I write work notes every day, so I add a couple of lines about personal things. I usually edit and share my work notes with the team on Friday evenings (sometimes on Monday mornings). As part of the same process, I publish my personal weekly notes on my blog.
I don’t try to make either set of notes perfect. The goal is to capture the gist of the week, not every detail. That’s also why my week starts on Saturday and ends on Friday evening. As if the tech world didn’t already have enough date/time problems.

• Uma was bored on Sunday, so we went for a short ride, then a walk around Halasuru (Ulsoor) Lake. The lake looked unusually beautiful; there were more people than I expected, but they were very friendly and cordial, so it was fun.
• I completed my SIR enumeration online. The experience was not great.
• Installed CopyParty on my NAS devices; it’s pointing to a specific public folder on my home network. It makes it easy to share certain things on the home network. At some point, I might have a public internet version at some point. It’s very easy to deploy and use. That reminds me I need to add a 4th disk to my NAS.
• Finally, I got the correct battery model (WN-27/2026) and replaced it easily. But when I started it, it went into BitLocker lock mode because it couldn’t find the TPM for some reason. I didn’t realize the TPM was the issue, so I went into recovery mode. I thought BitLocker recovery would be an admin password, but apparently not. It’s a key associated with your Microsoft account. So you need to log in to your Microsoft account and get it. It worked, then later I enabled TPM too. Enabling TPM stopped it from asking me for the recovery key on every boot. But what is the point of full disk encryption if a company has the recovery key? How does it work in the Apple world? I also dislike the user accounts on devices attached to online accounts. I know it’s almost a standard on mobile devices; I still hate it.
• I could do two P.T sessions this week. The second one was today. We have been progressively overloading. Today’s specials were Bulgarian split squats with 24 kg weights using 12 kg kettlebells. I feel good and fit. I have not had that feeling since 2016/17 when I used to CrossFit regularly. My recent InBody BIA scan shows improvement in body fat percentage. My coach thinks I have done well, from pain to no pain to strength building. I will get the Dexa scan next week. It’s more accurate than InBody. Hopefully it will also reflect the same. I also ran a bit in the middle of the week at night. I was a bit scared of traffic. I need to figure out thirty minute time slots for two runs per week. I couldn’t play this week either, but I am scheduled to play tomorrow.
• Got a good looking replacement for the petrol tank cap for the bike.
• Team members are like plants in a garden. They can at most take care of themselves, but not their surroundings. However good they are individually, I don’t think they can work together without someone looking after them like a gardener.
• I have two ringtones on my phone. One is from the StreetHawk theme track, and the other is from KnightRider. Both are 1980s TV series that I saw in the 90s. Looking back, they probably had a bigger influence on my love for motor vehicles. BTW, here is StreetHawk in Strudel.
• If you are into map data and maps, then you will love GeoLibre app. Umar Khalid’s jail reading list if you read books.

I have had the same EPIC number since 2002, and it is still valid. I have kept my information updated over the years. Yet, I had to search for myself in a 2002 electoral roll, and I couldn’t find my name. I don’t exactly remember what happened in 2002 or why my name isn’t there. Or may be it was added after 2002 SIR. Ideally system should know it and guide accordingly.

Then I had to search for one of my parents and link their details. Thanks to my father’s good memory we were able to find the part no. Because the search dropdowns doesn’t always show the polling station address. One has to know it!

Of course, Aadhaar is not compulsory²; it’s just that you can’t submit the form online without e-signing it using Aadhaar + OTP. I have a valid digital signature certificate that I use for e-signing. Why can’t I use that? No one knows.

What happens after the submission, no one knows. There is acknowledgement shown on the screen after the signing, but I dont know what happens after that. You do get a SMS message of the acknowledgement. But that message also doesn’t show any acknowledgement or any details on how to check on it.

For someone with a tech background, it took considerable amount time and effort to submit the form. Imagine folks who are less comfortable with technology or those who have changed locations and doesn’t remember well. Imagine those who fall for things like “digital arrest” scams trying to navigate this.

