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As I finish putting together my annual playlist of music I discovered and enjoyed this year, my mind wanders back to all the ways I’ve consumed music over the last four decades. I have already written about the old radio , our first and only record player , and the transition to cassettes . This post is about the medium that followed and was as anticipated as it was short-lived. Cassettes, thanks…
I recently moved to an iPhone 17 Pro after two years with an iPhone 15 Pro. The primary driver of this upgrade, just as it has been for the past several years , was the camera. It comes with an 8x optical zoom equivalent to a 200mm focal length on a 35mm body. The most that iPhone 15 Pro did was 77mm equivalent - a focal length that has now been replaced with 100mm. While I’ll miss 77mm, the…
A recent news article about the start of electrification of an 88 km train route 1 in the Netherlands made me realize that diesel engines are still in use here. This came as a surprise to me. Even after having lived here for over 14 years, I haven’t smelled even the faintest whiff of burnt diesel at the stations here. Perhaps because these engines only run on smaller, regional lines. That anyone…
My e-bike’s odometer clocked 500 kms today. The milestone was brought on by two lovely rides we took this weekend to enjoy the unexpected spell of warm, sunny weather 1 . The first one was to Het Twikse Twiske yesterday. It’s a small nature reserve just a few kilometers north of Amsterdam. We had discovered it a couple of years ago completely by chance. We were having breakfast at a cafe in Noord…
I lived in Bangalore for 9 years and yet never visited Tipu Sultan’s Summer Palace. On a trip to Bangalore this year, the wife and I decided to remedy this omission, especially since it was now a convenient metro ride away. We took the purple line from the M. G. Road station towards Challaghatta, changed over to the green line at the Nagaprabhu Kempegowda (Majestic) station towards Silk Institute…
Another year, another playlist - Spotify | Youtube Music I start each year with a silly and irrational fear of not discovering enough worthwhile music to fill a playlist of 50 or so tracks. I end the year with a playlist that’s thrice as long and requires careful culling. It also feels a little surreal to think that this is now the 9th iteration of a ritual I started in 2016 . That said, for the…
A previously unknown work by Mozart was discovered in a library at Leipzig last month. Within a couple of weeks, multiple high quality recordings were available on YouTube. Here’s one I enjoyed: A couple of decades or so ago the news of such a find might still have reached me within a few days, but I am sure I wouldn’t have been able to access a recording in India till months later - if at all. A…
March in Amsterdam this year was quite rainy. In order to get some reprieve from the oppressive weather, we booked a vacation to Mallorca. I caught a flu few days before we were due to fly, but I managed to recover enough for us to not have to cancel the trip. Mallorca is a popular tourist destination so there are several direct flights from Amsterdam. Upon landing at the Palma de Mallorca airport…
Given how much Marken is part of my personal cycling lore , I am surprised that I never managed to bike there all the way from Amsterdam. The distance (a 40km round-trip) must’ve had something to do with it. With my recent e-bike purchase, that was no longer a plausible excuse. My wife and I cycled there a month ago. Our ride took us through open fields, along stately farmhouses, over quaint…
I learned to bike in my 30s. It was my wife’s help and encouragement that made it possible. The excellent 1 cycling infrastructure of Amsterdam played its part too - I could actually get somewhere I wanted to be on a bicycle here. Had we still been living in Bangalore, I don’t think I’d have learned to bike. I don’t see myself as someone who would’ve mustered sufficient motivation to overcome not…
Those of you reading this blog on an RSS reader, might have noticed that several old posts reappeared in your feed yesterday. My apologies! Here’s what happened: I’ve been restoring many past posts from my old wordpress blog. While looking at posts from 2011/12, I realised that the permalinks didn’t have any dates in the url. For example from looking at just this url:…
With each passing year it is getting harder to remember how it really felt to live through the pandemic years. Early 2021 was still a period of a lot of uncertainty. The vaccines were here but the Dutch vaccination program was still in a disarray . This meant that lockdowns and curfews were still the Government’s primary tools to keep covid from spreading and making people sick in numbers that…
Lisbon has several spacious public squares. They all tend to have an imposing monument - usually a tall column commemorating a past King or an important historic figure - in their center and beautiful mosaic patterns on their floors made of white and black stones. We crossed Praça Dom Pedro IV (aka Praça do Rossio) several times during our recent visit: Praça Dom Pedro IV Praça Dom Pedro IV Praça…
The municipality of Amsterdam deploys extra cleaning crews at night to clean up the mess people leave after the King’s Day celebrations. While they definitely deployed them this year too, I saw a lot more litter in some of the streets in the canal ring than I remember seeing in recent memory. One could hardly walk on Prinsengracht without shards of glass from broken beer bottles crunching under…
The novelty of King’s Day has completely worn off for us by now. Perhaps it wouldn’t have had spending time in crowded places with loud music and drinking was our idea of having a good time, but it’s not. King’s day is observed on 27th April 1 and is a public holiday. This year, 27th April happens to fall on Saturday and the Netherlands doesn’t give a compensatory day off in case a national…
The Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute ( KNMI ) publish a dataset of average monthly temperatures recorded at various weather station in the Netherlands since 1901. I took the data for the weather station at De Bilt and grouped it into three buckets - 20th century (years 1901-2000), 21st century (years 2001-2023) and 2024. If you average the monthly averages in each bucket and plot them…
The Netherlands recorded the warmest February on record this year. Here is a boxplot showing the average February temperatures recorded in the Netherlands since 1901 1 . The average temperature this February was 8.2ºC (46.76ºF) - 0.6ºC (1.08ºF) higher than the previous record of 7.6ºC (45.68ºF) from 1990. It has also been extremely wet here for the past few months. Ideal conditions for an early…
While we had had a rainy start to our day, by the time we walked to the Terreiro do Paço ferry terminal the sun was looking to come out. The ferry terminal building looked quite new and a bit bland on the outside - though the facade did seem to have taken some stylistic cues from the Art Deco era. However, it was absolutely regal inside - all columns, marble and granite. The ceiling somehow felt…
Lisbon’s iconic yellow trams are quite the tourist attraction. Tram no. 28 is especially popular as it takes a scenic route through the city’s historic neighbourhoods. We had sat in one during our visit to the city over a decade ago 1 . This time we were too put off by the crowd of people queuing up for a ride. Historic city centres of many European cities can sometimes begin to feel like theme…
In less than a year, the quality of the images generated by DALL·E has improved dramatically. In Oct’22 I had given DALL·E 2 some unusual cricket related prompts . I revisited them to compare the results against DALL·E 3. My first prompt: Astronauts playing cricket on moon Resulted in a set of these four images: Astronauts playing cricket on moon While DALL·E 2 had struggled to render the humans,…
When I had moved to Bangalore in the early 2000s, The Opera House building at the end of Brigade Road (one that meets Residency Road), was already well past its prime. Like hundreds of other such colonial-era buildings in the city at the time, it was in disrepair and mired in lengthy legal disputes 1 . I must’ve thought that it would meet the inevitable fate that awaited buildings like these - to…
Each year I make a playlist of 52 or so songs that I absolutely loved that year. Here is this year’s playlist . Most songs weren’t released in 2023, I merely discovered them in 2023. There is one exception to that rule in this year’s playlist. Lana Del Rey’s Mariner’s Apartment Complex. I had heard the song a couple of years ago but it slowly grew on me this year and got so much play time (along…
I visited Bangalore recently after a gap of over eleven years. Naturally, I noticed a lot of changes - both big and small. I hope to share some of these through a series of short blog posts. The metro entrance at Church Street did not exist when I lived there. I loved the colourful mural that it had been decorated with. It reminded me of Studio Ghibli movies. Church Street/M. G. Road metro…
On our balcony we have two large, rectangular planters in which we plant all manner of random flowers and enjoy watching them bloom from spring till the end of summer 1 . We had a very warm and dry June this year. Specifically, the average mean temperature was 1.2ºC higher than the previous record. A record set a mere two years ago. As a result of all that dry heat our flowers died out. We…
Consider all possible three letter combinations of the English alphabet. From AAA to ZZZ . There are 26 x 26 x 26 = 17,576 of them in all, or 626 per letter. Some of these are valid English words - you could use them in a game of Scrabble. For example, ACE , BAT , ZAG etc. IATA also assigns three letter codes to airports. You know, the ones you see on your boarding passes and baggage tags. Like…
I’ll start this post with the obligatory photo of the Mediterranean taken from our hotel’s balcony. Future posts won’t feature one because on this day we checked out of the hotel and moved into an apartment in Valletta 1 . The view from our hotels’ balcony on Day 4 The apartment was in a street that was decked with green plastic festoons. I couldn’t tell if it was old Christmas decoration they…
The Internet Archive also archives physical books. The archive’s 2010 scan of a late 19th century catalogue of colourful granite tiles came to my attention recently - thanks to this post on kottke.org . Album of Ornamental Granite Tiles I decided to build a little web app that’d allow me to play with the tiles in this catalogue . The original catalogue only shows a little over 1/4th of the design…
Mansi recently drew my attention to this outdoor marketing campaign by Polaroid. We both found it funny that what was once considered “ instant” is too slow by our modern standards. I saw this campaign again on my way to work today and was overcome with nostalgia. Real Life is… “ Real Life is having to wait”. I am old enough to have lived through times when we’d wait weeks if not months to see our…
The Netherlands reintroduced a deposit scheme (‘statiegeld’) on plastic bottles ( PET ) in 2021. We get € 0.15 back on returning a bottle smaller than a litre and € 0.25 for a bottle 1 through 3 litres. As of April 2023, the scheme has also been extended to aluminium cans. Most cans now carry a deposit of € 0.15. Field studies show that this scheme has been very successful in reducing littler as…
The view from our hotel’s balcony on the third morning of our stay promised a mixed bag weather-wise. The view from our hotels’ balcony on Day 3 Fortunately, our itinerary for the day wasn’t very ambitious. We wanted to spend time walking about in one of the numerous neighbourhoods close to our hotel, catch the views of the Mediterranean sea from Dingli Cliffs and avoid being sucked into Valletta…
We woke up to a beautiful sunrise the next day. So transformed was the landscape that it wouldn’t have been unreasonable to assume that we had been transported to another place while we were asleep. A beautiful sunrise Malta is comprised of three major islands. The largest one, Malta, the smaller Gozo to its north-west and the tiny Comino in between. Given the day’s mostly sunny forecast, we…