ILUGC Monthly Meet – August 11, 2018 – 3-6 pm – IITM

/ tshrinivasan / Leave a comment

Hello all,

Indian Linux Users Group, Chennai [ ILUGC ] is spreading awareness on Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) in Chennai since January 1998.

We usually meet on the second Saturday of every month, and for the month of August we shall meet on Saturday, August 11, 2018 at 1500 IST.

Venue: Classroom No 1,
Aerospace Engineering,
Near Gajendra Circle,
IIT Madras.
Link for the Map: http://bit.ly/iitm-aero

Talk Details:

Talk 1: Introduction to Docker

Description: Docker is helping to containerize the applications and environment. Let us explore the basic operations of docker.

Duration: 30 minutes
About Speakers: T Shrinivasan, A Free/Open Source Software Enthusiast.

Talk 2: Demo of creating custom spins using Ubuntu 18.04 and the use of systemd-nspawn container for chrooting

Duration: 45 minutes
About Yourself: S. Baskar, Another FOSS enthusiast

The speakers are requested to only use F/OSS OSes for their
presentations. The talks will be followed by lightning talks, and Q&A session.

Entry free. All are welcome.

Fix wireless on HP 2000 laptop for LiuxMint 19

/ tshrinivasan / Leave a comment

Today, I installed LiuxMint 19 Tara on a HP 2000 Laptop.

Everything went fine. Bios was plain old. No issues with UFEI. Mint is supoer cool for newbies. But found Wifi was not working.

running “rfkill list all” showed that there were soft and hard blocks for wifi. running “sudo rfkill unblock all” removed the soft blocks.

Pressing the wifi button on F12 was not working.

Here is how fixed with some searching various forums.

  1. Ran this command.
sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-hp.conf <<< "blacklist hp_wmi"

2. Reset bios with default values

Then, WIFI started to work.

Thanks for the awesome opensource community for all the software ans ansers.

30 Project Ideas for contributing to Indic Wikipedia Projects

/ tshrinivasan / Leave a comment

Last week, I had an interesting meeting with Panjabi Wikimedian community and CIS-A2K team.

Panjabi wikimedia community is small in count. But each of them are contributing with their best. Many of them doing 100-days-of-wiki, personal wiki edithathon for 100 days. Few of them do in in multiple sites and many times a year.

Their interest on contribution and passion on their language is awesome.

Interacted on wikisource, wiktionary and wikipedia. Shared many ideas to improve their workflow. They are looking for many tools to automate their tasks. Those tools will be useful for all wiki communities.

Then, had some great discussions with CIS-A2K team. We spoke about many interesting project ideas.
Listing them all the ideas here.

1. List down the Top 10 tricks/hacks/must know on any wikisource project

2. Make simple tutorials on how to start contributing to wiki, in all possible languages. Still we dont have an ebook or easy starter guide in Tamil. There may be video tutorials. curate them and show them in better way to find them easily.

3. Telegram bot to proofread wikisource contents. Get a page from wikisource. split it into lines, then words. Show a word and OCRed content in a telegrambot. User should verify or type the correct spelling in telegram itself. Submit the changes to wikisource. Thus, we can make the collaborated proofreading easily.

4. Explore how to use flickr for helping photographers to donate their photos for commons. Flickr is easy for them to upload and showcase. From there, we should move the photos to commons. Few tools are already available. Explore them and train them for photographers.

5. We should celebrate the volunteers who contribute to wiki. By events, news announcements, interviews etc. CIS may explore this.

6. Web application for OCR4WikiSource

7. Make a web application to record audio and upload to commons and add in wiktionary words. explore Lingua-Libre for web app.

8. Make a mobile application to record audio and upload to commons and add in wiktionary words.

9. CIS may ask the language based organizations to give their works/tools on public licenses.

10. A one/two day meeting/conference to connect various language technologies. Each team can demonstrate the tools they are working on. others can learn and use them for their languages. CIS may organize this soon.

11. Building spell checkers for Tamil. Learn how other other languages are doing. Odia seems to have good spell checker. Explore that.

12. For iOS, there is no commons app to upload photos. It was there sometime ago. Fix the iOS commons app and rerelease it again.