What a mess this #SIR is. The #ECI website is probably one of the most user-unfriendly applications I have seen online recently. I thought IRCTC was bad.

Some coverage

• Citizen Matter’s has an How – To
• The Hindu – SIR: Voters, BLOs unsure what follows after filling online form
• TOI – SIR’s digital wall: 1 lakh try in Karnataka, only 0.2% get through
• The Hindu – SIR progeny mapping in Karnataka: Different BLOs, different instructions

Footnotes

• I have been using the motorcycle more and more. Especially in and around the neighborhood for day-to-day things. The above picture was taken at Hive Club, Thanisandra.
• Watched Balan (Malayalam, 2026). I loved it, though these days I can’t digest movies where children or animals go through difficulty. I want to watch Graamaayana (Kannada, 2026). It’s in theaters from today. Hopefully, I will get some time during the week to watch it in theaters.
• We tried KOREYAKI, a Korean Street Food place in Kalyan Nagar. I didn’t have much expectation. I had a Sweet and Spicy Ramen Bowl. It was good. It was also affordable.
• I spoke to a friend’s friend about adoption. Mostly about our experiences, and also answered some questions. Overall, good conversation. I should probably convert that into a blog post. There were very few personal things that I can easily exclude.
• I have not found a good Kannada Embedding Model, so what started as a simple experiment has become a serious project – kasturi-kannada-embeddings. Let’s see how far it goes.
• I have been building and simulating circuits in SimulIDE like crazy, spending hours together (today it was on 555 timers). This is the first time I am building circuits in a software simulator; I have mostly done so using hardware previously. I have used software only to design so I can publish, but this is the first time I am simulating, debugging, etc. Simulators have their own set of issues, but they are so much easier than building first on a breadboard.
• We have run our Roomba for ~300 hours, mostly on weekends. I replaced the brushes, filter, etc this week. It’s back to work. Anju’s laptop needed a battery replacement. The battery was ordered, but I hadn’t had time to replace it. Today, when I finally tried to, I realized I had ordered the wrong part. So now I have a spare F3YGT battery, which fits the Dell Latitude 7380 series. Let me know if you want it. What we have is a Dell Inspiron 7380, which needs the F62G0, so I’ve ordered that now.
• If you use Flatpak, then you will love Flatseal. It is a graphical utility for reviewing and modifying permissions for any Flatpak applications on your computer.
• IndieWebClub Bangalore is meeting tomorrow, 4th July. I might stay there for a while.
• I have realized that some people don’t like you for reasons you don’t know, and they will never reveal that to you. There is no point in trying to understand it. And it’s okay.

SimulIDE is a simple real time electronic circuit simulator, intended for hobbyist or students to learn and experiment with analog and digital electronic circuits and microcontrollers. It supports PIC, AVR , Arduino and other MCUs and MPUs.

I installed it from Flathub (SimulIDE). It worked well. It is easy to understand and work with. It’s also easy for a beginner to pick up and start designing circuits in 5 minutes. I tried a few basic circuits. Then I tried the Blink circuit and Fade circuits based on Arduino. Unlike previous ones, this one included building a firmware and loading it. To make it complex, I was also using the Flatpak version of the Arduino IDE. Then I found two options

Load Firmware in SimulIDE

In this option, we will build the software in the Arduino IDE. Compile it. Once it generates a firmware (a HEX file), we will load it into SimulIDE. For this, we need to know where the compilation output is in the Arduino IDE, and then make sure SimulIDE has access to that path. Enable verbose output in the Arduino IDE Preferences, and then compile. The IDE will print the path. Take the path, go to Flatseal ¹, and give SimulIDE access to that path.

Now SimulIDE has access to the folders where firmware is built. Before you simulate the circuit, right-click the Uno, go to mega328-109, and then load firmware. Choose the hex file. Alternatively, right-click Uno, go to mega328-109 – Properties, enter the firmware path, and select Reload HEX at Simulation Start.

