Tag: 2025

  • Weekly Notes 50/2025

    I started this week with a plan to get a lot of things done. Life, had other plans. It dropped me in the Hospital for the third time this year. I was discharged on Friday.

    Unlike my other Hospital stays this year, this one was marked by an absence of phones and a lot of time spent staring at ceilings. I thought I would read some books but I got nothing done.

    It’s good to be back home and able to write, even on a mobile device. Not yet back to 100%.

    I missed many events in Pune that I had hoped to attend. I wanted to take my daughter to see and meet the Pune urban sketchers community and also see some of the stationary they had on offer.

    I have been thinking of using mostly Instagram, Facebook, Substack and Mastodon through most of next year. I am not thinking of it as a rule.

  • Weekly Notes 48/2025

    I got a lot of work done in the past two weeks. But, I had recurrent health scares that kept me away from writing. This weekend I was really busy with several home improvement works. Hence, the delayed post here. But, better late than never, as had been the case in the last few weeks.

    I am currently reading Oh, Life Relax Please by Swami Sukhabodhananda and listening to Consider Phlebas by Iain M Banks. I went to the library after a long time. I donated Jatan Mehta’s book Seven uni verses among several other books to the public library here. There are many more books that I plan to give away.

    I also attended my first in-person event in a long time. The talk was on geology of the Himalayas by Suvrat Kher. I have been reading his blog, Rapid Uplift for a really long time. His latest blog post, Landscapes: PIndari Glacier Trail formed a part of the talk. I also had the chance to meet some of my friends there, whom I had missed meeting because of the surgeries.

    I started reading blog posts on Readwise again. I have also removed X, Mastodon, and Instagram apps on the phone.

  • National Novel Writing Month 2025

    I have been unhappy with 2025 and want to make the most of the year. I’m planning to rewrite a novel I drafted last year for NaNoWriMo. I envision it as a solarpunk story. You can find the previous version of Chapter 1 here. I have changed the storyline based on feedback from last year.

    I will link to each chapter in this blog post.

    Chapter 1

    Chapter 2

    Chapter 3

    Chapter 4

  • Week 43/2025

    I used to write my Weekly Notes in a structured way, tracking my reading and writing progress. This time, I want to write it in a more free-form style, similar to how I did for Week 42.

    My parents visited and took the kids to Mumbai during the Diwali holidays. It was our first time home alone. You might expect us to get a lot done without the kids, but we mostly just relaxed and did nothing special.

    We watched three movies – Coolie (Tamil), Ronth (Malayalam), and Greater Kalesh (Hindi) on OTT. I started reading Kurashi at Home by Marie Kondo (which I could not find in her publications list on Wikipedia) and Make Epic Money by Ankur Warikoo. I listened to The Art of Spending Money by Morgan Housel and I Will Teach You to be Rich by Ramit Sethi. I did not finish any of the books I started and left them all unfinished. I am spending my time recovering from surgery watching Countdown and Lazarus.

    I am disappointed with my recent book choices. I didn’t read Between Worlds, which I wanted to. I read more on my mobile than anywhere else. Between Worlds is just sitting on my shelf after I read the first two chapters.

    I have been following several accounts on X that focus on manufacturing in India. While there are traditional manufacturing companies, these new-age creators showcase impressive manufacturing processes through engaging videos. We imagined these processes in our heads. I will share a few videos in another blog post.

    It was interesting to see how India’s manufacturing limits its space program and how ISRO built up its capabilities, helping the program grow. This serves as a useful model for other sectors in India. For instance, the Semi Conductor Laboratory (SCL) in Chandigarh could apply this approach to build the capability of the Indian semiconductor industry, leveraging SCL’s experience being an ISRO Center.

  • Week 42/2025

    I underwent another surgery in the first week of October 2025. 2025 seems to be really bad for me health-wise. I hope something good comes of it. I am still recovering from it.

    I have had a lot of time to process as well during this period of illness, as is often the case.

    I started sharing my content on the blog again. I would earlier share this content on various cozy web groups (WhatsApp groups, mostly). I think I will start to post here to get better at tracking what I consume.

    I got on Arattai to know what all the buzz is about. Sai Rahul Poruri had written an interesting article arguing that moving from WhatsApp to Arattai was just about jumping from one walled garden to another. This helped me to get to use Prav again. I am looking for people I can speak to on the XMPP protocol.

    I expressed that I wanted to start writing about space again. That is my first love. Just reposting things on X and other social media platforms just doesn’t cut it anymore.

