Recent content on cyberjunkie.in
I haven’t written a post in a long time but it’s been on my mind all these weeks and months. Writing these notes offers me some relief. Things have been busier and not the good kind of busy. My father-in-law hasn’t been well; my wife has been away. She returned about 3 weeks back, only having to rush back a week later. Things are stable for now, but situations like these are…
Things have been happening faster than I can blog about them. The most interesting event has been my visit to my ancestral hometown, Mangalore in India. I was there for a cousin’s son’s wedding and a holy communion party. Many of my cousins also made it. It was one of the largest family gatherings in recent times for sure. The last time I met my family, I was shy and in a state of…
I have bad handwriting. I used fountain pens in school till ball-point pens and then gel pens replaced them. I wasn’t fascinated by fountain pens then, as much as I was about gel pens when they first arrived. Over the past 8 years or so, I’ve taken on a liking and appreciation for fountain pens. There is something very organic, and nice about writing with them. My handwriting has…
These are the phones I remember owning since 2000. Nokia 3210 Sony Ericsson K300i Nokia E63 Dopod D600 Motorola Milestone Samsung Galaxy Nexus Nexus 5 Apple iPhone SE OnePlus 5 OnePlus 7 Pro Motorola Edge 40 Neo I’m about to buy a new phone. It’s about two years old, and it’s not bad for what I need - listening to music, podcasts, communicating on Telegram, Matrix, IRC, WhatsApp,…
My folks live in an apartment complex. We have a security guard, and here in India, they’re called the “watchman”. Their days are uneventful. They ensure shady characters don’t wander into the apartment compound, they ensure the lights are turned on, the cars are cleaned, the water is pumped to the overhead tank, while doing some other errands like watering the plants and…
I Think I’m Paranoid was one of the coolest tracks from Garbage when I first heard them in the 90s. Shirley Manson was hot, bold and in your face in that music video. The song also had one of the freshest, crude yet appealing sounding distortions from a guitar. For someone in his teens, it wasn’t my first rock band but it was one of the coolest. This week, I went back to listening to…
Things have been a bit busy yet again, and I’m just about recovering from a mild case of flu. It hasn’t been as bad as the truly bad ones I’ve had growing up. We flew to Kochi over the long weekend. It was a good excuse to fly via the new airport I wrote about a few months back. It was so much more comfortable than the older airport. I returned from work, and freshened up. We…
KDE Plasma 6.6 was released yesterday, and since I’m an Arch Linux user (btw), I already have it installed. I use sway on the desktop, primarily because it handles multi-monitor setups so well, and KDE Plasma does not. One of the major annoyances I’ve had with it, is that virtual desktops switch on both my monitors. The new Plasma 6.6 update includes the option to enable virtual…
After the long rant about the mechanical keyboard market, I bought the best mechanical keyboard that meets nearly all of my requirements - the Royal Kludge R87 Pro. 87% - Compact enough but not cramped No wireless, no batteries, obsolescence and stuff to worry about Ins/Del/Home/End/PageUp/PageDown key array at the correct places Replaceable keycaps Replaceable switches VIA/QMK support Brown…
It’s been busy since the new year. We had a 3-day weekend and I got some time to myself to mess around with new things. I’m not even a half-decent guitar player. When I’m alone, and I have a drink, I loosen up just a bit and I can make some noise that’s likeable, at least to my ears. I think of myself as a guitar geek more than a guitar player. I own a Focusrite Scarlett…
I’ve owned mechanical keyboards since the early 90s. It was a rebranded variant of the Model M. I’m no stranger to mechanical keyboards so I know why they resonate with so many people. The TVSE Gold here in India later became the affordable, no-nonsense mechanical keyboard for a long time. There was even a USB version. Now, they’ve replaced the Cherry MX keys with cheaper…
I took a few days off around the past weekends and turned them into four and five-day weekends. Things were pretty uneventful, but I wasn’t too productive - just being lazy, having a drink or two every other evening, binging on shows and movies but very little gaming. The game I play obsessively had a release right before Christmas that broke the performance on Linux so this meant rebooting…
Not sure if it’s the GTK versions or Wayland or Hexchat has been left unmaintained for so long, but it’s pretty slow when I switch buffers from ZNC. I happened to look for alternate GUI IRC clients (I use weechat on the headless server sometimes). I ran into Libera’s IRC client recommendations . Halloy is just what I needed to end this slow Sunday. Configuration is done through a…