13. Build Maps with local languages with OSM.

14. One/Two day training on wiki tech. like gadgets, tools, toolserver, API, etc

15. Tweet marketing to promote the ebooks released in wikisource projects. Measure the downloads.

16. CIS may talk with amazon to release the ebooks from wikisource for free always at amazon.

17. Explore Valmigi project of malayalam, chikubuku of kannada – for their ebooks.

18. Download ebooks from dspace, bengali books – West Bengal Public Library Network – url – http://dspace.wbpublibnet.gov.in:8080/jspui/

19. Explore paid works for wikisource proofreading.

20. Blog on how ta wikisource for 2000 ebooks from TN government in public domain license. Send to CIS. They may try to do the same for other languages.

21. ASI website has info about all monuments. Scrap them all and add in wiki.

22. Scrap details from tourism sites and add in wiki.

23. Kannada archeology site has tons of images but with 3 seals added in all images. scrap them, remove seal and add to commons.

24. Tool to audit wiki sites. like new users, edits, measurements, KPIs, reports etc.

25. Discuss with wiki writers and help them to automate their tasks. Build new tools to help them. train existing tools.

26. Get existing photos from many photographers. Get license doc. Add in OTRS. Have a team to upload the photos to commons.

27. Find the pages that don’t have images. Search in commons and add 1 image automatically.

28. Infobox in wiki pages may have 1 image. Check for the same page in other languages.. get the image from infobox and use it in missing pages.

29. Tito showed a broken JS script. Explore it and fix it.

30. Discuss with victor and google team to improve the OCR feature and integrating with wikisource. Explore existing tools like http://tools.wmflabs.org/ws-google-ocr/ and https://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Google_OCR

 

Thanks to Ravi, Tito, Tanveer, Dan, Charan Singh, Manavpreet, Rupika,Gurlaal, Stain for the interesting meeting and great ideas.

We can work on these ideas and implement them soon.

If you are interested in doing any of the ideas, reply here or mail me on tshrinivasan@gmail.com

 

Project Idea – Need a web interface for Tamil TTS

/ tshrinivasan / 2 Comments

Hello all,

 

The Tamil TTS system provided by IITM and SSN College of Engineering had one issue. It can convert one tamil string to audio at one time.

https://github.com/tshrinivasan/tamil-tts-install

Because of this, we can not do parallel conversion. Few full text books took 4-5 hours for conversion. Because of this, we could not make it as a web application for public use.

Mohan

Mohan helped to make the Tamil TTS Script simpler to process multiple
conversion simultaneously.

Here is the super script that does magics.

https://github.com/mohan43u/tamil-tts-install

Thanks Mohan for your great works.

now, we need to convert this as a web application, so that anyone can
use it easily.

The requirements are below.
1. user registration with gmail
2. user should upload a tamil text file
3. once it is converted, user should receive an email with the link to
the audio file
4. we can keep the audio files for 1 week
5. REPT API support with authentication
6. A queue system

All these will be released in GPL.

If you are interested in doing this, reply here or write to me.

Project Idea – Mobile application to explain about the place I am in

/ tshrinivasan / 2 Comments

Few months ago, I was talking to Siva. He is part of Tamil Heritage Activities. They take people to Mahabalipuram often and explain all its great history.

They are looking for a mobile app to auto explain about the nearby place, by getting the geolocation of the person.

if you goto near to tiger cave of mahabalipuram, the app should explain all about tiger cave. The data can be provided from a wikipedia page or some custom webservice.

We can extend the same to any place. Like, extending the same for all the temples in kanchipuram or even all over world.

Wikipedia and wikidata can be great starting points for providing required information.

Now, we are looking for android/ios developers to develop this as an open source mobile application.

If you are interested in this, mail me on tshrinivasan@gmail.com or reply here.

Thanks.

Thanks Nithya! for the great Birthday Gift

/ tshrinivasan / Leave a comment

Feb 18, was my birthday. Myself and Nithya dont celebrate each others birthday, as all of the days are very precious for us.

I never gifted her anything. She also did not. But, for this time, she wondered me with a great gift.

Yes. It is a Free Software 🙂

She wrote a grammar checker (Conjunction Checker) for Tamil and released on Feb 18, with a nice blog post. It is here in Tamil https://nithyashrinivasan.wordpress.com/2018/02/19/birthday-wishes-for-shrini-with-a-gift/

It was my decade dream to create a great spell checker for Tamil as a Free Software. Conjunction Checker is one of the big parts of it.

It has too many rules and she read them all, understood, converted as Python code.

It is the awesome birthday gift.

Nithya! You are my best gift. Thanks, is a simple word. It cant express what es I mean.

