I am working on this mobile app that is a cross between karaoke and musical instrument practice. Through playing music for a long time, I realize that playing with a band or with the actual song is important to get a good feel of music, specially for starting musicians. Hence the app. Currently I have Nepali songs up. I am finding it difficult to get more subtitle files or generate them quickly (for lyrics layout). Through this I would want to ask how I can quickly generate lyrics file. I really would appreciate the help.
25 years ago I needed an app that would transliterate my writing in English to my native language (Nepali), as I did not know how to type in my native language (which I still don't). So I made a 1 person use transliterater. The fonts used for my native language then were mostly ascii fonts with typefaces changed to characters of Nepali. When unicode became more common, then an app that would change from those ascii fonts to unicode.
Then I needed units converter as Nepal uses different units of measurement compared to metric as local levels. Hence unit converter for myself.
Few more applications on the way, but most have been replaced by Google.
In the last 4 years I have moved away from programming to being a full time farmer. Here I needed simple app that would take market data from past years to figure out when I would get the best price for a crop. Hence I made one for myself that would aid me make my crop calendar. Now working on a simple 1 person app for a crop calendar.
Coolest thing I learned is to clone trees.
Roughest thing I learned is that most people who talk about climate, don't really want to plant trees. They just want to talk about it.
If you checked out all others maybe you want to check this one too. Its in Nepal and pioneers of various tech in cataract surgery -- https://tilganga.org/
Their number of treatment is pretty impressive (73,49,257 is their current count of people treated.)
I wrote and made collection of stuff, but literally nobody read in last few years. Realized blogging (or making anything on the web) comes with a lot of marketing. Hence found text files to be better for note to oneself.
I have started planting local fruit trees with an aim to plant 120,000 local fruit trees in the next 3-5 years. Currently I have reached 3000 in the last 5 months, with another 1000 in polybags.
Leaving programming after 25 years of it, I wanted to do something that will help world be a better place even after I am gone. Trees have always appealed to me. Hence local fruit trees -- sell fruits to run farm once fruiting happens in a few years. Local plants are localized to climatic and soil conditions of the area thereby requiring the least nutrition, water and care.
Its going to be a bit slow from here for few reasons, I have to learn to grow saplings faster and out of season, make fertilizer year round and figure out how to ensure plants are growing. I have figured out some of it, but financial resource crunch will hit me in next 6-8 months. So now trying to come up with ways to handle that.
Help in any of the above is extremely welcome. Does anyone feel social impact funds will want to look at me?
My daugther(18) and I(47) create a comic series at https://www.instagram.com/arghhhcomics/.
We use Inkscape and Gimp for them.
Now we have animated series coming up, called Misunderstood, where daughter is exploring blender. She is just starting, but loving it.
Having mentored quite a few gifted science students, the best thing that I have found is to give them a problem, give them a bunch of things and tools that they can break and tell them find a solution.
Find time to discuss various solutions or find mentors for your child who can do the same.
Let the child understand more, not by making, but by breaking the problem down to the smallest units possible and see the connection.
With the same philosophy we are working to build one room labs in public schools in Nepal called tinker lab (www.tinker-lab.org)
Here is a list of things I have been doing from the time I left programming 2 years ago, roughly having worked for around 24 years. I was left with lots of time and didn't want to work only in one thing like programming before. So I got into small projects that meant something for me. Might be of help.
-- Learning music for last 4 years, mainly to get into a hobby. I put in about 1-2 hours of practice per day. Thinking of building a course for people with absolutely no prior knowledge of music, but I have not started yet. Have got a mindmap going here - https://www.viewpedia.org/musicCourse-map.png
-- Mentoring, at NYAS ((www.nyas.org) and invidiually. Perfect as it does not take too much time, but connects to lot of young minds. Hope to increase and maybe we should create a network of mentors as someone suggested being mentor in the comments. I have not found a mentor network yet.
-- Lokopakar (www.lokopakar.com) - for mentoring and another unique program called Strength Together, that is a peer-to-peer network to help adolescent girls in developing countries overcome their feeling of "I am not Enough"
-- Tinker Lab (www.tinker-lab.org) - I found a group of guys who were into breaking things apart and seeing what was inside and trying to put it back (never really making it). We are now working to make a lab for public schools in Nepal where young, eager, self learning students to do the same. The first lab is coming up within the month.
