80) and the HTTPS port (443). But it’s used to carry encrypted traffic, and, as Mark explains: ...