Code and musings by Darshak Parikh
There are people, groups, works and topics that are old just in terms of age, and everyone and their dog wants to replace them for good, often for their age alone. But that turns out to be a wild goose chase, since these are so good at what they do, and/or they command so much mindshare, that they keep going for decades. See Emacs, Vim, COBOL, paperbacks, notebooks, email. Then there are those…
A couple of years ago, I wrote about my switch to Arc on my macOS workstation. It has served me well. But then BCNY made the biggest mistake: they alienated their early adopters. For over two years, Arc members did all sorts of cool things with it, shared it with the world, suggested interesting features and were generally a fun crowd to hang out with. I convinced about half a dozen people at work…
First things first: I’m no expert on mechanical keyboards. In fact, this is my first mechanical keyboard after spending half my life on membrane keyboards and being perfectly happy with them. So while this is not an experienced review, it does come from someone who has been somewhat sceptical of mechanical keyboards. Many people have told me about their superiority, but last month, a friend…
Why My work laptop is usually a MacBook, and installing Linux on that is not possible for various reasons. Now, being stuck with macOS isn’t all that bad. I’d take it any day over Windows. I even get to sync my dotfiles across Linux and macOS. That said, one of the first things I do after receiving a new MacBook for a project is fixing some of its silly defaults and making it somewhat more…
Arc Browser had been making waves in my social media circles, so I was mildly intrigued by what they were making. But it is in closed preview at the time of writing, so I didn’t bother taking a deeper look. I was happy with Firefox. That was until my friend Rahul mentioned he had been enjoying it and shared an invite to the preview. Now, after two weeks of using it as the primary browser on my…
My workplace has asked everyone to start coming to office at least thrice a week. Each team picks which three weekdays are best suited to them. This means that I will be moving to Bengaluru this week and find a place to stay somewhere close to work. I, for one, am excited about this. Work From Where? There’s a narrative that says knowledge workers no longer need offices, because they are equally…
Sometimes you want to create a vector graphic résumé or an infographic and export it as PDF. Doing this is easy in Inkscape using its Print function to create a file instead of printing on paper. If your document has a web or email address, it is a good idea to make it clickable, so that anyone looking at the PDF doesn't have to copy and paste the address. I'll show you how to do that. Creating a…
Problem statement Say you have a list of selectable items like emails or todos. There’s a checkbox next to each item, and the user can select multiple items to do some action with them. Since you love your users, you don’t want them to always select items one by one, so you provide a ‘Select all’ checkbox. There are four criteria you need to fulfill: On checking the ‘Select all’ checkbox, all item…
The activities you do in your free time fall into three categories: creation, recreation and consumption. In this post, I want to highlight the contrast and the relation between creation and consumption. Creation is when you produce something previously nonexistent. This includes writing, cooking, painting, playing music and coding to name a few. These are activities you will always find…
We have all been “writing” since we were toddlers. But it’s only after a certain age that we start writing for ourselves, if at all. The mode in which we write depends on our personal choices, the time we were born in, and the environment we work or study in. As for me, any non-trivial writing I have ever done falls into one of three modes: handwriting: for all my formal education (~18 years)…
I am 28, and I have only owned two personal computers in my lifetime. Excluding workstations, I have had one desktop and one laptop. Desktop (2007–2015) This one had a CRT monitor, a single-core AMD Sempron processor, an 80 GB hard drive and 256 MB of RAM, later upgraded to 1.25 GB. It was my high school machine and my father’s occasional taxation machine. It came with Windows XP, which I later…
TL;DR: I moved from WordPress to a superfast static site. Here’s the source code . This is not my first site. I’ve had a WordPress blog hosted on this domain since 2013. And I recommend WordPress to anyone who wants their own site but cannot write HTML and CSS. Then why did I move away from it? Because I can. As an experienced web developer, I was itching to write my own site by hand. Reasons…
Offline Web apps are finally a thing. The cleverest of ideas which were previously only imagination, are now reality. Thanks to the various storage mechanisms provided by modern browsers, it is now possible to save machine learning models directly on the client side. You can then use these to produce outputs without requiring a connection with the server. This post demonstrates how to do that.
Ever since the advent of HTML5 and ES6, the web is moving forward at the speed of the Millennium Falcon. While the world was still in awe at Angular's superpowers, the React phenomenon happened. And while the average corporate Java dev gets over the overwhelming pace of events, Angular 2 and Polymer will be ready to refill their pile of things to be amazed at. And that is a good thing. It means…
So I couldn't get WiFi to work on my SolydK installation. It does come with a nifty tool called 'Device Driver Manager', but even that couldn't find a driver for my wireless chipset, the Broadcom BCM43142. Some other Broadcom drivers sure are available in the Debian repos, but this one isn't. So I did the only sensible thing to do: searched the Web. And here's the solution.…