How was this even possible?

In 2005, I had posted this about Naadi Astrology and this unbelievable palm leaves that had poems that could accurately give all my details from my birth to the point those leaves were destined to be read. 

It is now your destiny to be able to hear this !! There was no easy way to upload just an audio to a blog then. Now we have methods!

There was no google in 1997 and even then, getting details about someone including their Indian Horsocope which needs date of birth and place of birth with an accuracy of 4 minutes, time windows, family details, names etc.. all in poetry.. not possible with even today's AI and computing power to write those as recitable poems. 

It was just amazing. A lot of folks reached out to me then and I did give them the contact to go find their palm leaves of destiny. However, not everyone who went there, could find their leaf. That is part of the deal. 

Some folks went multiple times over a period of years and managed to find it later! 

All that said, as part of digitizing audio tapes from years ago, found Naadi tapes from when my parents got my leaf and how years later San found her leaf on a visit to Vaideeswaran Kovil. She rushed it and was impatient as she had to come back to a hungry kid. Still you can see two data points.. 

Majority of what was said in detail was accurate. Then again, a lot of stuff was vague when it came to the future. We have two girls. In my reading, that was off. In San's reading it was right. 

If you have the patience, you can listen to this..  pretty impressive actually for a palm leaf that is a few thousand years old and preserved for generations in a temple! 

Maybe our destinies are all pre written.. or maybe there is some time travel involved here. In either case, the beauty of human existence is that we just go about our daily life with amazing selective memory loss. We all assume that we will wake up day after day and do things as we plan them. We put in for vacations 3 months from now, plan weddings, put 5 year FD's, etc.. forgetting that there is no guarantee for anyone for their very next breath! That is actually a good thing, so we can keep moving!

I usually forget this tape exists, except when someone brings up destiny in a conversation. Guess the readers of this blog can scratch their heads after listening.. 

Not sure if these places are still around and do the leaf readings. Have read articles that there are a lot of fake centers and copies floating around. Still not sure how any fake thing can guess this many details right and come up with limmerics in record time while the person is sitting in front of them.. that too in ancient Tamil script!

If any of you have had recent experiences with "meeting your leaf", do share in comments! 

This was out of sight and hearing and out of mind for a good 16 or so years. So it was interesting to listen to after a long time.. especially with Jr. listening in on every word  and asking questions. 

She was laughing so loud hearing my dad keep interrupting the reader about my wedding plans! 

This was way way ahead of Chat GPT !!! 

Software tricks that compensate for hardware

If you hear about software compensating for hardware be it in imaging, networking, security, etc. etc. take it very seriously. 

Got to witness it firsthand over the weekend. We were at a friends place and one of our friends who works at Apple, whips out an iPhone8 and says "let me show you the portrait mode on this one". She takes a photo of me and with a single swipe on the icons in the bottom she was able to adjust the lighting on the portrait, AFTER the photo was taken. The background was also blacked out instantly and precisely.

It is interesting to note that Apps have figured out how to identify your face and put bunny ears on them, glasses and hats on your image and move them dynamically as you move your face. That is already 2016! as pointed out by my other friends. So the face and body recognition has come a long way. The speed and precision with which it is being done is what is amazing and scary! 

It takes me (and I do this with practiced ease) 3-4 minutes to cut an outline and create portait shots by blacking or whiting out the background. I use the smart cut tool in Adobe Photoshop CS5 and do a layer by cut followed by a solid layer and reordering the layers. 

The key issue is that the smart cut is only as precise as I can do it manually. My rush and crude job in the picture below shows that I did not get the boundaries right on my head line or right ear, which is because the background color blends with skin color or fuzzy boundaries are hard to delineate. The option is to gradually increase opacity between the layers. It can be done and it will take another few mintutes and can be automated.

How do you adjust the lighting post picture?! Think the iPhone8 is taking a page out of the Lytro book and doing multiple exposure shots (kind of like HDR but by adjusting focus) or is adding image sensor tricks to deliberately over expose or underexpose a group of pixels after it identifies the face prior to taking the pictures and is then able to play with this in the post processing. Dont know what kind of AI went into this, but whatever it is, very impressive!