She is improving it a lot with more rules and testing.

Here is the code – https://github.com/nithyadurai87/tamil-sandhi-checker

She made a video about this tool – https://youtu.be/eC82S7wOr3E

Today, She spoke about this in “ILUGC – Indian Linux Users Group – Chennai” Meet. So happy to see her giving a talk in my homeland.

I am working on making it as web application, so that anyone can use it.

Thanks to open-tamil python library for its all great features of handling tamil text easily.

I am seeing Nithya as avid reader, writer, dancer, home maker and now a programmer.

You can read all her books here – http://freetamilebooks.com/authors/nithyaduraisamy/

Hoping to see more women contributors like Nithya in the upcoming days.

 

 

Annual Review – What I did on 2017?

/ tshrinivasan / 5 Comments

2017 was a great year for me, as all the years. Sharing here on how it went. Yes. It is too late to write this now. It is because of the few lifestyle changes I am following. Its is OK to do many things slowly and drop few things. Am I right?

Health :

I was trying to reduce my ongrowing tummy for years. in 2017, took some serious, series of efforts.

  • Joined Zumba Dance class on Sep 2017. It is a thrice in a week class. I attend 2 classes, atleast.
  • Bought a cycle on October 2017 and went to office in cycle. It was around 40 km per round trip. Cycled for 2 months, twice in a week.
  • Exercised for 10-15 min every day, mostly.

With all these efforts, my hip size came to 34 from 39. It is a great improvement. Thanks to “Dude Academy” and Master Kannadasan for inspiring.

Got fever 4 times. Those bad days reminded how bad my health is. It is time to eat good food, and siddha medicines which gave enormous immunity in my school/college days. started to have the medicines prepared by my dad.

Stopped drinking cool drinks, fried items like pizza, burger etc.

Family:

  • Viyan got into a nearby school. He is in LKG now.
  • He sent hand drawn Deepavali Wishes post cards to all our friends.
  • Nithya learnt karagam, Poikal Kuthirai dances. She is performing in various event. She wrote a ebook on Javascript. Released a video on Bigdata and Elasticsearch
  • Brother Arulalan joined at meteorology department as scientist in Noida.
  • Brother Suresh got a government job.

Office:

Office works made me keep on learning new things. Elasticsearch, Spark, Druid, Python3, AWS api are some great things I explored. Completed reading one book fully on the technology I start to work.

Travel:

  • Went to Vienna, Austria for a wikipedia hackathon. Met many interesting people and blogged the event happenings of Day 1, Day 2 and Day 3.
  • Went to Yelagiri for Nithya’s karagam dance on a government function.
  • Went to Kothagiri for marriage of Nithya’s friend’s sister.
  • Went to Kerala with Office friends and their Family.
  • Went to Pondicherry and visited science center, bharathiyar house etc.
  • Went to Melmalaiyanur with family.
  • Went to Beaches few times in the early morning. Those are really great times.
  • Went to DakshanChitra many times for Nithya’s dance practises.
  • Went to Sriperumbuthur as Nithya danced for Sri Ramanujar’s 1000th birthday celebrations.
  • Went to Kumbakonam and nearby places with office friends.
  • Went to few resorts with office friends.

Foss Contributions:

  • IITM and SSN College of Engineering, released a good Tamil Text-to-Speech system. Met IITM team and learnt how to install in linux. Automated and released it here.
  • In Vienna wikipedia hackathon, enabled LinguaLibre to upload voice files to wikipedia commons.
  • Helped to released a telegram bot to translate strings collaboratively for the english strings in openstreetmaps to tamil.
  • Helped to released a “Send to kindle” option for the ebooks in FreeTamilEbooks.com
  • Got some interest on adding interesting places to OSM. Used cycle to roam around tambaram and added many places with the maps.me app.
  • Conducted 2 hackathons for ilugc. one for tamil computing and one for wikipedia.
  • Conducted 1 event for ebook making training.

Society:

  • Found a social team “Agaththi” in Tambaram. Participating on their market for organic formers.
  • Filed few RTI in YouRTI.in for the issues in Tambaram and got few resolved.

Writing:

Wrote 57 blog post in this blog and 6 posts in Tamil in my tamil blog. This is low. Will try to increase next year. Writing a book on Python in Tamil. Hope will release by next year. But I have read plenty of books this year. I love reading than writing. Lazy me.

Books Read:

Thanks to PacktPub’s One free ebook per day, Kindle Unlimited Plan and All authors of FreeTamilEbooks.com for providing tons of great books to read.

