Some poems can remind you to just pause and reflect on life, here is one of that kind

Every other tech blogger have already published their setups at the beginning of the year. I am little late for the party, anyway here is mine.

Using Vowifi to save some juice on android.

I always wanted to cast android to my linux machine. It is especially useful in situations like watching the videos that is already on my phone in a bigger screen without really copying them over or syncing them using tools like syncthing. Oh too much to worry about. I wanted something simpler. Here is a neat tool that lets you do that the same without hassle of connecting over the network (btw you can do that too).

I switched to an open source keyboard for more than an year now, rocking the trusty old ‘Openboard valencia’. I don’t want bigger corporations to peek on what I write (Here is a short post on that). It was pretty good but lacked a lot of features that modern keyboards provide. In a new hunt for a better alternative, I stumbled upon this fork of Openboard that is still being updated.

I ran a speed test on my website recently and found my site too slow in loading images. Never thought the size or the format of the images would matter so much. Thanks to this post for giving me the idea of using our good old Imagemagik command : mogrify -resize 1024x768 -quality 85 *.jpg And then I decided to convert them to ‘webp’ and finally stripping the metadata to further decrease the file size.

Creating bootable usb using woeusb in linux

While digging the usual rabbit holes of the web, I found a collection of free api’s that you can mess around. One of them that really struck me was the joke api. For every api request that you send, you will get a random joke. You can even customize them as per your liking, as if you want a specific joke from a certain categories like Dark, Pun, Christmas etc.

Ever got frustrated by that Spotify ad that pops up every now and then!. Me too and there is away out. Take your all music and listen to them ad free wherever you go with this little beast called Navidrome. It’s an opensource player that is loaded with all features that you will ever need. Never spend an other dime for stupid subscriptions. The only requirement is that you must have a server of some sort either online or the local home server.

Here is a simple bash script that let you listen to internet radio stations all without leaving the convenience of your terminal. Prereqisites # The script works with dmenu so you need to have it installed. Uses Mpv to play the audio Steps # Download script by running wget https://github.com/Nandu-Chandran/.scripts/blob/master/radio.sh Then move it to your user bin by mv radio.sh ~/.local/bin Finally chmod +x radio.sh to give permissions. Radio urls are copied from online radio sites.

“രൂപത്തിലും ഭാവത്തിലും അസാധാരണനായ ആ മനുഷ്യൻ എന്നെ കാണുവാൻ ഓഫീസിൽ വന്നു. ജടകെട്ടിയ തലമുടിയും വിടർന്നു വിലസുന്ന കണ്ണുകളും മൃദുസ്മേരവുമുള്ള അദ്ദേഹം തിരുവസ്ത്രത്തിലും ഒതുങ്ങാതെനിന്നു. മൗനമായിരുന്നു കൂടുതലും, ഇടയ്ക്ക് സംഗീതംപോലെ വാക്കുകൾ തുളുമ്പി. ഹ്രസ്വമായ സന്ദർശനം കഴിഞ്ഞുമടങ്ങുമ്പോൾ അദ്ദേഹം പാദുകങ്ങൾ ധരിച്ചിട്ടില്ലെന്ന കാര്യം ശ്രദ്ധിച്ചു. ഓഫീസിനു വെളിയിൽ അഴിച്ചിട്ടതാകാമെന്നാണ് ആദ്യം കരുതിയത്. അദ്ദേഹത്തിനു ചെരുപ്പില്ലെന്ന് പിന്നീട് മനസ്സിലായി. ഓ, നമ്മൾ സാധാരണമനുഷ്യരുടെ തോന്നലുകൾ എത്ര സരളം. അദ്ദേഹം ചെരുപ്പഴിച്ചിട്ടത് ഭൂമിക്കു വെളിയിൽ തന്നെയായിരുന്നു. ഈ ഗ്രഹത്തിലേക്കു വലതുകാൽവച്ച് കയറുംമുൻപ് പാദുകങ്ങൾ സ്വർഗ്ഗത്തിൽ അഴിച്ചിട്ട ഒരാൾ, ഇതാ മുഴുവൻ ഭൂമിയും ഒരു ക്ഷേത്രമായി കാണുന്ന ഒരാൾ അതിൽ ചെരുപ്പിട്ടു ചവിട്ടുന്നതെങ്ങനെ?”

