by : admin Android, Android Development, Game Development, Games, Jupyter, Machine Learning, Online Training, Python, Training, Unity

My Summer courses at ITU

I’m offering four short courses at ITU online training. The courses will help you excel in your career and gain new skills during the pendamic lockdowns and extended summer breaks imposed by unprecedented circumstances.

Registration is online and the deadline is approaching fast. Some courses are almost full so if you’re interested, signup now!

All courses are online and will be conducted remotely. Here are the coures

Mobile Application Development Android

We will learn how to make mobile apps for your Android phones and devices. Course Details

Game Development – Unity

We will learn how to make games in Unity and run them on different devices. Course Details

Python Programming with AI and ML

We will start Python programming from scratch and will touch some Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning libraries in the course. Course Details

Python Programming for Young Wizards

This is a beginners course to learn Python Programming. Highly recommended for all ages starting from school kids to young at heart kids of all ages ๐Ÿ™‚ . Course Details.

Feel free to catch me on twitter or DM me at @basitj if you have a question, suggestion or comment about the course or you’re having difficulty signing up.

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by : admin Online Training, Training

Basit Ali’s Training

I’ve been a teacher and a student all my life, and probably will continue to be one for the rest of the years I live. But I think I should mark this to be the beginning of another chapter looking at the circumstances.

Today I dedicated this section to announce that a decent percentage of my work will be dedicated to provide technical training online. I’ve been doing that in universities and organizations but this is the time I dedicate a space for this.

Early Summer 2020 in combination with COVID-19 provide enough inspiration, time and motivation to go for it and here are a number of things I’m doing right now.

Online Technology Courses on Udemy

I’m working on a number of courses that I’ll be offering on the popular online education platform Udemy. My first course named Python programming for C++ developers is now live on Udemy.com already. Hope to add more course soon.

You can read more about my online course here or can signup on Udemy here.

Online Training at ITU

I have been associated with Information Technology University Lahore since 2014 and have been working both as an instructor in their regular under-graduate programs as well as conducting professional short courses.

This summer ITU is offering a variety of short courses targeting all sort of audiences. I’ll be teaching at least 4 of such courses this summer with Information Technology University as well. My courses include Game Development, Mobile apps development for Android and a couple of Python courses touching artificial intelligence and machine learning. You can find more details here about the courses I’m offering.

I’ll put the list of courses here for your convenience.

As they say if you cannot come to Lahore, Lahore can come to you with these training ๐Ÿ™‚ . You can find more details about these courses here.

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by : admin C++, Online Training, Python, Training

Learning Python for C++ Developers

Do you know C++ or another programming language and always wanted to start learning Python? This course is for you.

Yes this is my first course on Udemy and a few more are coming soon. The course walks you through the basics of Python, the syntax, the usage with example and tons of exercises and quizzes to help you learn online.

Actually still a lot of universities, colleges and institutes around the world still teach C++ as their first programming language. Once students have learnt C++ for a while, they realize its a good idea to learn Python and that’s where this course comes in to fill the gap.

Course Content

The course starts from very beginning, your first hello world program and then work your way through data representation, variables, strings, numbers, boolean and lists and then move to the control statements, conditions loops and functions. We cover recursion, handling files, exceptoin handling, tuples, dictionaries, sets and we even make graphical user interfaces in Python language.

We put all this to work with useful examples, exercises and quizzes to make it an enjoyable learning experience at your own pace and from the comfort of your home or office. See the course page for detailed course content.

You can take this course on your mobile phone, your laptop or hook it up on your TV.

Drop me a tweet on @basitj if you have a comment, question or suggestion.

Course link if you missed above. Apply Now

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by : admin COVID19, General, Happiness, Internet, Social Networking

Staying in touch – COVID19 advantage

While we are all going through a self isolation routine, we definitely have more time at hand to do what we have not been doing very often.

One of such amazing things to do is to go through your contact list and call up the people who you have not been in touch with for so long but you wish you could connect. No, don’t use social media, give them a voice or video call. Whether it is your old friend you don’t talk to any more, or an old class mate, a neighbor you grew up playing with in the streets, your sports mate, your teachers, relatives, bus driver, the ex-coworker you liked or may be someone you traveled with, just go ahead and give them a call.

Who to call?

Obviously start with your parents, your elders, your family and near friends. It’s one amazing phase we are going through that you can find time to regularly call them and discuss whatever you want. Check the time zone and call those oversees friends and family as well.

