Site description/subtitle
It's been a minute, eh? I've finally had the motivation to spend the last few days migrating back to Eleventy. I'm now well hooked into the Vercel ecosystem as well as a result. Not happy about that, but trade-offs! You always make them. For someone who gets overwhelmed easily with the scale of tasks like these, Claude has been an immense help in making this move happen. I'm most excited for the…
Here, on this blog, starting May 2021 and ending August 2022, I wrote as often as I could a recap of my months. I love this format, this publishing interface (WordPress), but eventually found out that the audience is both invisible and an unknown. Over time, it made me uncomfortable. I shifted to Instagram "stories" — and then monthly photo dumps inside of a "post" — after I realised I need a…
You can't live life alone. A community is essential. One of the most important steps to beating depression enough to function, which I would argue can be a life-long exercise, is to hang out with people who remind you the glass is half full. When you witness people who are hopeful in so many ways, you can borrow a little bit of hopefulness too. Peak capitalism, and Instagram reels, have convinced…
This… story is at least two months old now, but I think it deserves to be on the internet for someone looking for reviews of this thing in India. I've just taken it out of my drafts to publish, and yeah, that's it. For the first time a couple of weeks ago (at least at the time when I'm drafting this), I left for Vietnam – my first solo trip and the first international trip as well. A problem for…
Once every few weeks, I randomly type in 'tw' into my address bar and hit return. Takes me to Twitter.com. I don't know why I do this, because as far as intentional usage goes, it's been months I've been on there. I really do like it better on the fediverse. Feels more like a social place. It protects my mental health too because a ton of people use content warnings to give me the option to engage…
Out of nowhere, a couple of weeks ago, without ever installing any firmware update (at least intentionally), my Fitbit Charge 5 started: reporting incorrect battery numbers, swinging wildly from 40% to 90% to 77% and so on, and, turning off randomly with the only way to turn it back on being to plug it into a charger. As a reminder, I bought this thing for $155 off Amazon back in April 2022. At…
The title pretty much sums up the entire post, but I'll drop my two cents anyway: It makes it clear what the purpose of that effect is. This means your colleagues spend less time figuring that out. It's going to force you to only deal with one concern per effect rather than bundling way too many things into one. As someone who's always reading new code at $DayJob, I have learned and realised over…
I chanced upon Garrit 's toot today, which led me to Doug Belshaw 's newsletter-blog . I do enjoy Doug's blog but fail to keep up for a variety of reasons. A shout-out like Garrit did on his blog helped me find myself to it proper after what's been a while. If we are talking life/career burnout , I am always in. Of course I stopped writing as often on this blog, but I am tempted to try and speak…
I've made little noise about this subject, but I have. If you do not know, I had been itching to get a gaming computer. Using my family member's laptop to game was inconvenient. Of course, apart from the fact that it barely ran any game I wanted to play because of poor heat management plaguing small form factors. Over the last two weeks, I put together a full rig: a big monitor I can use for…
I've been doing some AWS/serverless stuff at work recently. If you've been following me long enough, you know I switched paths about 6 months ago. A couple of hiccups here and there, but it's been going well. Today, and not for the first time, I picked up some education from an ESLint rule page. no-await-in-loop tells us how to optimise our code and when not to use parallelisation. It took just…
It never really clicked to me how personal a keyboard is. The way you push these buttons, the way you move your fingers, how much your fingers travel, how hard you push, where you find the apostrophes and where you hunt for the ellipsis to pause your sentence and your mind. Where you drop a semi-colon from while effortlessly knowing where to look for the currency you need to print on your screen…
It's funny this pattern keeps emerging over and over in our lives — complain about something, lose any built-up joy and expectation of it, and then come to like it and enjoy it gradually. For context, I was very critical of AirPods just a while back. Of course I only use them in "controlled" environments, still, but they sound…pretty good? Spatial Audio isn't so bad, not even 'head tracked' which…
