I have been thinking about writing about my full name for a while, especially after this incident in which an AI hallucinated my full name. Now that I have a post titled with my full name, it should help our future overlords! Yes, my name is 3 first names. Mine, my fathers and...

It was my birthday week. I took the day off and didn’t do much. Anju took me to Mai Mai on MG Road. I loved the food. I also liked that we could sit outside. It’s rarely possible in Bangalore these days. It’s become so dusty. We went out for dinner the night...

I have been looking for a network protocol stack that can be run in addition to the regular TCP/IP network at TVC. Kiran has been exploring Meshtastic, mainly to connect the sensors to the Home Assistant that TVC runs. We have very poor cell phone connection and two BSNL wired internet connections, one...

It feels like a major life turn after 35, even though I thought 35 was like half-life. I haven’t crossed the second half-life yet. I think there are a couple more years until the second half-life, but it still feels like a big turn after 35. I didn’t think much about 45, but...

This week was good. I got back to my routine after two weeks of travel and a hectic schedule. Work is progressing well; I did two P.T. sessions, a game, and a run walk. I am still away from a five day active week. But I think I am consistently reaching three to...

It’s been a crazy but good week. It’s also been a fun week. Last Friday was a long class at APU before the midterm holidays, which kind of tired me out, so I spent most of Saturday at home resting.

I gathered a group of folks and did the BOF session at IndiaFOSS/2026. The idea behind the BoF session wasn’t to present anything, but to solicit ideas and provocations to improve the micro-granting scene in India. There is a real need of microgrants in India. i.e., we do have big-scale grant givers and...

In one of my earlier blog posts, I mentioned that I have become more routine, more protective of my time, and indirectly more productive since becoming a parent. That continues. I totally get how Parvathy feels in this video. I am still not a proper morning person. I wake up around 6 AM....

It’s been a busy week, but not as busy as last week, mostly because Monday was a holiday and I got some rest. Uma was away over the weekend with her Atte to celebrate. Belated Ganesha Chaturthi, if you celebrate. As a kid, my parents celebrated only Gouri Habba; Ganeshana Habba was there...

I have been looking for a full-fledged smartwatch for a while now. I have a Pebble and a BangleJS; I use them all the time. But they are semi-smartwatches. I wanted a full-fledged watch that lasts for days and works fully offline. This post isn’t a review; that will take time. This one...

It’s been a hectic week. I had quite a bit of work both at work and at home. I’m still lagging on my home TODO list. Monday is a holiday, so I should be able to cover it.

The primary reason I bought this watch was the ability to display and navigate using proper offline maps. Garmin doesn’t have maps for India. But the OpenStreetMaps community has maps that can be loaded into Garmin. There are many community-built web services, such as Thukke’s OSM Downloads and Userbeam, that provide Indian maps...

It’s been a good week and a busy one too. I have started contributing to Pucar as a technologist. I will blog more once I settle down. It’s been a busy week, and it looks like September is going to be a busy month. Hopefully I will continue with my physical activities.

It’s been a good but busy week. Lots of work got done. Though I think I am still lagging according to my TODO list. On a side note, I have been fairly active, with standard two days of P.T. and two days of pickleball. I have not made any progress on running. I...

My interest in LLMs has increasingly shifted towards smaller models, small in terms of size and their ability to run on modest local machines. For some time now, I have been using models with fewer than 40 B parameters on my machines in some quantized way. Then I came across BitNet, a project...

With the Peppo team here in Bangalore and other commitments, the week was crazy busy. I met at least half of the Peppo team in person for the first time. We have a great team at Peppo. As Mohammed said in one of our conversations, the Peppo team is not only talented but...

I wanted a way to represent workouts by the muscle groups they activate. Most applications where you log do it. I thought it must be easy with SVG images. It wasn’t as easy. First, I had to get an image that is remake-friendly. I used this drawing by OpenStax & Tomáš Kebert &...

