Category: Entertainment

Bicyclone-3

29 Mar
Raju Alluri 0 Comment Bicycling, Entertainment, Interesting

Hyderabad Bicycling Club (HBC) and World Wildlife Fund organized Bicyclone-3, the eco-friendly cycle ride today. The response was awesome. Good to see so many school kids turning up for this event.

I opted to rent a bike for this 20km ride, so that I could avoid the 30km commute to/from the venue. That turned out to be a bad decision, both for the time it took and the height of the bike I got. However, I am very lucky to get hold of a basic bike for the ride. I switched to the 10km path of the ride, given the low height of the bike.

Met my niece Manu and my co-worker Kalyan at the ride. Managed to click a few pics before and after the ride.

2014-03-Bicyclone-03

It is a great experience to see people of all ages turn up in good numbers for such a good cause. Congratulations to all the participants and thanks to HBC.

 

Republic Day at Palm Meadows

26 Jan
Raju Alluri 1 Comment Entertainment, Personal & Family

Our Palm Meadows community celebrated Republic Day today. In addition to the flag hoisting by our community President Sri Anand Raju, we had a few more interesting events. In chronological order, we had

  • A great speech by Baby Ananya on the importance of Republic Day – I could see a young generation ramping up on Indian History.
  • A well composed dance by Ms. Karishma for a patriotic song; I also liked her attire, especially her bangles depicting the tricolor.
  • A thoughtful and mesmerizing talk on mind and its health by Swami Padmanabhanandaji of Sivanandashram (The Divine Life Society), followed by a short Q&A session.

As usual, our support staff did nice arrangements for the event. Here are the pics from the day.

RepublicDay-PalmMeadows-2014

Copenhagen Wheel

06 Dec
Raju Alluri 0 Comment Bicycling, Entertainment, Interesting, Technical

What happens when a premier academic institution teams up with the City of cyclists? You see one of the best inventions getting now into mass production.

MIT’s SENSEable City Lab and City of Copenhagen bring us a pedal assist electric system called the Copenhagen Wheel. The wheel can be retrofitted almost on any bicycle. Superpedestrian, the startup that has exclusive production rights for the technology, is now accepting back orders for the wheel. The wheel comes both in single speed and multi-speed variants. The wheel itself may cost lot more than an average bike, but I think the wheel is really worth it.

How does it work? The prime factor of the wheel is its regenerating braking capability. The rider can use the exercise mode, pedaling against the motor and charging the battery in this process. Or the rider can use the motor assist mode, in which case the battery power is used to help the rider pedal easily thru, say, slopes. Each of these modes will have 3 levels and the modes/levels can be selected using a smart phone that communicates to the wheel wirelessly. Not sure if the modes switch automatically using the torque sensors in the system (my guess is it would be so, but we need to wait for more details and see.)

The wheel may be a costly affair in the initial days (the wheel is much costlier than average bike on streets) but offers a great potential for bicycling adoption. Excitedly waiting for mass production and global availability of this wheel.

A dream that might be reality

04 Dec
Raju Alluri 1 Comment Entertainment

We forget our dreams quickly – most of our dreams are forgotten by the time we wake up in the morning and continue with our daily schedules. Even if we remember some dreams, they are not remembered in vivid detail. At most, we remember en emotional event or two from a dream after a few hours.

However, one of my dreams (this one from a couple of nights ago) has a strong impression in my memory and I remember the entire conversation as though I watched a HD movie while I was sleeping. Here is the dream:

I am standing near the entrance of a mall, checking my social networking feeds from Twitter and Facebook. No rush in the mall and people are randomly walking in and out from that entrance. From my peripheral view, I notice a gentleman (who looks like an agent from Matrix and is with a very friendly disposition) walking to me, holding a gadget in his palm. I got curious as he approached me.

Mr. Agent: “Hi, I work for a Government Agency. We are running a pilot.”

[ My curiosity increases. ]

Mr. Agent: “We need your help”

[ My curiosity turns to keen interest ]

Mr. Agent: “Our automation systems recognized you, but we still want to double-check. Can you verify if this is your email id?”

[ He moves next to me and shows the gadget in his palm. The gadget looks like an extended mini pad. It has a screen showing my primary email id, with a couple of characters replaced with rectangles.

Knowing that it is my email id I did an affirmative nod. The Agent smiled when I started my nod and tapped on the pad. Now the rectangles are replaced with their respective characters from my email id. With a shocked expression, I asked him: ]

Me: “How did you recognize me?”

