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All of these albums are great to work to. In fact, these are the albums you should listen to when attempting to produce great work. My attention span is terrible even when I'm doing something I care about (like building software) so having my brain stimulated for a controlled amount of time is very helpful. These albums have a limited number of words and a lot of musical drama. They are perfect…
When I moved to Cooke Town in 2015, I used to eat lunch every day at Manjit da Dhaba. My office used to be on High Street so it was a short walk to Manjit. Today, there is a foot over-bridge across the railway line that divides Cooke Town from Cox Town, but back then, I would just walk across the tracks. There was a new apartment being constructed in front of the railway line, and it eventually…
I used to read a lot when I was a child. My parents kept the house full of books, my school had a huge library, and in primary school I had friends who took it as seriously as I did. We would cycle our library checkouts, burning through three books in the time most kids did one. All of this intensity evaporated during high school and university. Academics and adulthood are not conducive to reading…
This is relevant if you use Google Calendar with the iOS Calendar app, and not the Google Calendar app. To avoid messing up your Calendar alerts on iOS, don’t set a "Default Alert Time" in the iOS Calendar settings. Set all of them to "None". iOS 18 Settings → Apps → Calendar → Default Alert Times If you don't set these to "None", it will interfere with Google Calendar’s own alerts setting, and…
Rent a house near the beach, or a cabin but: Do not take your walking shoes. Don’t take any clothes you’d wear anyplace anyone would see you. Don’t take your rechargeables. Take Scrabble if you have to, but not a dictionary and no pencils for keeping score. Don’t take a cookbook or anything to cook. A fishing pole, ok but not the line, hook, sinker, leave it all. Find out what’s left. — How to Fly…
Update February 28, 2023: Some people asked me to mention Raycast in this post, which I have decided against, because I am not comfortable with the way Raycast is building their software. Elsewhere, Ankur shared his thoughts on the same and I agree with them. When you use lots of apps simultaneously, using ⌘-Tab (Command-Tab) to switch between them becomes slow because the row of icons in the…
It’s just something we made up. Somehow we’ve come to believe that greatness is a gift. Reserved for a chosen few, for prodigies, for superstars. And the rest of us can only stand by watching. You can forget that. Greatness is not some rare DNA strand. It’s not some precious thing. Greatness is no more unique to us than breathing. We’re all capable of it. All of us. The first time I saw this Nike…
“There’s a kind of time travel in letters, isn’t there? I imagine you laughing at my small joke; I imagine you groaning; I imagine you throwing my words away. Do I have you still? Do I address empty air and the flies that will eat this carcass? You could leave me for five years, you could return never—and I have to write the rest of this not knowing.” — This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal…
Update on September 19, 2023: WeWork does not use beans from Blue Tokai any more. Instead, they use Yaraman beans from Nandan Coffee Organic Roaster . Update on August 8, 2022: Some WeWork buildings (so far: Manyata Tech Park and Embassy Quest) also have a Chai Point area, which serve a few varieties of chai entirely free of cost. To be clear, this is not tea out of a machine; an actual person…
I am confident I clicked hundreds of other photos before this one, on one of the various Nokias I used through 2006-2010. But the photos were too poor in quality, not worth saving, and Google Photos with near-infinite storage was yet to be created. I took this photo on 10th December 2010 using a Samsung Galaxy Apollo i5801 phone. What’s in the photo? It’s a display connected to some random rack…
This blog runs on mataroa , and when Akshay introduced me to it, I did not expect it to do what it has done for me. As a writing platform, mataroa takes nothing to get started. There are barely any options I can configure. All settings fit on just one page. I cannot add external analytics to my blog, not even something simple like Plausible . Basic server-driven analytics are all that I get. I…
The way “happenings” are presented in the writing is very unique — in fact, I haven’t read another book like it at all. Here’s an example: the narrator starts to describe an incident (say, N1) somewhere in the book. While describing N1 (which may go on for many pages), the narrator branches to another incident (say N2) related to N1… and sometimes talking about another (N3!) while talking about…
If you still desire a thing, its time has not yet come. And when you have what you desired, you will have no more desire, instead you will have time. Weak desires protect you from disappointment. But nothing keeps you safer than being a visible ruin. — Indivisible, by Fanny Howe
I’ve been very fond of Anita Desai’s writing since I read Games At Twilight back in high school. That story had such a strong impact on me because I had no idea that one could take a topic as ordinary as the game of hide and seek, and transform it into an emotional experience of being a child itself. In Custody itself, was recommended somewhere on Reddit , and the prominent emotion of the book is…
All of us go through phases of total noise in our brain – hundreds of thoughts pulling your mind in hundreds of directions… incoherent emotions making your stomach feel ten times heavier that usual… a black hole in your very core, pulling everything tangible and intangible, threatening to implode your existence. In a moment like this, it makes no sense to do anything. Your mind is unable to…
GeneralMaximus : you know, i would like to have something like this playing when i meet some i like GeneralMaximus : but i'll probably have some Slipknot or Static X on. i just know it :/ GeneralMaximus : "you know the song that was playing when we first met?" GeneralMaximus : "yeah. wait and bleed." GeneralMaximus : "lovely memories, no?" GeneralMaximus : "i guess" lut4rp : rofl
You meet so many people through life. It’s like a constant cycle – meet, forget, meet, remember, forget, half-remember. Not everyone leaves a mark on you, but not everyone is forgotten either. Some people, some very special people have a sudden impact on you… No, I don’t mean the gentle, over-time-get-to-know-better people, I mean the instant omg-wow people. These very very few people in life, are…
I remember I was in 2nd year when I heard about Shaastra for the first time. A school friend, who was studying in Mumbai told me that the IIT Madras technical festival was awesome and I should attend. Of course, I couldn't. It would have taken me amazing amounts of mental prowess to convince my seniors and friends that a 40 hour train journey across the country would be worth it. Move forward 2…
A while ago, I found https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/light-themes/+bug/532633/comments/564 . That’s right, the Ubuntu SABDFL has confirmed that the new OS X style window title bar button placement, is here to stay. In response, the following theory was proposed by nirbheek on #hackers-india < nirbheek> Step 1: Make incredibly lame decision which is utterly stupid, without reason, and…
After struggling with my shared host for a couple of months now, I finally decided to shift to a newer one. This time I chose a VPS called WebFaction . Though, its not exactly a VPS, I'd call it a quasi one. It took me quite a bit of time to setup my domain, transfer files and verify everything, but hopefully I'm done! I'm quite impressed with WebFaction's performance and feature set, and if…
(This article was published in the Linux For You magazine, November 2008 issue.) Let’s face it. Conferences are boring. Really. Those massive, sponsor-centric events are for the white-collared executives listening to a possibly even more boring person on the stage. Now, this might not hold true for everyone, but it certainly doesn’t gel with the current times. Our lives have become faster and time…
For all those who have been using Apache 2 on a localhost on a Linux distro, there's this weird (and very irritating) warning that one gets whenever the Apache server is started or stopped. Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.1.1 for ServerName The address you get here might vary, but the error persists. Here's how to fix it: Open…
Any given program, when running, is obsolete. Any given program costs more and takes longer. If any program is useful, it will have to be changed. If a program is useless, it will have to be documented. Any given program will expand to fill all available memory. The value of a program is proportional to the weight of its output. Program complexity always grows until it exceeds the capability of…