Ashish's website
Being a PhD student within a research group entails some structure to tracking your progress as you proceed with research. Within the current team that I'm in, we have weekly group meetings where each member presents the tasks that they've completed during the previous week and discusses any issues they might've faced (if any), to our supervisor. Usually before the meeting, I jot…
Will you shed tears when I die? I envisage on my bed as I lie. Whence comes such a thought in my mind? As I feel my life has come to a grind. Ups and downs make up any life. I console myself with such thought to be rife. But why do I feel such deject? My mind keeps circling as I introspect. Today I'm here and tomorrow perhaps not. Such is the nature of life with fraught. Would you still care…
Having to deal with Microsoft's outlook has been a growing pain with my computing needs. Of course, this is pertinent only for work email. For personal email, I use Migadu which has good standards for email unlike Microsoft's. At work, I can only use either the official Outlook webmail or Thunderbird since those are the only clients that are whitelisted by the IT department at my…
It has been a while since I updated my website. Over the years, I've grown to like minimal yet aesthetic websites which comply with legibility standards. Recently, I came across the excellent Bear blog and was enamored by its simplistic yet appealing stylistic nature. I think it's a great platform to get started with writing your own blog page. But anyway, I was more interested in the…
A shining light in the tunnel of darkness. That's how I see hope, with a longingness. Sometimes good and sometimes bad, But somehow makes me glad. Is it hope that I'm looking for? Like a drop of water, in a large desert outdoor. Is it just something made up? A lie told even after I slipup. Hope is a dangerous thing. The results can feel like a swing. But is it enough to justify my life?…
Recently, I found out about this neat little trick to bypass the storage limit on Zotero for PDFs. Currently on the "free" tier there is a limit of 300 MB which fills up pretty quickly when you're doing serious research. This guide helps bypass this limit (subject to your computer's storage). The current pricing model. Not bad but you don't need it if it's just for personal…
When did I stop being a child? It's been so long, but I used to be quite beguiled. While I reminisce the days of not caring about the world. I wonder, when that child stopped being one, as an adult labelled. Perhaps it was when my interests changed. Things that I used to like, now feel estranged. Oh, how I wish I could go back to those simpler times. That child exists no more, but an adult…
What is my purpose but a tiny speck on this big blue dot? Is it already decided or do I get myself taught? I do wonder how the rest of my life shall continue. Will it be the same things I now pursue? Family it is for some people. For others, it is their career to excel. But does it matter in the end? Perhaps the greater reason is to make oneself enlighten. Often I find myself asking such…
Over the past five years, I've been using Vim (well NeoVim specifically) for all of my text editing needs ranging from tinkering with config files, shell scripts, to writing this website, making LaTeX reports and theses, etc. The paradigm of modal text editing that is Vim, just feels right. The user communicates exactly how text needs to be edited. For instance: delete all characters until a…
Recently I purchased a ThinkPad E14 Gen 5 laptop after spending 5 years with my previous workhorse machine, the HP Pavilion 14 with an Intel i5 (4 cores) CPU. The upgrade is quite significant, coming with an eight core AMD Ryzen 7 CPU... but I digress. The Problem With modern day laptops, often there are backlit keys on certain media keys like mute sound, mute mic, airplane mode and so on. The…
Qiskit is a python SDK for simulating and running quantum algorithms on real quantum computers. As mentioned on qiskit.org : Qiskit [kiss-kit] is an open-source SDK for working with quantum computers at the level of pulses, circuits and application modules. I plan on writing a series of tutorials on getting started with quantum computing using qiskit, as I learn as well. Like any other programming…
If you're on a *nix system and compare the fonts on chrome and firefox, you'd notice the difference. The fonts on the latter just look... off , or atleast that was the case on my system. My personal odyssey Recently I had made the switch from firefox to brave, for the naive reason that fonts were just rendered better (and LaTeX looks like it) on it (being a chromium based browser).…
We have all heard fancy jargon like "encryption", "cryptography" and what not, but what do these terms actually mean? In this article, I attempt to give you a brief introduction to the world of cryptography and how in particular, public-key cryptography, a popular means of encryption works. In layman terms, cryptography is the study of securing messages between two parties without a third party…