Hardware Upgrades 🛠️

I am 0.9999/4 part an engineer! I’ve cleared all my courses and bank 44/160 credits in my pocket. I took a much needed break from college; visited a couple of friends and family. A free mind and a whole lot of free time in hand before the next semester. This warrants a blog post of it’s own — I’ve got some new hardware and plans I’d like to talk about to cover up for the months I’ve left you on read on your <insert fav newsreader> :3...

Zero Sum Game

Life is not a 0 + 🎲 In the fast-paced realm of technology, where success appears to be a finite resource it’s easy to fall into the trap of viewing the industry as a zero-sum game. If you make it to the top it’s because someone else could not. If you have to succeed it ought to be at someone else’s cost What if you choose not to share your valuable resource in-fear of someone exploiting it or using it against you?...

Presenting anna at fireside

Presented and written by Adhesh, Anirudh, Aditya and Nathan There are several amazing SSGs out there, like Hugo and 11ty. Building your own SSG is an amazing learning experience. It also motivates one to maintain and improve their personal site. Building personal blogs from the ground up can be a tedious process. Some of us have had our hands deep in vanilla HTML and CSS, which isn’t fun to maintain....

2023 in review

Here’s a rant about—life, exams, FOSS stuff & the tangled mess that my uni courses have become For the past four months or so — I’ve been juggling university coursework, restarting social-media (ahem Instagram); attending hackathons and meeting new people at college. I have not really managed my time well. I wanted to re-start my YouTube channel, manage my time better and was seeking to be more independent. I have really become self-aware of the choices I have borne....

jukebox

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!...

App Defaults

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!...

College Essentials

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....

Replicate PWAs on Firefox

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....

Summer ⛅

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....

Mirror your Git repositories

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?...