Author: Pradeep

  • Weekly Notes 50/2024

    I think of these last few weeks as standing on the cusp of 2024, waiting for the calendar to turn, so that you can then jump over to 2025. To stretch that metaphor, I am anxious about that jump.

    In a previous post, in a section I titled “Internet is Broken” had spoken about how I was participating in various parts of the Internet because the information that I sought was found in these multiple broken parts of the Internet.

    I went to reading for a couple of days uninstalling most of these social apps. I reinstalled them yesterday.

    Work

    As the year winds down, many things are coming to an end and I am seeing new shoots appear.

    Reading

    I am listening to Haruki Murakami’s latest book, The City and its Uncertain Walls on Audible. I love the slow descriptive narrative style. I am yet to finish the book or to understand where the story is headed. But, I love his keen sense of observation.

    I am reading Rolland Allen’s book The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper. It begins with the story of the Moleskine.

    I also picked up a book from the PMC Library at Vidya Nagar. This was a book called The Ikigai Journey.

    Writing

    I wrote the fourth edition of Towards Eternity, a newsletter I am writing on healthtech.

    I have started re-writing the novel.

  • Weekly Notes 47/2024

    I was thinking about how to order the Weekly Notes for this week when I saw an alert for an order of T-shirts I bought today.

    Internet is Broken/Free Your Mind/Believe

    Internet is Broken

    I spent the last week on four social media platforms like X. These were BlueSky, Threads, Mastodon, and Warpcast.

    Each of these platform has a different kind of audience. The mindset and world view of the audience on each of these platforms is also different. This makes it difficult to share the same thing across them without light editing of the content. In that sense, at least temporarily, the Internet is Broken.

    BlueSky has an overwhelming number of media and science professionals. These are people who have got tired dispelling the mis/disinformation on X. While many of these people maintained a presence on both platforms for a while, the election has pushed them firmly to BlueSky.

    Threads has a calm and welcoming vibe that reminds me of the 2007-08 Twitter. It also has many people who were pushed by Meta to try this platform from Facebook or Instagram. So, there are many people here who have posted once and then gone away and you do not know who to follow.

    Mastodon has the open source community or indie hacker vibe. I like this personally.

    Warpcast has the crypto vibe. The only person that I follow here was Venkatesh Rao. Since I am following his Substack and Notes there, this was the easiest to uninstall. The price of bitcoin is rising again and Warpcast is becoming really active again.

    X now makes me feel like an underperformer. It seems all the people here are running several companies together, getting in shape, or having deep philosophical insights. Many are doing all of the above at the same time!

    I have been also checking out posts on Substack Notes. This seems to be closest to me, intellectually. But, I am still figuring it out.

    Overall, though, X continues to be a place to be for a space enthusiast like me. There are already many companies who post updates there which makes it easier to follow. I would love it if companies post updates on their website like they do on X. But, we are not there yet.

    Free Your Mind

    Start reading long form. Books. Long blog posts. Essays.

    Believe

    Asking myself this question – What should I believe?

    Reading

    I finished Chapter 1 of David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity. We discussed it earlier today in the Reading Circle.

  • Weekly Notes 46/2024

    I used to write these Weekly Notes on my older blog, Parallel Spirals. From now on, I will begin writing them here. I do not want to import the old Weekly Notes.

    Lunarpunk

    This week was mostly spent trying to understand lunarpunk. I wanted to understand this to take forward and conclude the story of Meera in my novel, Red Mars, Grey Moon, and Green Earth.

    I was following Venkatesh Rao who put me on this video about The History and Philosophy of Cypherpunk.

    This talk mentioned lunarpunk and Rachel-Rose O’Leary who would speak at the conference about it. When I searched on YouTube to see if she had spoken elsewhere, I saw this talk she gave at CoinDesk.

    This seems to point to lunarpunk as a crypto response to solarpunk. A broader Google search revealed otherwise.

    My understanding of lunarpunk is based on these Tumblr posts:

    1. What’s Solarpunk and Lunarpunk? This article answers the question from the point of view of aesthetics and as a genre.
    2. Some preliminary thoughts on lunarpunk v solarpunk. This looked at the aesthetics and props that can be used to hint that this is a lunarpunk story.

    This understanding has helped me to go ahead with Meera’s story in my novel.

    Reading

    Saurabh created a WhatsApp group for people interested in reading David Deutsch’s book The Beginning of Infinity. We decided to begin reading the first chapter and discuss it next Saturday (23 November 2024) as the delivery time for the paperback version on Amazon was long.

    My progress on reading Sandeep Mall’s Finding the Oasis has also been slow.

    Writing

    I wrote the fifth chapter of my novel Red Mars, Grey Moon, and Green Earth on thinkdeli.

  • Weekly Notes 45/2024

    I felt like this was a rich week for me. I got a lot done at work and it has reached a steady cadence. Below, you will find what I did when I was off work. Summarizing it here leaves me with a good feeling about going into the weekend.

    Health

    In the beginning of the week, I was interested in learning about health supplements. I asked the question whether I needed it or not. The answer came out to be – only a few simple ones – Vitamin D3, Seacod, and Calcimax-P. I buy these for the kids anyway, so not too much of an additional cost.

    Newsletter Nerd

    I have been interested in building a newsletter on the side. I am working with Saurabh at C4E to build a health and health-tech newsletter. While my space newsletter will remain free, I am spending the next six months or so writing for a business. I want to be able to help you to build your own newsletter at the end of this.

    Community

    In the late 2000s, you could get on X and find a person who was interested in something that you were and work together. I was wondering how this happened now. The answer seems to be on the cozy web on WhatsApp and Telegram.

    I am part of a few such communities but discovering these communities is hard.

