Recent content on polarhive
This post talks about my linkstash workflow and the small tools I built around it So, I help run a student tech community called HSP . We talk about cool stuff and share interesting links and articles we find during the week. I thought of an idea or rather an experiment that helps us maintain a neat list of all the links that were shared this week. HSP is all about knowledge sharing and building…
I recently purchased a MacBook Air M2. Yes I know M2 in 2025. There’s a reason—Asahi. It was cheap 65k INR ~(750 USD) I know, I jumped the gun, I have not given into proprietary software. I still back my rant on Apple 4 years ago. I will not be using any native MacOS exclusive feature like Safari, Airdrop, Apple Music et al. Unfortunately this has become my main machine right now, cider: (my…
This post talks about my Obsidian workflow Obsidian is a proprietary markdown editor built on electron. It’s just another text editor — your notes are just .md files in a directory. Borrowing a lot from the unix philosophy , it does one thing and does it well. I use it to edit and work with [[wikilinks]] on my /wiki , journal notes, archive the web, organize my files across devices and…
Last weekend I attended IndiaFOSS 4.0 This was my first FOSS conference I’d been to. My friends, and seniors from college were nudging me to purchase a ticket pretty early on. Unfortunately, I did not and missed out on the discounted student ticket. I was lucky enough to find someone who was willing to transfer their ticket last moment who I found in the FOSS United Telegram chatroom. The…
I am 0.9999/4 part an engineer! I’ve cleared all my courses and bank 44/160 credits in my pocket. I took a much needed break from college; visited a couple of friends and family. A free mind and a whole lot of free time in hand before the next semester. This warrants a blog post of it’s own — I’ve got some new hardware and plans I’d like to talk about to cover up for…
Life is not a 0 + 🎲 In the fast-paced realm of technology, where success appears to be a finite resource it’s easy to fall into the trap of viewing the industry as a zero-sum game. If you make it to the top it’s because someone else could not. If you have to succeed it ought to be at someone else’s cost What if you choose not to share your valuable resource in-fear of someone…
Presented and written by Adhesh, Anirudh, Aditya and Nathan There are several amazing SSGs out there, like Hugo and 11ty . Building your own SSG is an amazing learning experience. It also motivates one to maintain and improve their personal site. Building personal blogs from the ground up can be a tedious process . Some of us have had our hands deep in vanilla HTML and CSS, which isn’t fun…
Here’s a rant about—life, exams, FOSS stuff & the tangled mess that my uni courses have become For the past four months or so — I’ve been juggling university coursework, restarting social-media (ahem Instagram); attending hackathons and meeting new people at college. I have not really managed my time well. I wanted to re-start my YouTube channel, manage my time better and…
I don’t like using services like Spotify, Apple Music or Amazon Prime, as they need DRM . YouTube Music, works fine but — but you need a Google Account! Previously I manually downloaded playlists from YouTube using yt-dlp and maintained a tagged collection of my favourite songs. I would discover new artists using LastFM and listen using my browser. Fast forward to August this year…
I’ve seen a couple of people post about their app-defaults inspired by the latest Hemispheric Views podcast — Duel of the Defaults! It’s the nearly the end of 2023, and surprisingly this time around it isn’t about the latest iPhone, ChatGPT or AI taking over our jobs! It’s always fun when you are a part of these niché internet-trends! And.. a bunch of y’all were…
University is starting: next week I thought I’d write a helpful blog-post on how I’ve been prepping for college, some sacrifices I’ve to make and the tech-stack that’s changing. Don’t worry I’m still running arch btw :3 Here’s how the campus looks like For the next 4 years or so — I’ll be spending my time pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in…
PWAs Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) work seamlessly on Chrome and are often lightweight clones of their desktop counterparts based on JS frameworks like Electron. If you’ve used Chrome — some websites prompt you to install their web app. PWAs on Chrome have features such as: service workers for offline capabilities, responsive design, and push notifications. (Firefox is not far behind!)…
This site is now on: polarhive.net PSA: I got a new domain name. A new email address and setup a small VPS this week. I am done with my exams and will be pursuing a Bachelor’s in CS this August. Here’s my new /PGP key: 0x78DBFBE8B325A5A9 A short vacation I went on a short 2 day trip to my hometown in Kerala. Here are some pictures: I logged the whole journey on OpenStreetMap and…
If you’re into the FOSS/tech ecosystem; you’ve probably heard of ‘GitHub’ GitHub, now owned by Microsoft is a web-based social coding platform for everything “open source”. At least that’s how I feel they brand it. After the Microsoft takeover there has been a significant increase in traffic with new users joining the platform. Isn’t it ironic that…