Please note, watching news and social media could be distressing especially for the elder ones (and yes for everyone in general too) so it is a good get away when you talk to them over a voice or video call.

You can use any of the usual video/audio call mechanisms, every one is using things like Whats-app, Skype, Facebook, Face-time, Zoom, anything that works for the other party, go get in touch and bring back some smiles.

Old friends

This is amazing personal experience, we planned a friends’ get together and ended up talking over a video call, a group call of around 10 friends from school, some of them I’ve not met in person or even talked online in last 20 years or so. What a wonderful feeling to be in just one (virtual) place talking about life, work, family, kids, anything.

Schedule it

Frequently calling your loved ones and family is a good idea. May be call your sister or your parents or your friend every day or two, not a bad idea. We all use calendars and reminders for work, why not set a reminder for a frequent call that we should make, not for any reason, but just to show your face and see others how they’re doing.

Let’s call

So let’s call, use your favorite app and call now. Don’t mind if nobody picks up, you’ll definitely get a callback or two if you tried to call a few of them.

Don’t leave out texting

You should never under estimate the power of a text message (or a whats-app message). It’s just the advent and growth of group chats that is killing the beauty.

So when you plan to check on a friend or a family member, drop them a personal text, type it separately crafted for the person himself/herself adding a personal touch. No problem sharing a random joke or a meme every now and then but a personal text with your specific question or greetings is much more important.

Filter out what you communicate

Bottom line, no matter you send text or call, make sure your conversation should talk less about negativity, pain or suffering, talk more about happiness, good times, optimism and hope. There’s already a lot of negativity everywhere else, let’s bring smiles on some faces. Let’s go.

This post is part of a list that I call “The Positives of COVID19“.

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by : admin COVID19, Happiness, Social Networking

More Family Time – COVID19 plus

While a pandemic hits the world, governments and individuals around the world call for a shut down and everyone is trying to stay home as much as possible. One of the benefit of this social isolation drive is actually increased social interaction with the loved ones you should always have more interaction with. Yes the people at your home.

With evolving lifestyles, we have stopped interacting enough with our family members and those we actually live with. Whether it is hectic work schedule, heavy work load from school, university giving tough time, or your other hobbies or activities, your family members are actually those you are least interacting with. It’s may be not because you don’t want to, but because you have not enough time to do so.

An opportunity

With this forced stay-at-home trend, which is healthy and beneficial for you and everyone else in the first place, it automatically brings an opportunity for you to spend some more quality time with your own family.

Pros and cons of social media

Social media platforms and online interaction being at the fingertip of everyone today, has a negative effect on your family time too, we already know that. We are more in touch with those who respond to our tweets or Facebook status regularly. We know more about people we are following on Instagram. This trend may continue here as well during the social isolation as well.

The best thing to do in this lock down is to improve on your habits and give up on your social media use frequency, not entirely but lets limit it. This will not only give you more family time, it will help with your mental health as well. Too much time on social media is just amplifying negative thoughts into everyone’s mind.

What to do at home?

I think I’ll also start listing and posting about ideas of indoor activities you should have at home. Those of us with younger kids are having a tougher time keeping them entertained but trust me, it is not going to be that tough. Think about the previous generations, a whole lot of people, generations and generations of them have grown up happy and healthy without digital entertainment, hanging out, fast food and amusement parks. These kids can do it for a few weeks too.

So start a set of indoor activities, play board games or cards with kids, make lego trails, learn to cook something new, go back to the good old books (yeah the paper books I’m talking about), pick up your camera and do some bird photography/watching from your window (don’t go out), grab an online course and learn something new, go for some indoor games like table tennis, watch some TV together (but not all day) and balance things well.

Balance is a must

Balance is a must, too much of everything is bad so it’s important to maintain a schedule for everyone. Get up on time, make sure everyone is working out, eating balanced diet, work life balance and yes the family time.

Bottom line

So my short suggestion, give more time to family, have more interaction with people at home and enjoy this time as long as it lasts. Trust me you’re going to miss these quarantine days once it is all over.

See you guys at the other side of this crazy time.

This article is part of a set of articles I call “The positives of COVID19“.

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by : admin COVID19, Happiness, Life

The positives of COVID19

A lot has been said about the pain and troubles COVID19 has caused worldwide. No doubt its a natural calamity for everyone and nobody alive has seen anything like this before but I will be talking about all the good things that are caused by this pandemic and how it has effected everything around us in a positive way.

