US students toil to mitigate water woes in rural India

A 13-year-old student of Indian origin in the US and his American friends washed cars, sold pizzas and cakes, and held sports tournaments to raise money for a tube well in a water-starved village in India.

Shocked by the story of water shortage in Paras village and its environs in Akola district that Rujul related to them, a group of 15 American boys and girls decided to rise to the occasion.

The eight grade students of Princeton Day School, New Jersey, also went from home to home seeking donations - for a group of people no one but Rujul had seen in distant Maharashtra state.

On a visit to Nagpur, Rujul explained what drove him to do what he accomplished with the help of his friends.

Scenes of women carrying heavy pots of water on their heads from long distances are a common image depicting water woes in rural India. For Rujul, who was visiting Paras village, it was an astounding sight.

It was in Paras, nearly 250 km from Nagpur, where his father was born and educated up to middle school. Rujul asked himself whether there wasn't anything he could do to mitigate the hardship of women, some of whom were older than his mother. That was in 2006.

He retuned to the village this year with an answer backed by his 15 classmates - fund raised through voluntary labour to dig a tube-well on its outskirts.

'In the US, water is taken for granted. You turn on the faucet and get a continuous flow of water. Coming from there, I was really surprised to see the women's arduous trek. I could not imagine what living in such circumstances could be like', Rujul told IANS here.

'We thought digging a tube-well in the village that would cost about $900 would be the best solution and decided to raise funds for our mission,' he said.

The group of friends which Rujul and his friend Kevin Petrovic formed began fundraising at the school.

'We held car washes, sold pizza and cakes and held sports tournaments; we also peddled from house to house seeking donations', Rujul told IANS.

The funds were raised in no time and the work for the tube-well has begun. Rujul and his friends now plan to help dig more such wells in the area.

'I am planning to bring at least six members of our club this July to see the desperate situation. Though they are convinced about it, seeing is believing,' he said.

The good Samaritans have set up a Drinking Water for the Developing World Club and obtained a tax-exempt non-profit organisation certificate.

'We created a website for Drinking Water for India, Inc., our charity at www.drinkingwaterforindia.org,' he said.

Rujul's father Anil Zaparde, an Indian software developer in Princeton, and his wife Rashmi bring their children to India every year so that they see the people here and know the culture in which their parents were born and brought up.

'Last year, Rujul was equally astonished to see as many as 300 children packed in just two small rooms in the Urdu school in Paras,' Anil told IANS. 'And this year he was very delighted to see two more rooms constructed there from a small donation I made.'

'I realized the stark difference between a 13-year-old living in the US and in Paras,' Rujul remarked feelingly while talking about the village school. Equally touching for the sensitive lad was his father's generous donation for the renovation of the Shiva temple in Paras where Anil remembers going as a child.

'Some people here thought it odd that we, despite being Hindus, donated money to an Urdu school meant for Muslims students,' Anil said.

Anil and parents of the other children decided to encourage them to carry out the tube-well mission though anyone of them could have easily donated the entire money.

'We wanted to give the children the satisfaction of doing something on their own,' Anil said.

Impressed by the children's zeal, many individuals, besides a US charity Home Depot, have already approached them with offers for help, raising a hope that the initiative for creating a convenient water source for Paras, a village in Akola district, doesn't remain symbolic

(Shyam Pandharipande can be contacted at shyam.p@ians.in)