This week, I’ve been contributing to OpenStreetMap — a collaborative free software project that aims to create a free, editable map of the world Unfortunately, not many people have heard about OpenStreetMap & it’s usecases. It powers Snapchat’s — Snap Map , DuckDuckGo, Brave Search, Wikipedia & much much- more . I have blogged about making the switch to FLOSS software, degoogling…
I’m back from the dungeons! I haven’t posted in ages I haven’t blogged much this year. I just turned 18 a couple of days ago Everything is back to normal, C0VID is a thing of the past. Practical exams, school work piling up, my final exams fast approaching — this year is going to be a huge turning point in my life. Times flies so fast, I’m officially an adult now! I…
I don’t use Spotify, Apple Music, et al. DRM’d content is a big no-no. I don’t consume any kind of DRM these days. Most likely like you: I have a ~/Music folder on my laptop. Yours is probably empty, but I like to keep my music collection offline, available any day I want. I keep music cached on my disk as long as I need it. Songs get archived periodically every few months, if I…
The news you consume isn’t going to affect you in any way. You’ve probably forgotten what you read last week. I’ve blogged about it a few months ago ~ You are What You Eat Today , the only way I get updates is via RSS feeds. RSS stand for — Really Simple Syndication . RSS feeds are portable, extensible, light on network resources. I’ve also conveniently blocked…
From Arch to Void GNU/Linux After months of running Arch. I have finally decided to distrohop again. This time I’m trying Void Linux an interesting, indie-distro that my friend recommended to try. Unlike the majority of distros — which blatantly skin Ubuntu / fork Debian. Void is built independently, so it has it’s own package manager. The XBPS package ecosystem. The lack of…
What do you understand when you hear the word hack? Hackers, ah yes scary people. Nerds in-hoodies who live in shady places? Mashing fancy green text into terminals? Thanks to movies & coverage by the media — hacking in the modern world probably means someone who is skilled at breaking into/hijacking computers I bet you’ve often heard catchphrases like: ‘Keep your data safe from…
Remember 2021? or Should I say 2020? I guess nothing much has changed in the world. The world battles the pandemic. Although people aren’t panicking this year compared to last-year . Our dependence on proprietary software still disgusts me. Thanks to TikTok: our average attention-spans have reduced . I for one, made better use of my time in 2021 than in 2020. Remember that blog post I penned…
Things that add value to your life It’s an aesthetic, a vibe, a mindset that I swear by! The rule: seemingly simple–the comprehension? There are N different ways that you can–add value to your life, buying everything you need, in the hope that one day it might be useful to you. Refuel on caffeine, energy drinks staying up late night. Start fasting for days, weeks give up, get…
The saying is true, you are what you eat, consume, live to die for To put things into perspective, in today’s world you are what you scroll through on your daily news feed, Instagram stories, RSS feeds, blog roll, TV, Netflix, Spotify so on & so forth. In Elizabethan times people believed That the human body contains blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. Health is the state in which…
Brave is a web browser based on the Chromium web-engine influenced by Google The browser is surprisingly free/libre software: licensed under the Mozilla Public license just like Firefox. Before you @ me, this is not like the many, many one-sided shit-posts about Brave using the same recycled — mountain load of FUD that goes around when people talk about Brave. If you’ve been living…
Free Software is software that respects the user’s freedom To someone who’s not a programmer: this sounds totally absurd What the heck is freedom that these people keep talking about? free? no paisa? 🤔 I had always thought it meant software — that was free-of-charge . After reading Wikipedia I was even more confused . It talked about ‘respecting your freedom’. Respects the…
It all started from Scratch. Pun intended! The humble beginnings of scratch.mit.edu my first social network! 2016: 5 years ago I decided to sign up for a scratch account to share the programs I made locally using ‘ Scratch 2.0 ’. If I recall correctly it was — an Adobe AIR App that ran locally, and you could share your scratch projects online after you setup a username and password.…
I’m preparing for competitive entrance-exams Around 1.2 million students write the JEE exam each-year . It’s really tough to get a good rank: this is not like your school exams where you study for a subject and get graded periodically at school. There’s months & years worth of practice as you’re no longer competing locally. You’d need to be in the top 99.5%(ile) to…
This post is a reflection on Digital Minimalism on my Phone (FOSS) I wrote exactly a year ago A year ago I yeeted all my apps, disabled notifications, started using FOSS apps in the hope that I spend my time efficiently. After the initial few weeks the ‘FOSS’ and ‘Ad Free’ apps get just as much addictive as the mainstream ones. Although it’s not as toxic / invasive of…
