I spent a bit of time organizing the NMG/2026 introductions and making them. It’s almost done except for three. More coordination is required there. There was also one small change in the NMG; one of the grantees couldn’t receive the funds, so I granted them to the next person. Also, I had missed adding Ganghadhar’s contribution to the pool. Ganghadhar has been a long-term supporter of NMG and a good friend. Thank you, Gangadhar. With that, we could award a bigger grant. All in all, good.

• Update the Idly Dose Vada Coffee price survey to have 2026 values represented on the graph. I have not added a year-on-year comparison chart. I plan to do that.
• I continued with my two days of P.T. I want to make it 3 days of workouts a week. I need to make changes to include it in my schedule. I couldn’t play this week, mostly due to the rain.
• I have been playing pickleball for more than 6 months, so I thought it was a good idea to buy a pair of paddles. I got a pair of Vinsguir Graphite Pickleball Paddles (the ones with colorful doodles). It’s an entry-level, affordable paddle. I have used them before; I found them decent, so I got a pair. I also got a pair of Impakto barefoot shoes and a set of Supersox No Show socks, mostly for gym use. Both are practical, affordable, and easy to pack.
• I rode Manju’s HD x440 for the first time. It rides well. It felt a bit long, especially on sharper turns, but it’s a comfortable ride even for my height (163 cm). It’s heavier than a CB350, but I didn’t notice it while riding.
• Added Weeknotes by Jon Sterling and Liam O’Connor to my list. Both are from academia. I also like the platform they use for writing online. It’s called Forrester. It’s a FOSS tool for authoring, exploring, and sharing scientific and mathematical hypertexts. BirdNET-Pi is a FOSS software system for the Raspberry Pi that does real-time acoustic bird classification. You can easily set one up at your home or office. Locus Sonus Stream Project offers a worldwide network of “open mikes” that permanently stream local soundscapes to a dedicated server. The resulting live audio can be used in a wide variety of artistic and scientific projects, including bird identification. Unrelated but similar audio project where, in the center of San Francisco, a microphone listens to the street and uses Shazam constantly, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
• SourceGit is a FOSS Git client. It’s not on Flathub, but they have deb, AppImage, etc. It’s really useful if you are new to Git or you want to explore a complete repo. Honker is an SQLite extension that provides durable queues, streams, pub/sub, and a scheduler. I would like it to be integrated with Dramatiq. I think it will be a great combo, though it can work on its own. One of the MAGA “Influencers” is an AI character created by an Indian Student to earn money. I wonder how many Indian influencers are AI characters. Talkie is a vintage model trained on historical texts from a specific period. It’s fun and also a way to see if they can predict the future. I introduced 32-Bit Cafe community, Codeberg, and Neocities to my class this week.

• It’s been very hot; I used to think 35°C was the hottest, but now it’s consistently crossing 35°C. It is also very dry heat, the type that makes you tired, drowsy, and thirsty all the time.
• We had lunch with niblings at YouMee. I think it was okay. But kids loved going around, as there were lots of kids due to the holidays. Uma has been spending a lot of time with them this summer.
• Fixed a couple of pairs of Levi’s jeans that were at least a decade old. Started wearing them again. I love how they fit.
• A new 30 Days project called #30DaysOfDXing, where I am trying to receive various radio wave transmissions and listen to them.
• I was introduced to a new band, Peepal Tree, by a gymmate. Songs Chetana and Tangi are on my playlist now. I watched Vaazha -2 (Malayalam) and  Second Case of Seetharam (Kannada) this week. Both are one-time watchable.
• We have a new workout plan now. We will follow it for the next six months. My personal strength goal is to squat 1x bodyweight. Currently, I am at 18 Kgs, which is roughly 1/3. This was a good week, three workout sessions and a game session. We also got to hang out a bit at the Dolphins after the game.
• You might like The Creative Independent if you are looking for articles, interviews, and how-tos that can help you lead a creative life (according to them! ). I have found them useful.
• The union government tried to Trojan Horse the delimitation through the new women’s reservation bill. It wasn’t an honest effort, and it failed. If you didn’t know, there is already a reservation bill that was passed in parliament, but is not yet operative. On the other side of the world, people are getting arrested for sharing something privately on WhatsApp. I am no longer sure about E2EE on WhatsApp, following Signal’s E2EE being broken via a notification flaw on iOS.

