Nikhil Dev

About 2 weeks back, I was watching this incredible video on You Tube where this dude mods his Nintendo Wii console and builds a whole head tracking system.

The way it works is the reverse of how the Wii works.
In this you wear the radio sensor and the remote tracks you movemement and sends the feedback to the computer. The computer then translates this movements and manipulates the image on the screen to respond to your movements.The publisher has demonstrated an awesome example with the window opening into a stadium. A must watch.

I was really impressed when I got to see the new iPhone that my friend got from the US. But the Google Android interface totally blew my minds.

With the new Android platform, you cam play regular games like Quake and Counter Strike on the platform. The best thing about this is that its free, its open source and its made for different handsets. So in this case we dont have to depend upon a company that FORCES you to stick on to a mobile service provider of THEIR choice. Watch the video.

I still remember when Android was announced by Google in November, the shares just rose like crazy. One of the fastest growths in the history of Google. But of late its taken a lower end and we are not hearing much about it. Google wanted to show to the world what Android is capable of and would be a really strong competitor to the iPhone.

Just today I was going through one of these articles on the internet and it is rumoured that Google might team up with Dell and the Dell phones would come preloaded with Android. Although Android is under heavy development, it is said that we might be able to have a working model till the end of this year. Dell has been in the PDA business before and it certainly has Know How on how mobile phones are built. Combine Dell’s Hardware expertise and Google’s Engineers and you have a winner at your hands.

Just today I paid off the credit card bill of about 13 grand something tha tI spent towards the Numark total control and DJIO that I shipped to Rachel. She said she is arriving in Hyd on 26th Feb. I just cant wait anymore. I think I will start taking this practise seriously as well. Its better to doing nothing but drinking.

As a band(DTuned) we have stopped jamming. The others dont find time at all although I have all the time. But I will come up with something and record the guitars, bass solos and drums myself. All that Shoheb will have to do then is sing. This way, I am sure we can come up with an mp3 that is worth distributing to people.

Later we can think about composing some more. But as for now, my music is on a low profile. Buying a house if on a higher priority. The next would be getting a job that pays me at least double of what I am getting now from Google(that is what my market value is). My fingers sucked today when I sat down to play. I feel like selling away all my guitars stuff and sticking to serious DJing,. At least I can make some money on the weekends. All the people who have heard me mixing house and electronic said that it sounded awesome. So I think its time to make some money.

When I get my Numark, I will start a range of videos demonstrating the lessons on Traktor with Numark. I am sure there are quite a few people who would be interested in watching them.

Last week I had a problem, that just drove me mad. This is what happened.

I was defragging my 80Gig iPod, and my desktop at home for some reason froze. I had to hard reboot, but to my horror, all my music, the songs and the videos now do not showup on the ipod. I connected the ipod again and I could see them in iTunes. Even media monkey showed that the music was there on the ipod. The ipod stats also showed that the content was there. Why the hell is the ipod library not able to detect the media. Is it that the library got corrupted. If yes, then there was not way to rebuild an ipod library. So my only solution was to copy all the music off the ipod to my work desktop using Yamipod. After that I had to restore my ipod to factory settings. And then put all the music back on the ipod. I dont use Auto sync. So it was even more tough for me. Things went smoothly until just 2 days back when I connected the ipod again to my home computer. The same thing happened again. All the music appeared to be gone. This time it was nothing that I screwed up. All I did was just update a few albums on my iPod.

This is the time, I had to research on this. I brought out my Compaq 3228AU. Connected my iPod to that and copy just one song to the iPod. Miraculously, the library now showed up on the ipod. So what went wrong??

This is really interesting. What I did not realize was that I had upgraded the ipod firmware from 1.2.1 to 1.2.2 which was the latest firmware for iPod 5G and 5.5G. Now when I connected it to my work comp, the iTunes version there was 7.5 whereas the iTunes version at home was 7.3. There is a major incompatibility between the iTunes earlier to 7.5 and the 1.2.2 iPod firmware update. If you want to stick to an iTunes version lesser to 7.5 you should not update the firmware to 1.2.2. If you want to still use 1.2.2 firmware, you better upgrade the iTunes to 7.5. I think this is a nasty way Apple is forcing the consumers to use the latest versions of software.

I have been able to fix this problem after quite some research. If you are having the same problem, do comment. We will try to fix it together. If you have already fixed it, it would be great if you can share it.

Just a simple list of steps to fix this again:-

1. Upgrade to iPod firmware 1.2.2.

2. Upgrade iTunes to 7.5

3. Connect the ipod to iTunes 7.5 once and disconnect. Or just copy one song so that the library is rewritten.

4. Disconnect the iPod.

Voila!!!!

—–Update——

Just today I noticed that apple has released it Firmware version 1.2.3 for the ipod 5Gs. I have’nt  had any problems till now. but just in case there are any surprises, Will surely post.