• Manju and I met officially for the first time to discuss and plan TheGreatNERide2027. We met at Palmgrove inside Ballal Residency for a meal. It’s a regular South Indian restaurant. It wasn’t full, so we had time to sit and talk. It was also a very affordable restaurant in the middle of the city.
• My experiments with Reticulum continue. I have setup a Backbone Transport Node in Mumbai. It seems to be getting used. This week I have been playing with Telemetry setup of sideband app. I have lots of ideas. I will blog.
• I used DriveU to get back from APU. My driver was very professional. I might use it more.
• I have been trying K2 Horizon 3.7B. It’s small enough to run comfortably on my laptop. Inflation in India has definitely gone up, but people feel (10%-20%) it is higher than the released numbers. Qwenputer: a fully functioning, deterministic RISC-V CPU inside Qwen3.5.
• SIR Final Roll Revision 1 is out. My name is in a different polling booth now :( Other family members are in the correct booth. Should I be thankful that my name is there?

• It’s been a busy week. We have been making great progress at Pucar/Dristi, but there’s still lots to do.
• We tried coffee at Kana By Coffee Mechanics. It was not bad, food is also decent.
• I wrote a blog post about my name as a response to IndieWeb/Bangalore’s prompt. I continued exploring messaging on Reticulam Networks and the applications available.
• Manoj sent me this video from 18 years ago, when we were all very active on Twitter and had tweetups.
• I have been asked to use Silver shampoo by my hair stylist. I am officially a grey hair now.
• This week, we had unexpected rain in Bangalore. The temperature and dust levels have dropped, which is always good.
• What a messy week for web and security, especially for Indians. ECINET, yet again, proves why public tools should be FOSS. At this point, I no longer trust ECI’s software tools.

• I did two P.Ts this week. Anju also joined me for one of them. This week I did 3 pull-ups and 80KG lat pull-downs; both are currently my PRs. I didn’t play this week. I was planning to run today, but it started drizzling :)
• I continued with my Reticulum experiments. I have been running one locally to exchange short messages now. I wanted a public BackboneInterface in India, especially Bangalore, but the cheapest server I got was in Mumbai. So now it’s in Mumbai. Try it out. I hope to keep it online as long as possible. But you can switch at any time, or, better yet, you can use multiple BackboneInterfaces if you don’t trust its uptime. Next is to build a non TCP/IP based Interface.
• I met Sanket last Saturday, just before class. We have lots of common interests, including Kannada, TVC, etc. An hour flew by as we talked about them. I got a signed copy of his book ಅಲೆಮಾರಿಗಳು, ಅರಸರು, ವರ್ತಕರು as a gift. I just started reading it.
• Uma’s grandparents are here. So Anju and I get to go out. We are making the most of it.
• If you’re a passive investor like me, September/2026 was a disaster. NIFY100 fell by 5.92%. The Sensex has been going down over the last 18 months or so. I am worried about new investors who started in the last few years.
• I really wanted to watch Green Girl in theatres but couldn’t; now the creators have released it online. It’s a must-watch featurette. The CitizenLab has discovered that ads are being used to deliver zero-click spyware. This is an interesting and scary read. It seems like the government is shutting down the parks in Delhi to prevent folks from hoisting the Indian flag, and of course, the courts are deaf. AI Evals: Everything You Need to Know is a guide to AI and LLM evals for engineers and product managers by Hamel Husain and Shreya Shankar

