From Arch to Void GNU/Linux After months of running Arch. I have finally decided to distrohop again. This time I’m trying Void Linux an interesting, indie-distro that my friend recommended to try. Unlike the majority of distros — which blatantly skin Ubuntu / fork Debian. Void is built independently, so it has it’s own package manager. The XBPS package ecosystem. The lack of support for systemd rejoice systemd haters! Flatpak is supported, if needed....

What do you understand when you hear the word hack? Hackers, ah yes scary people. Nerds in-hoodies who live in shady places? Mashing fancy green text into terminals? Thanks to movies & coverage by the media — hacking in the modern world probably means someone who is skilled at breaking into/hijacking computers I bet you’ve often heard catchphrases like: ‘Keep your data safe from hackers’ ~ le VPN shilling YouTubers ‘Hackers leak classifed — Government documents’ ‘Can you hack my Instagram account?...

Remember 2021? or Should I say 2020? I guess nothing much has changed in the world. The world battles the pandemic. Although people aren’t panicking this year compared to last-year. Our dependence on proprietary software still disgusts me. Thanks to TikTok: our average attention-spans have reduced. I for one, made better use of my time in 2021 than in 2020. Remember that blog post I penned a year ago? Time to reflect I’m pretty satisfied with the goals I challenged myself with in that post....

Things that add value to your life It’s an aesthetic, a vibe, a mindset that I swear by! The rule: seemingly simple–the comprehension? There are N different ways that you can–add value to your life, buying everything you need, in the hope that one day it might be useful to you. Refuel on caffeine, energy drinks staying up late night. Start fasting for days, weeks give up, get back to the same old binging habits & then call it ‘minimalism’....

The saying is true, you are what you eat, consume, live to die for To put things into perspective, in today’s world you are what you scroll through on your daily news feed, Instagram stories, RSS feeds, blog roll, TV, Netflix, Spotify so on & so forth. In Elizabethan times people believed That the human body contains blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. Health is the state in which these constituent substances are in the correct proportion — pain occurs when one of the substances presents either a deficiency or an excess, or is separated in the body and not mixed with others....

Brave is a web browser based on the Chromium web-engine influenced by Google The browser is surprisingly free/libre software: licensed under the Mozilla Public license just like Firefox. Before you @ me, this is not like the many, many one-sided shit-posts about Brave using the same recycled — mountain load of FUD that goes around when people talk about Brave. If you’ve been living under a rock: Brave Software (the company behind the browser) takes the latest Chromium release, patches it, including some privacy-protections along with a ton of web-3 integrations....

Free Software is software that respects the user’s freedom To someone who’s not a programmer: this sounds totally absurd What the heck is freedom that these people keep talking about? free? no paisa? 🤔 I had always thought it meant software — that was free-of-charge. After reading Wikipedia I was even more confused. It talked about ‘respecting your freedom’. Respects the user from what? cyber-bullying? blocks-ads? respects your time? I, just like you had no clue what they were talking about....

It all started from Scratch. Pun intended! The humble beginnings of scratch.mit.edu my first social network! 2016: 5 years ago I decided to sign up for a scratch account to share the programs I made locally using ‘Scratch 2.0’. If I recall correctly it was — an Adobe AIR App that ran locally, and you could share your scratch projects online after you setup a username and password. Yep, flash used to be popular in those days....

I’m preparing for competitive entrance-exams Around 1.2 million students write the JEE exam each-year. It’s really tough to get a good rank: this is not like your school exams where you study for a subject and get graded periodically at school. There’s months & years worth of practice as you’re no longer competing locally. You’d need to be in the top 99.5%(ile) to qualify for a CSE course at Government colleges....

This post is a reflection on Digital Minimalism on my Phone (FOSS) I wrote exactly a year ago A year ago I yeeted all my apps, disabled notifications, started using FOSS apps in the hope that I spend my time efficiently. After the initial few weeks the ‘FOSS’ and ‘Ad Free’ apps get just as much addictive as the mainstream ones. Although it’s not as toxic / invasive of your privacy....