Now everything is set up. Code and Compile in Arduino IDE. Come to SimulIDE and restart the simulation. That will load the recent firmware and start the simulation.

Configure SimulIDE with Arduino Toolchain

For this, you can use the SimulIDE flatpak version, but you will need the native Arduino installed on the machine. For me, I downloaded the Arduino Linux ZIP file version. Then extracted it into a local directory, say /home/thej/code/arduino-ide_2.3.10_Linux_64bit. Then go to Flatseal and grant SimulIDE access to the folder /home/thej/code/arduino-ide_2.3.10_Linux_64bit .

Once this is done, open an INO file (the Arduino Sketch) on the right-hand panel of the SimulIDE. Go to compiler settings and set the Arduino installation folder path (/home/thej/code/arduino-ide_2.3.10_Linux_64bit) as the Tool path.

Now it’s all set. Use the integrated editor in the SimulIDE to edit code, compile, and load firmware. Then simulate.

Both setups were easy, even though Flatpak made it a bit difficult. If you are not using Flatpak, then you can ignore the Flatseal permission-giving part. The rest of the configuration will still work. Once set up, both flows worked flawlessly. For most people option 2, setting up Arduino toolchain is an easy option. See the demo below.

SimulIDE is an amazing piece of software for beginners. You will have fun building and simulating circuits in it. Try it and let me know.

Word2Vec and FastText

Embeddings are learned numerical representations. The actual values depend on the model architecture, training data, and its training objective. So the same object (say a word) gets different embeddings in Word2Vec and GPT. Think of an embedding as a model’s custom learned coordinate system for meaning.

This coordinate system lets us do useful things. Find semantically similar items, power search, feed downstream ML models, or even perform arithmetic on meaning. A general example from Word2Vec is king − man + woman ≈ queen. There are mainly two types

• SkipGram: Where the model predicts context words given a target word
• CBOW (Continuous Bag of Words): Where the model predicts the target word from its context.

I wanted to build a simple Word2Vec model for Kannada just to try it out and see if it’s useful. In the process I also built a FastText model. FastText is the same as Word2Vec with character n-grams. By default, I have built Skipgram based models. But you can try CBOW too.

With n-grams support, FastText makes it easy to handle out of vocabulary words and capture subword information, which Word2vec is not good at. For example, given the settings minn=3, maxn=8, FastText breaks each word into character n-grams of lengths 3 to 8 and learns embeddings for those n-grams as well. There is also a wordNgrams setting, set to 2 by default. We can play with this setting. wordNgrams is used to learn embeddings about the sequences of adjacent words.

For example consider the sentence:

"ಬೆಂಗಳೂರು ಕರ್ನಾಟಕದ ರಾಜಧಾನಿ"

With:

wordNgrams=1 (default) Learns only individual words:

ಬೆಂಗಳೂರು
ಕರ್ನಾಟಕದ
ರಾಜಧಾನಿ

wordNgrams=2 Also learns bigrams:

ಬೆಂಗಳೂರು ಕರ್ನಾಟಕದ
ಕರ್ನಾಟಕದ ರಾಜಧಾನಿ

wordNgrams=3 Also learns trigrams:

ಬೆಂಗಳೂರು ಕರ್ನಾಟಕದ ರಾಜಧಾನಿ

Data

For the corpus, I went with the Kannada text of Kasturi Magazine OCRed by Sanchaya and available on Archive.org. My repository has this text; you can use it instead of redownloading from Archive.org. I chose Kasturi content because it’s the most generic Kannada content available, small but good enough to do quick tests. It’s a monthly family magazine published from the house of Samyukta Karnataka, a very popular newspaper. You can think of it as Reader’s Digest of Kannada. I have not given the script used to download, as it’s not required. But it’s not that difficult to write if you want to. My bots were identified by headers={"User-Agent": "thejeshgn.com/1.0"} and all the downloaded files are named kananda_kasturi_{identifier}.txt where identifier is archive..org identifier.