• Uma started playing football this week. She is just getting used to it. I am still not sure if she loves it. But she likes going out, running around with friends. Football is a good way to do it.
• I have been working on NMG applications. We should have results on 22nd. I am late by a week this year.
• I started my regular gym sessions. This week, there were two sessions with my trainer and one on my own. I also played a game of pickleball. I am looking for more players living in and around me so that I can play at least twice a week. But I can only play when Uma is asleep, so it has to be either before 7 in the morning or after 7 in the evening. It’s not easy to find partners.
• We have a beehive on our balcony now :)
• I want to do a long ride on the NX500, at least a day ride of 200+ Km. RoyalBrothers, where I usually rent bikes, used to have it, but they don’t seem to anymore. Could you suggest any other place where I can hire it? Also, if you own one, can you ping me? I would like to talk to you.
• I used to host on MediaTemple, which later got acquired by GoDaddy. Two years ago, they also moved the platform to GoDaddy. Overall, it’s been okay, though pricey. In the last six months, they have been working on performance ( I know because it has improved, and I can also see they use Cloudflare CDN), but it’s been breaking my media hosting. often. The recent one is my GPX files, they have been serving it with the wrong content-type. So most of my GPX maps are broken as of now. I will have to think about it now.
• I think it’s fun to act like an AI bot for a while and chat with humans. If you are a ollama user, you might want to know this.

• I wrote a couple of blog posts about our Australia visit, walks, and drive. I have one more in draft and will publish it next week. It was a short trip, but it was fun. I would love to go back to Australia and do more walks and drives.
• I have not played or worked out in the last week. I already feel a bit rusty. Hoping to get back to playing and the gym next week. Compared to my previous holidays, this holiday we ate quite well and very healthily too.
• I broke my phone screen. I had to get an emergency phone via Uber Eats. It’s a Moto G56 5G. It’s a simple and affordable phone. It works well for all my needs, which are actually very basic. Now I have to get my old phone fixed.
• Echo and Pathu spent time with my sister, niece, and nephew this time. They have become very fond of them. We can’t board Echo anymore; he’s become very anxious and has fallen ill. He needs to be with family, ideally, at what he considers home.
• All mankuthimmana kagga’s, along with their English meanings. There are about 945 poems, each of which is four lines. They are profound, and the collection is a masterpiece. Samay Raina’s STILL ALIVE is a good watch. This free 2024 course, Practical Deep Learning for Coders, is still a good one, especially if you are starting. An interesting real-world + virtual game about tagging and claiming payphones in the Sydney/NSW area. I did tag a phone at Martin place.

• The holidays are going well. We got to celebrate Uma’s birthday with family. Uma enjoyed visiting all the animals she loves.
• Uma loves bus rides. So we took buses everywhere. We walked around the city, Hyde Park, and the Opera House this week. We also met Sathya for coffee. Thanks to weekly notes we know quite a few things happening in each others life. So it was like continuing a conversation we recently had. It was good to see you, Sathya.
• Today, she got to go around the farm picking strawberries. We do have a strawberry plant at home, which she is very fond of. Today she saw hundreds of them and picked many. I also got to drive on nice roads along the Hawkesbury River and ate some great pies. I will write more about that later.
• I have been using SSH keys to encrypt and, in some cases, to sign. It’s the most practical solution, as most of my team members already have SSH keys to sign in to git or a Linux server.
• No workouts or play this week. I have to make up once I am back in Bengaluru.

• On Saturday, I was at IndieWebClub/BLR meetup. I could help some folks with WordPress. Other than that, it was just fun to see and listen to so many bloggers. Beautiful Bangalore flowers.
• It’s the season of birthdays; we celebrated a couple this week, and we will celebrate more next week. Sunday was Echos gotcha day. It’s already been five years. Time flies, and he is a senior now. Anju baked a cake for him and for Pathu.
• I also met some friends for coffee and dinner during the week, but we couldn’t play. I was able to do two days of training at Stairs. I am progressing well.
• Dave Winer and Kotke have blogrolls that might interest you. 404Media is one of the tech media I follow. I am not a paid subscriber yet, but one day I might. I use uv everyday. The company behind it, Astral, is joining OpenAI, which I think is not good news for uv users. But let’s see. If your kids are forced to be online for entertainment, then The Kid Should See This is a curated list of videos that you might find useful. In fact, even for adults. Nightingale looks like a great tool for creating karaoke songs. It’s FOSS as well. I have not tried it yet.
• I thought courts would take a strong stance on Sonam Wangchuk’s illegal detention for 170 days. But I think I failed to realize that the S.C. doesn’t work in isolation; they are just part of this society, and they fail citizens just as other institutions do.
• If I am forced to define what I like to do in three words, then it would be to learn, build, and teach.

