pratham.name

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Exploding mobile kills man

This is scary. There have been multiple hoaxes of deaths due to exploding cell phone batteries, but this appears real.

23 year old Gopal Gujjar was found dead with serious injuries to his ear, neck and shoulders. Police believe he was killed by the device after discovering pieces of the Nokia 1209 handset, a basic model released in August 2008, scattered nearby.

When similar such incidents had occurred in 2003, Nokia had claimed that...

Check which famous writer you write like with this statistical analysis tool, which analyzes your word choice and writing style and compares them with those of the famous writers.

VidScan - Timelines of your favorite YouTube videos

There are many YouTube videos with maybe 5 seconds of content buried in between 3 minutes of video footage. I’ve written this tool - VidScan - to help make sense of such videos.

VidScan analyses comments on any YouTube videos and creates a timeline using them. For example, here is a timeline of a video of an Indian street. All time stamps are deep-linked to the YouTube snippet, so clicking lets you jump directly...

Controversial prodigy Tathagat Tulsi becomes IIT professor

22 year old child prodigy Tathagat Tulsi has joined IIT Bombay as an assistant professor, possibly as the youngest to ever do so.

Tathagat has been a fairly controversial figure, with the delegation of scientists taken by the Department of Science & Technology to Lindau in Germany for an interaction with Nobel laureates, suggesting that he was a “fake prodigy” who had “mugged up” jargon which he spouted unthinkingly.

With this accolade under his...

No Agents allowed at IRCTC from 8am to 9am

Taking note of the troubles faced by travellers when booking Tatkal tickets online, the Indian Railways has decided to bar all E-Ticket agents from 8 to 9.

Do you understand hex colors ?

I just learnt that Google Reader has dumped its Google Gears based offline feature. It was the one single reason I moved from Netvibes to Google Reader for.

Number to words converter - Indian style

The Indian numbering system is different from the standard three decimal western one. The divisions are thousand - lakh (100K) - crore (10M). Post crore, there are obscure divisions like “arab”, “kharab” that are rarely used.

I couldn’t find anything usable so I’ve written this small Python snippet for this conversion.

def number_to_words (n):
  words = ''

  units = ['', 'one', 'two', 'three', 'four', 'five', 'six'...

Can you jump over the Mario flagpole ?

It’s a question that’s probably bothered every Mario player - Can anyone jump over the flagpole at the end of each level ?

Someone actually put this to the test. There are 8x4=32 levels, with 8 of them castle levels that don’t have a flagpole. Out the remaining 24 levels, the flagpole in the 3-3 world allows you to jump over.

MapFight - Compare the geographical size of any two countries

I’ve written this small app - MapFight - to visually compare the geographical size of any two countries. So, for example, here’s how big India is compared to South Africa.

I started off with this list of countries by area, then used the standard Wikipedia world map in SVG and wrote a simple script to get all the country outlines in red and blue.

Based on the above data, any country is scaled...

For Pacman’s 30th anniversary, there is a playable Pacman game on the Google homepage.

In the comments, someone points out Stop Autoplay to stop all auto-playing Flash music.

I mostly use Google Chrome nowadays, so I just press Shift+ESC and kill the Shockwave Flash plugin.

How Indian EVMs are vulnerable to fraud

This video pretty much demolishes the Indian Election Commission’s claims of the EVMs being tamper proof.

The top 100 Indian movies on IMDB

Since IMDB distributes most of its data in plain text, I decided to use it to compose a list of the top voted 100 Indian films (with at least 500 votes).

Google Script Converter

Google India has released a bulk transliteration tool - Script Converter - to allow you to read text in any script you want.

Note that the Google Transliteration service, a similar service from Google, is different as it transliterates live text as you type, while the Google Script Converter does that to an existing body of text or a web page.

The results of this Hindi transliterated page of the lyrics of Jai Ho...

The Complete List Of Words That Can Be Written Upside Down On A Calculator

Someone has written this small Python script to list all the words that can be typed upside down on a calculator. Like typing “7735” on the calculator to spell out “SELL” upside down.

The numbers 0-8 correspond to the alphabets O, I, Z, E, h, S, g, L, B, so any word consisting of only these letters can be similarly spelt. Found on Reddit.

Moving blog to Jekyll

I’ve finally decided to move this blog to Jekyll from Tumblr.

Jekyll, a static site generator written in Ruby, outputs simple HTML files that can uploaded via FTP to your server.

I briefly toyed with the idea of writing my own blog software for Google App Engine, but decided against it since it does not support naked domains (like pratham.name).

Here are some reasons I finally chose Jekyll,

• Self hosted: More control, so...

Check your cellphone’s radiation output levels (via Engadget)

The Facebook phenomenon

The Boeing 787 Dreamliner, according to Rediff. (Larger Version).

Isros Answer To Google Earth Bhuvan Launches Goes

When checked at 10pm IST.

Number of internet users worldwide

Regex To Determine Prime Numbers

Convert the number to a series of 1s - so 4 becomes 1111 - and use this regex to check if it’s prime.

/^1?$|^(11+?)\1+$/

Very clever. Read this for an explanation.

Google Announces Chrome Os