Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

June 6, 2009

Scanning old Hindi books

Filed under: My Life — Tags: — Suramya @ 10:35 PM

Was rearranging my book collection here when I found some really old Hindi books. These books belonged to my Mother’s Grandfather and had been lying unnoticed with my books for ages. Unfortunately some of the books have gotten damaged, probably in all the moves we did over the years when dad was in the Air Force.

As these books are pretty much irreplaceable, I have started scanning them and then restoring them. So far I have scanned two books and will be scanning the rest as and when I get time. The plan is that once I am done scanning all these books I will visit my grandparents place and get the rest of his books from there and scan them too. Some of these books are over a 100 years old.

Since I am pretty sure that the books are no longer under copyright I am going to post them here on the site. Feel free to distribute the books as long as you don’t charge for it. Plus would be nice if you could mention where you got them from.

The books are scanned as .jpg images with two pages per image. As I said the books were in bad condition (I am sad that I didn’t notice this earlier) and some of them have pages missing so I have scanned whatever pages were remaining and restored the books and put proper covers etc on them to prevent further damage.

The first two books I scanned are available for download here:

  • Sachee Aur Imandaar Balak (Truthful and Honest Children) Contains short stories about children who were honest and truthful.
  • Hindi Stories Unfortunately the title page of this book is missing so I don’t know the name of the book. It contains short stories in Hindi

    • Will be scanning more soon. If you have and comments/feedback please do let me know.

    [Update 12/12/2014] :

    Looks like folks are not reading the comments, so updating the post to add this note. I am not interested in promoting Piracy, if the book you want is still being published then there is no way I am going to post a copy on my site. You can and should purchase the book from the publisher. The contact details for the publisher are below (Thanks Nostalgia for sharing):

    PEOPLE’S PUBLISHING HOUSE,G-18A(G-BLOCK), MARINA ARCADE,(BELOW MARINA HOTEL),
    CONNAUGHT PLACE,NEW DELHI-1,
    Phone 01123523349, 01123324064

    [Update 12/12/2017] : Fixed broken links.

    – Suramya

    June 3, 2009

    Status Update: Life, Site etc

    Filed under: My Life,Website Updates — Suramya @ 9:26 AM

    So what have I been upto recently? As I posted earlier I am in the process of updating the site with a new layout and new content. Portions of the site have not been updated since I initially created the site and I think its about time that this was rectified. For example the main portion of the About me section contained 8 year old information.

    At present the following pages have been updated:
    1. Home
    2. About Me (Except the Friends section)

    Currently working on the About India section. The information in this section is too short and doesn’t have that much detail so I am expanding it. Just to give you an idea of amount on new information I am adding here is an example; In the History of India section the portion the expanded section on Indus Valley Civilization is longer than the entire history page of the current site.

    This is why I think the update will take a while. I am considering making the changes live as and when I am done with a section. Still haven’t decided yet. Lets see.

    Other than this I am now learning Python so that I can program stuff on my phone. Have managed to write basic scripts so far. Python for Nokia is amazing. I got the phone to read an incoming SMS in a 7 line program. Working towards a program that will allow me to send commands/text to my system from my phone. Have loads of program idea’s that I want to try on the phone so this should be a lot of fun.

    Well this is all for now. Will post more later.

    – Suramya

    May 7, 2009

    Finally Voted today

    Filed under: My Life,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 8:39 PM

    After ~10 years (2 elections) of never being in the country when the elections were held I finally was in town during the elections and voted. 🙂

    We got up at 8am and went to the sector 44 community center that was the local polling booth. There weren’t a lot of people there at the time (only about 7-8) but it was still early as the voting started at 7am.

    Security wise the elections was decent. I don’t know how secure the machine itself but I don’t think its possible easily for one person to enter more than one vote (which used to happen with paper votes). Now when a person enters their vote a loud buzz would sound telling people that a vote had been cast. So if a person tried entering multiple votes they would first have to figure out how to switch the machine back on after a vote had been cast (It is activated by a guy sitting outside who verifies your ID) then they would have to disable the buzzer that sounds when votes are cast.

    Total time to vote, about 30 mins. This includes the time to drive there and back with a stop to buy groceries on the way back.

    – Suramya

    May 5, 2009

    My experience using a system with 378MB of RAM

    Filed under: My Life,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 10:29 PM

    My laptop charger died so I have been using my old desktop for a while now at home. This is a 1 GHz machine with 350MB of RAM running Debian. At first I was a bit worried that the system wouldn’t support my working habits because of the low RAM but while using it I have realized that Debian works great with ~378MB of RAM. Obviously the system is not as responsive as it would be with 1GB of RAM but its definitely usable.

