Recent content on Rajath Ramakrishna
I’ve been using herdr for a few weeks now and I really like it. I haven’t explored a lot of plugins yet. The ones I tried never worked and I was too busy to tinker with them. But two main features that still has me using it: AI agent integration - getting different notifications based on inputs needed or completion notification Keeping everything organized with workspaces. There are a…
I use GBoard on my Pixel 10 Pro. I’ve been a GBoard user for several years. It has all the smartness that makes typing a breeze. However, it’s missing one setting - smart punctuation. Let me explain. Whenever I type fast and keep hitting space, GBoard both autocorrects and also inserts space after the corrected word. When I try to type punctuations, the space end up before the…
I had a productive week in terms of app development. Grove I’m excited and partially relieved that I’m getting closer and closer to finishing my app, Grove. This has consumed me in the last couple of months and I’ve been adding features, fixing bugs and making improvements. I didn’t plan out a list of features to call it done for v1, so I kept adding features on a daily…
Last week I spent the last day of Fable 5 access on revamping my dotfiles completely. This included nix-ifying all the configs that could be nix-ified. I also had elaborate nix configs for personal, work and shared modules/packages so that I could use the same config at workplace, but I decided to trim it down to only use it for personal for now, due to restrictions at workplace. The resulting…
Most of us take a lot of photos on our phones and don’t do a good job of cleaning them up by deleting bad/redundant ones. As time goes on, more and more photos get accumulated and they fill up both the phone and the cloud storage we back up our photos to, only to reach a point where we’re out of storage and need to pay for more. Or, we have so many photos that it’s exhausting to…
I was browsing through some of the posts at bubbles.town and I came across a post by Antonio about how “ Your RSS Reader Is Robbing You ”. It instantly reminded me of another post I read on another blog a couple of months ago about a similar topic about how people painstakingly create their blog and how unique each personal website is because of all the love, thought and hard work…
I got to know about Andrej Karpathy’s llm-wiki a few months ago. I was intrigued by it, but never got around to using it. The fact that I could capture raw notes on the topic I was researching and the LLM could not only make connections between them, but find topics in my notes and create concept pages was something I saw value in. What is llm-wiki? llm-wiki is a skill developed by Andrej…
I used to use OpenClaw for a bit when it got popular. I was excited like many, but not so much to get myself a Mac Mini. I wanted to see what a personal assistant could do for me. I wrote about some of my adventures with OpenClaw in my previous blog posts . I also didn’t give it access to everything I had like some people did and I only gave it access to Todoist and Raindrop which were the…
I’ve been vibecoding a bunch of mobile and web apps lately. I haven’t had the chance to sit and write blog posts about it. I will be writing some blog posts on each app I vibecoded, my thoughts on it, what I ran into with each one and how opinions about vibecoding are being shaped. It’s been an interesting exercise and I’ve been having conflicting thoughts about vibecoding…
The last several weeks have been busy. Ever since I got laid off, I thought I’d have more time. And in some ways, I do. But with a little one at home, my hands are almost always full. Besides caring for and playing with the little one, I’m trying to balance chores, prepping for interviews, and working out, I’m also trying to vibecode mobile and web apps on the side to preserve my…
Layoff This was an interesting week. I got laid off. I was laid off from my previous job early last year because the company shut down. I spent about 5+ months looking for jobs and got a few offers. Now about 7 months into my new job I got laid off again. Now I need to start the search all over again. I’m getting some time to spend with family now that I’m not working, but looking for…
This website is built using a static site generator ( Hugo ) and hosted on Cloudflare Pages . I specifically like static site generators for the control, simplicity and the lack of need to deploy and maintain it on a host. I can write blog posts in Markdown format and push it to a GitHub repo and they get built and deployed. I like the fact that the posts are on GitHub because of a couple of…
