Deepavali

நண்பர்களுக்கு இனிய தீபாவளி வாழ்த்துக்கள். Happy Deepavali to everyone, enjoy in moderation. FOSS.IN CFP is also out, I highly recommend participating.

Gizmodo article

Gizmodo has an article by Brian Lam that has some assertions about E-Ink displays. He writes:
"E-ink is superior for replicating paper, but it can't even support realtime cursor, movements or button presses, let alone video"
Realtime cursor generally just means functionality as shown here: a) rgbpaint running on top of full X11 stack (kdrive/Xfbdev, gtk, etc) on a PXA255 GPIO driven display or b) sketch on same hardware but custom app written by E-Ink engineers to talk directly to hardware from Linux userspace bitbanging gpio. So E-Ink displays can support realtime cursor movements and button presses. His point about video is somewhat true if you want true 60Hz full image quality video, but you can get watchable video with some tradeoffs by using waveforms that reduce update time by trading off image quality. In Portland, I showed a demo of youtube running on an E-Ink display. I only got about 4-8 Hz (depending on video content) because of software and bitbanged GPIO limitations.

Kindle2 International

I'm sitting in Changi waiting for the last leg of my flight to the Mud Delta. 5 hours left to go. I just read about the Kindle2 international version. This promise of free worldwide data access for life... is pretty amazing. Amazon is stratifying the countries into totally free (you get both whispernet book purchase and free internet-over-whispernet), and limited (you get whispernet book purchase but no free internet blogs or browsing). India falls into the no free internet category which is highly unexpected. A crying shame or maybe a challenge for someone else to do better?

People tell us that what is innovative about the Kindle is the E-Ink display, but I think another key highlight is the fact that the Kindle was the first consumer device that treated wireless data connectivity as something too cheap to meter. About damn time. I hope more vendors take that route.