I built a "projector" yesterday. It uses the same approach taken by the many DIY Projector plans (link1 link2) found on the net.

A projector consists of three basic elements: projection lens, image source, projection light. The projection lens is what magnifies the image from the image source. The projection light gives enough juice for the image from the image source to appear on the projection surface. The DIY plans usually make use of a Fresnel lens as the projection lens, a TV/LCD as the image source and metal halide bulbs are the projection light. These components can be obtained *relatively* cheaply.

Materials:
My projector is quite simple.

I decided to use my ageing HP 5550 Pocket PC as the image source. The screen has a resolution of only 320 x 240 pixels, but it is more than enough for watching movies or projecting the usual Pocket PC applications - atleast enough for my use. I then got a handy sized fresnel lens off Ebay for less than 2 quid. I used cardboard I had lying around to make the projector housing.

Construction:


Results!
Since I had no screen and nor was I bothered to make one, the off-white colored wall in my room was to act as my screen. The projected image size was around 4 feet - a limitation due to the small size of my room.


Now, it's time for popcorn(not really) and a showing of Stargate Atlantis season 2!

Toodles.

ScienceMaldives was officially launched today, 1st March 2006. More info on the ScienceMaldives project is available on my previous blog post.

Check out the website and the site's discussion forum.

Introducing.... ScienceMaldives!

ScienceMaldives is one of my latest pet projects. It is a collaborative effort that saw its beginnings in January 2006 and features Muthasim and Adnan in the driving seat, in addition to myself. The work is currently still under development and is scheduled to be officially launched on 1st March.

The aim of the venture is to nurture and support the development of science and science education in the Maldives. We want it to be a resource for students in various stages of education as well as a resource for the curious non-students. We will be publishing articles, how-to's and providing/facilitating answers to specific questions that any of you may have. It is also aimed at being a means of access to material - journals, news, research papers etc from around the world. Additionally, we wish to promote research and application of science in the Maldives through increased awareness and education. Despite the name, it is not our intention to stick entirely to pure sciences and therefore we welcome the applied sciences and social sciences as well.

The ScienceMaldives wesite is mostly blank for now as we are working on the content at the moment to be readied for our official launch. The site also contains a discussion forum targetted at engaging our users in intellectual debates and as a means of obtaining answers to questions. The forum is already active with quite a few members aboard and many ongoing discussions. We hope that the site and forum would be better able to serve the needs of the Maldivian populace than similar foreign resources.

This effort is a strictly not-for-profit operation and we will be relying on the participation and content contribution by our visitors and users to achieve and maintain ScienceMaldives a reliable and rich source of information. Educators are encouraged to contribute articles as we wholeheartedly believe such deliverance of knowledge would help build a more educated and enlightened society in the Maldives. If you are interested in contributing to our efforts, please do drop me an email.

We do carry big dreams and hopes for the future of the venture. If things workout well, we intend on publishing a newsletter/journal in the Maldives. We also hope to cultivate practical forays into science by organizing and executing science fairs (which is something which the government has conveniently abandoned in favour of having more singing competitions per year ). These strictly remain long term goals for now and we are concentrating on compiling the website into a notable resource for all science lovers in the Maldives.

The ScienceMaldives site is located at http://www.sciencemaldives.com/ . Join the forum and start posting at http://www.sciencemaldives.com/forum/

Blobsy 2 ( beta, rc6 ) has been made official today. The release brings together a number of minor updates from various cvs commits over time as well as a few major feature additions by a few other developers. The release comes after a long time of inactivity in the project but hopefully marks a rekindling of more intense development work to keep up with the changes coming with Windows Live Messenger rollout.

Change log
- Upgraded to support MSNP10, MSNP11 and MSNP12
- Personal Status Message support
- Added Challenge Response Generation Object (chl.obj.php)
- Fixed SB WLM8 compatibility bugs
- Fixed SB MSG headers bug
- Removed redundant configuration file entries
- Added Unicode encode/eecode functions
- Fixed MSNFTP bugs and added multiple simultaneous File Transfer support
- Modified MSNP2P functions
- Updated UserRelated to utilise $msn functions


Go to Blobsy homepage

Here is another of my pet projects brought back from the land of the deceased.

This one is called "JavaScript Dhivehi Character Recognition". It was created early 2003 (or maybe late 2002) and made available on bichoo.net. Basically, it lets you draw a Thaana character using your mouse and then it "recognizes" what you have drawn. The purpose was mostly to satisfy my curiosity into artificial intelligence and pattern recognition at the time, however it also showed promises of the beginnings of a future where Dhivehi documents maybe scanned in and processed by a computer to convert it to text just as Optical Character Recognition technology has been doing for English documents. I think this rudimentary application was the first ever Dhivehi character recognition implementation released to the public. More interestingly, this seems to be the only character recognition implementation programmed in JavaScript floating around on the Internet even now.

I spent a bit of time tonight reworking some bits of the code for clarity. The entire implementation is done using JavaScript and DHTML. You are welcome to study the code to see how it works. The code is well commented and maybe a good starter into AI and pattern recognition basics. It uses a single layer single Perceptron model to really simplify things however it is a good enough practical implementation to work for characters drawn on a 10x10 grid. The grid makes up the input data to the neural network. The neural network is hard-coded into the page and has definitions for each character in the alphabet. I do hope you are surprised by the accurateness of the recognition of this little application.

Have a look at it HERE. Let me know if you find it amusing... or not.

My company - Technova Pvt Ltd - is currently working on bringing a full fledged Dhivehi OCR software to the Maldivian public. It will probably be made available early 2006, as a service for customers requiring bulk OCR processing. We shall be releasing Windows, Linux and Mac versions of the software for home and business use around mid 2006.