Browsing the web today has become a very pitiable experience. A simple search for information has become needlessly complicated series of clicks, decisions and distractions. The main reason for this is the monetization of the internet click and user attention primarily using ads. This website beautifully demonstrates what it is like to be on the web today. What do I use to make my browsing experience better? Extensions to block ads and scripts. Prefer passive information aggregation methods...

The world today is a heavily diven by technology. Over the past few decades, technology, particularly computers and smartphones have pervaded every aspects of our lives. Behind all this tech are engineers designing hardware, building systems and writing code among other things. Considering the impact that engineers have on the world today - are there ethical rules that engineers should learn to live by? During my undergraduate study in India, we had as part of our engineering syllabus around f...

As an NRI living abroad I travel to India at least once every year without fail. Every time I visit, I get a snapshot impression of what has changed that year. Given that I have nearly thirteen such snapshots so far, here are my main takeaways in terms of what has changed. Mind you, these are my impressions based on life in and travels around a Tier 2 metropolis in a Southern State with a progressive, relatively rich and educated population. Digital blitzkrieg The introduction of the Unifi...

Walking along the banks of the river Rhine in Cologne, once cannot escape hearing the incessant chatter of the parakeets in the trees there. Looking up one can see the specks of green and the familiar profile as the birds fly around. It reminds me of home where we have a lot of parakeets that make their home in the coconut, mango, gulmohar and rain trees all around. What are these tropical birds doing in the middle of Europe, one might wonder. They were brought here a long time ago as pets, som...

Watched the Aghanashini documentary and learned many things that I did not know before. The documentary is from the point of the view of the river herself and is well made. Here is an article that covers all the information in the documentary. For the first time, I learned of the fruit Uppage - Garcinia gummi-gutta that is grown in the forests and harvested during the monsoon. Learned that during the post monsoon flooding, bioluminiscent fungi grown on rotten wood in the forests along the r...

To attend university, I had to commute across Bengaluru every day of the week. I would take a bus that took me through the heart of Bengaluru - the City Market and the Majestic bus stand areas. Traffic in these areas were thick and the movement of vehicles was very slow. It was here that I got to see the ebb and flow of life through the dirty windows of a BMTC public bus. One such snippet of life has remained etched in my memory. The flyover that runs through the city market area provides much ...

Nearly a decade and a half ago, in the hey day of Nokia mobile phones, there were these stickers you could buy and stick on your phone. They would start flashing when you got a call and during. It was similar to how you could know a call was coming based on the hum from nearby speakers. GSM Handsets operated at a higher RF power that enabled these passive electronics components to use it. Modern phone operate far more efficiently, there are no such stickers for phones today. Hackaday article s...

We have a tradition in South India, particularly in Karnataka to take baths after rubbing oneself with and soaking in castor oil. This bathing ritual, I believe, is an ancient one and is still practised meticulously in certain families. It is considered mandatory to start celebrations of various festivals like Ugadi and Deepavali with an oil bath or yenne neeru and is also an integral part of personal festive events like the Upanayana and marrriages. It is said that on the day of festivals like...

I find myself very interested in history, and am lucky to live in a time when popular history content is widely available via books, podcasts and videos. History in school is often said to be dry and monotonous - full of dates and events laid out in a dry and unimaginative manner. Thankfully, that was not always the case for me. My interest in history is closely due to a few of my teachers in school. They taught this subject passionately and analytically. They made us think about it, here's one...

Indian Ocean Geoid Low is a region of low gravity below the tip of the Indian peninsula. The reasons for this has been studied by scientists from Bengaluru and identified as forming due to special patterns of magma flows. I find it extremely fascinating that this anomaly exists precisely in the area where Rama is said to have built a bridge with the help of his army to cross into Lanka. Apparently he asked the ocean to make it easier for his engineer Nala and they managed to cross the ocean on ...

The years after the COVID19 pandemic saw the rise of stray dog population in Bengaluru. The municipal body (BBMP) responsible for catching and spaying/neutering street dogs were not active during the lockdown. Their ABC (Animal Birth Control) program when implemented correctly was quite effective in keeping the populations in check. This was how it came to be that we had a surplus of puppies in our street - nearly 8 of them that year. In the neighborhood we did what we could in feeding the mot...

Recently our Sony Bravia TV started throwing the error 1107 preventing it from being able to access the internet. Searching for the issue I found that this could arise due to some IPs being blocked by internet providers or VPNs. I did have an pihole running that was filtering out advertisements, malware and adware. Disabling the pihole gets rid of the error. It is a pity that the Sony Bravia TV requires access to suspicious IPs, possibly adware to function. tags: #tech ...

We are living through a jaw epidemic - a shrinkage in the size of our jaws due to changes in lifestyle such as processed and soft foods. A reduced jaw size leads to various problems such as irregular or crooked teeth, reduced space for wisdom teeth, and breathing problems. Bones and muscles need stress to strengthen and grow. Eating soft foods in childhood prevents adequate growth of these muscle sets and jaw bones leading to subsequent health problems. Solution would be to encourage children t...

Nuclear waste is a very environmentally clean and consistent source of energy. It would be the ideal energy source if not for the radioactive nuclear waste left behind which continue to remain radioactive and harmful for millions of years after. Anyone using nuclear sources for energy have to consider the problem of dealing with nuclear waste. Typically solutions so far have involved simply burying them deep in the earth or encase them with concrete and drop them into the sea. In all cases, the...

