Kartik

As I wrote earlier, I had broken a finger while ice skating. It will be three weeks since the accident later this evening. Time passes fast. I have not been productive all this while. One of the reasons was that since going to orthopedics the Monday after the accident, I had a large obstructive splint on my right hand which restricted my wrist motion and made typing using the right hand next to impossible: [Read More]

It’s simple: blogs aren’t promotions. Blogs subscribed to shouldn’t be messed with. The flow of information by email is an extraordinary opportunity, and when a choke point messes with that to make a profit, things break. Apparently, even as prominent a blogger as Seth Godin feels the pain of algorithms when it comes to content. In this case, algorithms used for categorizing email. Visit the Link 🔗 I was planning to write a post about how to stay updated with my posts here as I have consciously chosen not to share them on social media ever since I started this new blog. [Read More]

I went ice skating last night for the first time: After enjoying it for two rounds, right about when I was about to exit the rink, someone crashed into me from behind and we both fell down. I immediately felt that the little finger of my right hand probably got twisted in the opposite direction of what is natural. A few hours after that: A broken bone is among the many firsts of the weekend, sigh. [Read More]

Joel Spolsky writes: My new year’s resolution was to give up on reading Twitter and Facebook. I gave up on the feeds because they were making me angry. A lot of times I was angry because of politics, but even on non-political things, the feeds seemed like they were full of conflict and stress. I can’t tell you how much happier I am without them. Am I the only one that hated reading feeds? [Read More]

Good technical detail about the issue I mentioned my home network was facing with my Pixel 2 earlier: Following initial research and investigation, our Engineering Team is confident that they’ve determined one of the key origins of the issue. From what we have gathered so far, the issue appears to be related to some recent releases of Android OS and Google Apps. This issue stems from these devices’ “Cast” feature, which sends MDNS multicast discovery packets in order to keep a live connection with Google products such as Google Home. [Read More]

John D. Cook: When I was in college, a friend of mine gave me a math book that I found hard to get through. When I complained about it, he told me “You’re going to finish a PhD someday. When you do, do you think there’s going to be fairy dust on the diploma that’s going to enable you to do anything you can’t do now?” That conversation stuck with me. [Read More]

Stats I technically managed to finish my 2017 Reading Challenge (26 books) but not in its full spirit as I really only read about 13 regular sized books, the same as last year (using my improved metrics). This major discrepancy can be partially attributed to my counting the 6 audiobooks I listened to under the challenge just to keep track of them. Some imprecise stats from the challenge here. Similar to last year, I believe the amount of content I read increased this year, even though I read and finished a relatively fewer number of books. [Read More]

Note (added on Jan 2): As I started composing this year’s edition of my year in review late New Year’s Eve, I came to realize how I overwhelmed I was to compress a whole year of learning and new experiences into a single post and in a single evening. After procrastinating for a while, finally deciding to welcome the new year in good company of friends, and regretting my decision to stay awake until 3 and hence losing enough sleep to be not productive on the New Year’s Day, I decided to break the task in to manageable chunks and spread them over the next few days. [Read More]

I just finished migrating content from my old Tumblr blog on techglider.in. Since that Tumblr blog mostly dealt with micro-blogging, I chose to put everything (except non-essential junk) in Statuses section. I also created a new post there to record my only major non-academic writing of this past year for posterity: On the Language Debate in India. Apart from the migration of another old WordPress blog from circa late-2015 (that seems like a lot of work to be done urgently), I do not plan to post any new content on techglider. [Read More]

Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Compassion by Marshall B. Rosenberg I will write more later this week about the topic, but as I wrote in my bio elsewhere, I was… on a mission, this year, to understand people better, learn from each interaction, become better at communicating and reading emotions, form closer better relationships. What would be a better way to end this year than by finally reading this enlightening book about communicating effectively with fellow human beings. [Read More]