I ended the Netflix subscription. We have not been using it for a long time, and we were just paying; finally, this month I ended it. Sleep has won for me. If required, I can subscribe again. We still have Amazon Prime, mostly because of the free shipping it provides. That said, in...

It’s been a hectic but active week. As usual, I continued with my two P.T sessions. I played a game of Pickleball on Thursday. I also ran twice. This week has been my most active week in quite some time. I took some time to write a blog post about return to running....

I have not been running. The last time I ran anything serious was a decade back. The max I have been doing is walking. Though I must say I love walking, especially with friends and family. It’s a great way to have conversations. I tried running again a few years back and dropped...

This week has been good. It’s been a busy week, but it has been good except today. I typed a wrong Git command and pushed without verifying. Initially, it looked like I lost a couple of weeks’ work, but thankfully, since Git is distributed, we had a copy and recovered without much hurt....

Andhra Pradesh and Telangana are the least explored states in the South for me. I have been adding places of interest to my list. Gandikota has been on that list for a while. I wanted to do it post-summer and during monsoon so it would be cooler. Monsoon has not really arrived, though...

I have been to and seen many protests. But this one (#cjpprotests) is very different from the rest. I see them not only facing so much harshness but also having so much fun and so much camaraderie. It makes me jealous. All power to the younger generation. Though I am young at heart,...

Overall, a good but hectic week. I spent time planning for the next few months. Planning is my comfort zone. When things are planned, I sleep better. It doesn’t mean I can’t do unplanned things; I can, and I often do. But I like the regular parts of life to have a thought-out...

Photos taken on a mobile phone can include metadata. I like it for various reasons. My various projects depend on metadata, such as date, location, orientation, etc. But more and more, the phones are removing that metadata when I transmit it. Some of them also change the file name. But I care, and...

I started Weekly Notes in 2022, with WN-29/2022. With this week’s note, we will complete four full years. Except for a couple of notes published on Saturdays, I have been on time, publishing on Fridays. In one of the IndieWeb Bangalore discussions, I wrote something that I think that sums up my approach...

I did SIR enumeration online. The application seems to have been written by someone who hates users and doesn’t want them to get the work done1. I have had the same EPIC number since 2002, and it is still valid. I have kept my information updated over the years. Yet, I had to...

It’s been a hectic week. Lots of work, meetings, and things to get done. I still have things on my list. I might have to work a bit tomorrow. I continued with my regular P.T sessions. I could also play last Saturday, which was fun. BTW, welcome to the second half of 2026.

I was looking for an alternative to Tinkercad to simulate building, coding, and running Arduino projects. SimulIDE Circuit Simulator seemed like an ideal candidate. SimulIDE is a simple real time electronic circuit simulator, intended for hobbyist or students to learn and experiment with analog and digital electronic circuits and microcontrollers. It supports PIC,...

Embeddings are numerical representations of real-world objects, such as words, phrases, text, images, audio, and video. Since the real world is so complex, these representations are usually vector arrays of floating-point numbers. This helps computers process meaning, context, and semantic relationships using distances and directions between vectors. Word2Vec and FastText Embeddings are learned...

It was a short work week. I took Thursday off because we had some registration related work in Denkanikottai. The morning drive was easy and fun, but then, like any government work, it didn’t get done on time. So we entered the city during the peak evening traffic, with some rain. It was...

I wanted to visit TVC to monitor the construction of the house and help Kiran set up the fiber backbone for internet connectivity. TVC is roughly 90 kms from MG Road. It’s a good distance with variation to test my Yamaha and see how it performs over a long distance. If it can...

I am back from Chennai. It was fun meeting lots of students, hearing what they think, etc. This time I met some old-time friends, which was a bonus. Conducting the workshop was also fun. I hope to build on that workshop to demystify LLMs further and offer it again. In the last week,...

I sent this email to all workshop attendees. It made sense to publish it as a post as well. Thank you for attending the “Back to Basics: Build Your Own LLM from Scratch” session. It was great to see so much curiosity and many questions in the room, the feedback many of you...

