Almost every year I start by thinking I’ll write more. This year is no difference. This blog was built with the hope that it makes the writing experience better and easier. As much as I like Jekyll, writing blog posts in markdown is a horrible experience. It just adds up to the mental block about writing something.
Setting up a new blog which is not powered by a static site generator is another problem, because it required the time and energy to set things up. But this time, I thought I’ll do it and pick up some skills along the way. I always learn better when I build something. So this eas na experiment with Teraform and Ansible.
I recently bought a new (used) laptop, a Lenovo Thinkpad T430, and decided to install Linux Mint with KDE on it. I used to use Cinnamon but decided to give KDE a chance because I’ve used KDE apps before and they’re the finest.
It’s been running fine since then except, I’ve had this problem where once in a month or so, when I close the lid, the laptop sleeps for a second and then wakes up instantly. First I thought it was a kernel issue, so I updated the kernel and that fixed that somehow. So I kept using it but then again in about a month it happened again. I updated the kernel again, it went away. Then today morning it happened again. By now I’m pretty sure that it’s not a kernel issue. Something is stopping the system from falling into sleep. So I looked in to syslog and looked for logs around the time the wake up happened to see if there is any error logged there. I didn’t find any error and the log looked like this -
Happy new year 2017! As we celebrate the beginning of this new year, I’d like to jot down what all I did in 2016.
Got married!
Everything was decided in the last quarter of 2015. And finally on 29th January, Ayanti and I got married on a not-so-cold winter evening. The journey that started 5 years ago at an Anime club meetup (Yeah!), evolved to it’s next stage. Got some photos on Flickr to share with you all. :)
I love graphic novels. They are a visual treat, the best way to tell stories. And I also like to travel and reading about travel stories. I’ve come across some graphic novels on travel that tells you about real places and real people. So thought of mentioning them here. I’ve read some of them, and plan to read the others soon.
Author: Aimee Major-Steinberger
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for last few weeks, I’m sure you’ve seen at least one of these ads around you -
Free Basics ads on different mediaBecause you’re here, I’m assuming that you’re interested in knowing more about this “Free Basics” everyone is talking about. For those who have heard of “Internet.org” before, Free Basics is just a re-branded Internet.org with couple of changes here and there. For those who haven’t heard of any of this before, here goes -
The annual Kolkata International Film Festival started yesterday in Kolkata. And like every year they have a website - http://kff.in
I was looking forward to this event like every year. But opening the website was one of the massive disappointments for me in some time. I’ll briefly explain why.
For an event like KIFF, the basic requirement for the website is to have a list of movies being shown and the corresponding venues. And also the other way around - a list of venues and the movies being played there.
I’ve been a DuckDuckGo user for few users now. The idea of having no history of my searches, or rather not having to provide any identity to search the Internet, has always attracted me. Almost all the other search engines actively keep a track of who is searching what so that they can search better “personalized” results. Which also means that they know what you are looking for, at what time, from where etc.
So I moved to Bangalore again last month. My new home is about 9km from my office. It’s not so bad because I don’t have to go to office everyday. Still, travelling in Bangalore has always been a bit pain for me, me being from Kolkata where everything is cheaper, specially transportation. You can travel 10km for Rs20 in the same auto that would cost you Rs130 in Bangalore, just because the concept of shared travelling is a big thing in Kolkata(which I wish were true in Bangalore). You have taxis in Kolkata which costs a bit less than Autos in Bangalore. Taxis in Kolkata costs about Rs12/km whereas autos in Bangalors costs about Rs13/km. And even buses are cheaper in Kolkata. Usually it’s Rs6 for first 4 km, and then increases by Rs2 for each 2-4 km. You can literally travel 12-14km for Rs10 in some routes. AC buses costs a bit more, but rarely more than Rs50 unless you’re travelling the whole route.
Few days back I had an assignment to visualize a network of people who talk to each other. I needed to find the people who are contacted most. Drawing a network graph seemed like the best way to find it out visually.
So I looked around for tools that could help with it and came across Networkx. They have a nice documentation and a Lot of examples on drawing different kinds of graphs. I decided to try it out. Here’s how to draw a simple undirected graph with it -
Yesterday, I was standing at a road crossing waiting for the signal to turn green to cross the road. There was a “No U Turn” sign at the crossing and couple of traffic police. Then a taxi comes and wants to take a right turn, from the look of it because the passanger couple wanted him to. The traffic police stops them of course. Then the male passanger, who was dressed really well with formal shirts (If you met him any random day he’d introduce himself as a gentleman I’m sure), starts arguing with the traffic police. His point being he’s taken right on that crossing before so he can take right again.