Build and Test

You can run the trainer, change parameters and test them. I have included all the code and steps for both Fastext and Word2Vec.

Project is available on Codeberg, Github and HF.

# Prepare the clean corpus.txt from the raw inputs
uv run prepare_corpus.py prepare ../data/ ./corpus.txt

# Train the embeddings with default parameters 
uv run fasttext_embeddings.py train ./corpus.txt --recursive --out ../models/kasturi_fasttext_v4

# Try the embeddings
uv run fasttext_embeddings.py test ../models/kasturi_fasttext_v4.bin --word ಕನ್ನಡ
uv run fasttext_embeddings.py test ../models/kasturi_fasttext_v4.bin --word ರಾಜಧಾನಿ
uv run fasttext_embeddings.py test ../models/kasturi_fasttext_v4.bin --sentence "ಬೆಂಗಳೂರು ಕರ್ನಾಟಕದ ರಾಜಧಾನಿ"
uv run fasttext_embeddings.py compare ../models/kasturi_fasttext_v4.bin

For comparison and evaluation, I used the same method that I had used before for testing other embeddings. Take a bunch of Kannada words (I have used the same bunch), get the cosine similarity between them and create a comparison matrix. I also compared my matrix against the word vectors trained by FastText team using Wikipedia and Common Crawl data. You can see them below.

TODO

I have called it kannada-kasturi-embeddings because it’s a good name and we started with Kasturi. But it wont be limited to Kasturi magazine data alone. I will add other newspaper and magazine data to it and build a comprehensive embedding that’s useful. I will also keep comparing to see how it performs. The current test and compare methods are very basic. I will come up with a better method. So the TODO list is

• Add more quality data
• Improve the clean_text function
• Add more automated quality testing and comparisons
• Build different embedding models and not just Word2Vec or Fastext

In the meantime, try it and let me know what you think.

• The motorcycle fell during my ride to TVC. Thankfully, nothing happened, but I was worried about the paint job. I really like the paint work, and the motorcycle looks very pretty. It will be very sad to have scratches on it. So I went to the 3M car care center in Hennur and had it covered in PPF and the non-painted areas in ceramic.
• I met some college friends over the weekend after a really long time. It shouldn’t take this long.
• I continued with twice a week P.T. I am trying to add a third day of workouts, but it’s been difficult. I have not played this week. Hopefully, I get to play tomorrow. I am also asking around to see if I can find partners to play on a regular basis.
• My week, at least as per my Weekly Notes, starts on Saturday and ends on Friday, as if the tech world didn’t have enough date/time problems.
• IITM’s School Connect program is a great way to explore emerging fields, interact with the best folks in the area, and make informed decisions. It’s targeted at high school students. It is also very affordable (for example, it is Rs. 500 per student). If you know a school kid, please send them there; if their school is not on the list, bring it up in the PTM. It’s very easy to join.
• If you work with GeoJSON a lot, you probably know about GeoJSON.io, but there is also MapDraw. It has a ton of features and is FOSS. Now, I would like to watch this movie called Artificial when it gets released. Explicit Harms of Non-Explicit Images is a research report on how image-based abuse happens in Pakistan. It’s not different from the rest of the subcontinent. All FreeCodeCamp course YouTube videos are indexed and presented on a single page for your binge watching. It’s easy to find and watch them. If you like maps and art, take a look at one man’s lifetime effort to paint a map of an imaginary city, including 4000 individual panels measuring 8 by 10 inches, called Jerry’s map. What is more impressive is his process.
• Om is no more. He is one of those OG bloggers whose work I followed wherever it was published. He was just 60 and too young to die. But life is unpredictable. I have never met him or talked to him. He did link (during GigaOM days) to a couple of my blog posts. In my view, he played a major role in making blogs mainstream and always had interesting things to say about tech, unlike mainstream media. You will be missed, Om.
• At least half of the songs in this weeks playlist are Uma’s favorites.

