Technology

The International Space Station (ISS) above Mauritius

30 March 2016 By Avinash Meetoo Leave a Comment

A week ago, we witnessed something quite out of the ordinary: the International Space Station (ISS) passing over our tiny island, Mauritius. If you look closely at the photos above, the ISS is the bright dot. It was moving quite rapidly across the sky.

As you can expect, Christina and I as well as the kids were mesmerised.

100% is better than 15%

21 February 2016 By Avinash Meetoo 7 Comments

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I just purchased a new wireless router: a TP-LINK AC1750 Archer C7.

I have flashed OpenWRT, a Linux distribution, on it and now the sky is the limit. For example, I have managed to get 100% of something I’m currently paying for instead of the 15% I normally get. The steps I followed are:

To make sure all DNS requests for that specific website go to TVUnblock, I added a few lines to /etc/dnsmasq.conf as explained here (but, of course, using the DNS servers of TVUnblock)
To make sure my Chromecast queries the TVUnblock DNS instead of the Google DNS servers, I added two iptables lines to /etc/firewall.user as explained here.
Finally, to make sure that TVUnblock does not block me, I use this cron script to notify them whenever my dynamic IP changes.

Thanks to everyone involved ;-)

An update: this does not work anymore. I am back to 15%… for the time being at least.

Flickr is a social network of people who like photography

7 February 2016 By Avinash Meetoo 9 Comments

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I started using Flickr to share my photos more than then years ago.

Flickr has brought me a lot of joy as, 11 years after, I have uploaded 16,165 photos which have been viewedÂ 1,463,578 times in all (for an average of more than 90 views per photo which is not bad). Most of the viewers are members of my extended family and I thank them for that, even though only a few of them leave comments (most probably because they do not have an account on Flickr).

Yesterday, while browsing the Flickr website, I stumbled upon Flickr groups and this sentence caught my attention: “Flickr groups are a great way to share photos, post comments, and hold discussions around a common theme.” Of course, I knew that Flickr was a great social network for photographers but, up to now, I had neglected that part. So, I subscribed toÂ some groups which I felt were interesting, both because of the quality of photo submissions but, first and foremost, because of the community of photographers participating and their level of interaction. Here are the groups I haveÂ subscribed to:

Canon DSLR User Group (because I have a Canon EOS 60D camera)
The Portrait Group (because most of my photos are portraits of family members, especially my wife, Christina, and my two kids, Anya and Kyan)
Nature (because I live in Mauritius!)
Landscape (same as above — because I live in Mauritius!)
B&W (because of the inherent beauty of black and white photos)
Macro (because this is something I would like to be able to do)
Strobist (because I would like to perfect my off-camera flash technique)
Night Images (because cameras have great high ISO performance now)

My intention is, initially, to visit those groups regularly in order to understand how they work, then start submitting some of my photos to them so that other photographers can offer constructive criticism. My intention is do discover like-minded people, talk with them, learn from them and, ultimately, become a better photographer.

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