    Actually it works fine with 250MB also, as my 128 MB RAM chip died I had to take it out and I could still use the system with a single 250MB chip. This is with Firefox (with upto 8-10 tabs), Thunderbird, uTorrent (using wine), Konqueror and Konsole (multiple sessions) running. I could even watch videos without issues. Though a couple of times I did have to close Firefox when viewing a video because the video would take ages to startup.

    The main issue I had during this time was with Firefox. I found that I would have to restart it after using it for a while (day or so) or when I went to a page with a lot of flash. It used an average of about 130MB of RAM on my system. At times it went up to 60% usage on 378MB (according to top). [Don’t feel like calculating it right now]

    Flash was a pain during this time. Pages with a lot of Flash slowed the system down to a crawl. So it looks like a lot of the memory leakage/excessive memory use in Firefox has to do with the Flash plugin in use.

    If this machine was running XP or any other flavor of windows apart from 98/95 etc it would have been completely unusable. I did try booting into windows XP on this system to do some OCR (I can’t seem to find a good OCR client in Linux) but the system was pretty much unusable with about 2-5 second wait while opening windows etc.

    My usage is a lot more intensive than most regular users so for a normal user Linux will be even more responsive. I mean does average Joe have 10 Tabs open at the same time while OpenOffice is converting a 95 MB document to HTML? (Don’t ask. It was a PDF converted to .doc which I needed in html) Oh and I usually listen to music when I work so Amarok was also running in the background at the time.

    BTW, in case you are wondering I am running KDE v3.5.10 so its not an old version and most of the effects are still on (Except for the transparent panel, which I find annoying)

    Another thing I learnt was that USB transfers take longer if you have low RAM for some reason. Atleast they do when you are using a USB pendrive, my external harddisk seems to work with the same speed even with low RAM.

    So if you have an old machine, don’t throw it. Install Linux on it and donate it to someone or use it as a extra server or something.

    – Suramya

    PS: I have finally upgraded the RAM on this system to 1GB so it works even better. 🙂

    April 23, 2009

    Cooking and me

    Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 11:52 PM

    Most of my friends know that cooking and me don’t go well together. Its not that I can’t cook, just that I tend to get distracted or get lazy and just order out. Infact the main thing I am good at during cooking is chopping stuff up including onions (They don’t make my eyes water) so…

    A couple of years ago Surabhi and Vinit were on their way home so they called me to ask me to start boiling rice so that they could make something when they got back home. So I got the instructions over the phone and put the rice on the stove and went to my room to work on the computer and then completely forgot about the rice. Surabhi and Vinit got stuck in traffic and were delayed for a few hours.

    About an hour or two later I thought that I smelled smoke. At first I ignored it thinking I was imagining things. Then I thought maybe the neighbours were burning something. Finally after about 15 mins I suddenly realized that I had put the rice to boil. Ran to the kitchen and found it completely filled with smoke. Turns out that all the water had boiled away, then the rice got heated, got burnt and finally was converted to charcoal.

    I had to open all the windows in the apartment and setup fans to get rid of the smoke. To make it all the more fun, this happened in the winter so the temperature outside was below zero (probably in the -5 to -15 deg C range) so the apartment became freezing cold. When Surabhi and Vinit got home we made an unspoken agreement that they would never again ask me to cook without supervision.

    That all said, I do know how to make sandwiches and Omelettes. But prefer to avoid cooking.

    By now you must be wondering why all this talk about cooking all of a sudden. Right? I was browsing the web and saw the following comic strip at Sinfest and it reminded me of the above incident and led to this post:

    Now that I am back in India having to cook for myself is no longer an issue. Having a maid cook for you rocks. 🙂

    – Suramya

    April 13, 2009

    First post from a phone

    Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 3:49 PM

    This post is the first time i am posting to the blog from my phone. First impression, Opera mini rocks. It is very fast and responsive. Secondly I wish that this phone had a QWERTY keyboard. Typing on this keypad is hard.

    I am currently at Nidhika’s wedding where she is getting ready so i have been kicked out of the room for obvious reasons. So i am passing time by surfing the web on my phone.

    This is all for now as i am getting tired of typing on this keypad.

    – Suramya

    April 11, 2009

    Limiting sales/downloads to a particular platform sucks

    Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 1:43 AM

    As I mentioned earlier in a post I have recently started listening to audio books (mainly because at that time I was feeling too sick to read or work on the computer). Since then I have read(heard) a couple of them and most of them were pretty good. For me mp3 is the best medium as I can use it on any platform i.e. I can listen to them on my computer/phone/CD player in car.

    A couple of days ago I was going through John Scalzi’s blog and I saw a note that METAtropolis (A novel he edited) had been nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation and was available for a free download at Audible.com (Still available for free as of 11th April 2009) I decided to go ahead and download it. This was because
    a) The book sounded very interesting
    b) It was free
    c) The book sounded interesting.

