Sambrani's ponderings ramblings on mostly things non-meta. {{ posts | description:false }}...
The odd UX flow for booking a wheelchair on the Indigo website is, put charitably, dysfunctional. If you're not vision or hearing impaired or mentally deficient, you can't, ostensibly, get a wheelchair - the UI element is disabled . People that can't walk half a kilometre or so to the plane apparently don't need a wheelchair. So, the way to get around this is to book the ticket, call Indigo…
I've found keyboard shortcuts really useful. Not quite a poweruser but I end up learning a few when I get a new tool. Karabiner-elements is just excellent when it comes to Mac keyboard shortcut customization. It's open-sourced and has a great community , however it's a bit of a challenge trying to find a complex-modification (as it's called) for the thing you want. For instance, I wanted ESC to…
I would be surprised if the following hasn't occurred to chat apps like WhatsApp that ends up with large groups. Here's the deal: when I visit a place I should be able to declare in a group that I'm around. If someone in the group is also within a (configurable) radius (say 5 km), they can get a notification. If they want to hit me up, they can ping. I wouldn't know who saw the notification, so no…
I love that ChatGPT and its ilk generate markdown that I can copy/paste into a doc. Sidebar - The AI Mode in Google just can't give me markdown, it renders the table! But, I didn't quite find a good way to share markdown (text or table). I don't want to give a link to the ChatGPT session, I just want to share a table. I asked ChatGPT and it suggested a few online tools that need a login. I'm tired…
There's Aphantasia - the inability mentally visualise, and there's Hyerphantasia - mental images are graphic and inescapable. I think I have (what I call) Planophantasia - I can visualise 2D, i.e., photos, better than 3D. Published 28 Oct, 2025 . Last edited 9 months, 2 weeks ago.
Update: I created a GitHub Page with code generated by ChatGPT. Print shops now typically have a WhatsApp number (along with an email address) and ask people to send their documents to that. While that's great, it's not particularly easy to do that on both iPhones and Android. Whatsapp only works with contacts and it's necessary to create a contact to start a chat. Thankfully, they do support a…
It's sad that a category called long reads exists for blog posts. I'd think something like Finnegans Wake qualifies to be a long read but people don't appear to consume even articles. Heck, even I balk at something that extends beyond a few pages. While the number of tokens LLMs process are increasing, it appears the same is reducing in people, what with small sentences, tweets, hashtags, smaller…
I found this Ray Dalio quote insightful: Everyone fails. Anyone you see succeeding is only succeeding at the things you're paying attention to--I guarantee they are also failing at lots of other things. The people I respect most are those who fail well. I respect them even more than those who succeed. That is because failing is a painful experience while succeeding is a joyous one, so it requires…
Videos are typically 16:9 or some thing and so are displays. Mine is currently a Dell U3223QE, a 32" 4K display. VLC renders subtitles on the video and I don't quite like that. I read somewhere that MPV makes it easy to move them but I'm not feeling up to changing from VLC. I had tried Googling earlier and had got some reddit thread where they outlined how it can be done, but I hadn't gotten it to…
CS50's Introduction to Artificial Intelligence with Python is a nice course with problems for each section. The course creators have been nice enough to provide most of the scaffolding code and expect students to only write some of the core functions. They've even got free GitHub Codespace for students of the course. Checking for correctness of the solution uses a program, check50 , that tests…