• I have been building many of my projects in public for a long time, but not all my work can be public, and not every team I work with works that way. Still, I’ve found a pattern that works for most teams and for me: something like open office hours, except we’re all working. I call it Katte – The Open Desk. We meet online at a specific time, in one or two hour blocks, ideally with 2 to 8 people, and work together or separately, talking only when it helps. It’s mainly meant for teams, but it can also work with strangers as a form of accountability. This week I documented it.
• A friend, Bharathi, at NPTEL/CODE turned 50. It seems like she is just getting started, even after achieving so much. She is such an inspiration to me.
• I attended a lecture by Peggy Mohan at APU today. It was brilliant and also fun. She is such a brilliant storyteller.
• We are making great progress at Dristi V2. The last two weeks were spent designing. It’s been build and build week. The next few weeks will be the same, I guess. Once it reaches some stage, I will share more details.
• Uthara and Dave from BuzzWomen wrote a book, The Buzz Way, covering how they work. Congratulations, Uthara and Dave.
• Tomorrow, October 10th, is a big deal; I am guessing based on how far the Delhi police will go to prevent the peaceful protests. If they were this proactive in general, Delhi wouldn’t have become the crime capital. I am very optimistic about the protests; they are going to be large, effective, and, above all, peaceful.
• NCF is 30 years old now. They are celebrating with lots of programming; attend if you can. Aleph Alpha has built Savanna, a model factory that implements the entire training pipeline in code so that models can be built collaboratively. They have also released their open-weights model, Kolibri. I haven’t tried it yet, but it looks interesting. I came across RoadStr, decentralized road-event reporting using Nostr and MeshCore. Web and Android. It’s very close to the project I had proposed at FOSSHack/2026. I am trying it in a browser now. I will definitely try it on OSMAnd using their plugin. I need to see if I can collect historical data for a specific location for research. Otherwise, it looks great. I am also studying and exploring the Reticulum Network. It seems useful and stable, especially when the bandwidth needs are small.

• Sunday, I went to FOSSIndia/2026. I met a bunch of people, did my BoF session on microgrants, and then also got Cardputer Adv (with Mesthstatic) from Kiran. Also met lots of other folks: Tanvi, Adhavan, Vivek, Aman, Rukmini, Arun, Noopur, Padmini, Pranesh etc. I have missed mentioning a bunch of people here. Sorry about that. But I might write different blog posts just covering the people and projects at FOSSIndia/2026.
• Tuesday, I left for Goa for a work offsite with Pucar. It was an amazing three days; I learned a lot. It’s fun to be in a room when people are debating. Just to watch, listen, and absorb. This was my first face-to-face meeting with the Pucar team. I really enjoyed hanging out with them.
• It was a short trip. I couldn’t do much other than work. I played a bit and went for a walk; that’s all. The tourist season has not started yet, so it was peaceful and fun.
• I also met Ajay Shah and Susan Thomas. We had a bunch of fun but enriching conversations. I will have to make plans to go to Bombay now, just to have longer conversations. Given the work I have now, it’s probably only possible in early 2027.
• It’s been two weeks of back-to-back travel. I don’t know how people do it.
• I played one game of pickleball this week; no runs, but I walked quite a bit and also did one P.T. session.
• Everyone is using AI at work. I think it is okay, but the negligence. is NOT OKAY. I found an AI chat prompt in a judgment by a Bangalore District Court. I have been exploring decentralized mesh networks. Meshtastic on LoRa is popular and seems very useful, but it’s limited to messaging. Reticulam Network is a network stack to build decentralized wide-area networks using heterogeneous communication modes. Currently, I am trying an app called Sideband that runs on top of Reticulam Network, which runs on top of the Internet. I will try other interfaces soon.
• Happy Mahatma Gandhi Jayanti to all of you. It was a long weekend for all of us. We took a short family trip to Hesaraghatta. It’s a do-nothing holiday. Pathu is enjoying her stay with other dogs; Echo is with us.

This week has been tough but interesting overall. Lots of good conversations, both technical and non-technical. I hope to find more time to write next week.