-- Farming, fruits for fun, vegetables commercially. Now thinking of adding bee keeping and a farm stay program. I spend only the weekends on it as others handle everyday work better than I.
-- Viewpedia (www.viewpedia.org) Still left with time as I gave up social media and most of TV. So learning about my own culture and building a website to provide collection of youtube videos of mostly unwritten Nepali culture. Currently focused on music and dance.
Starting 1998, every couple of years I have taken up one or other side projects, which have all ended up not making a penny or even had much visits. My misadventures have been documented really well by the Waybackmachine in archive.org
This was a travel and hotel booking website we made using Perl starting 1998.
Then there was a Indic text editor tool, based on character map image exchange, that didn't go anywhere. As I was building the editor, so was Unicode becoming more common.
After that was rating system for anything using Pearson’s Correlation Coefficient. I specifically used it for hotels and universities.
In between there were tools for early learners, used goods exchange and even a product demo system where people could give incremental feedback on specific aspects of the product.
After 22 years, I have realized that most projects failed because I was more into the programming aspect of them. Once the products were done programmatically upto a level in which I was satisfied I failed to follow through with marketing or even creating basic awareness.
With that discovered self-realization I started doing things low tech, meaning requiring very less programming work from the start of 2020. This included making videos on youtube and making what I call a Visual encyclopedia website, http://www.viewpedia.org
Now I realize that marketing or awareness creation part is equally hard. I have been trying to get my site ranked on Google and Bing for last few months and haven't gotten anywhere. Youtube videos, the highest count is 500 views.
I hope to document my projects in last 22 years and my current learnings for marketing in articles that I hope to post to HN later.
I left Facebook 6 years ago. Never really closed my account, just walked away from it one day and didn't go to it anymore. I felt missing out for sometime (like a year). Sometimes I feel I miss out. But now I really don't care.
Facebook cares though. Hehe... I get message from Facebook literally everyday, saying I missing out on this or that.
6 months back I registered for Instagram, but the last login was 3 weeks back.
With time I seem to have learnt not to care for Social media.
Listening and trying to understand a lot of folk music I found out that it is not only language barrier, but a lot of music is unwritten and undocumented.
So I started working on a site to try and provide visual documentation for such music and cultural practices (currently heavily inclined towards Nepal).
Started learning music (Madal, Nepali drum and Clarinet) at age 43. 4 years now and getting allright at both with no previous skills.
Hope to make a set of Youtube videos for learners like me soon.
Currently putting together a website that showcases unwritten and undocumented music, dances, cultures called http://www.viewpedia.org Heavily focused on Nepal right now as I come from here.
how about building a social platform and further learning site for serial entrepreneurs?? Serial entrepreneurs get together to test ideas, projects, etc...
They learn mainly by seeing what others are doing and sharing thoughts.
I go to sites to learn something, it is designed for someone just starting out. I want to talk to fellow serial entrepreneurs who are looking at various ideas, but don't know where to meet them and how. Even sharing of visions and opportunities that serials entrepreneurs see could be really insightful not only for themselves, but for anyone who are looking at what is going to happen next.
We, meaning 3 of us, have automated a greenhouse using Python code running on a raspberry pi -- this includes getting data from sensors within the greenhouse (temperature, humidity, soil moisture, soil temperature, carbon dioxide), from an accurite 5 in 1 weather station outside, and then running fans (intake and exhaust), water pumps and sprinklers, camera, etc... and pump data to web, so that we do not need to be present to see what is happening inside the greenhouse. No code is production ready, but we have had 2 good vegetables crops from the greenhouse already. The problem we working on is presented here : https://medium.com/@pravenj/a-bucket-a-day-a-hack-in-agricul...
maybe hack a project for extreme affordability from hackproject.org? More problem discussion in the slack channel where you can self-register hackprojectorg.herokuapp.com. Even old problems or simple problems that you might have not even looked at with passing eyes could have dramatic effect for extremely rural areas and what the UN calls the frontier worlds.
