RK's Rambling

MovieBuff: Dive Deeper into Movies Before You Watch MovieBuff: Dive Deeper into Movies Before You Watch Have you ever spent two hours watching a movie only to be disappointed? MovieBuff is here to help! This Streamlit application leverages the power of Google's Generative AI, specifically the Gemini-Pro model, to provide you with detailed information about movies and TV series before you invest your precious time. Motivation Choosing a movie can be overwhelming. With countless options available, it's hard to know which ones are worth watching. MovieBuff aims to solve this problem by offering a quick and easy way to explore movies based on your interests. How it Works MovieBuff is incredibly user-friendly. You can either: Enter the movie title and year: Simply type the name of the movie you're interested in, and MovieBuff will fetch relevant information like plot summaries, directors, genres, themes, main conflicts, settings, character descriptions, tr...

One thing Covid has taught me is the importance of VPN. Also one other thing COVID has taught me while I work from home  is that your Windows Machine can be brilliant  as long as you have WSL2 configured in it. So imagine my dismay when I realized I cannot access my University resources while being inside the University provided VPN client. Both of the institutions I have affiliation with, requires me to use VPN software which messes up WSL2 configuration (which of course I realized at 1:30 AM). Don't get me wrong, I have faced this multiple times last two years (when I was stuck in India), and mostly I have been lazy and bypassed the actual problem by side-stepping with my not-so-noble  alternatives, which mostly include one of the following: Connect to a physical machine exposed to the internet and do an ssh tunnel from there (not so reliable since this is my actual box sitting at lab desk, also not secure enough) Create a poor man's socks proxy in that same box to have...

This is the second update to the Immersive Payment project update under the Grant For Web Fellowship. You can read the last report here:  https://blog.rabimba.com/2021/05/immersive-payment-first-update.html Background Technically, WebXR is a device API that makes it possible to distribute VR/AR experiences over a web browser. It is broadly used to describe web based VR/AR experiences. The web is the biggest platform, able to reach almost every device and balance the power with app stores through permissionless innovation. However, there’s a major issue holding the ecosystem back from growing: monetization. There’s a reason why 99% of WebXR apps look like prototypes, it’s because indie creators struggle with finding ways to capture value. More polished experiences like Mozilla Hubs and Frame usually have the backing of a large entity, so they can survive. While many of the apps on the front page of Oculus Store net millions in sales, apps on the startpage for Oculus browser (#1 ap...

It has been more than 6 months now that I have had the Immersive Payments, Spark Grant. Since then I have worked on realizing the scope of the project and finally, I am here to give an update. The project aimed to solve the following facets of distributed payment in the space of webvr. Can we have micro-payment enabled for small micro assets? Can we have a way for content and asset creators to define a way to have these transactions as part of a self-hosted (or managed) marketplace The initial concept was simple. Starting with 3d assets and models which a creator normally creates for making a virtual reality or even augmented reality scenes. Instead of having to buy them, can a creator benefit from the audience having more control over having added third party assets. Initial Prototype: The initial prototype for the project depends on Spoke and creating scenes for mozilla hubs. We wanted to see if we can have extended portions of these scene where some characters can be Monitezied usin...

  This is a news close to my heart. My project "Immersive Payment" has been awarded with Grant for the Web , and I will be focusing on using Web Monetization to enable Micro Payment and for Web Mixed Reality assets, as well as for 3d contents. It took me almost five months from learning about the initiative to actually getting thee Grant. It all started back when in Mozilla TechSpeaker call a fellow TechSpeaker and a friend Andrzej Mazur explained bout the program. He himself is also an early awardee . After the talk, I got really excited and interested in the potential and concept of Web Monetization, however, it wasn't until June that I really decided to apply. The application process was a bit of roller coaster ride for me. I had an idea of what I wanted to do and also explored what is possible right now. But a bit of termoil in my personal life kept me from going beyond toy implementations. Fast forward to June end and I finally had the project chalked out with init...

Background : India recently banned certain Chinese Apps from being used and also with that launched a campaign of being vocal for local . Essentially promoting industries and app developers alike to encourage building and using homegrown solutions. And along with that came a plethora of apps replicating different features of popular Chinese + non-chinese but popular apps trying to capitalize on the national sentiment of vocal for local. In this series, I will try to look into a few of recently launched apps which I will call "clones" functionality wise. And also look at some of their claims where, in my opinion, they peek into the grey area too much. This is purely for archival purposes so that I can catalog my own findings and direct others here from social media debates. Part 1 Drishti Play Store:  https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.arnab.dristi News Coverage: 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 In short, this is a Zoom rival with a very similar  UI and feature set (exactly like ...