Came across this random youtube comment that I found interesting… Hinduism is Science and a theism at the same time How? The Universe (Brahmand) consists of 4 things Param atma (Energy) Param tatva (Matter) Maha kal (Time ) Kal (Black space) (Today Science says Space and Time are not different they are different attributes of 1 thing and Hindus use 1 word “Kal”) Param Atma Param tatva Both are Param (Supreme) Hence equal Atma = Tatva Energy = Matter E = M E = MC^2 (After Solar formation) Both are Immortal Both can not be created nor destroyed only translated ( or incarnated) into another form (or body )

All the hormones in your body are made from the same basic stuff, which is called LDL cholesterol. But what happens when you’re in one of these long-term states of stress is that cortisol steals the other hormones’ LDL cholesterol. Because it thinks you’re under attack, and in a state of crisis, your body prioritizes the generation of cortisol. Your body can’t tell the difference between emotional stress, physical stress and nutritional stress.

My Rating: 4.5/5 # Marcus Aurelius asked: “You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life?” our phone during our child’s bath time, or lose our ability to enjoy a nice moment without a frantic urge to document it for a virtual audience. checking your “likes” is the new smoking. from his well-worn path through the world of tech to become Michael Zeiler’s famous pecking pigeon experiments from the 1970s that rewards delivered unpredictably are far more enticing than those delivered with a known pattern.

My Rating: 4/5 # “Dying,” Morrie suddenly said, “is only one thing to be sad over, Mitch. Living unhappily is something else. So many of the people who come to visit me are unhappy.” The tension of opposites? “Life is a series of pulls back and forth. You want to do one thing, but you are bound to do something else. Something hurts you, yet you know it shouldn’t. You take certain things for granted, even when you know you should never take anything for granted.

Say you have a bunch of products in your Amazon cart. The price of such products varies so much that you end up checking them every now and then. It’s such a pain to keep track of the prices of each one of them individually. Here is how a small script can simplify this process, once you feed it the product link, it looks for the product online and notifies you through the mail if its price falls well below the price you have set.

Disclaimer: This is an ’excerpt’ from an article that I found on web. And I don’t own any of it’s content. To talk of love in these times of inestimable despair sounds cruel. But the current pandemic has also revealed to us the enduring, loving nature of humans. When the regime, the system and those responsible for our well-being failed, love, compassion and human understanding took over. It is thus not inappropriate to speak of love in these tough times.

For the past year or so, I have been trying to find open-source alternatives to the apps that I use on daily basis. Especially trying to replace the ones that need gazillions of permission even before installing, nowadays even a photo editor needs a microphone and GPS access (;¬_¬) In fact, apps know too much about you, for instance, most of the keyboard apps that you use commonly are loaded with spyware to track words that you type.

Control a led light using ESP32 # Recently I just bought a new ESP32 dev board to tinker with its wireless capabilities. After setting it up in the Arduino IDE and running into some basics I tried building something that is actually useful. How about controlling a device remotely, maybe switching off lights in my room without getting off my bed. That sounds cool right. After a liitle bit of googling, I found this pretty easy to setup.

Thanks for visiting my website. This is my very first blog post ever. I intend to jot down things I’ve been passionate about throughout my life. I’ve always had this notion of getting my mind curious over many things. This includes me fiddling around as an electronic hobbyist or as someone searching the midnight sky for shooting stars. This will be a place for all those curiosities lurking within me. So consider this blog as a playbook of ideas where I can allow my thoughts to run wild and bring out something useful down the line.