Cancel and do it with the keyboard shortcut

When you discover a keyboard shortcut for what you’re about to do, cancel doing that and do it with the keyboard shortcut instead. ...
How I use LLM in September 2024

Almost two years into the era of AI explosion, here’s how my life has completely changed ...
Connecting to Bluetooth Speaker in Linux in 2024

One might think that by the second half of 2024, bluetooth speakers would work on linux seamlessly. ...
Block Specific Outgoing Mail Addresses in Mailu / Postfix

Have you ever had a mailu server keep retrying mails to email addresses that don’t exist? What if you didn’t want to or didn’t have access to stop emails to this address at the source? ...
FOSSMeet 2024

My talk at FOSSMeet 2024 of NIT Calicut ...
Dr C Viswanathan's Comment on 'Different Systems of Medicine' in mfc's 50 year celebration

Verbatim quoting the comment made by CVN ...
[SOLVED] FromThePage upload stuck in processing

Manoj messaged me the other day saying how he was unable to upload a file to the “FromThePage” instance of Sahya. I started investigating it after 4 days. ...
Is Open-Source Maintainers Burnout an Example of the Tragedy of the Commons?

The tragedy of the commons is invoked every time something wrong happens with open-source development. Is that always correct? ...
Moderation is Hard. Moderation is Very Important.

Moderation, CoC, etc are very important. But they’re also very hard. To be a moderator is as difficult a job as it is to be a leader ...
Judah's Curation of OCW courses

Judah spammed me with a list of courses from OCW (probably related to technology, yes, I asked for it). So I decided to review them. ...
FOSSMeet 2023

My talk at FOSSMeet 2023 of NIT Calicut ...
Caddy Statistics with GoAccess

Setting up Caddy logging and GoAccess analysis ...
The magics of scrcpy

When you already have a super powerful camera and microphone in your phone, why should you struggle with video on your computer? ...
Districts without Domino's

Which districts of India do not have a Domino’s Pizza Store in it? ...
Hardening Mailu

I ran an open relay with Mailu for a few weeks. Here is how I fixed it. ...
Subtitling Experiments 2023

Is it the best time to be alive as a subtitle-r? ...
50 Shades of Open

Open this, open that, open everything. Is anything ever open? ...
Downloading Ward Maps from OpenStreetMap using Overpass

You can download ward maps from OSM by following this ...
Understand Social Media's Role in Democratic Backslide

It is one thing to say social media is bad, it is another thing to understand how social media is affecting our democracy and respond to it ...
Discovering Social Coop

I just came to know about Social.Coop and got some useful insights into organizing commons/cooperatives/anarchic/decentralized groups ...
Nextcloud instance on local network

How to get nextcloud kinda working on the local network (on Windows) ...
Android Web Hosting Setup

You can theoretically (if all stars align) host a website on your android phone ...
How reading fast helps me stay on top of things

What if you could read twice the books in half the time? Would you practise a new skill? ...
Two Experiments for Productivity and Efficiency

This blog post explores the benefits of new habits and experimentation for increased productivity and efficiency. ...
Browsing through Omeka S source code

I like to learn things by looking at the source code. ...
Every Developer Should Have a Blog

Why should every developer have a blog? ...
Intention To leave Twitter

I am beginning to feel it is time to leave Twitter. Why? ...
Rules for Software Engineers

If your job title includes “software engineer”, here’re some rules you should follow ...
Religion and Law in India - Questions

What are some things I want to read from an essay about religion and law in India ...
My 2023 mobile blogging workflow

This is how I update this site in 2023 ...
ChatGPT vs Programmer

Is there any difference between ChatGPT and programmers if ChatGPT can write React components just the way programmers do? Will programming jobs be snatched by the model? ...
Merge My PR, I Will Pay You

If FOSS is collaboratively built, how can FOSS developers reject contributions? ...
Things to do on a boring day in software development

If you’re not coding, what else could you be doing? ...
Give up the Free Software vs Open Source Debate

If you really care about humanity, then you cannot waste all your time arguing about free software ...
Remaking Capitalism

How do we make capitalism more human? What can free software and open source learn from each other? ...
Installing Apache Superset on Ubuntu 22.04 in July 2022

Apache superset has some fragile libraries. It took a while for me to install it on my computer. This is the documentation ...
Exploring Frappe

