I don’t like using services like Spotify, Apple Music or Amazon Prime, as they need DRM. YouTube Music, works fine but — but you need a Google Account! Previously I manually downloaded playlists from YouTube using yt-dlp and maintained a tagged collection of my favourite songs. I would discover new artists using LastFM and listen using my browser. Fast forward to August this year — I started attending university: sharks ahead >–< spotty internet!...

I’ve seen a couple of people post about their app-defaults inspired by the latest Hemispheric Views podcast — Duel of the Defaults! It’s the nearly the end of 2023, and surprisingly this time around it isn’t about the latest iPhone, ChatGPT or AI taking over our jobs! It’s always fun when you are a part of these niché internet-trends! And.. a bunch of y’all were asking me to do it, so without furthur-ado!...

University is starting: next week I thought I’d write a helpful blog-post on how I’ve been prepping for college, some sacrifices I’ve to make and the tech-stack that’s changing. Don’t worry I’m still running arch btw :3 Here’s how the campus looks like For the next 4 years or so — I’ll be spending my time pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science at PESU Bangalore. Checkout this mini LaTeX resume that I compiled last-week....

PWAs Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) work seamlessly on Chrome and are often lightweight clones of their desktop counterparts based on JS frameworks like Electron. If you’ve used Chrome — some websites prompt you to install their web app. PWAs on Chrome have features such as: service workers for offline capabilities, responsive design, and push notifications. (Firefox is not far behind!) infact, Firefox uses Google’s servers to push notifications to android-users....

This site is now on: polarhive.net PSA: I got a new domain name. A new email address and setup a small VPS this week. I am done with my exams and will be pursuing a Bachelor’s in CS this August. Here’s my new /PGP key: 0x78DBFBE8B325A5A9 A short vacation I went on a short 2 day trip to my hometown in Kerala. Here are some pictures: I logged the whole journey on OpenStreetMap and contributed to Towercollector A couple of posts ago I had blogged about OSM, de-googling my phone, exclusively using FOSS apps on my phone....

If you’re into the FOSS/tech ecosystem; you’ve probably heard of ‘GitHub’ GitHub, now owned by Microsoft is a web-based social coding platform for everything “open source”. At least that’s how I feel they brand it. After the Microsoft takeover there has been a significant increase in traffic with new users joining the platform. Isn’t it ironic that GitHub itself isn’t open-source? Oh, it’s on GitHub so your project must be open-source right?...

This week, I’ve been contributing to OpenStreetMap — a collaborative free software project that aims to create a free, editable map of the world Unfortunately, not many people have heard about OpenStreetMap & it’s usecases. It powers Snapchat’s — Snap Map, DuckDuckGo, Brave Search, Wikipedia & much much-more. I have blogged about making the switch to FLOSS software, degoogling, digital minimalism on my phone, the importance of decentralizing & owning our digital-tools....

I’m back from the dungeons! I haven’t posted in ages I haven’t blogged much this year. I just turned 18 a couple of days ago Everything is back to normal, C0VID is a thing of the past. Practical exams, school work piling up, my final exams fast approaching — this year is going to be a huge turning point in my life. Times flies so fast, I’m officially an adult now!...

I don’t use Spotify, Apple Music, et al. DRM’d content is a big no-no. I don’t consume any kind of DRM these days. Most likely like you: I have a ~/Music folder on my laptop. Yours is probably empty, but I like to keep my music collection offline, available any day I want. I keep music cached on my disk as long as I need it. Songs get archived periodically every few months, if I have a change of taste....

The news you consume isn’t going to affect you in any way. You’ve probably forgotten what you read last week. I’ve blogged about it a few months ago ~ You are What You Eat Today, the only way I get updates is via RSS feeds. RSS stand for — Really Simple Syndication. RSS feeds are portable, extensible, light on network resources. I’ve also conveniently blocked regular HTML+JS sites in my browser as an experiment; more on that later....