Last week I was contemplating more and more about how I can reduce my phone usage. I noticed I was on my phone quite a lot and needed a break. I was mostly browsing Reddit, HackerNews and Lobsters. I needed a way to reduce this usage and be still, where I don’t feel the need to reach for my phone. It’s still a work in progress. I need to get back into reading, I’ve taken quite a…
Ever since I heard about Tailscale and what it could do, I was always curious to try. I previously used Wireguard as my VPN to connect to my home network. But for some reason or another, in the rare instances where I wanted to access a device on my home network from outside, I found it hard because either the Wireguard docker (which used to be hosted on the Raspberry Pi) would not be running…
Last week I was quite busy with work, but I did play around with OpenClaw a bit more. Explorations I installed Tailscale on all my devices. I’ll be writing a blog post about it soon. The setup was way easier than I thought it would be. I augmented my Todoist grocery helper workflow on OpenClaw to make it check for deals/coupons on QFC as it adds each item to my Todoist. OpenClaw by default…
I recently wrote about how I used OpenClaw to add groceries to my Todoist Shopping List project which is where I maintain my grocery list. I made an enhancement to this workflow which does the following. For each item I add: OpenClaw checks if the item is unlabeled (I use QFC as my default grocery store, so unlabeled ones means I have to buy them at QFC) If it has a label, it adds that item to the…
I use Todoist as my shopping list for groceries. I have a Shopping List project in my Todoist where items can have labels like wholefoods , costco , etc. My workflow to add items to the Shopping List project was to open the Todoist’s Add Task shortcut on my Pixel, type the item, optionally add a label, then add the item to the Shopping List project. If I had to add multiple items, I had to…
It was quite an interesting and productive week. Here are some of the things I did: Projects I vibe-coded an Android app called Expander . It’s a text expansion app that works for both static and dynamic snippets (like date, time, day, with custom formats). I also vibe-coded an emacs package called org-retro-journal.el which is like Memories in Google Photos but for journaling. You can look…
I’ve been trying to use OpenClaw to automate some of the tasks I do. OpenClaw is great for acting as a research assistant and I configured it to do the research for some of the tasks I have in my Todoist. Whenever I think of capturing a task, I do it in Todoist and get to it later. To automate research tasks like comparing headphones, or summarizing a the comment thread of a HackerNews post,…
I use text expansion a lot for the words or phrases that I frequently use. This works well on Gboard , the default keyboard on Android where you can configure text shortcuts. But it does not support dynamic data like current date, day or time. I need that for adding journal entries in Orgzly . There weren’t good apps for this and the only one that was good enough was Typing Hero. This did…
Like many people over the last few days, I was curious to try Clawdbot/Moltbot/OpenClaw. I didn’t rush to buy a Mac mini. I instead installed it on a raspberry pi that didn’t have anything important on it and it didn’t have access to other devices. I was mind blown by not just what it could do, but also how easy it was to configure it, all of which happened by just interacting…
I’ve been using Hugo since 2020 and as part of the setup, according to the docs, I had to create two repositories. One which I called blog for the .md files, and another called rrajath.github.io for the generated HTML files. This led me to a workflow where I write a blog post, commit the file and push it to the blog repo. I then run a script that executes the hugo command generate HTML…
Here’s everything I did last week Fediverse stuff I stumbled upon omg.lol and found it really interesting. After a few minutes of checking out the services that were offered, I joined and created a profile page , a now page and a weblog . I also joined social.lol and it has some of the nicest people there. I’m really digging this whole ecosystem. Domain registrar switch Realized I was…
I’ve been journaling in org-mode since 2020. It’s a simple journal.org file in datetree format, where I add entries each day. One thing I never did is to go back and read what I had written. I really like the Memories feature in Google Photos where it shows what I was doing that day or around that day a year ago, 2 years ago, 3 years ago and so on. And I wanted a similar feature for my…
I’ve been seeing quite a lot of /defaults posts where people post their defaults. The first post I found was from Neil Macy’s blog . Most of the blog posts reference the podcast episode Hemispheric Views 097 - Duel of the Defaults! , so I listened to the episode. Now, I have my own app defaults list and this one’s what I was using in 2025. (You can find other people’s defaults…
