New home theatre and 50 3D Blu-rays

During my school days, I vividly recall hearing my childhood friends rave about a particular 3D film called ‘My Dear Kutti Chatan’. Although I cannot distinctly remember if I had the chance to watch it back then, the discussions surrounding the thrilling pop-out scenes sparked my curiosity and fascination for the three-dimensional experiences.

My journey into the world of three dimensional movies began when I moved to Chennai for work. During that time, my friend Partha and I would regularly watch the newest 3D releases.

Among the films we enjoyed were Shrek, Avatar, and Transformers: Dark of the Moon, which particularly left me beaming during the exhilarating highway fight sequence where Bumblebee heroically transformed and shielded Sam Witwicky. Such awe-inspiring scenes fueled my love for such movies, compelling me to continue seeking out films that offered an immersive experience.

Love this scene from the movie Transformers: Dark of the Moon.

In 2012, following my move to the United States, I purchased a 40″ TV from the Best Buy store in Springdale, OH. Alongside, I brought home my very first 3D movie, Avatar.

Since then, I have been gradually building my collection of Blu-rays. In 2018, upon returning to India, I shipped my households along with my cherished collection, and my 50″ TV that was purchased in 2017.

Regrettably, the TV ceased to function after five-years, and repairs were not possible in India. It dawned on me that no 3D televisions have been manufactured since 2017, and I had to settle down to a regular television for my living room.

Whenever I cast my gaze upon my Blu-ray collection, a sense of longing for the immersive movie experience washes over me. This sentiment lead me to research and buy an ultra-short throw projector that supports 3D formats.

I needed to rearrange the office room to fit a movie setup. After getting the green light from my wife (with the one condition of adding a loft), I proceeded to redesign the room. Luckily, when I purchased the house a year ago, I hadn’t done any interior designs or installed wardrobes or a loft in the office room. This provided me with the flexibility to relocate my computers from one corner to another, allowing the room to accommodate both a home theatre and my office needs. To free up the necessary space, I sold my old large computer desk and utlized the available wardrobe area to install a new computer table, recliner, wall shelves, and a loft.

The computer desk color is not the exact brown that I wanted, but it was the only close option available from the contractor.

I designed this office setup by myself. 🙂

The home theatre setup features a XGIMI Aura 4K UST projector, a 100-inch screen and a Denon AV receiver. I chose five Q Acoustics speakers with subwoofers along with two JBL ceiling speakers for Dolby Atmos.

The purchase and installation process was complex, requiring extensive drilling, relocation of switchboard fixtures, and over a month to complete. However, I am pleased with the final outcome. My 4 year old kid likes this setup as well. 🙂

This projector requires expensive DLP link 3D glasses, hence my old 10+ passive glasses are no longer useful. I’m not a fan of active shutter glasses but that’s the only option I have.

The movies now look fantastic on the new setup, rekindling my passion for collecting the blurays. 🙂

Now it has come full circle: my 3D movie collection prompted me to set up a home theatre, and the new home theatre, in turn, has led me to acquire even more movies.

After 11 years of collecting movies, yesterday, I received my 50 and 51st 3D movies – Harry Potter Year 7 part 1, 2, and The Hobbit: The battle of Five Armies Steelbook.

I know, the progress is slow and the collection count is less for a 11 year old hobby. I focus only on acquiring movies that genuinely captivate me rather than buying them solely for their format.

My collections so far.

As 3D Blu-rays are facing a slow death , collecting them becomes a pricier endeavor, particularly when seeking out Steelbook editions. Nevertheless, I am determined to persist in my journey of gradually collecting 3D films until the world ceases their production. Here’s to hoping for an ever-growing treasure trove!

Thanks for reading!

3D Blu-ray collection

I’m a fanatic of 3D movies and I have been collecting 3D Blu-rays movies since 2012. My first 3D Blu-ray was Avatar which I bought along with a 40″ Samsung 3D TV at BestBuy in Springdale, OH. Since then I keep buying the movies that catches my attention.

I love to roam around and browse through the media aisles at BestBuy and Target when I used to live in the United States. After moving back to India 2+ year ago, I only find physical stores selling pirated movies where I live currently. Hence, my only choice is to rely on Amazon India to buy legit movies.

Lately, I have become very picky and started to ignore the regular blu-rays that come with blue plastic cases and leaning towards Steelbooks and special editions. However, they are expensive (approx. ₹2500+), so I tend to buy only a 4 or less movies in a year. It roughly comes around ₹10,000 per year which is a lot of money but this hobby is something that I would like to stick with forever.