This time, my trip to Chennai was also a road trip. I got a ride with friends in the car, and it also gave us lots of time for conversation. As we were going to the convocation, the discussions turned to education and degrees. Though there are lots of folks dissing college education...

I did a workshop titled “Back to Basics: Build Your Own LLM from Scratch”, which kind of included some basic theory on how a transformer works, and then building a very small LLM. The idea was to demystify an LLM (or transformer) by understanding what goes on and then building one to deepen...

I am at IITM/Chennai for Paradox. I have been here since 2022, since the first Paradox. The fest and the crowd have grown bigger. I came by car with friends A&S. We took Old Madras Road and stopped at Sriperumbudur for a quick visit to the Rajiv Gandhi memorial.

FlavorGraph is a large-scale graph network that combines data from over a million recipes with chemical compound information from 1,500+ flavor molecules to predict ingredient pairings. It uses graph embedding methods to represent foods as dense vectors, enabling data-driven food pairing suggestions that go beyond human or chef intuition. In FlavorGraph, the chemical...

It’s been a good week in general. The work schedule is back under control. I am getting back to normalcy there. I also played after a long time on Sunday. We played singles again. It was tough but fun. It tests one’s stamina and technique more than doubles. I enjoyed it. I am...

We have updated Uma’s playlist on her radio. It’s no baby rhymes now. It has carefully selected songs. Currently, U2026 has songs from Kannada, Malayalam, English, and Italian. I have heard all of them and read lyrics as well to make sure it’s friendly. It is tough to filter out songs for toddlers,...

A CBSE student raised a question about his misplaced answer sheets. Instead of empathy or a call for accountability, he got called anti-national. This is about the machinery that turns complaints into betrayal, and reminds us that hate does not stay contained; it will come to your home too.

I have proposed BoF (Birds of Feather) session and discussion at IndiaFOSS/2026. The proposal is yet to be approved as of today. I am logging the same content here for readers of my blog post and also for record keeping. I will update in both places if there are any changes.

This Saturday, we drove to Palakkad to meet Pradeep and Dhanya. It was a short morning walk and breakfast meet. We met at the fort, walked around, and chit-chatted while having breakfast at Indraprasta. The fort is well-maintained, and the walking path around the fort is good for a casual morning walk. Thanks...

I was in Chennai for the first half of the week. I couldn’t get a confirmed 1st or 2nd class train ticket. So I had to fly from Kochi. It’s such a waste of time and money. Chennai is hot, hotter than Thrissur. But I mostly worked from Indoors, so it was okay....

Every application I love has some kind of power-user mode where I can add my own code or scripting to make it useful to me. Simple examples are Firefox with its addons or VLC with its plugins. Ideally, any significant or valuable application should have such a feature. But as a developer or...

We are in Thrissur. We left at around 2 AM and reached by 11 AM, with two breaks. The drive was comfortable. The traffic was friendly this time. Echo is getting old, and Uma is more active now. So the breaks are a necessity now. Thrissur is hot, but it’s been raining since...

My first, full-fledged in-class course at APU ended this week. The final round of assessments is yet to be done. I am in the process of it. Most students have done well. I have done physical workshops, special classes, a bunch of short-term courses, but this was my first in-class, full-fledged course. Traveling...

It’s been a busy week, both at work and at home. I think the heat also made the week much more tiring, but thankfully, it rained a bit yesterday. Hopefully we will get more rains. I spent a bit of time organizing the NMG/2026 introductions and making them. It’s almost done except for...

NMG 2026 results are out. If you are a grantee, congratulations. This is the 9th edition of 2026 and the biggest both in terms of total grant and the number of grantees. Initial emails have been sent. Today, I started sending some introductory emails so fund transfers can happen. The actual fund transfer...

Thanks for your patience, everyone. It took a lot of work to process this year’s applications. There were lots of good applications. We are a micro-grant, but that said, this is the biggest year for NMG, with 5.6 lakhs in the grant pool, thanks to friends of NMG – Shweta/Ashwini(60K), Divya(25K), Miss.Y(30K) and...