This page contains everything that was moved from the Now page Aug 24, 2024 Reading Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains Health Working out Meditating Learning Guitar Nothing Else Matters - Metallica Mellowing - All Them Witches Breathe - Pink Floyd Drawing Aug 24, 2022…
Jan 15, 2026 Reading 101 Essays That Will Change the Way You Think: Brianna Wiest The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness: Morgan Housel Health Getting back into working out Learning Guitar Last of Us theme Fix You by Coldplay Dark Souls Firelink Shrine This is a Now page, based on the concept by Derek Sivers . Visit nownownow.com for more inspiration. Visit the…
I recently started using prodigy.el at work since I had to run a few services locally for development. I used to run them in my terminal in different tabs, but I thought of giving Prodigy a try and it worked great! I was able to not just run the services without having to look at the logs (unless I needed to) but also configure the status of each service based on certain text patterns in the logs.…
When I’m on a line that is indented, I like to switch between going to the beginning of the line and the first non-whitespace charater. These have two different keybindings, C-a and M-m respectively. I wanted just one keybinding to switch between these two positions. I tried searching if this already exists in Emacs and I couldn’t find it. So, I wrote a small function and bound it to…
A few days ago I visited YouTube and saw this: For many years, I turned off my YouTube watch history to avoid getting distracted by the recommendations that appeared on my homepage. As a result, my homepage was quite boring and contained only a few videos from my subscriptions and a few popular videos in general. Nothing was personalized. Although I still found myself clicking on a few of those…
I’m no stranger to consuming information on my phone, computer, iPad, etc. I consume them in various forms - text (with newsletters, RSS feeds, read it later services), audio (with podcasts) and video (YouTube). I quit social media several years ago and I’ve always felt good that I don’t spend hours and hours scrolling through my feed on websites like Facebook, Instagram, etc. And my YouTube…
I recently read a reddit post on /r/HelixEditor where a user was asking if it was worth switching to Helix since they’d been a long time vim user. This is just one post, but there are many people who asked same or similar questions. This is a common question that I’ve seen asked in many subreddits and other communities. I’ve also faced this kind of a dilemma in the past myself. The crux of the…
I’ve been a vim user for as long as I can remember. I like vim so much that I try to incorporate vim keybindings wherever I can. Like, using Vimium extension in Firefox/Chrome, vim extention in IntelliJ/VSCode , evil mode in Emacs , etc. I recently stumbled upon Helix Editor which made me rethink vim’s way of navigation. Helix was so much more intuitive for me in terms of selection->action…
I previously wrote about Raycast and how it has replaced a lot of apps I use. One of the things I mentioned about Raycast is that the developer experience is excellent. This post briefly talks about my journey in creating StoicQuotes , a Raycast extension. Background I’ve been practicing Stoicism for many years and one of the things I do every now and then is I read a quote by a stoic philosopher…
Like my previous post about knapsack problem , constraint relaxation is another mental model I read about in book Algorithms to Live By . When I read it, I again felt the same way I did for the knapsack problem - it’s common and we do it all the time. Constraint relaxation is when you encounter a problem that seems complex enough (think too many constraints) that you feel a little overwhelmed to…
Knapsack problem , for those who don’t know, is an optimization problem that is encountered in several fields like computer science, investing, decision-making, etc. When defined in an abstract sense, the problem is to select a set of items each with a certain weight and value from a larger set such that the total weight does not exceed the volume of a sack. The problem is to optimize for the…
I’ve been an Alfred user for many many years and I’m also a Mega Supporter with a lifetime license. It provides so much value to me on a daily basis that it’s become one of the apps I install first when I set up a new laptop. I’ve used quite a few workflows an Alfred, I was using it as a clipboard manager, I had tons of dynamic snippets stored in them. I was doing everything with Alfred. This was…