    Shephali Bhatt wrote about how the community is the conduit for creators in The Economic Times. A week ago Kommune had also put out their report, Consumed, that spoke of these trends, among others.

    Pranay Kotasthane of The Takshashila Institution wrote an X thread on what makes a great digital community that is worth reading.

    One of the communities that I looked at again was the IndieWeb community. I like reading Manuel Moreale’s People & Blogs series. I hear Jeff Triplett’s appeal to publish and write more on blogs:

    PS: Write and publish before you write your own static site generator or perfect blogging platform. We have lost billions of good writers to this side quest because they spend all their time working on the platform instead of writing.

    I have been fortunate to join the community at thinkdeli where I have been writing the first draft of my novel publicly. More on this below.

    I tried to read two of David Deutsch’s book and did not get it. If you have a book circle that is interested in reading his work, I would love to join in. Please leave a comment on this blog or reach out to me on X or Mastodon.

    Reading

    There is some issue with the Audible billing that I have not been able to fix. I re-listened to Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman again.

    I have been reading two books on writing, as I write:

    • On Writing by Stephen King
    • Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

    I have been reading Finding the Oasis by Sandeep Mall as a way to look at health, wealth, and relationships in an integrated way.

    I read Spacecraft Navigation – A Mini Guidebook by Sumana Mukherjee. This helped me revise some of the concepts regarding satellite and spacecraft navigation. I discovered this via her LinkedIn post. I enjoyed reading about how interstellar spacecrafts navigate.

    Writing

    I went back to Zettelkasten again. I still have the stacks of notecards at home which my daughter borrows from me sometimes for her own creative endeavor.

    I had gone through several rabbit holes in the past – starting from the book by Sonke Ahrens. I then went on to watching YouTube videos of Scott P Scheper. He held my attention for a while.

    The latest writer who has captured my attention is Bob Doto. I am still reading through his writings on the Zettelkasten. Doto’s book A System for Writing is very expensive.

    These are the links to the novel that is titled, Green Earth, Grey Moon, and Red Mars.

    Tumblr tells me that I have posted 1000 notes there.

    I want to return to writing the space newsletter with a refreshed format.

  • Weekly Notes 44/2024

    This week is a week of a lot of travel. I traveled to Mumbai to attend my high school reunion. I also went to two bookshops – Kitabi Chai (X and Mastodon) and Pagdandi.

    Writing

    Started writing for NaNoWriMo 2024.

    1. Chapter 1

    2. Chapter 2

    Reading

    I am listening to Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman again.

  • High School Reunion

    I went for my high school reunion on Saturday, 26 October 2024. The high school reunion was in the school premises in Mumbai. I was going to school after 22 years.

    I met many of my teachers there and a few friends from my batch. We met the support staff, some of who are still working there.

    There were batches from 2000 to 2014. Since I was from batch of 2002 there weren’t too many people I know. But, meeting the teachers was a great pleasure. I didn’t speak much though. I just return to the way I was in school when I go there.

  • Weekly Notes 43/2024

    I have not been very disciplined about writing these Weekly Notes in 2024. I have not enjoyed writing on WordPress. But, the alternatives are either too technical or too expensive or the process to pay for them from India is too convoluted.

    But, I do not want the rest of the year to be the same. I want to be consistent. This is a small effort towards that.

    Writing

    I have had the honor of writing three articles for The Hindu. These are:

    1. ISRO has a problem: too many rockets, too few satellites to launch (paywalled)
    2. Since Chandrayaan-3, what has India’s space programme been up to? (paywalled)
    3. New rocket, plus moon and Venus missions, herald new beginnings (paywalled)

    All three were edited by the brilliant Vasudevan Mukunth. The third one specifically needed a lot of that editing brilliance.

    This allows me to get back to my weekly newsletter which will begin again next week.

    I am also planning to write daily for National Novel Writing Month 2024. This will be posted on thinkdeli.com.

    Reading

    I am presently reading Stephen King’s On Writing.

    I recently finished listening to Chetan Bhagat’s 11 Rules for Life. I picked it up on Audible, which is still advertising it to me despite it being in my library. I found the advice neither philosophical like the Stoic self-helps nor generalist self-help. It seems somewhere in the middle. Closer to the generalist self-help but slightly above.

    The second half of this year has been better but my tsundoku is growing everyday.

  • Onam Pookalams 2024

    Thiruvonam Pookalam

  • Pooradam

    We are in Kerala on account of Onam. Celebrated Pooradam which is Children’s Onam today.

    Flower carpet made for Pooradam Day. Photo: Pradeep Mohandas

  • A Return to Regularly Scheduled Programming

    My last blog post on this blog was on 3 November 2023. Since then, I have been writing on another website. I did not post about it here because it was an experiment.

    I am back now.

    I had moved from WordPress to Blot. Blot is a service that allows you to write in an editor of your choice. You can then upload the document on Google Docs or Dropbox, and the Blot will publish it.

    I had an itch to try out a service other than WordPress. I was partly impressed by the IndieWeb movement. I was in love with open source software. I was in love with simple software.

    This is a post to help you catch up with what has happened since I last wrote here.

    I am still living in Pune with my family. I went on two drives this year – one to Tamhini Ghat and another to Panshet Dam. I celebrated my son’s first birthday in Pune.

    I had the honor of having two articles published in The Hindu – one on ISRO Chairman Dr. S Somanath’s comment on having more rockets than satellites, and a recap of space events on the occasion of National Space Day. Thanks to VM for the opportunity.

    My reading has been slowing down this year. So has my listening on Audible. This implies that my writing has also been affected. My space newsletter writing has also not been regular. My work-related writing has improved after a slump in the first half of 2024. I am very happy with Q3, 2024.

    I will move all the posts I wrote on the other blog to this one. I will link to them on my weekly updates so that you can read them.