The biggest frustration of being partly hearing impaired is the continuous tension in a conversation scenario. It is a daily struggle with failed efforts to reconstruct words and sentences out of fragments of sound. A fraction of the affected people can do lip-reading well (useless in a telephone conversation) and the ones with severe deafness has to resort to sign language which very few hearing people know (or could be bothered to learn).

We are in the age of warp-speed technology right now and this article is an attempt to figure out how today’s technology can be leveraged to provide the single most useful communication tool between the hearing world and the impaired, irrespective of medium or gadgets: The subtitles (closed captions or CC).

Imagine a handheld device with a display screen which can translate any speech to text. Any speaker, any kind of accent. But as fast as a complete sentence is spoken. This gadget alone can change the whole world. It can even be only 80% accurate and the human brain can still decipher the missing parts in a real-time conversation.

Technology in advanced countries like in the US has subtitles in TV programs which is a god-sent for the hearing impaired. For the 25 years I lived in my country, I never understood a movie or a TV show. On the first day in the US when I turned on the TV at a friend’s place, I felt like I was reborn. Movies on TV became an instant addiction for the next few years.

Closed captioning has enormously helped the hearing impaired people, but it still does nothing for the daily struggle. A major part of that is undoubtedly the use of telephone. The existing TTY technology is old, and not scalable. A recent innovation in this arena is brought by CapTel which still needs a dedicated device and plan. They even launched a web based service Web CapTel in Australia which a blogger found really great. This is a service powered by human translators, so still does not solve the fundamental problem of machines converting speech to text.

In this age of smartphones, it will be really really awesome to have a smart speech-to-text app in an handheld phone like the iPhone. Imagine being able to talk either face-to-face or on the phone while reading real-time subtitles. It would be the best app and invention for the mankind, I am petty damn sure.

A necessary upgrade of my wordpress blog was long due. And so was the default theme that looked so 2004. While the previous upgrades till 2.7 was smooth, this one (version 2.8) needed a bit of manual effort. After backing up the database and code I followed the instructions as given here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_WordPress_Extended

The primary trick was to keep

from the previous installation. The new codebase came with a

so there was no overwriting. After that I hunted for a cool theme and could not be happier with “Fusion”.

Wordpress rocks.

So, I am now set with a refillable cartridge kit coming next Monday. I plan to print a lot in a few weeks but there is always the worry of the printer’s waste ink sponges to be full soon. The waste ink counter can be reset using a combination of keys, but the sponge replacement is supposed to need a lengthy surgery on the printer (unless taken to an epson center and spending $$$).

I was looking for a painless workaround, and the closest I found is as follows:

http://www.continuousink.info/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4149

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/pavelnemo/Epson2100NemoMod?authkey=7QzJC-KLLdk#

http://www.wasteink.co.uk/waste-ink-mods/epson-2100-wibox-mod/

So basically I need to pull out the waste ink tube from the right side and attach an exit tube to it which will lead the ink to an external container. Sweet.

I started a photoblog a month back after being convinced by my good friend Francesco. The idea was to think of photography at least once a day and post a favorite image in fairly big size (900px). We both started liking the pixelpost framework a lot for its clean looks and ease of tweaking. So much so that we had to consider making it as a portfolio website as well. The obstacle to make pixelpost work like a static portfolio was the inability to view image sequences within a category or tag. In the browse page, you can see thumbnails under respective categories but the category information would be lost once an image is viewed large.

After a day of tweaking code I managed to pass the category and tag parameters between the browse and image pages. So under normal conditions without any specific category or tag it will behave like a chronological sequence, but if we pass a category and/or a tag they will be honored by the image navigation links. As an example, browse page that shows only images with tag=portfolio: http://joydutta.com/photoblog/index.php?x=browse&pagenum=1&tag=portfolio

This can now serve as my online portfolio page. If you click any image thumbnail, the tag will be passed so the image sequence will only be within tag=portfolio. For example, see the navigation links: http://joydutta.com/photoblog/index.php?showimage=16&tag=portfolio

If in the browse page with tag=portfolio you click on a category, the collection will be narrower as expected. Now, both the category and tag information will be passed on when you click a thumbnail and the resulting sequence will honor both. For example, see the thumbnail links: http://joydutta.com/photoblog/index.php?x=browse&category=3&pagenum=1&tag=portfolio

Pixelpost rocks.