Bhardwaj Rish

Omega2 by Onion . A super small WiFi enabled Linux server. It's a computer that costs $5. You can power it with LiPo batteries (:D), it has WiFi built in, and is made by a group of super enthusiastic people. It's everything your electronic hardware design course taught you about Arduino and Raspi, except it's one third the size and one fifth the price. For those interested :D And it's my first contribution to an Indiegogo campaign. $5   :)  Downside, it'll ship some time in December '16. What am I planning to use this for? I'm probably going to do something with the Omega2 and this nanoquad. The WiFi on board of both the quad and the Omega2 makes things easier. :D (Okay, the quadcopter's website sucks. Don't judge it on that. Their nanoquads are just like the Crazyflie's, except 5 times cheaper. I'm going to write a blogpost on the Pluto quad as soon as it arrives!)

Black Mirror . A British TV series based on futuristic worlds depicting the problems of today, especially ones to do with technology. Each episode has a different story line, with different actors in different worlds. The name is perfectly fitting - when a screen is off, it looks like a black mirror. Every episode is a morbid reality of our society, a dark reflection of what the screen, technology has done to us, how we see ourselves as a society. Charlie Brooker, the creator of the series says this (couldn't help but smile at this) - The irony is, how we're all watching the series on our laptop, television, or mobile phone, and at the end of each episode when the screen cuts to black, we see our own reflection on that dark screen, the black mirror. Forward to 4:31 seconds, if it doesn't on its own. Each episode is a perfect allegory. I saw 15 million merits recently, and couldn't help but notice all the hidden metaphors to reality - frankly, they're hidden...

You have a sheet with several numbers written on them. You have to fill in operators to make the left side balance the right side. You can use   any operator, and as many as you'd like. You can use brackets. You cannot write any number on the sheet. So, square root works because there's a symbol for square root. Cube root doesn't because it requires you to write 'three' in the root symbol. Similarly, you can't square a number, because it requires you to write 'two' in the superscript. You also cannot use decimal as it requires you to write '0' in front of the dot. Here's the question -  0 0 0 = 6 1 1 1 = 6 2 2 2 = 6 3 3 3 = 6 4 4 4 = 6 5 5 5 = 6 6 6 6 = 6 7 7 7 = 6 8 8 8 = 6 9 9 9 = 6 I'll give you the answer to the first.  6 + 6 - 6 = 6 Can you solve the rest? -- It took me almost half an hour to complete.

Brief, unstructured, but have always wanted to put this through. Many questions and not  critically thought ideas. The root of most human induced problems is large population. I feel any race/city/organization/institution that limits it size to as much as it can handle will function better than those that grow uncontrollably. Now this sounds obvious, but surely other than the Chinese no one seems to be following this. The obvious issues - Day to day troubles - Road traffic. Queues in supermarkets. Local transport, metro, buses, trains always crowded. Education - Can the government provide education to  everyone ? What is the selection of students? Creates division and hierarchy amongst institutions - not everyone gets to study at a top tier institute. On what basis is an individual considered worthy of a top level education? Employment - Where do you generate so many jobs? Even if you push in more people into each domain, say increase the size of police f...

The more I think about it, the more I feel I've made a big mistake. Or maybe I haven't. Imagine this . You're on an indefinite term in jail. No, jail's too harsh. Let's call this a zoo . You're one of those many human-animals that are captured, and kept in protection in the zoo. You've been captivated for months now, and have hated every minute of the feeling. You're wise, you're strong, but like every other human-animal, you live in this zoo, waiting for the day you'll be free. Every day you dream of what this day would have been like had you been free - from the city you would choose to live in to the people you'd like to do meet and do business with, the food you'd eat and the place you'd like to call home. If only you were free right this very day . Every week or so, the zoo has visitors- people from the industry, factory owners who tour the zoo and observe the animals inside. These visitors spend hours trying to find a right f...

A couple of my posts have been about how people are awesome. This post? This is about how I just don't understand a couple of things here and there. No intention to hurt the people involved in the image. Online communities are amazing. Stackoverflow, stackexchange in particular (not mentioning Reddit here). It is quite a feat to have created a tool that has created such a vast community  ( Jeff Atwood  - the creator of SO - read his blog if you haven't, extremely fun to read!) that follow the rules, attempts to fix those that don't abide by them and continues to grow. It's almost like a world of its own - most people are like the average citizen - they answer questions of things they are good at and cause no trouble. A small percent are the troublemakers - illogical people with little sense who post wrong questions/downvote wrongly or are just plain  wrong . There are policemen who make sure rules are enforced - they verify and edit questions, write appropria...

Imagine walking down the road on one of your many monotonous days, to find something so spectacular, something so joyful that just being there for 5 minutes makes you feel like every moment of your otherwise common day is now going to be like no other. :D It is not uncommon to see single violinists/trumpet players on the road playing solo music in Europe, but to see a whole orchestra perform, wearing ordinary everyday clothes, with the biggest smiles on their faces, spreading smiles to everyone watching, is simply precious. Beethoven's Ninth symphony. :') There are several people that stand out in the video. The girl on the lamp post at 3:33, it's such an ingrained human reaction to move your hands to the rhythm of the music. The ordinary dressed Choirmaster at 4:06 who is anything but ordinary. The (probably Italian) guy at 4:09. His priceless reaction is what the flashmob plays for. You can see the happiness on his face. :D I really wish to be a part of sev...

Warning. If you like puzzles, this w ill take up a lot of your time. I've been (trying to do)/doing algorithmic programming on Hackerrank and other similar websites for the past couple of months. (Practising competitive coding is the only way to get a soft engineer job, apparently.) Some problems are really fun, while others are now standard algorithms that took humanity 10s of years to figure out - you can't expect yourself to come up with solutions to all of them without sitting through the theory. I was trying out 'interview practice questions' on Hackerrank, when I found this. This question is one of a kind, I haven't come across anything like it before, and certain you haven't either. It took me 10 minutes and a slight peek at the discussions tab to convince myself this question is legit. A guy mockingly posted "IMHO, the problem is a hacker challenge - it's not a reasonable "practice interview problem" unless you are interviewing ...

We all know the latest buzz. The world has been going crazy over Pokemon Go, starting their adventure as a trainer, merging the gap between _real_ life and the virtual world. There are hundreds of blogs about how Go has impacted the world, how it is forcing people out of their homes and to actually explore their city and meet new people, making the world a more social place. (Personally, I still don't believe this. Go reminds me of the people from Wall E . Everyone's under the influence of _The Screen_. But let's leave this for another blog :) ) Go & Open Source Developers This is why people are awesome. In less than a month since Go's release, there are dozens of Github repos creating unofficial APIs and tools to help you locate Pokemon, find the closest poke stops and gyms. My roommate has been going out everyday in hunt for Pokemon since he got hired last week. Last night, while discussing stories of his many adventures and how he met so many people p...

It's funny how only once you find a really good song you realize how much you needed it. Before that, you never really knew about it, and life was still fine. But now that you've heard it? - You can't live without it. I was very fortunate to find these songs this summer. Each one has a good memory associated with them, and I'm really glad music of this sort exists. The Strumbellas Spirits - The music video & the live version . I got this song in my head and it won't go! The Strumbellas aren't a very famous band yet - they will be very, very soon though. All of their music is soft and meaningful. Bonus- they have an excellent violinist; that instrument can entirely change the mood of the song :D While listening to the live version of this song, you can genuinely feel the pain in his voice - the second half where the lyrics are - And I don't want a never ending life, I just want to be alive, while I'm here. There must be more to this, a deeper mea...