There are several Positive effects of COVID19. Some of them are as obvious as the sunshine in the morning but some of them we have still not noticed though we are living through them day in day out. So let’s try to list down these benefits, positive changes, good learning or positive vibes that have entered our lives and environment around us due to COVID19. I don’t think this list is in any particular order.

Please feel free to to suggest anything I’ve missed.

  • Staying home, more time with family and loved ones
  • Staying in touch, even with those you didn’t contact for long
  • More time with friends, real friends
  • Less traffic on the road
  • Less trains moving
  • Less flights in the air
  • Less fuel burnt worldwide
  • Less pollution
  • Less time wasted traveling, traffic jams and searching for parking
  • More time to contemplate, think, pray
  • Less spending, only spending money on bare minimum
  • Going back to traditional ways of entertainment in some cases
  • More time cooking
  • Better utilization of time in general
  • More time to exercise and involve in healthy activity
  • Avoid junk food and drink
  • More book reading
  • Do your own cleaning, dishes, cooking
  • Indoor workouts and exercises, you really don’t need a gym usually
  • Better overall use of technology
  • Things going online
  • Actually conducting online education including online schools and universities
  • E commerce and its higher adoption
  • Online groceries
  • Online Food delivery – the real use of technology
  • Countless benefits of working online
  • Better ways of entertainment, both online and offline
  • Sense of connection to people and neighborhood
  • Connecting back to the nature, bird watching, trees grass and more
  • A lot of community volunteer help with ideas to stay healthy, entertained and busy
  • Parents collaborating to keep their kids positive through COVID19 lockdown
  • Making impossible things possible
  • New ways of running governments
  • Most efficient use of means of communication
  • Realizing the value of trivial things and possibilities when they are gone
  • Recognizing and appreciation of every professional around us
  • Giving time to nature to be itself
  • The power of humans to be humans, helping one another in amazing ways
  • Realizing the pains of poverty, sickness and suffering around us and finding ways to improve them
  • Wars are not the best thing to continue
  • Borders are just in our minds
  • The power of learning, making real use of technology – by everyone

Lets not stop here, lets continue to add more to this list. We are no doubt in a transition from a pre COVID19 to post 2020 era. The life and the world will be very different when we come out of it. I’m sure most of us will actually get through this. No doubt there’s a lot of pain and death and suffering involved. We all can join hands (not literally), work together and live through this.

Stay home, stay safe!

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by : admin General

And I’m back

This blog was started back in 2008, so the blog is taking us from disaster to disaster.

It was a personal problem when I had lost my job and wanted to keep myself busy, so I started blogging. Honestly , back then it got very popular and I had a large fan base. And then with time things slowed down and you can see nothing much was written here recently.

This time it’s an international calamity. Its a pandemic that has taken over the world and is not slowing down for sure.

I think this is the right time to get back to blogging. Stay tuned to this place for a more regular content.

Thanks for reading, if you actually did. ๐Ÿ™‚

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by : admin Game Development, Games, Technology

Introduction – How to start making 3D Games

Game Development WorkshopJust like last year, I gave a talk about 3D Game making this summer as well. It was great to see a big audience totally interested in game making, mostly comprised of students and game enthusiasts. All who attended and even those who missed, keep following this blog or follow me on twitter @bastij ย and we’ll announce a follow up training session on this very soon.

Thanks all for making it a success.

Remember, you can start developing today!

 

Here are a few photos from the event:

by : admin Islam, Live TV

Hajj 2015 Live Online TV Streaming

Live Hajj 2015

Hajj 2015 begins now. You can watch live TV channels online that are covering Hajj. I will continue adding more links to the list below. Here are the working links.

KSA 1 Live online. Click Here.

Saudi 1 –ย ุงู„ู‚ู†ุงุฉ ู„ุงูˆู„ู‰ ุงู„ุณุนูˆุฏูŠุฉ ย – ย Click Here

Al-Quran -1 – Saudi Live : Click Here

Watch on Hamari-Web.

May Allah accept this Hajj for all the Muslims visiting Makkah right now. May Allah bless all Muslims and bring peace to this world.

by : admin Microsoft, Microsoft Windows

How to download Windows 10 DVD Image ISO without hassle

 

win10b

 

If you are waiting for a notification, an automatic update, an icon to click in your task bar or any other intimation from Microsoft for a free Windows 10 upgrade, you may be out of luck. Some of us have received the download but for those who are still waiting for a way to download Windows 10, the method is actually pretty simple. This is how I am doing it right now:

Here wo go…

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