Category: Digital

  • Kantha

    We used to listen to Kantha soon after our marriage. It was on our playlist. We used to also listen to this song along with Aalayal Thara Venam also by Masala Coffee.

    The song went off our playlist for a while as the kinds of songs we heard changed over the years. The Hindi-speaking world was introduced to this song in 2021 through the Dice media series, Little Things in Season 4.

    The recent resurgence of the song on Instagram was with a viral dance video nicely choreogragraphed by Alexander Noel. There are various spin-off versions of the dance steps you would have seen on your Instagram feed (if you’re addicted).

    This spurned some interesting videos that went beyond the dance moves and into the meaning of the song like the one you see below.

    It’s always great when things that you enjoyed listening to surfaces again and gains something of a cult status.

  • Setting up my Obsidian v 3.0

    I had a long weekend here in Pune owing to a holiday on Monday on the occasion of Eid. I spent my Sunday afternoon trying to learn the fundamentals of EMACS. I was trying to see what I would like to use to set up my note making stack. I wanted to learn EMACS to try and set up the EMACS Writing Studio.

    I learnt a lot of key bindings. I took the effort to learn about key bindings (or keyboard shortcuts) for the various programmes I used. I learnt that I needed to spend some time to learn programming so that I could better understand what I was doing.

    Obsidian has held a strange attraction for me because of its purple coloured logo. I love the colour purple. If you visit my blog’s URL, the purple coloured hyperlinks are a dead giveaway. I decided to give Obsidian another try.

    I had tried setting up Obsidian twice before this. The first was Nick Milo’s Linking your Thinking system. I do not know why I abandoned that practice but I moved to Roam Research after trying it.

    Last year, I gave Obsidian another try after reading Binny V A’s Zettelkasten and the Art of Knowledge Management. I knew I wanted Obsidian to have a place in my note making stack. This time I tried Odysseas’ system.

    I added only a few notes in the last one year. I did not seem to have used Odysseas’ system. I continued the practice of adding notes to Roam Research and also set up Readwise to export its highlights to Roam Research in this period. This pushed my use of Roam Research.

    My wife asked me what I had got in my life out of consuming social media, videos, books, etc. She said that she saw no return for all the time I had invested. I wanted to start consuming in a way that it showed a return for the time I invest, if not for entertainment. This is the role that I want Obsidian to play.

    In the aforementioned consumption binge my wife accused me of, I remembered a channel I came across called Wanderloots. I remembered a sentence he said in one of my videos. It will allow me to measure my productivity in terms of “permanent notes” I wrote and not in terms of the input.

    He has a playlist that shows how he sets up his Obsidian with a mixture of mixes Zettelkasten, CODE by Tiago Forte, and Obsidian’s system of tags and topics to set up his digital garden.

    I plan to tweak his system further so that I can use Obsidian as a place to read, think, and write. I plan to use discretion in dumping things into Obsidian for now.

    If you visit his YouTube channel now, he is talking about setting up an AI locally on your machine to work with your notes. I am presently enjoying consuming his back catalog of content.

  • My Experiments with ChatGPT and Claude

    I spent January 2025 reflecting on what jobs Artificial Intelligence (AI) would eliminate. It was at this time that news was circulating about astrology apps were doing extremely well while the situation elsewhere seemed bleak.

    These apps had astrologers chatting or talking to you in exchange of money on a per minute basis. The famous astrologers seem to be charging in the region of more than INR 10,000 for 3 readings. The rate increased as the astrologer gained fame.

    I asked ChatGPT to create my Vedic astrology birth chart. It created one that seemed to match the ones created using online birth chart calculators. When I tried it later, it could not generate a chart as a python module that it depended on had failed. It seems to be working again now.

    When the birth chart creator failed, I used the online software to get planetary positions at the time of my birth and fed it into ChatGPT. I then went ahead and asked it questions like people usually ask an astrologer (or how I assumed people usually do).

    It did read the chart and the text incorrectly sometimes and I had to point out the mistake and asked it to revise. ChatGPT’s predictions seemed reasonable with some to very little overlap with my own experience (as was expected).

    After a gap in February owing to my surgery, I tried again this past week while I was recovering. I had two long conversations with ChatGPT based on two prompts I had asked.

    I copied the responses into a text file and made two files from the two prompts.