Note that when I do smart cut and add a black layer, there is no lighting effect. I can also recreate part of the effect by creating a custom Vignette option. But I cannot change the local lighting on my face. It will always match the original. 

The "smart cut" being done with software is what is incredible. This is going to put portrait studio kits out of business. 

The SLR camera and lenses are temporarily safe. It still takes a good zoom to capture pictures of moving subjects against a plain backdrop and CS5 to adjust it. Maybe when you import the photos into an iPhone8 those photographs will be edited with a button click. Photoshop options and customized macros are going to be folded into the iPhone. You dont need those anymore soon..

One idea that I had was this.. Build a housing for an iPhone where the phone's camera focuses on an internal white board inside the box which replaces the plane of the full frame sensor in an SLR. You directly put your 2000$ lens on to this small box and the phone connects to an EF lens, telescope, binocular etc. etc. 

In the mean time photography enthusiasts like me will still lug around a heavy bag... 

Technology is moving very fast. Faster than a common person with respect to that technology field is improving. I am in hardware and see a scary progress in software. A software person is probably seeing the same thing in hardware space. The collective improvement is something neither one can anticipate or expect. . . it beats the average expectation by a wide margin!  The happy go lucky average users (all of us) don't see the larger picture of where this is going!

Another addition

We have a new addition to the electronics in the house.

A mac mini.

The old Dell from 2002 died(?) finally after making a few croaking noises. The blue screen showed up many times. It is possible to revive it with a hard disk wipe and installing some later software and OS versions. Instead we chose the less time consuming path and upgraded to a Mac Mini.

Technology has sure come a long way in a decade, huh?

Have not had a chance to play with it since I set it up on sunday night.

The kids love it though! Every day they tell me something they figured out how to do on the Mac just to show me how retarded I am..

Have gotten used to it!

Today we had a short discussion on "Can we sell the Dell on craigslist? who will even buy it?"

San came up with a "Can we donate it to the temple?" and the answer from the rest of us was "don't insult the temple with this computer. they already have computers from two years ago that folks have donated. this goes in a museum"

Do not know if we will find someone who will use the old computer..

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Size trends

An old post was remembered and dug out of the Archives ..

The new trend seems to go in the opposite direction!

There was a company provided Samsung blackjack prior to the iPhone which definitely fits in the gap like a missing data point in the graph.

The phones seem to be growing longer, wider and thinner. They seem to stick out of our regulation size pockets!

That made me think for the first time in my adult life about pockets!

Why are pockets in T-shirts and shirts the same size?
How come they are the same across the world? How come Americans didn't say all American shirts will have pockets on the right side instead of the left? In a world where people drive cars differently, have no universal connector for electronic devices, have multiple measurement systems across the world, the pocket has managed to stay the same size? how come? what is the secret behind it?

and while pondering about the pocket went back to doze off!

Soon we will need bigger pockets to carry these thinner ipad size phones. Can totally imagine a conversation with my tailor in India..

Me : Shirt'oda sEthu pocket'a konjam perisa thaiyunga saar! (just like the shirt stitch the pocket also one size bigger)

Tailor : Why?

Me : Valarra phone! (growing phone)

If it happens, you read it first here...

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Waking up .. at the right moment

Today has been a great day.

No, the wife is in her usual weekend clean up mode and the kids are doing the same things they do..

But there has been a marked change in me. No grumpiness for not being able to catch up on lost sleep from the last week.

There has been a positive attitude to things.

The last week has been very tiring with 2 AM phone calls and lots of work.

Decided to download an iPhone App called "sleep cycle".

This app uses the accelerometer in the iPhone, figures out when you are in deep sleep and when you are rolling around in the bed and times it so that you wake up when you are in deep sleep. The alarm sounds are wonderful and they gradually fade in to high volume.

As an added bonus, it keeps all the statistics and allows you to send the graphs to your gmail account!

In all my life no one has ever done a wonderful job of waking me up like this!

Thank you Sleep Cycle!

Thank you iPhone 3GS !

Thank you Technology !

Now all those <6 hour sleep nights are not going to be that bad after all!

There are other reasons for the exuberance.. but that will be explained later..

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