In dealing with large amounts of data even the simplest things sometimes becomes a problem - listing files for example. To list a few million files on the command line, my usual go to list command ls -lrt simply took too long. This was because it was also sorting before printing the files. ls -1f simply prints the files and is much faster. This stackoverflow post has more options on how to do this effectively. tags: #linux ...

This post is a nostalgic reminder of a shaving product by Godrej that has since been discontinued. The simple round tab of shaving soap came in a small plastic box as shown below as well as in paper boxes for refills. It was good soap, lasted forever, included minimal packaging, was eco-friendly and cheap - everything I look for in a consumer product. It is not longer available taken off the shelves probably due to a lack of demand or because it was no longer profitable to sell these. It follo...

First published December 06, 2019. There was a very violent rape case in Hyderabad, India where four persons raped and burned a veterinarian in a planned manner. This has caused a huge uproar in the country. The police arrested all four of them, and in the early hours of this morning they were all shot dead in an encounter. The police state that they tried to escape - all four of them - at 3AM in the morning and were shot. The commissioner of police has been known to be an encounter specialist,...

In the summer of 2020 , when the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic was raging across the globe I came across this Kannada podcast called Aralikatte on Spotify. I am not an avid follower of podcasts and had not explored this medium before. I thought to give this a try and I am very happy that I did. In "Aralikatte" a group of Bengaluru techies get together to discuss various perspectives on a random range of topics. Sometimes experts in a particular field are invited to talk in a casual and i...

An older write-up from July 22, 2020. The comet NEOWISE (named after the NEOWISE mission of the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) space telescope) is near earth and I got a chance to see it. Living where I live, the weather is always a big issue and for most of the comet's viewing duration there was heavy cloud cover. The comet is a rare naked-eye comet that was expected to dazzle viewers after the great show provided by Hale-Bopp in 1997 that I remember seeing so clearly when I was yo...

I remember reading this story somewhere a long time ago and it made a huge impact on me. I do not know where I read it and cannot find it anymore. Here I have tried to reproduce it as best as I can. Long time ago in a far away land, there was a small kingdom nestled at the foothills of a large mountain. Behind the mountain was a deep dark forest where a strong powerful dragon lived. Every once in a while, the dragon would come down from behind the mountain, terrorise the people and steal all t...

In my recent discussions with some of my friends I have repeatedly come upon this insight that the human brains have remained unchanged for over 30,000 years (at least) i.e. the hunter gatherer humans, Harappan peoples, Huns, Romans etc. have had the same brains with the same cognitive abilities as we did. I find this idea to be amazing because it has a lot of implications on how we currently view and understand things. I came across this idea first from this Kurzgesagt video talking about human...

I have been brewing my own Kombucha and Kefir for a few years now and am very happy with the results. They provide a healthy, home made, refreshing drink for every occasion. Also, coming from a culture where fresh curds (Indian jogurt) are compulsory at the end of every meal, I also have a small pot of live curds always at hand. There has been a recent trend towards probiotics that has made all of these very popular. Further, recent scientific findings have highlighted the possible impact and ...

title: My list of FOSS created_at: 2024-06-10 04:38:27Z Here is a list of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) that I use as of today. I hope it helps others who are looking to switch to open source alternatives make their decisions. Hardware I primarily use a macbook pro M1 as my primary machine along with a personal iphone. Apart from that I have a few raspberry pi's and one lonely beaglebone (both running Debian) for doing odd tasks. Software Application Software Comments Web Br...

One of the things I love about India is its diversity - and what tastier representation of diversity than that of bananas. Growing up in South India, I took all the different varieties of bananas for granted. Only when I was exposed to years of monoculture Cavendish bananas in Europe did I truly begin to appreciate what I had. Below is a table of some varieties I know with their local names for reference. Cavendish banana Most common variety found in supermarkets in US/EU. Generic ...

In the movie Boothayyana Maga Ayyu, there is a character called Siddi Byra, who is of African origin. I had always wondered what he was doing there of all places until I recently learned about the Siddis, an ethnic group of African origin in the Indian subcontinent. Siddhis were primarily brought to India as mercenaries by Indian Sultans or as slaves by Europeans in the 15th-16th centuries. The community is especially strong in Karnataka although there are pockets spread throughtout the subcon...

RSS or Really Simple Syndication is a way to access and read web content in a standard format. It is a simple way to read and follow web content in a highly specific passive form without any influence of advertisements or algorithms. News, Youtube channels, blogs, podcasts, web comics - you can follow them all using RSS. There are many RSS clients out there but I can recommend NetNewsWire for macos/ios users and good old Thunderbird for everyone else. The merits of RSS have been described el...

In my travels up and down Germany, I have sometimes passed by the Karlsruhe train station. My train stops, I never have gotten out, and depending on where my train is I have seen this wall of text. It does not look like an advertisement, and it caught my eye multiple times before I finally managed to read it. It simply says, Ich bin ein Individuum. Weit mehr als jede ausgedachte Figur aus irgendeiner Erzählung. Ich atme. Ich fühle. Ich lebe. Und das jeden Tag. Ich esse. Ich arbeite. Ich schlaf...

Hello world. I am starting this blog to collect a random assortment of my thoughts, ideas and experiments. Previously I have used telegra.ph to write short excerpts that I shared with friends, this blog is a means to bring it all together in one place. The motivation behind this blog and the published method is to: Stay minimal. Create an independent, bloat-free corner of the world wide web. Learn how to best do all this. The blog is written in markdown. I have putting this blog out in so ...