I have about 45 Blu-rays at home out of which 26 are 3D formats as of today. I know, it is not a lot for a 8 year collection but I’m sure to build an empire of 3D blu-rays someday.

I use Xbox as a player hooked on to my 55″ 3D LG TV to watch the movies. I did not buy a dedicated Blu-ray player as Xbox servers as the gaming console as well as 3D and 4K Blu-ray player.

The challenge now-days is that the market is more for 4k blu-rays than 3D so it is hard find all the titles available in 3D formats. Also there is no 3D TVs that are being manufactured nowadays. However, 3D projects are still available for purchase which is the only hope for fans like me.

Here’s the picture of my movie collection. I would buy a separate bookshelf as my collection grows.

As I stay home

Hello everyone, Hope you are all staying safe and healthy. With Corona going viral across the world, it has put a disruption on our everyday’s life. As I stay home, I want to share my thoughts and observations.

Government:

On March 23, 2020, The government of India have mandated the lockdown. It is a month now and surprisingly, the Central and Tamil Nadu state government seem to be doing a decent job on implementing and educating the people about the situation. Kudos to them.

One thing that I think they have messed up is with the preparedness activity for the lockdown. The announcement was a bit late and a very short time was given to people. It was a chaos and a nightmare for elderly and women who had to travel to their hometowns.

Photo source: PTI

Considering our population, It could have been better if Govt announced this a week earlier instead of just giving a 2 day notice. However, things have settled and I believe people are safe home now.

People:

While government trying to take proper measures, not many people seem to adhere to the law. On one side there are poor people trying to cope up with this tough situation and on the other side folks roam around the city irresponsibly. By watching and reading news, I felt that a lot of people lack discipline and did not understand the consequences.

Once in a while during the lockdown, the Prime Minister of India requested people for door step activities like applauding and lighting candles. It is a good intention but a few people considered that as a challenge and took it to a whole new level of entertainment 👏 🔔 🍽  and celebration 🔥 🎆. That was really crazy.

Mother Nature:

The nature seem to be healing itself during this time. How do I say that?

interstellar_blightDusts: My apartment is close to the roads and collects a lot of dusts. I feel like I’m in the places shows in the movie Interstellar. Recently, the dusts and air pollution have significantly reduced. I don’t have to clean 🧹 the balcony very often😁.

Noise pollution have decreased as well. btw, why do we people in India honk a lot while driving 🎺 ?

Buying essentials:

I managed to buy the veggies 🍅 🌽 🌶  in near by shops, however, it was hard to find groceries, also Big Basket was mostly out of slots for delivery. After the initial days, we now have vegetable vendors come to our apartment and big basket started to have more slots as well. I have not stepped out of the apartment for the last 2 weeks. Essentials are enough to live a decent life and I will try follow the minimalism even even after the lockdown.

Work from home: (WFH)

I work for a Software company and we decided to work from home starting March 19 rather than waiting for the Government’s order. We arranged laptops, setup Virtual Machines and VPN for employees to work remotely.

WFH is not new to me but I feel like I’m glued to my computer 👨‍💻 from dawn to dusk. Huh, Every software engineer’s problem!

If you are someone who do not have an option to work at home, this is the time to find an alternate income options or build skills that helps you earn through internet. This pandemic also reminds us the importance of the emergency fund.

What else ?

Trust me, Staying home is not that hard. I have been practising since child hood. I’m an introvert. 😉

I usually watch animated movies and documentaries when at home. It is no different during lockdown. Just that my kid doesn’t allow at times and prefers rhymes instead.

If you have a smart TV or a streaming device you can subscribe to Netflix, Amazon prime Hotstar, Apple TV+ etc. Please stay away from DTH TV shows and serials, they are either negative or too much of artificial celebration, meaningless jokes with annoying laughter tracks. The TV content quality is no good. Here are the shows I have watched or in my Watchlist:

Netflix: Stranger Things, Series of unfortunate events, Minimalism, Abstract: the art of design, Babies etc.

Hotstar / Disney+: Modern family, Fresh off the boat, How I met your mother, Lion king, Frozen 2, Onward, Aladdin and a lot more good animated movies.

Amazon Prime: Young Sheldon, Shark Tank, the Middle etc.

