Skill is an amazing virtue. Most of us confuse the word with knowing something and knowing something so well, that it becomes an extension of who we are.

Over time i have realized that true expertise can be attained  when you concentrate in a world where only two things exist. You and your skill and you work every single day to make that relationship better.

You just can’t be distracted with competition, show boating, PR, advocacy  and all of the rest.

This clip just made it all come together.

Superlative aerial filming of a Suziki GSXR 1000 superbike through a countryside road.( the Isle of Mann) The films almost blends into your vision and memory.Considering the speed of the bike, crosswinds on the helicopter and keeping a steady frame and focus, this is simply art.

It’s made that simple and smooth.

As for the Rider; Guy Martin is known as amongst the most fearless and charismatic TT riders in the world, and this is the Isle of Mann, one of the hardest TT circuits out there, but it’s not about that.

It’s about the sheer enjoyment of racing for nothing but the freedom and ability to ride. About the modesty and down to earth demeanour which comes when you know that your only barrier is yourself and to be the best you have to keep being better everyday.

It’s about being in a zone where your skill is just an extension of who you are.

Guy makes modesty, freedom, happiness, peace and ability come alive effortlessly by just riding a bike. It’s almost as if no one but the road exists for him.

I only wish if i had the ability to evolve just one skill into this realm of freedom.

From it being  a job to it setting me free.

The Ruins of Villa Epecuen

Amazing photo feature in The Atlantic

Back in the 1920s, a tourist village was established along the shore of Lago Epecuen, a salt lake some 600 kilometers southwest of Buenos Aires, Argentina. The resort town, named Villa Epucuen, soon had a railroad station, and it thrived for several decades, peaking in the 1970s with a population of more than 5,000. Around the same time, a long-term weather event was delivering far more rain than usual to the surrounding hills for years, and Lago Epecuen began to swell. In 1985, the salty waters broke through an earthen dam, and Villa Epecuen was doomed. A slow-growing flood consumed the town until it reached a depth of 10 meters (33 feet) in 1993. The wet weather later reversed, and the waters began to recede in 2009. AFP photographer Juan Mabromata recently visited the ruins of Villa Epecuen, met its sole inhabitant, and returned with these images.

 

A ghost town submerged under salt water resurfaces after 20 years

Photo Credit : (Juan Mabromata/AFP/Getty Images) #  Published in The Atlantic

Lone Inhabitant of Villa Epecuen today: 81 year old Pablo Novak who is the only person who came back to the town and is living here today.

Photo Credit : (Juan Mabromata/AFP/Getty Images) #  Published in The Atlantic

To see all the 20 pictures from this amazing photo essay head over to the original post in The Atlantic 

Source: The Atlantic

Chartkick- load your JS chart graphics faster

We all love nice looking colourful charts ( 3d) on our web and mobile platforms. But most of these make the page load slower.

3d Visualizations of Pie Charts, Graph Charts, Bar Charts. Column Diagrams from web databases are generally rendered over standard JS using jQuery which sometimes can cause timeouts or may not be rendered properly if the page doesn’t load fast.

Chartkick aims to solve that problem by simplifying your admin dashboard and giving each chart its own endpoint.

With Chartkick you can create beautiful Javascript charts using one line of Ruby.

Example of a Column Chart

<%= column_chart Task.group_by_day_of_week(:created_at).count %>

 

Example of  a Pie Chart

<%= pie_chart Goal.group("name").count %>
 

So how do you install it ?

Start by downloading Chartkick here

Add this line to your application’s Gemfile:

gem "chartkick"

And add the javascript files to your views. chartkick.js runs as a Rails engine - no need to install it.

Note: These files must be included before the helper methods.

For Google Charts, use:

<%= javascript_include_tag "//www.google.com/jsapi", "chartkick" %>

If you prefer Highcharts, use:

<%= javascript_include_tag "path/to/highcharts.js", "chartkick" %>

Head over to GitHub to read the rest of the documentation or if you are wiling to fork it.

Source: ankane.github.io

Raspberry Pi ships camera module

Raspberry PI’s camera module is now shipping.

The five megapixel fixed-focus shooter — which only measures 25 x 20 x 9mm — can snap 2,592 x 1,944-pixel images and capture video at 1,080p (30fps), 720p (60fps) and VGA (60 or 90fps).

And yes just for $25 from RS Components or from Premier Farnell/Element14

Example command prompts to activate the camera:

Capture an image in jpeg format:

raspistill -o image.jpg

Capture a 5s video in h264 format:

raspivid -o video.h264

Capture a 10s video:

raspivid -o video.h264 -t 10000

Capture a 10s video in demo mode:

raspivid -o video.h264 -t 10000 -d

Here’s a video on setting it up the camera hardware

For more exhaustive documentation head over to the Pi Forums here.

Source: raspberrypi.org

BBM comes to iOS and Android as a standalone messaging app

True that.

Question is - is it too late in the day ? For Blackberry?

Messaging services have been slowly funneling traffic away from social media platforms for a while now and the mobile phone is truly starting to reflect what it always was - the most effective social network of them all.