• Uma wanted to get on a digger; she asked me. I said I don’t own it; if you want, you need to ask driver uncle. She called him loudly and asked him if she could come inside. He said, “Yes.” After a while, she asked, ” Can you start and move the hand? He said, “No.” I was just watching the conversation.
• This week’s P.T. was at odd times because I was traveling; thanks to Bhumika for accommodating. I couldn’t play this week, but I was able to run wherever I was, which is a good thing.
• The Indian Express has done a good series on the CEC and ECI of India. For me, the most worrying factor was that technology blocked what the law allowed; hence, 97 voters couldn’t be added to the voter list, and I think it’s a crime that should be punishable. Also, what was decentralized in process and pre-tech is now centralized by technology; i.e., voter list creation is decentralized but centralized technically, and storage and RBAC are centralized. Ideally, each state should own the platform with a separate installation and database. They should sync to the central one only for reporting purposes, as it used to work before. We are kind of losing it due to the centralized architecture design, and it goes directly against the Constitution.
• I was in Chennai to meet the team. It was a very short but hectic trip. I couldn’t get a train ticket, so I took a private electric bus. I must say KSRTC (Karnataka) has the best buses in the country.
• I like that Anand includes “Mistakes I made” and “Questions I was asked” in his weekly updates. Lume is a small, crazy-fast hybrid search engine written in Rust; you can run it locally or on your server.  

• I did a long walk/run with friends on Sunday, along with a huge kaalu soup (paaya) breakfast. Otherwise, it was a regular week with one game and one P.T. session. I should be back to two sessions next week. Also wrote a post about why I chose the Forerunner 965.
• The Hyphen Journal is here. I subscribed a long time ago, but their system somehow didn’t register my payment. So I had to ask customer support. Thanks to Pradeep for reminding me to subscribe. It was on my list, but as it often happens, I had made a mental note of it and promptly forgot about it. The journal looks pretty; I haven’t read it yet, maybe this weekend.
• Many times, I try to remember the sites I’ve already visited and struggle to do it. I have used bookmarks with tags, but it hasn’t worked because I forget to bookmark them. What I need is a search engine that remembers every site/page I visit and indexes it for searching. Turns out Hister is exactly that. It’s FOSS and self-hosted. Ducklake looks simple and powerful at the same time. It uses SQLite/PostgreSQL for the catalog and Parquet files for the actual data to build a data lake. WebMCP looks like a very interesting addition; it could be useful for websites that don’t support APIs or where the user wants to see things as they happen. Jeff sent me ebook2audiobook, which seems to support Kannada through Facebook’s mms-tts. I haven’t tried it yet; it’s on my list. Tante’s article on Power Grab and Fascism in FOSS is a must-read. There is a lot of fear-mongering about open-weight models, especially from the V.C. and S.V. community. I remember Bill Gates calling FOSS developers communists almost two decades ago. In that regard, open-weight models have already won.
• Kerala women MLAs walk out of a workshop where Hindi was the only language used. Why is it so difficult to run a bilingual event for a government organization when they are forcing kids to learn three languages?

• I played once this week. I was so involved in the game that I hit my face with the racket while trying to pull the ball, resulting in bloody and swollen lips. So I only did one session of P.T and one run this week.
• Uma was also down with a fever this week. It was a bit scary as there were H1N1 cases in the neighborhood. Thankfully, it was just a normal fever.
• India’s GDP figures are out. Forget what the government says; think about the effect it has on your earnings. Has it increased? Has your buying power increased? What about your buying power in dollar terms? We do buy a lot of things directly or indirectly in dollars. For most people, these questions matter far more than the GDP growth rate, and I doubt many are noticing meaningful improvement. I feel it’s gone the other way: inflation is so high that growth doesn’t matter at all.
• If you have any school-going kids or know any, point them to the 2nd edition of the #ReclaimConstitution Quiz. It’s open now.
• Cot is a Self-hosted observability platform for autonomous systems. It runs in a single Docker container locally and hooks into your agents to log. SwarmLLM is a way to combine all the hardware on the network in a P2P network to run inferences. Nothing to install, and everything runs in the browser. It is quite an interesting experiment. It’s not FOSS. Uncloud looks like an easy, no-frills way to deploy applications to a bunch of servers with a single command, without tedious cluster management. It’s also FOSS. I also like that it has a way to push the containers to servers without a registry. It seems to work only with Docker and not podman. I have yet to try it out, but I am very impressed with its simplicity.