    So I went ahead and registered on the site and tried to download the book. I must have spent a good 1/2 hour on the site trying to download it on my Linux system but was unable to do so. At first the stupid site kept trying to force me to install a windows program on my system even when I told it that I wanted to listen to it as an MP3 or on a CD player. Then finally I somehow convinced the system to allow me to download but alas I still didn’t get to listen to the book. What I got was a 300 byte file with a weird name and a .py extension containing a long text string that looked like part of a URL.

    Ultimately I gave up. If I had paid for the book I would have been really upset. I still fail to understand why they want me to download a program on my system before letting me download a mp3 file that can be played on any system.

    In any case I don’t think I will be downloading/purchasing any more books from them in the near future.

    – Suramya

    April 2, 2009

    Trips to Antarctica are expensive but I wanna go

    Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 3:52 AM

    Visiting Antarctica is one of the things that I have been wanting to do for a couple of years now. I was talking to dad today and he was also interested in it so I did a little research on it online. There are a lot of tour companies that take you on a cruise to Antarctica but they cost a lot.

    Apparently if you get a ticket for about $5,000 you have gotten a great deal (This doesn’t include tickets to the port of departure). According to this site I found $5,000 – $9,000 is a normal price for these tickets per person. Although I did find one cruise costing ~$30,000 for a 30 day trip. Most tours are 11-14 days.

    I am estimating it will take about $8,000 – $10,000 including the flight tickets/stay at the departure port and shopping per person. I really want to go but its very expensive. 🙁 The best time to visit is Nov – March. BTW my birthday is in Dec *Hint Hint* .

    Any contributions to the trip fund will be welcome 😉

    Well this is all for now.

    – Suramya

    March 31, 2009

    I really do need more monkeys

    Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 11:06 PM

    I guess I really do need more monkeys as I haven’t posted a blog post in more than a month. It wasn’t that I didn’t have anything to say, just didn’t feel like typing it all out. Not that a lot of people have been waiting for me for say something witty… Or the lack of visitors could be because I didn’t post anything interesting to comment on.

    This past month was interesting and fun (mostly):

    1. Attended Pranav and Jigna’s wedding in Indore. Had a blast.
    2. Played Holi for the first time in 10 years. It looked like I had a sunburn for the next day because all the color wouldn’t come out even after multiple showers
    3. Met up with friends.
    4. Got an eye infection (This was the not fun part)
    5. Caught a cold. (This too)

    Realized that audio books are great when you have a cold and can’t stand reading or looking at a screen.

    Bought a new LCD monitor. (Finally.) Now the 6 year old monitor is finally retired. RIP.

    Well this is all for now. Will post more later.

    – Suramya

    February 9, 2009

    Trip to Sultanpur Bird sanctuary

    Filed under: My Life,Travel/Trips — Suramya @ 5:34 PM

    Last Saturday we went for a trip to the Sultanpur Bird sanctuary from work. The trip started at 6 am for me as thats when I left home to pick up Ashwani, Harish O, Harish T and Ram Awadh from the office. On the way to the office I inaugurated the birdwatching by spotting a chicken on the road.

    Surprisingly everyone was on time and we made it to Nehru Place which was our meeting point for the rest of the group at 7:15am there we hot tea while we waited for the rest of the group (Dhiraj, Shobhna and Angad) to join us in Angad’s car. After a quick snack we left for the bird sanctuary picking Sanjay and his wife and son on the the way.

    The drive there was a long one. Unfortunately there were no road sign’s anywhere telling us how to get to the place so we kept having to ask people for directions. For some weird reason people kept pointing us to the long route to the place. About 3/4th of the way there we found out that the route we were following was impassable because a bridge was being constructed on it. So we had to turn back and drive 15 kms back on the way we came and take an alternate route.

    On the way we stopped at a field and took pics there. Once we made it to the Sanctuary we had a great time. We saw a lot of the birds and no I don’t know their species. All I can remember now is that we saw Peacocks, Parrots, A few kinds of white birds and a couple of black birds.

    I had taken a boomerang with me and we all tried to get it to come back to us. Harish T was the only one that managed to do that. Thankfully it didn’t get stuck in the tree’s.

    I had also taken my Remote Controlled place with me, but unfortunately the built in battery in the plane was almost dead so we couldn’t really fly it. So we decided to go with the old faithful and had a cricket match.

    On the way back we found a direct road to Gudguan. Though calling it a road is a bit of a stretch as it was more like driving on a dirt trail than an actual road. There was a lot of construction going on so that probably was the reason why this road was so broken. Hopefully the fly-overs will be completed soon and the road will get a bit better.

    This post was delayed for so long as I was procrastinating putting up the photos on the photogallery but luckily Shobhna is less lazy than I am so she has put up the photos from the trip here: http://picasaweb.google.co.in/shobhna.sharma/SultanpurOfficeTrip2009

    In the near future I will probably also post the photos on my site. In the mean time enjoy.

    – Suramya

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