I wanted to understand how Frappe/ERPNext works. So I went through the codebase. ...
Tips for autopkgtest in Debian

You know how to run autopkgtest, but how to run it better? ...
Some Interesting FizzBuzz Solutions

FizzBuzz is fairly easy. But that’s where you can put constraints on it. Spoiler alert: Don’t read this if you want to figure some of these out yourself. ...
Prav Project

Do you want to fight a losing battle against capitalism and concentration of power? Prav Project might be for you. ...
Some Tiny Personal Programs I've Written

Tiny personal programs are tiny programs that you build for yourself for various reasons. This is a list of my tiny personal programs ...
Working on Freedom Respecting Software With Android

If I do not have a laptop, but I do have an Android phone, can I still work on freedom respecting software? ...
Why Anti-Feminists are Anti-Feminists

I spent a significant amount of time interacting with people in a telegram group named “Egalitarian Club” over the past couple of days. ...
Copy of Letter to Wellcome "Open" Research's Editor about Comments Policy

Wellcome “Open” Research has a peculiar commenting policy. I wrote to their editor about how it is exclusionary. This is a copy of that email. ...
Cataract Surgery on LC230

My laptop’s webcam had grainy images due to scratches on its webcam cover. This is how I did a surgery on it. ...
pegasus

Pegasus Notes ...
IEEE APSIT Podcast

An interview of mine ...
It is Natural to Feel Responsible for your Project

Just because you don’t make money from the software you write, you don’t have to disclaim all responsibility of it ...
Book Review: Phantoms in the Brain

A revolutionary new way of looking at how we think. ...
Hash Constants Break Encryption

Government of India says that message hashes can be used to trace originator of messages without breaking encryption. This is a sincere lie. ...
Hourly Chime With Timers and TTS

In an online session today a participant had a chime every hour that said the time “It is 4”, “It is 5”, etc. I wanted it on my computer. ...
It Was Working In Previous Release, But Not In The Present - Debugging Bugs Introduced By Dependency Upgrades

Errors introduced by dependency upgrades are sometimes difficult to track down, especially if you are not clear about how dependency resolution works in node ...
Concepts in Linux

There are a few fundamental concpets in Linux family of operating systems that one needs to be aware of before one can be proficient in using Linux ...
Seasons of Code: Methods of Encouraging FOSS Contributions

Various methods of encouraging FOSS contributions that have been tried. Their apparent merits and demerits. ...
PostgreSQL Gotchas

These are some interesting things I learnt about postgres from reading Learn PostgreSQL by Luca Ferrari, Enrico Pirozzi ...
Free Software is a Religion

Is free software a movement or a religion? ...
On Hacker Culture

What is hacker culture? What should it be? Is there a problem with hacker culture? ...
Rethinking Free Software

Once I freed my mind from the clutch of a particular imposing presence on how to think about free software, I have been questioning some of the choices I have made in the past. This is a list. ...
What to Learn from the Downfall of RMS

Where did RMS go wrong? What can we learn from it? ...
GSoC 2021 Organizations

Since SMC didn’t get selected for GSoC I decided to look through the organization list in GSoC and see how many I knew. Turns out there are some nice new ones. ...
Liberated Computer

I bought a Liberated Computer from Libre Tech Shop last week. I love it! ...
Groking Varnam - Part 2

In part 2 of this series, we look at how varnam “learns” patterns before doing transliteration ...
Groking Varnam - Part 1

I wanted to figure out how varnam works (and even possibly rewrite it in a modern language, for fun). So here are the notes ...
Use a Framework

Ever so often there is a blog post or a comment that talks about how “needlessly complicated” development in <language> is. If you don’t want to handle all those complications, you have a way forward which doesn’t involve using a less powerful language - use a framework that deals with the complications. ...
MiniDebConf India 2021 Online

MiniDebConf India 2021 Online happened past weekend. It was fun! ...
Packaging One Line Packages

Debian project is constantly troubled by javascript (and maybe go, ruby, etc) ecosystem where projects would have too many dependencies, some of them too small. How should Debian deal with it? ...
Following Up on a Debian Bug

What happens when you make one contribution to Debian? You get that irresistible urge to follow up. Human beings are so predictable in doing things that are rewarding. ...
My first (real) Debian Contribution

Debian is the flagship free operating system. Over the last week I made a small, but useful contribution to Debian. It made me so happy! ...
My Gnome Shell Setup

There was a DE show-off in Free Software Camp today. This is an expanded version of what I presented ...
WTF is economics?