One of the things that was initially unique to Mac was the dockbar. I remember the first time I used a Mac, I was quite fascinated by it. I liked the zoom-in effect as I hovered my mouse over each item on it. A fresh install of MacOS (or OSX back in the day) comes with a persistent dockbar at the bottom taking up a good chunk of the screen real estate. So, even when you maximize any app, it won’t…
Early last year, I had some pain and discomfort in my wrists, so I decided to switch to a split keyboard. I went down an /r/ErgoMechKeyboards rabbit hole and ended up getting a Moonlander Mark I . Around the same time, I also found that a lot of people use Colemak as the keyboard layout and that QWERTY is actually very inefficient. And down another rabbit hole I went. After doing a lot more…
I’ve been trying out Helix Editor recently and loving it. I wanted to see if it could be my primary IDE and one thing I wish it did was format the file on save. By this, I don’t just mean fixing indentation, but also applying eslint fixes and running prettier. And I wanted this formatting to be applied based on the rules defined for that package. For example, I was in a nodejs workspace with…
I’ve been doing the “Year in Review” series for a few years now. At the end of every year, I take some time to think about what went well, what didn’t go well, any side quests I ventured into to get a perspective on how my life is going and what kind of changes it needs. What went well Reading I read quite a few books in 2022. Some of the notable ones are Blood, Sweat and Pixels ,…
Directory of AI tools containing free/freemium/paid services https://www.futurepedia.io
More than a decade ago I came across BuzzFeed articles like “10 things you didn’t know about the Illuminati, number 7 will surprise you” for the first time. At the time, I didn’t even know they were called clickbait. This reminded me of the tabloids I saw near checkout lines in grocery stores. Every time I’d see one of those magazines, I used to think, “This is…
A few weeks ago, my coworker was talking about Helix Editor . I’m generally fascinated by CLI tools, so I decided to check it out. As soon as I tried it I was super impressed with how many features were packed in it. Tree-Sitter, Language Servers, multiple selections and many more. I have been struggling the past few months to get a good IDE experience set up on Emacs and every time I try,…
A coworker of mine runs a bi-weekly tech book club where a bunch of people get together, read a couple of chapters of the ongoing tech book (like Clean Code) beforehand and discuss in the meeting how that can be applied in our existing codebase. Since he runs the meeting while sharing his screen, as he goes through the pages of the chapter, he shows his highlights that he thinks are good talking…
The title of this post seems kinda oxymoronic. Enjoyment and boredom seem to be opposites, so to speak. If we’re bored, that means we’re not stimulated and that means we’re not enjoying whatever it is we’re doing (or not doing). Most people I know hate doing mundane repetitive tasks or chores like cleaning, folding clothes, etc. I particularly like them. Not because I enjoy…
Last year I went to physical therapy because I had severe lower back pain. It turned out the pain was mostly because of bad posture. As I was visiting the physical therapy place regularly, I started describing to the therapist how I sit on the couch, how I sit at a table and what my overall posture is during these times. I would ask questions like “I sit with my back straight at my desk, and…
Note : Most part of this blog post was written using the workflow described below. Alright. This needs some explaining and prerequisites. I’m a heavy emacs user. I use it for a ton of things, one of them is to maintain and update my blog, which is a static site generated by Hugo . There is already a great package called ox-hugo which helps with blogging maintenance and workflows for…
In the years I’ve composed emails, I was initially finding it a little hard to go through the top-down steps of adding people in the To field, CC field and coming up with the subject line. There were two problems with this workflow: It broke my flow for composing an email I’d have a vague idea of how to express my thoughts into words and that flow was broken by filling out these…
The basic concept of Don’t Break The Chain is to do an activity every day so as to “not break the chain”. This is a method that enforces consistency. This is helpful to make habits stick, provide visual feedback on the progress on a daily basis and motivates us to keep going. I came up with a slight modification to this method which I call “Don’t Break the Chain -…