Two things that frustrate me as a web developer when I see them on the wild web: Being unable to toggle a tick box by clicking/tapping on its label. A label has a much larger surface area for tapping/clicking and keeps things "easy" for everyone. Not to mention it is accessible for people who use accessibility features. Not having the right inputmode or type attribute on an input . This breaks iOS…
Since getting the Fitbit , I've been trying to walk 250 steps or more every hour. It pings me 10 minutes before an hour is to finish if I haven't already completed my 250+ steps. Looking at my weekly averages, there are of course good weeks (5 of 8 hours on an average per day) and then there are bad weeks (2-3 of 8 hours on an average per day). I've been trying to build this habit for a really…
It's interesting to me Will was able to move from Bear to Joplin and generally enjoys it as much as he did Bear. I use and love Bear , and the closest I have to that with a more cross-platform-friendly constraint is Standard Notes , who also recently added regional pricing . Not to my surprise, though, as they were willing to offer economic difficulty discounts for a long time. All you had to do…
I've been on the fediverse/Mastodon since 2019 and have made some amazing friends. At the moment, I run SmallCamp , and help moderate Fosstodon along with a fantastic team and over 250 300 350 600 800 950 patrons . Part 1: looking like an actual person. Please fill out your bio and make an #introduction post with that hashtag, yes. Look at what other people are posting about to get an idea. Put up…
The timeline. The reverse chronological timeline has been failing for me recently. As has the notifications tab for mental health reasons. I think I was a little afraid to admit it to myself, but it is. I log in a few times a day, read only a little bit (whatever is recently posted at the time), miss out completely on what's posted when I'm sleeping, and have found myself missing posts from people…
I think my break is over. However, you will not find any personal posts (or personal side stories) from me anymore over here. Please follow my socials for those. Techie posts, though, are… okay. Strictly techie. My blog has some RSS feeds — if you would be keen on following along. 😊 I encourage you to get in touch over email by using the following convenience link for any discussion: comment via…
I'm taking an indefinite break on this blog. It has been a long time coming… wrote a little about it on Fosstodon , too, a while ago. It's a locked post so you might not be able to see it. With that said, I'm also done with my monthly reviews, which is something I wanted to be clear about. ~11-12 meaningful posts over 17 months, and I'm OK with that. It was a good run. I wasn't chasing perfection…
Ugh. Ugh. Ugh. I talked about not blogging as much in my June 2022 review . Internal monologue around that continues and I'm constantly finding myself wondering if keeping this blog is worth it. Maybe it's just an itch. Some smart people on Mastodon have recommended just keeping things as they are, and posting occasionally if that's what I find myself comfortable with — even if it's just 3 posts…
I lied — it's not been a whole month. Close enough, though. OK, anway, first, let's get some setup and numbers out of the way. Setup. I set up NextDNS on my laptop and my phone. I left the tablet out. No one else in my household is using this. Configuration was relatively easy. They had me download some "profiles" that I could "install" and activate. Very old school, like with those GPRS/EDGE…
8 months down, 4 to go. Like any other year, 2022 is zooming past. Somehow, still, more than ever. New workplace. I mentioned about starting a new contract soon when I put up my July 2022 review post . Well, it has. While dealing with React and friends isn't always a joy, can I take a moment to acknowledge that working on user interfaces and delivering a great user experience is something I love…
This is not a surprise to veteran iOS users, or Signal enthusiasts. There is no way to backup your chats, not in a way that I can count as reliable and proper , and that's a hard no for me now. There are "workarounds" but they are shambolic, really. Between hopes and dreams. When moving to iOS , I decided to take a chance and install Signal. I was already losing all my chats from Android at the…
Ok, the year is flying by — please stop? rain. Not very appealing, is it? A lot of rains this month. Not enjoying them as much as an adult as I did adolescent. I guess that also has to do with the state of things in a developing/poorer country. The infrastructure almost never copes with anything more than mild showers. energy. At this point in time, I feel like I have no energy for anything but…
In the metro cities and the airports of India — especially airports — I got real tired of seeing people sport their AirPods. I would think to myself every single time, "Hey, that looks so convenient!" I could not have been more wrong. I now wish I didn't buy a pair at all. Generic downsides that will apply to most products. To name a few downsides: They are not made to last . Can you replace the…