Blackberry is late. 

But it does give credence to another rising trend out there. 

Doesn’t matter whose mobile OS you are on. Even if it is a competitors, if you have a good product/ service, make sure its available on all mobile OS platforms, so that you get all those users on all those platforms to at least have the option of using your product/ service.

Exclusivity (in an open age) on products of mass consumption especially on mobile platforms is a tricky bet and needs a huge ecosystem to succeed.

So code. Hack away. Understand your competitors mobileOS, UI and UX and deliver your product on that OS with a superlative user experience.

And you will benefit.

Ask Google.

Their Search app ( with Google Now), Map’s app and YouTube App on iOS are used more by Apple users than Apples own products in the same category. They even created an IOS app for Google Plus so that people could use Google’s Social Network on the iPhone.

All this just increases usage of your product/ service. And when people use your product more, you end up making more money.

From more avenues.

Because, users only care about services and products they use. Not about Operating Systems.

ESPNs relation with Twitter- Twitter’s march into TV

Twitter’s march into the television kingdom continues unabated. WSJ’s new article announces the details of an expanding partnership between ESPN and Twitter.

You can read the details here.

But from a digital trend perspective here are the interesting parts one needs to think about.

The symbiotic connection:

The closer ties spotlight the symbiotic business needs of Twitter and the television industry. For the TV networks, Twitter tie-ins provide new ways to make money beyond 30-second TV commercials likely to be skipped or ignored

 

The rise of the hashtag:

Nielsen says 40% of people who use a smartphone in the U.S. visit a social network while watching television. Twitter wants to ensure it is making money from all the posts about TV broadcasts, and from the ways TV networks use Twitter to promote their shows.

 

The pie in the offing:

Twitter and the TV networks are going after the same prize: a slice of the roughly $350 billion annual spending on world-wide TV advertising, according to Nielsen. Some research shows social media is boosting viewership of live television, and the TV networks and Twitter are eager to capitalize.

Now if one could analyse the data from all those engagements and drive more meaningful insights, that can forecast ad rates, programming content, time slotting for programs et all -

That’s something that would have a huge market demand.

Can big data analysis structure all this unstructured data into cohesive bundles of market insight based on mathematic frameworks of demand forecasting? 

That would be something.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

About Dropplets

Hat tip to Arvindh Sundar for this.

Recently he moved his entire blog from Wordpress on to Dropplets, a simple markdown blogging platform. It’s database less and so can install on any server in just about 30 seconds.

Now I have been vocal about my quest for a simpler blogging platform for a while, because most blogging platforms have metamorphosed into complicated CMS full of feature creep where I end up spending more time on managing plug ins and features than writing.

I moved away from Blogger and Wordpress almost a couple of years ago, because I needed a simpler platform that let me blog, curate, post images, video’s in the simplest, least time consuming way both from a desktop and a mobile.

So I ended with Tumblr.

However, the cleanliness and simplicity of Dropplets impressed me.

Take a look here. Pretty neat.

Very close in look and feel to Svbtle, which i love because of its invitation only community feature and extreme high quality of writers.

You can download the latest version of Dropplets on GitHub and then extract the downloaded zip file.

With Dropplets, you have to write your posts offline (using the text or Markdown editor of your choice) in Markdown format. Here’s a handy syntax guide if you need a little help with your Markdown skills. All posts for Dropplets MUST be composed using the following format:

# Your Post Title
- Post Author Name (e.g. "Dropplets")
- Post Author Twitter Handle (e.g. "dropplets")
- Publish Date in YYYY/MM/DD Format (e.g. "2013/04/28")
- Post Category (e.g. "Random Thoughts")
- Post Status (e.g. "published" or "draft")

Your post text starts here.

Check out all the other documentation here on GitHub.

Jony Ive on Design

Ben Thomson recollects a personal experience from a talk show and gives an amazing write up on Jony Ive’s philosophy of Design down at Stratechery 

One of the things that’s interesting about design [is that] there’s a danger, particularly in this industry, to focus on product attributes that are easy to talk about. You go back 10 years, and people wanted to talk about product attributes that you could measure with a number. So they would talk about hard drive size, because it was incontrovertible that 10 was a bigger number than 5, and maybe in the case of hard drives that’s a good thing. Or you could talk about price because there’s a number there.

But there are a lot of product attributes that don’t have those sorts of measures. Product attributes that are more emotive and less tangible. But they’re really important. There’s a lot of stuff that’s really important that you can’t distill down to a number. And I think one of the things with design is that when you look at an object you make many many decisions about it, not consciously, and I think one of the jobs of a designer is that you’re very sensitive to trying to understand what goes on between seeing something and filling out your perception of it. You know we all can look at the same object, but we will all perceive it in a very unique way. It means something different to each of us. Part of the job of a designer is to try to understand what happens between physically seeing something and interpreting it.

I think that sort of striving for simplicity is not a style. It’s an approach and a philosophy. I think it’s about authenticity and being honest. Not just taking something crappy and styling the outside in an arbitrary disconnected way.

Source: stratechery.com