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Top 40+ GIMP plugins

Web Design

• Snow: Generate realistic 3D snow. Caution: Requires large amount of memory and swap memory.
• Anti-aliasing: Smoothen and fix straight lines.
• Adaptive contrast enhancement: Intelligent adjustment of contrast.
• Fourier Transformation: GIMP plugin version of Fourier Transformation.
• Refract/Reflect: Refraction effects to simulate falling water drops.
• ShapeIt: Bend text or image according to information in map layer.
• Borders: Add borders to your image.
• SoapBubble: Create bubbles. Contains two versions, for GIMP v2.2 and v2.4.
• Aqua Bou: Create web buttons in ‘Aqua Bou’ style easily.
• Chrominium: Create a chrome logo with glow and sparkles.
• Cloud Generation: For easy creation of clouds. Updated to work with GIMP 2.4, the latest version.
• Gothic Glow: GIMP’s version of Gothic Glow action, originally for Photoshop.
• Liquid Rescale: Content-aware rescaling. Keeps the features of the image while rescaling along a single direction.
• Particle Deposition: simulates particle deposition on a surface. It generates small particles with random size and velocity and lets them fall onto the surface where they settle, increasing surface height in the place a bit.
• Stampify: Make your image look like a postage stamp.
• Plasma2: Newer version of the original Plasma plugin for GIMP.
• SaveForWeb: Find optimal compromise between minimal file size and acceptable quality of image quickly. Useful for designers.
• Steel Text: Create a text effect that looks like shiny steel (or gold) and a dropshadow.

Photography

• Pandora: Stitch together multiple images to make a panorama.
• Film Grain: Add film grain for a classic feel, to BW images.
• Black Ink: Transform an image to a B&W drawing made with ink.
• Copyright Text: Add a copyright text to image.
• DeNoise: Noise reduction plugin using a modified Gaussian blur algorithm.
• DustCleaner: Detect and remove the dust spots in digital image.
• Astro-plugins: A set of plugins for astronomical image processing.
• FocusBlur: Makes an image out of focus with luminosity and depth.
• Lomo: Make photos clear, sharp and crisp. Especially useful for outdoor photographs.
• ISO Noise Reduction: Implements an ISO noise reduction, using different methods (masking the edges, then blurring the individual color channels or the lumimance channel only).
• Photo Effects: A bunch of scripts brought together in one script-fu file. Contains cartoon, color pencil, conte crayon, cutout, Drawing, ink pen, note paper, paint dot image, palette knife, pastel, stamp, water paint effect, wrap effect, angled strokes, crosshatched, chrome image, cross light, funky color, soft focus, solarisation, brick wall, patchwork, stained glass, texturizer, high pass, scroll effects.
• RedEye: Quickly remove red eye effect caused by camera flashes.
• ShadowRecovery: Recover image information in darked regions.
• Shadows/Highlights: Eliminate shadows and highlights in photographs.
• Refocus: Opposite of FocusBlur(listed above), this refocuses images. Provides better results than Unsharp masking which is built into GIMP.
• PhotoToolbox: Perform several actions on a photo at once such as defocus, desaturate (several papers emulations), toning, add grain.
• Light Filter: Provides basic filtering by adjusting colour levels of each pixels.
• Gradient Along Path: Strikes a vector applying a gradient orthogonally to the path.
• Landscape painter: Creates interesting paint effect that looks best with landscapes.
• EZ Improviser: Improve dull, dingy images.
• Edgy: Make an image look edgy.
• Digital IR: Simulate a black and white infrared image.
• Colour saturation: Change the color saturation of your image.
• Blot: GIMP avatar of BlotBrush. Based on blot algorithm and works well with spatter or cloudy image.

Miscellaneous

• GIMP Dewierdifyer: (for Windows) Get rid of common window annoyances in the GIMP. It adds a background window that sits under GIMP. It groups other GIMP windows into one, so that when you’re alt+tabbing to other apps, only one icon of GIMP gets in your way.
• Turing Pattern: Renders a kind of Turing pattern.
• Yin-Yang+: A seemingly useless plugin, but fun nonetheless. Add yin and yang symbols. Also optionally add drop-shadows.

15 Online Tools That You Will Come To Love As A Tech

IPTools offers a wide variety of online networking tools. With this site you can look up IP address information, check spam databases, run pings, run traceroutes, lookup WHOIS information and much more.