Apple TV+: The morning show, SEE. Helpsters, Snoopy, Here we are: Notes for living on planet earth are good for kids.

i4fu8u           kk,m (Ok, that was my kid, I guess he made his statement as well)

This was a long post, are you still reading ? if so what are you folks doing to make this lockdown more useful and interesting?

Design – Finish App

Design process involves a lot of creative and critical thinking ;). I have no degree or an expert in Graphic design. However, with the observations and references to many user interfaces, I have developed a sense of design myself.

My first iOS app – Finish required me to create so many drafts.

Be it right or wrong, good or bad, I thought it would be interesting to share those.

 

IMG_2412.PNG

User Interface of iOS Reminder app:

With the stock reminder app that comes with iOS, users have to scroll indefinitely to set a date, month and year. It takes continuous scrollto choose a date.

Note: Nowadays, no one have to deal with touch or mouse to set a reminder. Asking Siri, Alexa or any voice assistant to set a reminder will solve the above problem.

With that above scenario as a problem statement, I decided to create an interface that takes only a few taps to choose a date, month and an year (and to make the world a better place 😉 ).

Here are a few of my works that I drafted for the app.

Time Dial – Draft to Design.


Home screen – Draft to Design

Month view – Draft to Design

Laddu

I had a lot of Laddus at home yesterday and created this crazy poem and video while digesting it 🙂 
Laddu

Resembles like the Earth,

Pop one in mouth,

You’ll realize the life’s worth!

Btw, This turns out to be my first post in 2017. Happy new year to everyone! 

Write

Writing! remember ? I do not mean writing emails or blogs. I mean the real writing that involves pen and paper.

It has been a very long time since I wrote, I have even forgotten how my hand writing looks like.

It did not occur to me until I saw a friend posted on Facebook that he decided to write. I wanted to write aswell and bought a note from Barnes and noble which I have not opened for days. coincidently, I got a free pencil and pen set from my office today which looks so organic.

writenote
Pencil and Note – Made for each other 🙂

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Pen and Pencil set that I got from my office

Today, I started to write and really struggled with the spellings and hand writing. I would blame me on losing control over the technology and let it bring down my creativity, intelligence and my uniqueness.

Technology made us lazy with algorithms and bots. One example is the auto-correction that substitutes the spelling when we type wrong. I felt like a dumb when I’m stuck while writing on paper and end up asking Siri to spell for me.

walle-otto02
This is me trying to take control from Technology 😀 Movie: Wall-E

I will write more frequently from now that helps me accelerate my thinking and creativity.

Cocoapods

Cocoapods are dependency manager for Swift and Objective-C that maintains external libraries. I had to install this to make use of AWS libraries for iOS application.

This can be installed with the Ruby which is already available on OS X El Capitan. The installing process seem to be simple as mentioned in their official website, but I faced a couple of issues which I wanted to share, so it saves time for others who faces similar issues.

First, I updated the Ruby version. Open terminal, type the below command.

$ sudo gem update --system

Then, run the command to install Cocoapods.

$ sudo gem install cocoapods

This will ask you to enter the password. Once I typed in my mac login password and hit enter, it threw me the below error.

ERROR:  Error installing cocoapods:
activesupport requires Ruby version >= 2.2.2.

After googling this for a while, I ran this command (not sure if this is necessary).

$ sudo gem install activesupport -v 4.2.6

After it installed active support version 4.2.6, I ran the cocoapod installation command again which gave me another error.

$ sudo gem install cocoapods

Fetching: nap-1.1.0.gem (100%)
Successfully installed nap-1.1.0
Fetching: fuzzy_match-2.0.4.gem (100%)
ERROR:  While executing gem ... (Errno::EPERM)
    Operation not permitted - /usr/bin/fuzzy_match

After reading a few forums, I found there is a problem with OS X El Caption which has access issues to system, so I was suggested to run this for a specific user folder.