Among the list of cool tools I discovered and tried out lately on my Linux boxes are autofs and chezmoi. autofs solves the problems of network shares that are unavailable when your machine boots. The service automatically mounts network shares (nfs and Samba are of interest to me) when you access them. The Arch wiki page for autofs has a good explanation of how to set up autofs along with…
I have been fascinated with planes, civil aviation in particular for as long as I can remember. I faintly remember my father’s newspaper cutouts of aircraft like the Airbus 300, stuck on our apartment door like a collage when I was 4 or 5. It was around the age of six that we moved to my parents’ own apartment in this brand-new town, and that fascination with aircraft only got…
There are some products that I just don’t need to be wireless or smart. I think that is true for a lot of people, but surprisingly neither customer nor manufacturers seem to get it. My (conspiracy) theory is that they are manufacturing products wireless or smart, so that they can sell your data or have your product be obsolete in a few years. Two products come to mind that should be dumb…
After much planning, anticipation, hyperventilating, preparing for the VISA formalities, we finally made our trip to Istanbul in late November 2025. The trip went smoothly. Istanbul has always fascinated my father. We spent about a week there and it was amazing. It was my second time there and I loved it just as much, maybe a tad more because I was familiar with everything. Things are more…
Even YouTube tried to do an Unwrapped thingy this year. It is awful and I am not including it here, but some of the others can be nice. I won’t lie, I like that Spotify creates a playlist of the music I listened to this year. I listen to the playlists from previous years. I tend to look for what others are reading, watching and listening to. It’s by preferred way of discovery. I hope…
I recently wrote about wanting to setup mpd/mopidy for Spotify but some things weren’t working the way I intended. I ran out of patience and installed ncspot instead, and it’s been great. It’s fast, the authentication is simple and the keybinds are near vi-like. It even lets me navigate and modify my Spotify playlists. The default Shift+m bind even finds me ‘similar’…
Yes, locked inside to be specific. As if the days couldn’t get more chaotic. This is the week, for my most hopeful and ambitious travel for my folks. My wife also has a work offsite, where she’s flying out in a couple of hours. It’s nearly 10:30pm. I ordered in some dinner for me, locked the outer safety door of the apartment, latched it all up, then tried closing the inner…
It’s been a busy two weeks and more. I wish every day, to write a little on my blog but there has been much on my mind, while at home and at work. Sleep has been sketchy. I am taking my folks on a overseas trip and I’ve been preparing to make it as comfortable as I can. Work got busier too this past week. I am quite sleepy as I write this, but hopefully I’ll write more over the…
I use Spotify and I am not too ashamed about it. I’m sure there are concerns about how they treat artists. I have used most popular music streaming services - YouTube Music (also when it was Play Music), Apple Music and lately, Spotify has been the music service of choice. I like that I can find most music there. Along with last.fm, it lets me discover and play new music from Last.fm once…
I don’t care for AI. I don’t care for it enough, for many reasons. Most folk today are leaping over each other to claim the title of ‘prompt engineer’. I’m sure there are a few good use cases for AI; it can be a tool in situations if used in moderation, provided you’re already a subject matter expert. Take for example, an experienced writer. Sure, in a speedy,…
I’m introverted, and asocial. I like spending time on my hobbies. I’m the type to finish off all my work first, then relax. I’m the type who eats all the boring stuff off a plate, before relishing the good stuff. I have a high-speed routine of how I get ready, and how I unpack when I’m home. I know how many minutes I need to freshen up. It’s odd but I cram in as much…
Owning a car, like many other things in India, can be quite a frustrating experience. You’d think a company like Renault operating in the country would have its act together. The service center franchises surely don’t, or, unknown to me, they do at the customer’s expense. I’ve had issues with my car for the past four years or so, soon after a periodic service. I realized…
I have a few domains registered but I’ve done little with them. Hosting a blog was one of the long-pending things to do. I chose to use Hugo - it’s familiar ground - Markdown, a single command to generate the pages and I have a handy server at my disposal. I have long abandoned mainstream social media and news. Now with AI threatening to numb and dumb down people further, I figured…
I’m a hobbyist-generalist. I spend all my time on things interesting to me. I also read blogs to further those interests. I wrote for work in the past, and I’ve been nudged lately to write on things that interest me. So, this is my little blog - consider downloading a RSS Feed Reader and subscribe . Write to me, at blog@cyberjunkie.in