With the Kindle device, I enjoyed plenty of hours in continuous reading.

Award :

Got an award for the contributions on Tamil computing on 2016 from The Tamil Literary Garden, Canada. Received Rs. 50,000 as prize money. Working on creating an organization with this money to do more contributions with more volunteers. Will ask for donations soon.

LifeStyle:

Was living a simple, minimalistic lifestyle.
Quited TV, Facebook and smartphone two years ago. Still able to live without them. Prioritized the life in the order of Health, Family, Office, Personal growth, FOSS Contributions.

Thus, the year 2017 was so great. It gave me great lessons via bad experiences too. Those are opportunities for me to learn about people and world.

Hope you too had a great year. Hoping that 2018 will be even more exciting for all of us.

 

Project-Idea : Custom data updater for maps.me mobile app

/ tshrinivasan / Leave a comment

https://p.apk4fun.com/82/71/7c/com.mapswithme.maps-featured.jpg

Maps.me is a good mobile app (Free Software) for navigation and adding Places (POI – Point of Interest) to OpenStreetMap.org

It uses offline data, to provide smooth user experience. OsmContributor, OSMAnd are other few android app, to contribute to OSM by adding POI. But we can feel the lag on navigating the map as they fetch real time data on every move over the map.

Maps.me is super fast. But because it uses only offline data. The maps.me provides updates for the data once in a month or twice.

We can see the POIs added by us. But, when we run a mapathon kind of events, many volunteers will be roaming around a city. Sometimes, they come to a street, where the POIs are added by someone else already.

When you are using maps.me for adding POI, we can not get the POIs added by other volunteers immediately. We have to wait for the updates provided by the maps.me team.

This leads to repeated adding of same POI many times. Even verifying for the same POI using other app is boring.

Checked for the maps.me team for providing options to update the data whenever required. But it is not on their roadmap.

Discussed this with “OpenStreetMap Asia” telegram group. Erwin Olario replied with few ideas.

  1. Maps.me uses mwm format for the data
  2. https://export.hotosm.org/en/v3/exports can export data in mwm format
  3. https://export.hotosm.org/en/v3/learn/export_formats#mwm gives steps on how to download latest data and use with maps.me

All we need now, is a mobile app to download the desired data from hotosm and place in the proper path of maps.me

We can develop this as a separate mobile app and distribute to all.

If this is done, anyone using maps.me can click another app, and update the osm data whenever required.

Reply here / Contact me if you are interested in doing this as a Free/OpenSource Project.

My mail id – tshrinivasan@gmail.com

 

Update – 1

 Ilya Zverik has provided a daily snapshot for each country, but sometimes, it’s not available: http://direct.mapswithme.com/regular/daily/

 

 

An Affordable Laptop from IIT Bombay

/ tshrinivasan / 1 Comment

Last week Saturday, met Mr. Mohamed Kasim, from IIT Bombay.

He demonstrated me a tiny, lightweight, cute laptop.

It is a 11.6″ laptop, based on an atom quad core processor. It has 4GB RAM, 32 GB NAND flash, an expansion slot through which one can attach an optional 2.5″ HDD/SDD, and most importantly, 10 hours of time, thanks to a 10,000 mAh battery. It has two USB ports, a mini HDMI port and a microSD card slot. It also has wifi and bluetooth.

This laptop comes with Debian Linux operating system and a lot of useful software, such as LibreOffice, LaTeX, Scilab, OpenModelica, Inkscape, GIMP, Blender, OpenFOAM, eSim, Synfig Studio, and various editors and browsers.

The cost is 10,000 INR.

I checked for its performance. Opened LibreOffice, Eclipse, Gimp, Blender and explored their basic operations. The performance was smooth. Cant see any lagging or heating.

Currently, the laptop is available Institutes and organizations for bulk orders. The service and support support centers are being setup across the country.

It is really lightweight. It is price is too low for its performance. You will love to buy immediately if you see it and experience it. The same happened to me.

Read here the announcement from Prof. Kannan, IITB
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/affordable-laptop-kannan-moudgalya/

Video – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae3EZsK_yuM&feature=youtu.be

A brochure on this laptop is available here: https://goo.gl/hKfGfs.

20180203151312.jpg

If you are interested in buying it for your organization/college/school, contact Mr. Mohamed Kasim on mohamedkasim AT iitb DOT ac DOT in