RK's Rambling

  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...

At the end of last year, I was invited to speak at the Immersive Technology Conference, which took place at the University Of Houston. It was a two-day event with my talk being the first one. That always is something I simultaneously hate and still crave for. Because even if it's stressful, that is the only timeslot which allows me to actually listen to and enjoy other talks after me. Otherwise, I keep fretting over my own and can't concentrate on anything else. The conference line-up was pretty good. I enjoyed the talk by Ann McNamara. Ron Dagdag, Brian Dornbos and Angel Muniz. The only problem was the two rooms had conflicting sessions so I had to prioritize and choose. Which made me miss the talk by Chris Gerty from NASA since my own talk had a clashing slot. The event also had a few expo stalls. And I managed to try my first Hololens experience here. Admittedly I look a bit foolish in these glasses. This also was the first conference as a Mozilla Tech...

It's almost no secret that I love Open Source Bridge. There are plenty of super awesome developer conferences out there. A lot of which I never visited. But even among the ones I was fortunate enough to visit, Open Source Bridge is very special. This all-volunteer run conference has a special place in my heart and this time it was my third time visiting it. The first two times were pretty interesting for me too. The very first time I visited Open Source Bridge was in 2015, to talk about my first contribution to Firefox OS Keyboard . It was my first talk at a conference in the United States, and at a developer conference. Needless to say, I was pretty tensed and excited as well. I still remember that talk, and also OSB made a video of the talk so that I would not forget -_- In 2016, I was invited to present a talk regarding some IoT work which at that time was still important to Mozilla. OSB stopped recording videos from that year, but this resulted in an opensource.com arti...

Firefox Focus – A Free, Fast Private Browser for....android! On 17th November 2016 Mozilla announced Firefox Focus . A free fast and easy to use private browser for iOS .   Focus in One Plus One Firefox Focus was filled with goodies. From inbuilt tracker blocking, content blockers to making privacy the first class citizen. It was all of that. Wrapped in a nice package, but only for Apple Ecosystem . The argument for having focus was to make privacy dead simple and default experience for most people out there. An excellent read is this article " Privacy made simple with Firefox Focus ". And while this was all fine, a lot of us were severely disappointed that we don't have an android version. That all changes now. Mozilla has released a port of the Firefox Focus source code and I decided to build a port from it. And this is how it looks in my One Plus One. Notice the bin in Android If you notice it looks almost similar to its iOS counterpart. F...

I was invited to speak at Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Expo (SVVR) this time. SVVR (Silicon Valley Virtual Reality) is a community-focused industry organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of a healthy, diverse Virtual Reality ecosystem. SVVR is unique in a sense that they are a pure industrial conference. Almost everybody who has been dabbling in virtual reality technology turns up here to showcase, learn and to collaborate. The SILICON VALLEY VR EXPO is our main event each year. Over the past 4 years, the annual SILICON VALLEY VR EXPO has grown become the premier international VR industry conference & expo serving ALL VERTICALS affected by VR and related technologies. We are a PURE industry conference, created by VR insiders passionate about advancing the technology and the industry. Our focus on VR professionals makes SVVR THE BEST NETWORKING EVENT IN VR. This year the event took place at San Jose convention center from 29th to 31st March. What sur...

LibrePlanet is a yearly gathering of free software activists, users, and contributors—and, it's my favorite conference of the year. Here's why. LibrePlanet is run by the Free Software Foundation , and has steadily evolved from a yearly members' meeting with presentations from staff and board members to a full blown two-day conference with speakers and attendees from all over the world. The event brings people who care about free software together to talk about the future of the movement, address current challenges, and celebrate successes. Prelude I was invited to give a talk  at LibrePlanet 2017 on 25th March at MIT, in Cambridge, Massachusetts representing Mozilla as a Tech Speaker. I reached Boston on 25th early morning. Around 1 AM. The journey itself was awesome till I realized that you don't get Uber or Lyft at Boston Airport. Not that the apps don't function there. They work! Just no driver will be ready to pick you up from Airport at that time. After ...