    I was hearing many things about Claude and wanted to try that out as well, as a note making tool. So, I fed it the two text files and asked it to compare the two documents and provide me the difference between the two documents.

    It guessed correctly that the first document was general in nature and provided large life guidelines. The second document was more specific with timelines and answers to specific situational questions.

    I then asked it to summarize and provide the top three highlights and the summary of the predictions and suggestions provided in the documents. It did a reasonable but not a thorough job of it.

    These were both done on free versions of these models.

    I learnt some interesting things about astrology and its practice during this experiment. North Indians seem to be using astrology to predict career paths, relationship styles, health possibilities etc. South Indians but specifically in Kerala, people seem to be using astrology to solve particular issues in their life as they arise.

    Getting back to ChatGPT and Claude, I liked the ChatGPT use case better.

    I still want to do what Claude does myself. I think and write together. If Claude makes a note out of a wall of text, it has not really helped me understand the nuances of that text. That is where human effort still needs to be applied.

  • A challenge of blog questions

    Thejesh tagged me in a challenge of blog questions. I enjoyed reading his replies and I have never been tagged in such a challenge.

    Why did you start blogging in the first place?

    I started blogging because I was tired of crafting websites from HTML and I was not good with CSS. I loved the fact that I could choose a background and start writing. The focus moved from making to writing.

    There were times that I missed the making and tried to go back to it. There were times when the ghost of designing got into me and I would spend hours crafting my website. But, I felt that writing is where I should focus my energies on writing.

    What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? Have you blogged on other platforms before?

    The blog is presently hosted on WordPress. I think the reason is the same as the one above. I loved twiddling the controls behind the scenes of various blogging platforms. I realized, like above, that I should focus my energies on writing. So, I decided to stick to WordPress.

    I have hosted my blog posts on Blogger, LiveJournal, Tumblr, Posterous, Vox, Roller, Ghost, Blot, and finally on WordPress.

    How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?

    I write my posts on two platforms. Most of the posts that you read here are on WordPress’ native Gutenberg editor or Visual editor.

    I write some of my posts using WordLand. I am using this tool to write the posts in my Status Updates category.

    When do you feel most inspired to write?

    Whenever I am not sleeping. I don’t think I can survive without writing.

    Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

    I usually only read once more after I complete writing. I let my thoughts simmer before I write the draft.

    What’s your favorite post on your blog?

    Some of my posts that I love are about things I do with my daughter (1,2) or ones about note making or Indian Philosophy.

    Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

    I am twiddling with the controls in the WordPress admin panel all the time. This is based on curiosity and not on anything as sophisticated as a plan. Making a blogroll is an area of interest.

    Who’s next?

    I want to tag these people not because they would take part in a challenge like this but because I would love to hear about how they write and think about the art of blogging.

  • Clicking a link rabbit hole

    Manu spoke to James for his People and Blogs (P&B) series. This is one of the branches that I clicked through that went down a pretty interesting rabbit hole.

    One of the reasons I wanted to read James’ blog after reading the interview was because he is a technical writer, just like me. I loved his blogroll, called Wander. There were many pages that I loved wandering around on.

    Another implementation of a blogroll that this reminded me about was the one on Doc Searls’ blog. This dynamic blogroll on his blog’s right side bar is built by Dave Winer and uses some OPML magic.

    The Library Movement

    One of the blogs I found on James’ Wander page was Marisabel’s Konfetti Explorations. One of the recent blog post entries was about the 5 Laws of Library Science, formulated by S R Ranganathan.

    When I searched to learn more about Ranganathan, who I had heard about earlier in various contexts, I learnt that he was one of the founders of the Madras Library Association, founded in 1928.

    I was looking for other library associations that may have been active in India. I found that the Kerala Library Association was started quite late in 1972. The association is credited as one of the reasons for Kerala having one of the highest literacy rates in India.

    Puthuvayil Narayana Panicker, known as the father of the library and literacy movement in Kerala, is credited with establishing libraries across the state in the 1990s.

    I was surprised to learn that Maharashtra is one of the earliest such associations to be formed, founded in 1921.

    There is also an Indian Library Association, formed in 1933. Looking at the website tells you that the organisation prioritizes the people running the organization and not the libraries or the library movement in India.

    As a counterpoint, look at the website of the Free Libraries Network. They are running a fundraiser that ends tomorrow which offers various Indian authors offering services in return for a donation.