BugMeNot allows you to find and share logins for sites that require you to register. This tool is great to use when you don't want to have to go through the process of creating an account for a site when you just want to login once for something like a driver.

SpeedTest.net allows you to test your Internet connection speed. It's great to use when you want to see if your ISP is holding up on their end of the bargain.

Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site that allows you to bookmark sites and view them from any computer. This site is great because not only can you bookmark sites and view them anywhere, you can also search through everyone's bookmarks to find great tech articles.

Omnidrive is an online storage service that allows you to upload large files, access them from any computer, and share them with other people. They also offer the ability to edit your Office documents using Zoho without ever downloading them. You get 1GB free and the ability to upgrade to 1 terabyte. This site is great for hosting your tech tools and accessing them from computers you are working on.

10 Minute Mail allows you to create temporary email addresses that expire after 10 minutes. It's great to use for sites that require you to receive something through email but you don't want to be bombarded with spam.

Free Password Generator
Free Password Generator generates very strong and unique passwords. Before you generate your passwords, you can predefine settings such has what type of symbols to use and the length you want it to be.

Trend Micro HouseCall is an online virus, spyware, and malware scanner that runs in your web browser. It's very handy when you are working on a computer that doesn't have antivirus software and you want to scan it without having to install one.

You Get Signal allows you to check which ports are open into your network. This is great tool to use when you are trying to patch holes in your firewall.

WhatIsThatFile.com
WhatIsThatFile.com allows you to identify unknown files on a computer. This tool is great for looking up files that you suspect might be possible viruses, trojans, or malware.

YouSendIt allows you to send large files to other people when the files are too large for your email. This tool is a great alternative to using FTP.

DLL-files.com has a huge library of downloadable dll files. Next time you get an error about a missing dll file, you can go here and download it.

Google Microsoft Search allows you to search specifically through Microsoft-related sites. This site is great for searching through Microsoft tech articles for a specific problem.

Zamzar is a file conversion tool that allows you to convert file types through their site. Currently they support over 60 file types. This is a great tool for converting files when you don't have the appropriate application to do so.

Default Router Passwords Database allows you to search for router as well as other devices default passwords. This tool comes in very handy when you have to reset a device but can't find the manual to look up the default password.

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If Operating Systems Were Houses

What if Unix, Windows, Linux and OSX were houses?

UNIX is the old Victorian Mansion that was the first of it’s kind and set the standard for all things to come.

It is still considered one of the most solid and stable houses ever built since it was build by compliant construction practices.

It’s incredibly solid foundation allows it to be expanded upon and added to. This foundation has led to many other houses being built the same way and with the same compliance and care.

Windows is the government housing.

The houses are built quickly, cheaply and go up anywhere and everywhere.

Unfortunately since they were all built so cheaply, you end up spending twice as much later to keep the place standing.

The foundation is shaky at best and anytime you hang a picture, you worry about knocking the entire house down.

You constantly have to call the exterminator to keep the bugs out and everytime you remove a piece of furniture, there are always parts of it left behind.

OSX is the modern day mansion.

It’s built from the ground up using the same sturdy foundation as the Victorian Mansion.

When you look inside, every room is the exact same and is in pristine condition. The floors are so clean there is a mirror reflection of every item in the house and the lights are positioned perfectly to make everything look just perfect…just the way the owner wanted it, so don’t touch!

Once the builders were finished with the house, the owner had the front door locked, the doorknob removed and put bars on the windows so no one could get in to touch or move anything because that’s not the way he intended. If you don’t like it? Go screw yourself because he doesn’t care what you think.

Government housing owners start looking at other options and stumble on the mansion. They are awed by it’s beauty and blindly follow. Once they get their house, they realize it’s designed for handicapped people. They can’t get in the house because the owner doesn’t trust anyone using his design because he already designed everything just the way he wanted it and can’t imagine how anyone could possibly think it should have been done differently.

…but of course, it’s for your own good……you retard.

Linux is the carpenter/designer’s dream house.