Mr. Agent: “We installed cameras and sensors that can scan. Your face and your teeth signatures are captured and they matched with our database.”

[ Keen interest transformed to excitement at this point. I was about to ask Mr. Agent if there is an extended version of this pilot in which I can participate. ]

That’s when I woke up.

With data capturing and analysis happening around us every minute, the key aspects of this dream (scan, recognition, correlation to other personal data) might be a reality, who knows?

Reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows.

Potter: “Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?”

Dumbledore: “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”

 

 

Mission Peaks This Morning

11 Nov
Raju Alluri 1 Comment Entertainment

I haven’t had enough of Mission Peaks hiking. Headed there again today, accompanied by Krishna K.V. and Sunil Gadgil. We started out so early (reached the park y 4.45am) that I got parking right at the park’s lot. And I had about 20 choices on where I can park. What a luxury?

Weather is awesome while we are climbing up. Decent temperatures, no high wind chills and the skies are really clear. Once we reached the top, we managed to get a few great photos.

Once we started heading down, the cloud blankets started sneaking in. It got windy and chilly at that point.

Here are a few pics from the day.

MissionPeaks-2013-11-10

 

Giving a bit of detail, these shoes are supposed to be black in color. That is an indication of a good hike…

From MissionPeaks-2013-11-10

 

Bye Bye BlackBerry

19 Sep
Raju Alluri 0 Comment Entertainment, Misc

Today I said adieu to my long term primary phone – the one I use to make most calls – my BlackBerry. I still love the simplicity of the phone, but the phone became a white elephant for the feature set it delivers. I still have two more phones that I use – an Android one and an iPhone. These phones are designated for specific needs. For my large volume calls, I may still be looking out for a phone with considerable battery life. Nokia and Samsung (I am not joking) seem to be the best contenders so far.

Coming back to the BlackBerry – today I took the backups, extracted key contacts from the backup and then pulled the battery off the phone.

Bye bye to this BlackBerry, after about four years with it.

Introductory Wildlife Photography Meetup

31 Aug
Raju Alluri 2 Comments Entertainment, Photography

Twin Cities Photography Club (TCPC) conducted a meetup on Introductory Wildlife Photography on 24th August.  The meetup is attended by about 20 members. I enrolled into the meetup closer to the end of the RSVP process.

The day was sunny and bright enough for shooting in the wild. We headed to Narsapur forest, about 40km from the city. The training part of the meetup included key aspects of wildlife photography including preparation (food, attire), precautions and simple techniques. The importance of patience is very well evidenced during the exercises where we attempted to shoot pictures of butterflies.

I shot most of my pictures with my Canon T2i using my 55mm-250mm kit lens. For the first few pics, I used my 18mm-135mm lens. I focused a bit on framing of the picture and shutter speed. However, the biggest takeaways for me (from the meetup) are more practicing of manual focus and attempting exposure compensation during lowlight conditions.

Here are a few pics from the day:

WildLife-2013-08

 

We headed back for a late lunch. My carpool included a team of passionate individuals and we discussed a good range of photography topics during our travel.

It is a well organized meetup from TCPC. The organizers did a very good job.

Bicycle, Joy Rides and Mudguard

18 Aug
Raju Alluri 0 Comment Bicycling, Entertainment

Its rainy season, the season of potholes, puddles and muck on the road. Unless you are very lucky, you don’t get to see fresh water on the road when you are pedaling. Excluding the mud factor, this is the best season for joyful bicycle rides (especially if you have a mountain bike).

My bicycle doesn’t come with a mudguard by default. In my recent trip to US, I got this entry level mudguard (the one I can find in a sports store in the last minute of my shopping) made by Blackburn. The model is called Splashboard rear fender. I installed it last week (in a matter of a couple of minutes) and my early morning bicycle rides are much pleasant now.

The fender is effective only around the speeds of 15kmph and for heavy dirt. I still see that the light (ash-like) dirt manages to fly to my shoulder level when I pedal at about 25kmph. Given the low number of stretches that allow me to pedal close to 25kmph, the fender is doing an okay job for me. The amount of post-ride helmet, dress and hair cleaning is drastically reduced now. With the fender, I am enjoying my biking along dirt roads a lot better.

Here are a few pics of the fender and more importantly, the dirt on my bicycle. Good indication of the great mornings.

 

Bike-Mudguard-2013-08

BTW, if you are looking for monsoon maintenance tips for your bike, you should read this blog post by The Bike Affair. Simple and very useful, as always.