    The search term suggested a news item on the same page about a group of students who started an open library in Pune. This seems to have sparked autorickshaw drivers, bloggers, professionals, etc. who maintained similar open libraries in their own spaces.

    A search for similar open libraries or for a list of them took me to the page of the Open Library project. The Wikipedia page of the Open Library project says:

    Open Library is an online project intended to create “one web page for every book ever published”. Created by Aaron Swartz, Brewster Kahle, Alexis Rossi, Anand Chitipothu, and Rebecca Hargrave Malamud. Open Library is a project of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization.

    A perusal of the Open Library blog led me to reading posts by someone called mek, who turns out to be Mek Karpeles, according to the same Wikipedia page above.

    A search helped me find Mek’s MediaWiki based website. Once upon a time, when I was a Wikipedia editor, I too had wished I had had such a website. Kirk had such a wiki, but I can’t find it now. Another thing that I have not fully explored but loved is Mek’s blogroll.

    And thus the journey goes on, in a Web not intermediated by social media websites. When you click on links not only to find what’s there but not knowing how it will look like. That was the Web that I entered in 2004 and its good to be back there again.

    Anu Atluru said this better than me in a note on Substack:

    I wish publications in the Substack app had as much personality as they do on web. I get the standardization but it makes the vibe less personal, less like stepping into the writer’s world, and more like modern “social media” sameness.

    This rabbit hole helped me learn more about libraries and blogrolls. Maybe they are similar? I already have a library worth of books under my children’s bed in storage. I want to implement some kind of blogroll on this blog as well.

    That may need clicking on another link rabbit hole.

    You can read this blog on your favorite RSS feed reader or via e-mail by subscribing below.

  • My Internet Reading Daily Diet

    Pranay Kotasthane asked in OpenTakshashila’s WaterCooler the following question:

    What does your internet reading daily diet look like? Do you use specific websites, workflows, or tools? Please share…

    Pranay Kotasthane

    This blog post is a more extensive answer to that question. In my Weekly Notes 27/2023 blog post, I shared how I had changed my information consumption. In my On following people’s work, I lamented about the difficulty of following people in a fractured social media landscape. But, this is my current internet reading daily diet.

    I follow quite a few newsletters that I have subscribed to using Yahoo! Mail. I follow many blogs using RSS feeds on Feedly. I now use Mozilla Thunderbird while reading these on my laptop. I use the respective apps when reading them on mobile.

    I have subscribed to the Times of India and the Indian Express for news. I read The News Minute for news related to Kerala. I read Scroll for their books and niche national news coverage. This has changed since Week 27/2023.

    For my varied interests, I follow people on Twitter/X and Mastodon. I try to spend time on these once in the morning and once in the evening.

    I listen to a few podcasts on Spotify and watch videos on YouTube. I do these on mobile only.

    For anything that interests me, I take notes by hand in my bullet journal. For anything that I want to add as a reference for the future, I add it to Roam Research.

    You can read this blog on your favorite RSS feed reader or via e-mail by subscribing below.

  • Running Ubuntu

    I always wanted to run Ubuntu only on my machine. We had two laptops at home. One laptop is the blue-coloured HP Pavilion that we purchased in 2016. The other was a black Dell laptop that we bought in 2021.

    We named the blue HP, Neelathamara, and the black Dell, Karuthamuthu.

    I had a dual-boot, Ubuntu and Windows installation on Neelathamara after we purchased Karuthamuthu. Some issues and some shoddy computer repair during the pandemic meant that I had to switch it to Windows only for a while.

    I had purchased a MH-USB from the LibreTech store earlier this year. The issues in 2022 made me worry about going to dual boot again. So, today, I moved Neelathamara to a full Ubuntu install.

    The install experience was awesome as I did it during my lunch break at work!

    I do not know why it took me so long to pull the trigger. I have also moved my blog reading from Feedly to Thunderbird. I am still using Feedly to read blogs on my mobile.

  • On following people’s work

    I’m seeing a trend that I want to encourage. People are dusting off their old blogs and websites and starting to write on them again.

    One reason for this is the changes in social media usage. People I used to follow on Twitter are now using different social media platforms like Instagram, Threads, Mastodon, Farcaster, Discord, Telegram, micro.blog, LinkedIn, and some have even quit social media altogether and moved to blogs. So, I need to find out where I can interact with them now.