Economics is a subject I have no clue about. Therefore, I sat down to read some fundamentals today. ...
White Hat Jr seems to be in Byju's business. But what business are Indian parents in?

India’s education system is broken at all levels - even in tech platforms ...
Free Software Camp Opening

Free Software Camp 2020 opened last week and it has been a pretty nice experience till now ...
Book Review: How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism by Cory Doctorow

The book might look like it is about big tech, but it is actually about capitalism and monopoly. And the how-to part of it is about policy reforms which might be a put off for some. ...
Debugging Without Logs? Use strace

You have a process/service running in what seems to be an infinite loop. The log is turned off or is empty. How do you debug this? ...
How Not to Update Ubuntu

tl;dr - backups matter ...
Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software And Ruins the Moral Fabric of the Tech Community

Using “open source” and ignoring the philosophy of free software is convenient for corporate entities, but not beneficial to the society. ...
Care For Mozilla's Mission, Not Mozilla

Mozilla might fail as a company or an organization. But Mozilla’s mission is too important to fail ...
Gotchas in setting up pom.xml (Maven)

These are certain things that maven does which confuses new Java programmers ...
Remove MySQL/MariaDB binary logs when binary logging not enabled

What happens when you get a “You are not using binary logging” error when you try to delete the binary logs that are taking up too much space in /var/lib/mysql ...
Modern Web Development in Java - The (Never) Complete Guide

Coming to Java from nodejs, web development seemed extremely and unnecessarily complicated to me. After navigating the standards and specs and implementations and javadocs (and countless stackoverflow posts) here is what I know. ...
Privilege to Innovate

They say Indians aren’t innovative in the tech space. Ever wondered why? ...
The Big Brother Will Now Tell You Which Apps You Can and Can't use On Your Phone

India government “banned” some 59 apps today because they are “they are engaged in activities which is prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, security of state and public order.” This is dangerous. ...
Choosing Between Home Server and Cloud Server

Running a server and accessing it from a different computer on a different network is one of the happiest things in learning to be a web developer. Here is how to go about it ...
List of Times Vegetarian was Used as a Word on the Internet

Some people think that using the word “vegetarian” and “non-vegetarian” is sensationalistic. So I compiled a list of either word being used in language. ...
Where does a program start at?

This is live notes from a talk about how programs are executed ...
My Idea Of an Ideal Decentralized Social Network built with blogs, RSS feeds (and some existing messaging system)

RSS and static sites can act just as good as a centralized social network (or even better, considering how the latter are turning out to be universally bad) when combined with a messaging system for comments. ...
Does GPL apply to the output of an API that is released under the GPL license?

Imagine an API software is written in GPL. Would the data that comes out of the API be under GPL? ...
Why I Won't Write Tweets Any More

Twitter forces users to cut words, sometimes at the expense of losing meaning. This creates confusion and polarization. This is bad. ...
Converting PDF with transparency to PNG

I keep forgetting how to convert a PDF with transparency to PNG and keep a white background ...
Checking if Aarogya Setu's Source Code Produces the App from Play Store

Aarogya Setu’s Android source code is supposedly on github. How do we know if it is the real app? ...
Going Dark Theme in Gnome Shell, Firefox, and all sites that support it

Did you know there is a CSS media query called prefers-color-scheme that websites can use to switch to dark mode automatically? How about going fully dark in Gnome Shell and Firefox? ...
Java lessons I learned from GBIF's github repository

A well-written software is a textbook in itself. This is a list of java language related stuff I figured out when I went through GBIF’s repositories on github ...
Zettlr - the markdown editor I didn't know I was missing from my life

Zettlr is a beautiful markdown editor that I discovered just today (and I’m already writing about it) ...
Verifying Telegram Reproducible Build Diff Tool

A failed attempt at proving that Telegram’s apkdiff.py is broken ...
Moving Abroad: Worth It?