The foundation is rock solid and is inspected every year by thousands of the best carpenters all over the world.

The house is everything you want, if you know what you’re doing. It’s all there for you. The doors, windows, walls and roof. You ‘get’ to assemble it yourself any way you like.

Once it’s finished, you rarely have to repair anything and will never have to tear it down and start from scratch. It’s designed in a way that allows it to be built upon until it’s turned into a skyscraper or left as is.

Everyone on the block is envious and wants to know how you bought such a beautiful house so cheaply. After you explain to them that you built it yourself, they leave in disgust and never talk to you again because you’re one of “them”.

source

8 Bad Decisions When Starting a New Website

When starting a new website there are a number of decisions that you will make that can have a huge impact on the long-term success of the site. Many times these decisions don’t seem as important as just getting the site up and running and as a result they don’t get the attention they deserve. Here are 8 decisions that can cripple your chances of building an effective website.

1. Free or Cheap Web Hosting - Many aspiring website owners are tempted by low cost hosting options. It’s understandable that someone would want a low-priced or free hosting company when starting a new website, but this can have serious consequences. Free hosting will be slow and will most likely include ads on your website that you have no control over. Even low-priced hosting tends to be slow and the customer service and support will almost certainly be inadequate.

You don’t need to spend a fortune on hosting. In fact, quality services are very reasonably priced . What you will quickly learn is that your hosting company will strongly influence the performance of your site. When your website goes down because of inferior hosting you’ll understand the true cost of not spending a few more dollars each month for a better option.

2. Not Buying a Domain Name - If you want your online business to be taken seriously, you need your own domain name. Many free hosting services, including blog platforms like WordPress, offer the option of having a website without needing to buy a domain name. Domain names are so inexpensive (can be less than $10 a year at GoDaddy.com) that there’s no reason to not buy a domain. Your domain name is crucial for being able to brand your website.

3. Not Getting the Right Domain Name - Buying the wrong domain name is almost as bad as not buying one at all. Unfortunately, finding the right domain name today is not an easy task. With millions of websites online your first choice will rarely be available. Your domain name should be easily remembered and relevant to your site. Very long domain names can be difficult for visitors to remember, and they increase chances for typos from potential visitors. If possible, choose a .com without hyphens (if it’s not possible to avoid hyphens, don’t use more than one) that contains a keyword. There are a number of tools available to help you to quickly find the right domain name.

4. Designing Exclusively for Search Engines - In attempt to gain strong search engine rankings, the human visitor is sometimes forgotten. Don’t prioritize search engine spiders over your visitors. It’s possible to design a user-focused website that is still search engine-friendly. If your website satisfies its visitors the traffic will come, and most likely so will search engine rankings.

5. Prioritizing the Look Over the Content - A lot of new website owners get excited about the new site and forget that the content is what will ultimately determine it’s success. Sure, a website should look good. But the content and usability of the site shouldn’t suffer at the expense of its appearance. Minimalistic designs are becoming increasingly popular, and one of the biggest reasons is that they allow for the content to be the focal point. Just as much time and effort should go into creating the content as goes into creating the design.

6. Forgetting About the Target Market - Every website is created for some target market or target audience. Try to always keep them in mind as you are creating the site. In order to succeed, you’ll need to provide them with what they want. It’s easy to forget about your target market and design the site how you like it, but what really matters is what your target market will think. Anticipate what they will be looking for at your site and find a way to meet their needs.

7. Poor Navigation - One of the most frustrating experiences for a website’s visitors will be trying to find something specific with poor navigation. The pages and sections of the site should be easy and logical for visitors to maneuver. For larger sites a sitemap and site wide search can be very helpful.

8. Ineffective Keyword Targeting - Part of attracting new visitors is using the right keywords and phrases. In most cases some research will be necessary to find the best words and phrases to target. There are a number of tools available to help with this research (some free and some paid). Google’s keyword tool is one of the better free options.