    My virtual voyages through some of these blogs helped me discover the IndieWeb (via Jatan Mehta). It was here that I was introduced the concept of Publish (on your) own site, syndicate elsewhere (POSSE). It would be great if everyone did it, but not everyone does. So, I am left with following people I like following in the places where they publish.

    This doesn’t work well for me, though.

    This is why I love the trend to move to blogs (or anything that I can read on a feed reader). This allows me to read on a feed reader rather than on a browser or an app.

    Maggie Appleton, in her essay, A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden, talks about the concept of the garden and the stream. Many of the places that I follow people are streams. These are timeline based feed of activity.

    A feed reader is still a stream but one where the curation is mine and not an algorithm’s. I want to allow the algorithm to help me discover people whose work I would like based on my previous activity. But, I would like to follow and consume them at my own pace, perhaps in my own feed reader or inbox.

    Newsletters (especially Substack) hold a place in between. These seem to be an implementation of the solution I talk of above. The Substack algorithm seems to help you to find people you may like following. You also get to consume them at your own pace in your email client or on their app.

    You will notice Substack’s attempts to push you to read on their app. You have had a history of other apps changing ownership or their algorithm in ways that are outside your control. This is how Substack diverges from my expectation above.

    Substack is a good temporary solution for my problem. But, I have no control over how long they will stay good. If a feed reader closes (like Google Reader did), alternatives will emerge or I have the option to use other feed readers like Thunderbird.

    Feed readers also let me easily move to another service. If Substack shuts down, I will have a hard time finding the people that I followed on Substack on other platforms or blogs.

    There were two brilliant essays that I read recently on why we must move on from newsletters to elsewhere, that I think of as part of this trend that I see. I hope these two essays will encourage people to POSSE.

    1. Newsletters; or, an enormous rant about writing on the web that doesn’t really go anywhere and that’s okay with me – Robin Rendle
    2. Getting too good at the wrong thing – Nat Eliason

  • Substack post vs blog post

    When people used the word blog posts to refer to their Substack posts, I found it difficult to understand why. I thought of each post on Substack as an edition or as an issue. When people pushed back to ask me for the difference between a Substack post and a blog post, I felt that it was fundamentally wrong but could not articulate the reasons for the same. I was reading Venkatesh Rao’s blog, Ribbonfarm, where he has articulated the reasons much better than I have.

    I don’t agree with all of his points but these are good points to begin thinking about this.

    1. Blogs are ontic media; newsletters are epistemic media
    2. Blogs encourage you to invent concepts and coin terms; newsletters encourage you to use existing concepts and terms to lay out persuasive arguments
    3. Blogs are portals; newsletters are flags. Blogs encourage you to build seductive worlds to draw people into. Newsletters mark out territory in existing shared worlds.
    4. Blogs encourage true essays in the original sense of the term — explorations; newsletters encourage explainers, sermons, speeches
    5. Blogs are promiscuously and publicly social; newsletters are clannish and tribal
    6. Blogs are stocks; newsletters are flows
    7. Blogs invite internal and external hyperlinking; newsletters fight both
    8. Blogs are relational; newsletters are transactional
    2021 Ribbonfarm Extended Universe Annual Roundup, Venkatesh Rao

  • Skein – Media consumption

    After a long time, I found myself browsing Binny VA’s website. After that, I went to his Twitter handle.

    Rabit holes follow:

    Binny VA’s tweet appreciates a shout-out!
    Binny VA’s shoutout led me to a lovely Zettelkasten twitter-thread.
    MostlyNotWorkin’s Twitter thread led me to another Twitter thread by Roam’s Connor White-Sullivan.
    CSW’s tweet thread led me to this Twitter thread by Priya on how social media consumption is linear.

    Priya references a blog post by Aaron Z Lewis article on how the way we consume media is changing. I was following Visakan on Twitter. Aaron’s article clarified what Visakan was actually doing. The other examples that Aaron provides in the blog post need more digging from my side. But, it shows new ways in which the impact of Twitter threads was going beyond Twitter.

    1. Venkatesh Rao – Ribbonfarm – blogchain
    2. Ben Hunt – Epsilon Theory – Discovery Map
    3. Are.na – non-linear threading product.