I left early at 6:20 AM and took a break in Anekal for breakfast at Raghavendra Bhawan. Then I took a photo break near Jawalagiri. And took some pictures. As usual, I forgot to put the side stand properly (it’s happened to me before), and while I was taking a picture, the vehicle fell. I went on to take pictures because it was a flat surface, not a ditch (thankfully). A while later, people gathered and picked up the bike. They thought I was injured and asked me about it, which was very nice of them.

Since it was lying down for a bit, the carburetor was rich, so I had to wait and give it some kicks. But nothing much. It started like a charm. There were no damages or scratches. But later I saw there was some damage to the turning lights. I fixed it with QuickFix at home.

With all the breaks, I reached TVC at 1030AM. I must say there wasn’t much traffic on the road. I rode around 50KMPH at most places. In some stretches, 60 to 70KMPH. Return was hectic. I rode non stop but there was too much traffic and also it rained a bit which made it worse.

Yamu rides well at 70 km/h, is quite stable, and the drum brakes give enough confidence. It can easily reach 80 km/h. It vibrates a bit, but it can be on highways with less wind. I wouldn’t try beyond that unless I am overtaking or for a very short burst. You can easily cruise at 70 km/h. So for most Indians, it has enough speed. On this ride, my average speed was 30 km/h. Given the traffic on Hosur Road, crowded Anekal Road, the rains with traffic while returning, etc. I think it was good speed. I didn’t push either. Overall, it was a good ride. I feel comfortable and confident in the vehicle.

At TVC, the construction of the house is in the final stages. It should be completed by the end of August (at least according to the builder). I might have to visit it often during these final stages. So more drives or trips are coming.

I helped a bit with laying the OFC at TVC. By the time I left, they had gotten internet at the kitchen camp. There is more work to be done, along with some citizen science projects. I am looking forward to it.

In the last week, I had not attended to my email inbox, so I did. And also marked really old emails are read. I like inbox zero. Thanks to the folks who re-emailed. Sorry about the delay.

• Uma’s school has started. So we are having an early dinner and going to bed early. I like this routine.
• I continued with two P.T sessions. I am doing more and more strength training now. I am also tracking the progress. I have not played in a while. I hope to play next week.
• I am scheduled to teach a course called World of Computing at APU starting in August. The content looks great.
• E20 has been a problem with my old bike. I see some rust and some rubber being eaten away. Currently, I have a full tank of E20. After this, I plan to switch to Indian Oil’s XP100. It seems like XP100 (IOCL) and Power100 (HPCL) are the only petrol fuels that are ethanol free. They are not cheap at Rs. ₹160/L to 188.04/L, but it seems it’s better to spend on fuel than on vehicle maintenance. When I was a child adulterated petrol was crime and now its a policy :(
• I didn’t know about Breadtime Stories, and it’s in my neighborhood. While I was there, I added some details. Added another posbox picture to the collection. I took it on the way to Chennai last week.
• Lots and lots of AI-generated spam comments seem to be coming my way. It’s not easy to flag them as spam by reading the comment text, but they all end up liking a shady website. That’s the easy clue. Anthropic was forced to takedown Fabel 5. I have been using Grammarly since 2020 as a desktop writing tool to fix grammar and spelling. Seems like it’s going the opposite way, forcing AI generation on users instead of helping them to write. I have been using their Classic document format in recent months. I am not sure how long I will pay for the subscription. I am sure they will sunset the classic format soon. Maybe that’s the day.
• Kage looks like a good CLI tool for downloading any website for offline browsing. It stores content in the Zim file format, an open standard. If you didn’t know, it’s the format Kiwix uses to provide Wikipedia offline. Now, of course, Kiwix has grown and provides more than just Wikipedia. Anyway, since the content is in Zim format, you can use the Kiwix Android app to browse and read it. A good way to carry web content on Android for offline usage. VizChitra/2026 is on the July 4th weekend. I am still not sure about my July plans, so I have not bought a ticket. But if you love data and visualizations, you might like it. Worst case, I might just see all the exhibitions. If you are interested in building your own tileset based on a geojson, then this val by Peter is useful.