• It’s been hot and dry in Bengaluru. It’s been raining also, not a lot, but just enough to cool down a bit. I hope it continues. We have started using AC for roughly an hour every day. Just to cool the room before we go to sleep.
• I played a game of pickleball with friends on Sunday morning. Now that seems like an ideal time for everyone. I also do two P.T sessions this week. I have started noting down the strength levels. Whenever I cross a milestone, I will try to add a record there.
• I wrote about my new hydration backpack. It’s been very useful. I hope to use it more.
• NMG/2026 application period is over. We have received 285 applications in total. I have started going over them slowly.
• Sathya has a map of cafes and restaurants in Sydney. I have been following and adding some of them to my TODO list. But this listing is very useful. List of public spaces across India to run all kinds of community events. It’s an FOSS and Open Data project. Instagram users have lost E2EE. I am not surprised. Instagram is just an advertising platform now and wants every signal. The next step for Meta would be WhatsApp. It seems like whatever progress we (India) had made in terms of transgender rights is regressing.
• There are lots of interesting things happening in the world of ActivityPub worth noting. Madblog exposes a bunch of Markdown files as a blog with full support for ActivityPub federation. It looks very easy to set up and run. Pubby is a Python library to manage everything related to the ActivityPub protocol. It makes it easy to bring AP to your Python applications. ap cli client is, as the name suggests, a command-line client to your AP server. And the most interesting one is holos.social, where you run the ActivityPub server on your phone (keys on the phone) and then expose it to the world through relay servers. Relay servers act as a middleman between your phone and the world. It also supports custom domains.

Note: This was written yesterday. But I forgot to post.

Visas are here. All of us got 3-year multiple-entry travel visas. Maybe we can make another visit to Australia and spend more time there. I would love to ride around Australia if possible. But before that, hopefully, airlines will have enough fuel to take us there.

• March 15th is the last day to apply for NMG/2026. If you were planning to apply, please do. Also, please forward to interested folks.
• I wrote a short blog post about using Moodle CodeRunner to run Bash questions. I use it for in-class lab.
• I finished #30DaysOfWatercoloring in 90 days. I am very late, I know, but it’s complete, and I love it.
• Updated IDVC 2025 data and published it. I have also made the 2026 data live. But take it with a pinch of salt, as there have been very few survey submissions. But I think we will have enough items soon, maybe by the end of April.
• I played a game of pickleball with friends this week. I could also attend two P.T sessions this week. I could do 3 sets of 10 reps at 55kg on lateral pulldowns. The goal is my body weight. I should cross it this year. I am very happy about it, given where I was at this time last year. BTW, I have lost weight and am now at my ideal weight – 58Kgs.
• I have had a couple of OpenOffice bookings this week and had some great conversations about FOSS, OpenData, etc.
• If you want quick access to Windows, here is a JavaScript emulator that runs Windows 2000 in a browser. I don’t know how Amazon implemented AI tools for its developers. For the organization that runs a lot of internet infrastructure, they should have been more deliberate and thoughtful. I wouldn’t agree to a code merge that is not reviewed and signed off by a person. Glad/sad to see Amazon coming to the same conclusion after disasters. Seems organizations and governments think Sovereignty in AI means deliberately hiding facts and sanitizing history, rather than conducting research and building. This thought process is completely different from what the FOSS world thinks about Sovereignty. India relaxes rules to allow easier Chinese investments again. It just shows how arbitrary these decisions are. We might even see TikTok soon!?! All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), an anti-war film, is now in the public domain. You can watch and share it using the Archive.org link. LibreOffice has Markdown support now.