Is it worth going to a different country for a “better” life? Or are there costs that are hidden till when one looks back? ...
Why I Stopped Caring About Mozilla

I had been a mozilla fan-boy for years. But last year, I gave up. This is an explanation post. It is also a semi-rant. So, please apply discretion. ...
IndiaOS (the first edition)

IndiaOS is an open-source conference organized by ERPNext and Zerodha. This is my report from attending it (as much as I recall from memory)1 There are probably many many errors in this post. (I’ve already corrected two after publishing. Please let me know if you find one.) ↩ ...
[Newsletter] Deep Work

As is usual, new year is an opportunity to restart things and start fresh things. Here are some fresh things from my life. ...
Bad, Java! Builder Pattern, Fluent Programming

In this post on learning Java (and OOP) as a functional programming person, I look at the builder pattern, what problem it solves, and why it may be that way ...
[SOLVED] Netbeans won't start in ArchLinux | Fix xdm-archlinux from messing up path

Netbeans won’t start in ArchLinux if you are using xdm or xdm-archlinux because of xdm messing up with the PATH variable. Here is a fix ...
InGenius and girlGeeks hack, 2019

inGenius is a hackathon by PES Engineering College in Bangalore. I had attended it as a mentor from Mozilla community and this is an event log ...
Why Will Devices Accept ARP Broadcast Messages when the destination MAC doesn't match theirs?

In ARP, broadcast messages are sent to the destination mac of FF:FF……FF, why will devices accept that packet then? ...
Traceability as a Mandatory Requirement (Intermediary Liability)

The government of India is going to make traceability mandatory in social media in order to combat the various harms various social media bring on in real world. Is it really the right way? ...
What is GirlScript?

I had a short call with the founder of GirlScript today. This is when I first heard about the organization. ...
Building an Open Health Dashboard for the Country

Imagine if you had granular data about health at your fingerprints the way you can look up a movie info on IMDB or a fact on wikipedia. Imagine being able to engage with and contribute to that dataset. Imagine how powerful our public health professionals would be with that kind of a tool. ...
Programmer Skills: Syntax vs Concepts

What should a programming interview test? Whether the programmer can write correct syntax or whether they have the concepts right? ...
Intermediary Liability and the Duty of Care Approach in Software

Should online services like Facebook be held responsible for the content that is distributed through them? What about free speech? ...
Fake Liberal/Progressive Twitter Accounts (IT Cell Caught in Action)

On the internet you could be talking to a dog and not know the difference. This post is the story of one such incident that I personally faced. ...
Migrating Wordpress to Jekyll

Mozilla India blog has been on wordpress for almost 9 years. The community felt that it had to be migrated to a modern framework. As a dutiful admin, I did it. This is how. ...
Addon Distributor (for self-hosted web extensions) in Rust

How Mozilla’s decision to ban my add-on made me build a simple tool to maintain an update_link for keeping my extensions self-hosted and updateable, and using rust ...
Simple Self-hosted Newsletter

I have been trying really hard to get a simple, small, non-scalable, flat-file based mailing list going on for a long time now. This is a note of what I am building ...
Reverse Sexism - Possible?

What is reverse sexism? Can it exist? Can it not exist? ...
Collaborative data exploration (in R)

You have collected a lot of data (whatever be your field). You have done your own exploratory analyses on this and perhaps even published a few papers. What next? ...
Anarchic Conferences

Are there limits to what anarchic systems can do? Can an anarchic system organize an offline conference? ...
Understanding Certbot

Ever wished you did not have to struggle with certbot and could just understand how it works? This guide is for you. ...
bspwm

I have been a fan of i3 for a couple of years now. But today I heard about bspwm, took the plunge and has been extremely happy about the switch ...
Intro to Live Coding

Report on a live coding workshop I attended today ...
Inserting ZWJ in LyX

Zero-Width Joiner is a character used in languages like Malayalam and Persian to connect characters and form a complex character. LyX was giving me trouble in inserting those characters. This is how deep the rabbit hole goes ...
Spreadhseet pro-tip: Using countifs over multiple columns

Countifs is a extremely versatile formula that can be used in Google Sheets to generate frequency tables and proportions of complex interrelated data. This is a short introduction to the formula and the autofill properties that are required to make it work magic ...
Getting Malayalam Support in LyX (XeTeX/LaTeX)

How to type Malayalam in LaTeX using LyX ...
i3 multi-monitor and xrandr

i3 is my favourite window manager (and desktop environment). When I connect an external monitor or projector to my laptop, though, xrandr comes to the rescue on how they should work with each other ...
Adding Malayalam language to Lyx

Adding Malayalam language support to Lyx. Adding any language to lyx. ...
What is Leadership?