$ sudo gem install cocoapods -n /usr/local/bin

Password:
Successfully installed fuzzy_match-2.0.4
Fetching: cocoapods-core-1.0.1.gem (100%)
Successfully installed cocoapods-core-1.0.1
Fetching: claide-1.0.0.gem (100%)
Successfully installed claide-1.0.0
Fetching: cocoapods-deintegrate-1.0.0.gem (100%)
Successfully installed cocoapods-deintegrate-1.0.0
Fetching: cocoapods-downloader-1.1.0.gem (100%)
Successfully installed cocoapods-downloader-1.1.0
Fetching: cocoapods-plugins-1.0.0.gem (100%)
Successfully installed cocoapods-plugins-1.0.0
Fetching: cocoapods-search-1.0.0.gem (100%)
Successfully installed cocoapods-search-1.0.0
Fetching: cocoapods-stats-1.0.0.gem (100%)
Successfully installed cocoapods-stats-1.0.0
Fetching: netrc-0.7.8.gem (100%)
Successfully installed netrc-0.7.8
Fetching: cocoapods-trunk-1.0.0.gem (100%)
Successfully installed cocoapods-trunk-1.0.0
Fetching: cocoapods-try-1.1.0.gem (100%)
Successfully installed cocoapods-try-1.1.0
Fetching: molinillo-0.4.5.gem (100%)
Successfully installed molinillo-0.4.5
Fetching: colored-1.2.gem (100%)
Successfully installed colored-1.2
Fetching: xcodeproj-1.2.0.gem (100%)
Successfully installed xcodeproj-1.2.0
Fetching: escape-0.0.4.gem (100%)
Successfully installed escape-0.0.4
Fetching: fourflusher-0.3.2.gem (100%)
Successfully installed fourflusher-0.3.2
Fetching: cocoapods-1.0.1.gem (100%)
Successfully installed cocoapods-1.0.1
Parsing documentation for fuzzy_match-2.0.4
Installing ri documentation for fuzzy_match-2.0.4
Parsing documentation for cocoapods-core-1.0.1
Installing ri documentation for cocoapods-core-1.0.1
Parsing documentation for claide-1.0.0
Installing ri documentation for claide-1.0.0
Parsing documentation for cocoapods-deintegrate-1.0.0
Installing ri documentation for cocoapods-deintegrate-1.0.0
Parsing documentation for cocoapods-downloader-1.1.0
Installing ri documentation for cocoapods-downloader-1.1.0
Parsing documentation for cocoapods-plugins-1.0.0
Installing ri documentation for cocoapods-plugins-1.0.0
Parsing documentation for cocoapods-search-1.0.0
Installing ri documentation for cocoapods-search-1.0.0
Parsing documentation for cocoapods-stats-1.0.0
Installing ri documentation for cocoapods-stats-1.0.0
Parsing documentation for netrc-0.7.8
Installing ri documentation for netrc-0.7.8
Parsing documentation for cocoapods-trunk-1.0.0
Installing ri documentation for cocoapods-trunk-1.0.0
Parsing documentation for cocoapods-try-1.1.0
Installing ri documentation for cocoapods-try-1.1.0
Parsing documentation for molinillo-0.4.5
Installing ri documentation for molinillo-0.4.5
Parsing documentation for colored-1.2
Installing ri documentation for colored-1.2
Parsing documentation for xcodeproj-1.2.0
Installing ri documentation for xcodeproj-1.2.0
Parsing documentation for escape-0.0.4
Installing ri documentation for escape-0.0.4
Parsing documentation for fourflusher-0.3.2
Installing ri documentation for fourflusher-0.3.2
Parsing documentation for cocoapods-1.0.1
Installing ri documentation for cocoapods-1.0.1
17 gems installed

That worked for me. Now, you can install the external libraries in your projects.

 

Enterprise Architect

I’m an Application Architect who is in pursuit to become an Enterprise Architect. While looking for an opportunity to learn and grow in career, I came across the Open Group Enterprise Architecture certificate program (TOGAF). I was preparing for this exam on and off for several months until I decided to focus dedicatedly for the last few weeks. I finally attended the Togaf Part 1 exam and cleared it today.

This is foundation level and I need to prepare and pass one more exam to be Togaf certified.

I would like to share the list of my preparation materials so it will be helpful for someone who stumble up on my website.

Book: Togaf 9 Foundation Study Guide: 3rd Edition by Rachael Harrison.

If you are like me who prefers paperback over pdf, you can buy it in Amazon. The book also has sample questions.

Video course: Become an Enterprise Architect with TOGAF 9.1 Part 1 by Scott DuffyUdemy.com

I bought this course from Udemy.com and the tutor makes it simple to understand.

Going through the video course and the entire book helped me pass the exam.

Before I start to prepare for the Togaf part 2 exam, I would take a small break and spend sometime to create a tiny / silly app for Apple Watch. 🙂

I hope to become a successful Enterprise Architect in near future.