Day trip to shravanabelagola, belur and halebidu from Bangalore

Splendid Rock temples of belur and halebidu are around 230kms from Bengaluru. Karnataka is famous for explicit rock cut/carved temples from ancient era. Built by hoysala kings, in soft stone in 11^th century, Belur & Halebidu rock temples have very elobarate carvings of mythological and social events. Shravanabelagola has worlds tallest monolithic statue of bahubali, a jain saint.

07.00: We planned a day trip to these three sites from Bangalore, since they are about 5 hrs drive from bangalore it was essential that we left early. We were four adults and two kids. Though we planned to start at at 6am, we managed to leave at 7.

08.00: It took almost an hour going through the ring roads of Bangalore to reach Nelamangla and the diversion towards hassan. Hassan road is nice though still under construction, so you expect lot of diversions.

12.00: We reached Shravanbelagola which is about 150 kms from Bangalore at 12 noon. Vindyagiri, on top of which there is bahubali also called gomateshwara's statue, has a steep ascent to the top. It requires some effort to get to the top especially for the old with arthritic knees. But the view from the top and the statue of bahubali, is worth all your efforts.

Essential apps for ubuntu lucid lynx

This is my list of 15 most useful apps for the ubuntu lucid lynx and ubuntu in general.

1. Google Chrome : Google Chrome is a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer and easier.
   
   
   I feel that chrome is a wee bit faster than firefox especially the start time.
2. Google Earth : Google Earth lets you fly anywhere on Earth to view satellite imagery, maps, terrain,3D buildings, from galaxies in outer space to the canyons of the ocean. You can explore rich geographical content, save your toured places, and share with others.
   
   
3. GIMP : GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc. GIMP is expandable and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything. The advanced scripting interface allows everything from the simplest task to the most complex image manipulation procedures to be easily scripted. GIMP is written and developed under X11 on UNIX platforms. But basically the same code also runs on MS Windows and Mac OS X.
   
   

Solution to noisy fan issue on Sony Vaio CS

A few months back i wrote on this blog, how to rectify the noisy fan issue of Vaio CS17G. Look here.
Even though the noise reduced considerably, i still got a faint noise intermittently.

I decided to partition my hard disk and install ubuntu. Installed ubuntu 10.4 or lucid lynx and am running it since its beta release. Its been more than a month now and i am very much impressed with this new release. So much so that most of the times i am running ubuntu and i hardly ever needed to revert back to my vista partition. I might have done so only two times in a month.

I have noticed a peculiar thing that whenever i am running ubuntu i never get this noisy fan on this laptop. But if i revert back to vista, within 30 mins this intermittent fan noise starts.
Why this happens?
Because ubuntu runs at a lower temperature than vista on this machine, about 3 to 4 degrees less of CPU temp. It keeps below 50 degrees most of the times. But it is  >50 degrees most of the times, if i am running vista.
This could be the reason.
So if you want a permanent solution to the fan noise on Vaio CS it might help, if you switch to Ubuntu.

Bluetooth & suspend problems solved Macbook

It is a well known problem that on apple macbooks, whenever your battery lifetime is nearing the end or the battery is not functioning well, you will face these two problems.

• The bluetooth icon on the panel fades and it says bluetooth not available.

• And when this happens suspend will not work and when you close the lid, you can still hear the fan running noise intermittently.

These issues are some how related that if you have a battery related problem your bluetooth disappears and when this happens suspend will not work.

Apple says to reset the SMC, see here.
But this may not work for most as this may be a hardware problem.

I faced the same problem and after heavy googling was all set to take apart my macbook to set right the problem.

But since i replaced the battery the problem rectified on its own.
Initially after the replacement the problem persisted. But gradually i started getting the bluetooth available intermittently and whenever bluetooth is available suspend worked fine.
Later i was getting the bluetooth not available problems intermittently.
After nearly two months of new battery it seems now that the problem has disappeared completely. Now bluetooth is always available and suspend works fine.
So the fix is : Replace your battery if nothing else works.

Ubuntu lucid lynx 10.4 on Vaio CS17G

Its nearly a week since the release of ubuntu lucid lynx or ubuntu 10.4. I upgraded when it was still beta and now i have fully updated lynx. On my vaio cs17g, i was hoping it will fix few specific glitches with this laptop. see my previous blog for this.
So does anything change? Not really
Although there are a lot of improvements over ubuntu 9.10 like,

• Faster boot time: some guys claim to have a boot time of less than 10 secs, i get around 15 secs till Login screen.
• Improved appearances: in the sense, better default themes, i like dust sand, ambience
• Introduction of "me menu" which i feel is a very nice idea.

In terms of addressing my specific problems pertaining to this laptop, no much change.

• suspend does not work: it suspends well but no keyboard on wake up
• Inbuilt microphone does not work
• Media keys do not work

I managed to get the brightness key working after tweaking and getting them to work with nvclock.

Apart from these glitches i feel it is a great improvement over the previous release.