What is leadership? ...
Open Peer Review

What is peer review? What is open peer review? What is a good format for peer reviewing? ...
Setting up Home Server

How I set up a home server ...
How does one learn how to build things?

How does one learn how to build things? ...
Mission 2019

If you are someone who likes many things, there is a good chance that you get distracted and end up doing nothing that you like. Deciding to focus on a few things at a time can be useful ...
Mozilla India Laundry List

What are the things I want to see happening in Mozilla (India) ...
Response to "The Plastic Straw Dilemma" by NAS Daily

Textual response to a YouTube video about selective empathy ...
December 2018 - What extensions do I use in my Firefox

Firefox extensions add useful functionality that saves time ...
Porting a Legacy Firefox Extension to the Latest Format

Back when the war for net neutrality was on in India, when Jio hadn’t yet come in lowering data prices (for the entire internet) for all, when Fa(r)cebook was promoting their walled garden of internet calling it “free basics” in India, I had created a Firefox add-on called Zero Internet to shout for protecting net neutrality. ...
Can Screenshots be Freely Used in Presentations?

If you use screenshots of various web pages or apps to make a presentation, can you license the presentation freely? ...
Deciphering the Aadhaar Verdict

Roundtable discussion on the analysis of the #Aadhaar verdict, its impact on the ground, and next steps ...
Leaflet.js and geojson with wrong order of latitude and longitude

Leaflet and geojson might sometimes have issues because of a standards confusion. This is how to fix it ...
Why Open Science

A Classic Example of Why Open Science is the Best for Humankind ...
Setting up a Newsletter

After struggling for weeks I have been able to set up mailman and create lists for self-hosted newsletter ...
Mixcloud

Mixcloud is a good online radio service with lots of music ...
Cost of Dengue Treatment

This is a response to an article on health systems research calling the cost of dengue treatment in India too high ...
An Instance of Chinese Whispers in Academic Writing

Academic papers must be written with due regard to authenticity. When done in a hurry, there usually are errors that creep in. Like this one. ...
Wake Up Scientists

Professor K VijayRaghavan, principal scientific advisor to the government of India, gave an inspiring talk yesterday called “Science, the fulcrum for social and economic change” as part of the ongoing series of kaapi with kuriosity organized by the wonderful International Centre for Theoretical Sciences ...
Netlify CMS!

For the past few weeks I had been searching, searching, searching for adding a backend to my site. I had used Netlify CMS in the past but I did not want to use it because I thought it was tied up with netlify. But, boy, was I wrong? ...
Automatic Dynamic DNS Updates Using Nsupdate (for IPv6)

IPV6 opens up the internet to any internet connected device and vice versa. How to make use of it, though? ...
One Month in Bangalore

It has been one month since I moved to Bangalore. This is a quick life update on what I have been doing and will be doing ...
Functional Javascript

Are stateless functions the sexiest? ...
Hello Julia!

Solving the eight queens chess puzzle as a hello world program in julia ...
Newsletter: How do you know what to do with your life?

First, the good news. I am now a Fellow in HIV Medicine. I finished this one year RGUHS course last week and now am taking rest at my home in flood-stricken Kerala. No, there is no danger where my home is, and yes, the food is yummy. ...
Automatic Wildcard Certificate from Let's Encrypt

How to get around the DNS challenge automatically ...
Self hosting DNS server

What if we set up our own DNS service? I had netlify putting me in a difficult position wherein it was not allowing me to delete the A record for my apex domain. ...
Installing postfixadmin on archlinux with nginx

Archlinux can make anything possible, even postfixadmin and nginx ...
Certbot command for wildcard certificate

Forgot certbot parameters again? ...
Running Arch Linux on AWS EC2

You can run your favourite OS on EC2 as well ...
Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) with Android IP Webcam

How to use your android phone as video source for OBS ...
How a tiny temporary file made me waste hours

Sometimes the bugs are because your working directory is not clean ...
Discovering Debops

Who wants to manage servers logging in via ssh? ...
An Infectious Diseases Fellowship [Draft]