    Not too much to share this week. But 42 is an important number and should not be missed. Hence, this short senseless note.

  • Neil Borate shared a summary of the changes in EPFO. Video on X.

  • Pune to Palakkad – 27 August 2025

    We drove down from Pune to Palakkad for Onam. The route we took was Kolhapur – Chitradurga – Tumkur – Sathyamangalam – Coimbatore – Palakkad.

    My main concern before the start of the journey was repair work on the Pune – Bangalore Highway (old NH4, new AH47 or NH48). Multiple people warned me about it. So, we were actively considering the Solapur – Vijayapura – Chitradurga stretch to avoid the repairs on the Kolhapur stretch.

    Two days before the drive, Rakesh had consulted multiple people himself and suggested that we take the Kolhapur, as a known bad road was better than an unknown road. I was concerned by the lack of mobile connectivity in case of any issues with our vehicle. Google Maps showed instances of roads being drowned in one or two stretches of the Solapur alternative.

    Colleagues at work I asked said that the stretch towards Bangalore was good but had no food stops nor mobile phone coverage for nearly an hour and a half as the roads went through wildlife sanctuaries.

    Following Rakesh’s advice we chose the Kolhapur alternative. 

    It was Ganesh Chaturthi that day and we started off with some Ganesh aartis. We had mentally prepared for multiple road blocks which appeared on Google Maps but did not exist on the road. Multiple times in Maharashtra, Google Aunty would ask us to take a diversion where none existed and seemed flummoxed when the car went straight ahead.

    The diversions on the Maharashtra stretch were much better built. There were potholes in some places but that was expected given the incessant rains in the past two to three weeks.

    Google Aunty did much better with the diversions on the Karnataka stretch of NH4. Here, the roads were much worse than the Maharashtra stretch with unnecessary speed bumpers, non tarred roads, and numerous potholes. 

    We made our first stop at the Kamat’s in Satara just before going up the ghats. The meals were good. We carried some snacks from here for what we expected to be a bad Kolhapur stretch.

    The Kolhapur stretch wasn’t as bad as we thought it would be. We went through but at slower speeds. 

    We crossed the border into Karnataka and stopped at a McDonalds (called Viraj Junction) just past the RTO check post for bathroom breaks and some coffee. 

    There are not too many food places on this stretch upto Chitradurga. So, we stopped at a familiar place for lunch when we saw it. It just says Restaurant but Google calls it Itagi Cross.

    We met a foreigner here who was going the other way on his Honda Goldwing. My 2 yo son waved hi to him. He waved back and asked him how he was. My 2 yo said, I’m fine. We had rice and dal here and it was really good.

    We had planned to reach Tumkur by evening that day but the Dharwad- Hubli stretch had other plans. This stretch was the worst stretch on our way to Palakkad. But, I’m happy they are expanding it now. When we reached Chitradurga, it was half past five. We stopped for tea and decided to push to Tumkur.

    We called ahead and booked Hotel Sadananda. We then had the first spell of rain on the road. This slowed us down a little. We then stopped for the night at Hotel Sadananda and had dinner from there. We had a simple meal at the hotel which was fine but not great.

    We had a hot water bath and had a good night’s sleep. We decided to leave around six the next night.

  • Weekly Notes 29/2025

    Reading

    • The Courage to be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga (17%)
    • The 6:20 Man by David Baldicci (28%)
    • A New Horizons First for Interstellar Navigation by Paul Gilster
      • “Mariner 4 used Canopus, a bright star in the constellation Carina, as an attitude reference, its star tracker camera locking onto the star after its Sun sensor had locked onto the Sun. This was the first time a star had been used to provide second axis stabilization, its brightness (second brightest star in the sky) and its position well off the ecliptic making it an ideal referent.”
      • “…we’ve also just had a first in terms of autonomous navigation through the work of the New Horizons team. Without using radio tracking from Earth, the spacecraft has determined its distance and direction by examining images of star fields and the observed parallax effects. Wonderfully, the two stars that the team chose for this calculation were Wolf 359 and Proxima Centauri, two nearby red dwarfs of considerable interest.”
    • If You Like Public Broadcasting, Be Customers, Not Just Consumers by Doc Searls

    What I am Watching?

    Mukherjea suggests investing 50% in Indian stock market and 50% in the US market for the equity portion of your portfolio which I found interesting.

    New songs dropped from Agam this week.

    Dharmesh Shah mentions many interesting technical notes on ChatGPT.