iPhones & MacBooks are beautiful, powerful pieces of hardware That you can rent from Apple — that’s about it Why did I specifically use the word ‘rent’? Sorry for triggering any Apple fanbois: the only thing you ever buy from Apple is their marketing. All Apple devices — natively run their proprietary operating systems and are entirely owned by Apple. They can shut…
2021 is the year I complete my general-schooling, plan ahead, catch-up on my backlogs Because 2020 has taught us that anything can happen at times when we are the least prepared Covid was the highlight of the year, but let’s hope for the better. I’m sure we have all heard-of ‘New Year resolutions’ — this post about that, but I am writing this two weeks before new-years, I plan to dive…
Google is probably your search engine. Chrome your web-browser? Google flavoured Android + your OEM skin, the OS your phone runs on I’m talking about — Xiaomi’s MIUI, OnePlus/Oppo/Vivo’s Oxygen OS, Color OS, Samsung’s OneUI, literally anything other than iPhones probably run Android + proprietary Google software. YouTube? — it’s the 2nd biggest search engine after…
“I trust Mozilla more than Google; but Mozilla trusts Google more than you” Google is the default search engine on Firefox. All their app store screenshots feature Google Search. No self hosted F-Droid repo. It’s again Google Play. Google is their primary & only ‘real’ source of income. Ironically their only real competitor. Do they want to promote privacy friendly…
Whaat? you use Linux? aRe yOu sOme hAcKeR ? No, that’s not how I perceive it. People & the media - have confused us with the term hacker . I mean hacking as in a hacksmith someone who is playfully clever . Tinkering stuff, not just computers, hacking as in life-hacks, not breaching security as such, they too are hackers but not the only ones :0 A musician has total control over their guitar,…
If you’ve searched for privacy oriented messaging apps Signal is probably on that list. By now you’ve probably heard about Signal the centralized, navy blue , metadata resistant messaging app, now anchored by an ex WhatsApp co-founder . Signal out of the box still lacks a bit of polish. When compared to competition like Telegram or Element/Matrix (As of 2020-10-20) No usernames, hiding…
Unless you’re from the USA (the land of free SMS) you probably use a messaging app like WhatsApp, Telegram or Signal Why? You get cross-device-sync, better features, ditch phone numbers as – identifiers, huge privacy gains, stickers & share media in an instant! SMS is costly, outside of the US. At least in India — I don’t think I have ever used SMS other than receiving OTP…
Wait? What’s wrong with Twitter? YouTube or XYZ platform? These apps are centralized, are funded by advertiser whims. Need non-free software to run. Hard to scale or port. Unnecessary walled-gardens that keep normal users who don’t have an account — out. I don’t like centralized social media anymore. I think it isn’t worth my time in the long run. I switched to…
China — heard about China in these recent days? The app bans and censoring websites of Chinese origin under the so called name of national security and safeguarding the privacy of fellow Indian citizens? Geopolitics reigns: the real issue of data-protection & privacy is not going to be talked about. While I think: we should not use apps that collect this much data. I would never bar someone…
The quickest way to call me? 🤙 VoIP calls: polarhive.net/call A dilemma ~ privacy? or instant connectivity — you can’t have both There’s the obvious privacy issue, the cellular radio in the phone is screaming all day to towers near you to keep you connected 24/7 wherever you go. I have the phone-app disabled on my phone . I have Airplane mode turned on. I only rely on WiFi to…
Unblock domains, access websites freely & securely Tor stands for ~ The Onion Router. I’ve often recommended people to use the Tor Browser when using the internet. I don’t think pseudo-privacy-browsers like Brave or Firefox can ever match the protections offered by the Tor Project. First, it masks your true IP address. when expecting real privacy when browsing the web. This article is…
Without the big 5 tech titans. Utilizing FOSS/Libre software Here’s what’s different from your average expectation from a phone It runs Android, without pinging Google or other such servers without me telling to do so. No ads, spyware, lag or battery draining apps. No Google apps, none of the infested Facebook apps, Tencent, WeChat, TikTok whatever that mistreats me, the user. There are better…
“Imagine Instagram allowed users to follow and like Tweets through the Instagram app; vice-versa” Social media is about connecting people right? Such Corporate speak! Much like the earlier days of the internet where you can host a personal website, not having to worry about walled gardens or ‘signing-up’ to view simple photos & posts. Modern centralized social media…
Facebook is not going to break up and re-sell WhatsApp & Instagram anytime soon It’s up to the user’s to defend for themselves, you are at their mercy when fighting for privacy on a platform that lives by selling your data. Breaking up? - a silo like Facebook unfortunately controls our social relations . Facebook hacks into our social life: emotions, the fun moments we share & with our…