What would it be like if I designed an ID fellowship? ...
BSNL injects ads into internet traffic

What is undoubtedly the worst internet service provider in India? ...
Test Driven Development

What is test driven development and why do it ...
Documentation Driven Learning

Documentation Driven Learning is the counterpart of Test Driven Development in learning ...
Be Like Sun

Be like Sun. Keep shining ...
Two Research Ideas

Dr MRS called me one evening to share two research ideas ...
Data in Healthcare Hacknight - Ideas

What use can data be of in healthcare? ...
Installing FreeBSD

The hard but fruitful path to installing freeBSD ...
How I roll out my websites - gitlab, netlify, and others

Static sites are the present day standard for web building. I publish this blog and my website using different static site generators and powered by git, gitlab, netlify, and other useful tools. Here’s how the whole thing works ...
"Indian" by Balachandran Chullikkad (my English translation)

This is the English translation of the poem “Indian” by Balachandran Chullikkad which appeared in Malayalam in Mathrubhumi weekly (Issue 41) ...
Mind Bends

This is a post that demonstrates that it is possible to make your mind serve you rather than be a slave to your mind. ...
Mozilla India is Dead - Long Live Mozilla India

Mozilla India underwent a restructure in Mozilla India Meetup 2016. This failed horribly and Mozilla India is still struggling in dark. Here’s a formal eulogy and possible hopes for future. ...
Anonymous Feedback

Riding on the Sarahah wave, the author invites constructive feedback from readers and acquaintances for personal improvement. ...
Jekyll Post Not Reflecting On Gitlab Pages [solved]

The short story of a cute little problem between Jekyll, Gitlab Pages, and me ...
Independent Resolutions

Like all independence days, today has been about resolutions for me. ...
What is the Cost of Free Speech?

Freedom of speech and expression is a right that tend to be taken for granted. Until it no longer is a reality. ...
High Tech Post-Op Follow Up

Is it possible to follow up post-op patients via smartphones? What about regular patients? ...
Instant Wisdom

Instant wisdom is a rule or axiom created on the fly, especially by people of authority, which has no real basis in reason or cause ...
Book Review: How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams

Cartoonist Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert comic strip tells his life story in How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life. A cartoonists life is not necessarily filled with humor as we learn. ...
(Serious) Series Review: Black Mirror

Apply Murphy’s law to everything that you use today or are going to use in a few years from now. Imagine the worst consequences. And imagine being helpless in the face of those. That’s Black Mirror for you. ...
I am a Doctor Now

What happens to you when you go to medical school for 5.5 years ...
Google Direct

Google Direct is a search generator which will help you search Google ...
Daya Bai - An Inspiring Person Who Shatters Stereotypes

Clothes differentiate humans, fortunately or unfortunately. Imagine a lady dressed like a tribal woman in an old sari, ornaments, and wrinkled face. Our brain makes a “natural” association between this woman and an illiterate woman. Now she starts talking in English about her experience or experiments in uplifting society. Your mind is blown, and that is Daya Bai ...
GSoC Beginner's Handbook to Free Software

Essential things about free software projects and communities that GSoC first timers should know ...
Keto Diet - First Attempt

7 invaluable lessons from my first attempt at keto diet ...
Cleaning up Spam on MediaWiki

How I cleaned up about two thousand spam users and their thousands of spam pages and edits from a mediawiki instance ...
How is Machine Learning Different from Human Learning

Machines can never think like humans, or can they? ...
Thinking in The Open

Why every thought must have a permanent URL ...
Contemplating Diet Change

Diet, like religion, is forced upon you by your immediate surroundings. What if you were eating the wrong things all your life? ...
Comments

A thoughtful comment is one of the greatest rewards a blogger can get ...
Dear Zindagi

When I went in for Dear Zindagi, I didn’t know it was a Shah Rukh Khan movie. But my unsettled mind became alright when I saw Alia Bhatt on the screen. ...
Career Advice

This is what they say. ...
Why would Kashmir want to stay with India when they don’t even get access to internet like the rest of Indians?

