I don't like traveling anymore
One of my biggest motivators to make money in my early 20s was traveling.
Posts on Sid Verma
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IS 1293 : What are the different kinds of Indian electrical sockets?
I spent a lot of time today reading the specifications of Indian electrical sockets, and since it took me way too long to find this information - here’s a quick summary of what the different kinds of sockets mean. I hope at least one other person finds this useful.
Comparing tools to connect your devices in a mesh VPN
I have a nice little computer in my house which hosts a bunch of services I use. It sits behind a NAT, so I can’t connect directly to it via my public IP address. Hence, I use a cheap cloud instance on DigitalOcean to act as the gateway for my home-server to the internet. My previous setup was basically a VPN tunnel between a cloud server and my home server, where the cloud server forwarded…
Decision making while writing software
Post #1 in the Meta:Programming series.
Meta:Programming - Notes about the nature of software development
I’m hoping to write a blog series for my younger self. He is someone who used to look at a service and say - “I could build that over a weekend”. This is also someone who would look at a company with a small product, which rarely gets any new features, and wonder why that product needs 10 developers working fulltime on it. I don’t plan on writing about the philosophical…
Diary of a new employee
Monday Today was my first day at this stealth startup. The boss (CEO) is a dick, but we’re building great stuff. The physical entertainment/tourism industry is a huge market, and it’s very possible that we’re going to be the next Disneyworld. Tuesday Surprisingly, I feel halfway through my induction already. Things happen at such a fast pace here that it’s a bit…
Website Updates
Every once in a while, I get into this productivity slump where I don’t write code for weeks, and it gets hard to get back into the rhythm of working again. For me, the easiest way out of it is to redesign this website. It’s low-effort (relatively), gets some creative juices flowing and has little risk of not panning out ultimately. And I guess it kinda worked. I spent two whole days…
Personal infrastructure overview
Writing intros to posts is such a hard thing. I’ve spent more time on what to write in this paragraph than the rest of this article. You’re supposed to start with a background and a motivation, and conclude with a sentence that you finally did it, and here is how. I have not done it yet. This thing keeps evolving. As to why I started doing this: it’s fun. It’s fun and…
iOS Shortcuts for Firefly III
I’ve been using the excellent Firefly III to manage my expenses for a while. As a result, I have developed a habit to actively monitor every transaction I do, which, in my opinion is a much better way than using other automated expense managers which can only track your non-cash expenses, without a lot of context. Android had an unofficial app which made it easier to interact with Firefly,…
Moving to an iPhone (for now)
I spent the last two days trying to switch from my three year old Oneplus 3, to a brand new iPhone 11. I thought I was probably done with expensive phones (I count Oneplus as an expensive purchase), but resigned to giving iOS a chance this time around. The Oneplus has served as my phone for 33 months now, and has had its fair share of rough usage. The screen broke twice (and got replaced once).…
Eight months of unemployment and traveling
In March 2019, I left my job at Tower Research Capital , to take a small break from work and live aimlessly for a while. My mental health had been declining steadily for the last few years, and going away for a while seemed like the only way out.
Doing sysadmin things through Terraform
Disclaimer: I have not worked as a sysadmin anywhere in my professional life, nor do I consider myself to be very good at it. I’ve self-hosted a small part of my personal infrastructure (IRC bouncer, VPN server, torrent client, etc) for a while now. These services were set up over the course of a week on the tiniest DigitalOcean instance five years ago, never to be touched again for the next…
Russians are harvesting our faces!
This Forbes article says that Faceapp is evil because they are harvesting user-data: That (Faceapp’s TOS) may not be dangerous and your likeness may stay on Amazon servers in America, as Forbes has determined, but they still own a license to do whatever they want with it. That doesn’t mean the app’s Russian parent company, Wireless Labs, will offer your face to the FSB, but it does have…
Kodi controllers
For the past five years, a Raspberry Pi, running Kodi , has been attached to my TV. The Pi, TV and the software all get updated time to time, but the overall setup has been the same for most of it. +----+ +----+ +-----+ | TV |----(HDMI)----| Pi |--(USB/DLNA)--| HDD | +----+ +----+ +-----+ Controllers I’ve used for Kodi over the years - Desktop Keyboards (Wired/Wireless) Wireless Mouse Web…
Minimalistic npm packages.
A follow up to my previous post , this time we look into some of the lesser known, but widely used javascript packages. Javascript’s NPM package manager, is one of the biggest and fastest growing package manager out there. As of writing this: RubyGems - 145,675 (25 new packages/day) PyPI - 149,111 (104 new packages/day) Packagist - 191,577 (103 new packages/day) Maven Central - 244,143 (149…
Mathematical operations on objects in javascript.
All of these were executed on Node.js 6.9.1 > [] + [] '' Obviously. > [] + {} '[object Object]' Less obvious, but okay. > {} + [] 0 Huh? > {} + {} '[object Object][object Object]' Oh, fuck off. I’d rather just add strings to these from now on: > [] + '' '' > [] + '1' '1' > [] + 'a' 'a' > {} + '' 0 > {} + '1' 1 > {} + 'a' NaN Lol. Okay, subtraction maybe: > [] - [] 0 > {} - {} NaN > [] - ''…
The internet kind of sucks now.
This is mostly a rant, over my increasing frustration with how the internet works nowadays. Maybe it’s just nostalgia with rose-colored glasses. I still want to shout this here in this void. I wasn’t there during the early days of internet. The first time I went online, was probably in 2005. That’s only a little over a decade, but I remember it way too differently from what it is…
Dumb smartphone is the best smartphone.
Quick recap: I dropped my Oneplus 3 six months ago - didn’t get it repaired for a month. Instead, carried this $10 phone with me for a while. My interimn phone
Hillhacks and Hackbeach
Hillhacks, as defined by the website : hillhacks is held in the lap of the stunning Dhauladhar Himalayas every summer. People from different places, walks of life and lines of thought come together to share, collaborate and learn. Hackers talk code. Artists share their creativity. Students join in from schools and colleges to learn new skills. Locals and globals mix and mingle. We build things…
Link etiquettes for web developers.
This post might seem like nitpicking, or unnecessary to a lot of people, but it’s frustrating when links don’t work how they’re expected to. DO NOT use <span> or <div> tags and then proceed to handle their click events. Use proper <a> tags. This breaks so many things! People can’t use them if they have disabled javascript or it just failed to load. Ctrl-click will not open…
Wi-Fi positioning woes
Alice lives in India. She has super-cheap cellular internet (less than $0.2/GB on some networks). Cheap enough for it to be her daily driver, using a number of portable Wi-Fi routers, which just sit on her desk. And since it is so cheap and portable and convenient and long-lasting, she just carries it everywhere in her purse, wherever she travels. Alice also faces an a peculiar amount of problems…
STDIN inputs via Sublime Text (sort of)
I love Sublime Text. I really do. I can put a ring on it if it had any corporeal form. I’ve been using it so much, that trying to work on anything else is kind of a pain. And yet, when dealing with STDIN inputs, the magic falters. This method describes a workaround to give inputs without a prompt. Recently, I tried my hand on Competitive Programming, and though I didn’t get really good…