    Thinking of buying a new car. So, started listening to this on financial rules for buying a new car.

    My son watches this and has caught on many Malayalam words from this one. He has also picked up counting in Malayalam from 1 to 10, saying left and right in Malayalam etc.

  • Weekly Notes 27/2025

    I realized I was not listening to podcasts that I usually would. I have downloaded PocketCasts to fix that. I have also downloaded the X and Tusky app for Android to access X and Mastodon. Thus ends my social media detox.

    What I’m reading?

    1. Education is free, Learning is expensive by Seth Godin
    • “If knowledge was power, controlling access was essential.”
    • “They even call it the ‘admissions office.’”

    2. On SpaceNews going paywalled, and the broader disregard for archiving in journalism by Jatan Mehta

    I read Doc Searls’ blog post about the subweb only two days back and now to be bought into my own space world so quickly is sad to see.

    3. Six Paths by Vishwesh Shetty (Qissa Comics)

    4. Build an Epic Career by Ankur Warikoo

    What I’m watching?

    Matt D’Avella is someone I started following when I was into minimalism. Good to see that he is still trying to hang in there.

    I have been trying to explore solarpunk and lunarpunk themes in my story writing. I haven’t written much this year. That’s something I hope to fix at this year’s NaNoWriMo.

    I’m seeing many finance YouTubers and podcast hosts talk about cryptocurrency again in India. Most of the stuff that I have watched had been sponsored by the cryptocurrency exchange, CoinDCX. Another cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, which had decided to not comply with India’s Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) guidelines for cryptocurrency exchanges and had left India is also returning with a India Blockchain Yatra.

    Mukesh Bansal’s solocast on fasting.

    Madhu Kela, knowingly or unknowingly says in this podcast, “China is an autocracy, India is a bureaucracy”, although he corrects it to democracy before he completes.

    Storytelling in Malayalam

    My Instagram watch time is also growing. I might add things I watched from there as well, starting next week.

  • Weekly Notes 26/2025

    I almost lost this domain name. I was only on Instagram and Netflix.

    What I’m reading?

    • Platform Reality by Robin Sloan
      • “Ted Gioia’s recent newsletter style is a key example of 2020s ventilated prose, an unmissable textual trend.”
      • Always read the PS.
    • Playability by Jay
      • “One of things happening in culture that I think we can all feel intuitively is that increasingly media mediums are playable. I don’t mean ‘gamification’, and I don’t simply mean ‘engagement’ (but metrics inside of systems are certainly part of it). But the sense that people – Gen Z and Gen A, are literate in exploring systems. They poke at the rules, bend them, maybe even break them and see how the system responds far more than millennials did. We played the game, but didn’t fully appreciate that culture is an emergent property of a system’s design.”
      • “gamification (In my opinion) is mostly about obedience theatre.”
      • “Gamification is used to make you feel like you’re playing when you’re really just complying.”
      • “Code writes the rules. Rules shape incentives. Incentives shape behaviour. And behaviour becomes culture.”
      • “This is why playability matters. Not because everything is a game, but because we are all beginning to think like players, and this changes how we should understand agency inside of systems.”
      • “There’s a lot more we can say about both of these challenges, but in short they make doing solarpunk both harder and more necessary. The more cyberpunk the world gets, the more useful solarpunks become. The more material reality is buried under layers of digital abstraction, the better it feels to actually get your hands dirty.”
    • AI Won’t Live on Publisher Sites by Ben Werdmuller
      • “Almost nobody is visiting homepage after homepage. Readers almost universally read content from a central feed of information.”
      • “Email newsletters are, at their heart, another version of this model. By subscribing to a publisher’s newsletter, you’re adding their content to your reverse-chronological feed of information.”
      • “If AI lives in the browser, as it does in products like Dia (and soon in Chrome), you can query not just one information source, but every information source you visit through that browser.”
      • “publishers are better off considering how they might embrace emerging standards like Model Context Protocol (MCP) into their offerings so that their information can be consumed.”
    • Use a Lot of Words by Seth Godin
      • “Verbosity is the new brevity.”
      • “AI isn’t like that. In fact, our concision is getting in the way of the insight we’re looking for.”
    • How I Turned ChatGPT Into My Personal Nutrition Coach and You Can Too by Brett McKay

    What I’m watching?

    The video has some AI tool suggestions that I want to try out.

    This video taught me a lot about Dharavi and its history.

    This video asks an interesting question and not sure if it really answers it.