Is Internet being blocked in Kashmir by idiots who don’t understand what Internet is? ...
Mozilla India Restructure 2016

Mozilla India underwent a restructure in Mozilla India Meetup 2016. What’s the new structure? Will it be any good? What are the new challenges that face Mozilla India in this regard? ...
Mozilla India Restructure Proposal

Can Mozilla India become a guardian of the open Web in India? ...
Mapping Kindergartens While Doing My Fieldwork Using Maps.me

This is the first diary entry I make on openstreetmap. ...
What you read is what you become

All that noise in the digital world is what fills your mind. Do you trust the world to keep it neat? ...
FOSSMeet 2016 @ NIT Calicut - Getting Started Contributing to Mozilla

FOSSMeet is an annual event at National Institute of Technology, Calicut for promoting Free and Open Source Software. ...
On differential pricing and net neutrality (and a bit about broadband also)

This is a copy of the submission I sent to TRAI on its consultation paper on differential pricing for data packs ...
Make Impactful Contributions to Mozilla

Mozilla has a lot of projects and activities. Getting involved with Mozilla has always been easy for people of any background. ...
Communication Tools in FOSS Communities

Chat apps are probably used as the hello world project for learning server-client programming. I think so because there are so many messaging apps out there and rarely do they inter-operate. The shift to mobile phones and rich text messaging just speeds up the process of fragmented communication channels. ...
Why Document Everything You Can?

When I take part in conference calls, or attend an event, or even just have an interesting conversation, I try to take down notes. ...
Fear of Incompleteness

I believe I have self-diagnosed an illness that perfectionist autodidacts are prone for. It is the thought that “you aren’t ready”, or “your knowledge is incomplete”. ...
Using Blogs to Chat

I often find myself talking about the same things again and again with different people. And I sometimes have ideas that I feel proud of. Very often, I feel like what I just told someone in a private chat needs to be heard by the whole world. ...
Rethinking Conversations I Have

For the past 10 days I was home, tending my parents’ kitchen garden and doing other chores. I was so consumed and the days would fly so fast that I skipped many conversations on Telegram, Slack, Email, etc. ...
My Application for Mozilla Participation Leadership Cohort

I had applied for being a part of participation leadership cohort and attending various global gatherings in September 2015. It was an involved application process. I should thank Jafar, Abhiram, and Sagar for giving me a shoulder tap each. ...
Realigning with AI

I was going through Kaustav’s website when I saw this post where he was realigning himself with AI and that’s when I realized I should also realign. We were talking yesterday and that had led to the textbooks in this MIT course getting added to my reading list. ...
How I Got Comfortable With Emacs

Emacs was very uncomfortable for me for a long time. No, I wasn’t a pro in vim. I had found the need to configure everything in Emacs daunting. ...
Is Free Basics Worth it?

Free Basics gives poor people access to health-care info. Why are Indians opposing it then? Asks @MikeatFacebook who’s apparently a VP at Facebook. ...
Working on Mammoth-sized Repositories and 2G speed Internet

Firefox OS simulators are becoming old. They haven’t been updated in quite some time. The current way to simulate gaia on desktop is to use mulet. ...
Quitting Facebook

I permanently deleted my Facebook account like a few days back. It’s scheduled to be deleted from their server on 23rd, but I’m not sure they’ll delete my data. ...
Creating a Decentralized Social Feed

This website is my social timeline. You can follow me by subscribing to my ATOM feed. You can send comments by emailing me. You can see through all my posts and easily switch through them with shortcuts (j, k). Open posts with ‘o’. ...
Moving Blissful Life to a Domain Name I Control

I’ve owned a domain name (learnlearn.in) for a long time now. Yet, my blog Blissful Life hosted on blogspot at asdofindia.blogspot.com was my primary means of writing till today. ...
Tuxedo '15 SJCE - Firefox OS App days

I was studying for what will probably be my last internal when Abhiram pinged me saying he’s in SJCE and I saw this tweet from him as proof. ...
Fish function for creating a new Jekyll post with front matter

I started using jekyll for this feed aggregation and I couldn’t make myself write the weird date format in jekyll front matter. That’s how I came up with this simple snippet that creates a file automatically with the YAML front matter for jekyll. ...
Grambot

Grambot (@gram_bot) is the Telegram <=> IRC integration bot that I made for Mozilla India policy and advocacy task force. It was later used for various other groups too. ...
My (Remote) Mozfest Experience

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Welcome to this place

This quasi-blog, quasi-website, quasi-gist, quasi-pastebin will serve as my bin to put things that do not really belong to my blog or my website ...