• 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.

• Onam as on Wednesday. Happy belated Onam to all of you. We did Pookalam together. Uma was an active participant this time. We also watched Bethlehem Kudumba Unit. It’s a fun romcom.
• I am revising the MAD-1 course structure. This week, I took time to go through the material and see what needs to be updated. I plan to close it by the end of September if everything goes well. Once that is done, I will do the same for the MAD-2 course.
• 1-bit models have become practical and production-ready. I have been using one locally, and I have been quite happy.
• In the World of Computing course, this week was mostly about tinkering. Tinkering with electronics and computers is what I enjoy doing day to day. This week’s class was fun, at least for me :)
• I gifted myself a Garmin Forerunner 965. It’s my biggest fitness-related buy and my first smartwatch with lots of features. I have Pebble and Banglejs. They are good, but are meant for different purposes and also in completely different price brackets. I will write a detailed post about 965 once I use it for a while.
• I am not sure what happens to DuckDB now that Ducklabs has joined AWS. It’s a brilliant piece of technology and product. Hope it gets more support. Also, I have removed Ollama from my machine; now I mostly use Llama.cpp

• I played host for them; actually, a few team members did all the work. I was just present, that’s all. That said, that kept me busy during the week. We booked a hotel on Church Street through a popular booking site, but they canceled at the last minute. Then we had to book the same hotel using a different aggregator site. This is the second time for me. So I think from now on, after booking a hotel online, I will call the hotel to confirm. The confirmation from the aggregator means nothing.
• We had team lunch at Brik Oven and team dinner at Ishaara, both on Church Street. We also took some time out together to spend a day at Our Native Village near Hesaraghatta.
• I ran a bit on Sunday; my calf muscles were hurting, so I stopped. But I was able to run on Monday and Tuesday at Hesaraghatta grasslands. It’s so different to run in the green surroundings compared to running in the city. I could do only one P.T session and one game.
• On Sunday, I went to watch the Bengaluru’47 exhibition at RBNAM School. I loved it.
• I wrote a simple web component called muscle-map to log the workouts here.
• I have lots of image albums on my phone which are collections on random subjects. One of them is titled “Unidentified Urban Objects” in Bengaluru. This week I took an opportunity to upload to an Arena channel called Unidentified Urban Objects. It has lots of random pictures of manholes, electric poles, public sensors, toilets, and gods on the footpath, etc. You can also add to the channel. All Bangalore-focused.
• I am probably one of the few paid Grammarly users who still use classic mode to avoid AI rewriting in their new interface. Also, the new interface is not writer-friendly; too many distractions. 1-bit, 1.125-bit, and 1.58-bit LLMs are very interesting and are capable. I have started exploring some of them and will probably productize some.

• I have been using Tau by HF as the coding agent. It’s very simple but has been very good. It’s just enough. This one is different from Tau by dpc, which also looks good. I am yet to try it. It’s on my list to try. Work in general has been good, and I am happy about the progress I have been making.
• They have started digging everywhere in Bangalore. Almost all the roads around our home have been dug up. I can see the work is getting done, but I don’t know why they had to do it on all roads at once. Now it’s an adventure ride to Uma’s school every day.
• These days, every Tuesday is a cupcake Tuesday for Uma. We stop at Cafe Da Costa Bakery on our way back from school.
• Saturday has become the rest day. Originally, I wanted to do a longer run on Saturdays, but it has not happened yet. Sunday was also mostly a rest day as it rained when I started running. Bangalore rains are unpredictable. So I immediately stopped and returned home. As usual, I did two P.T sessions during the week. I also started logging the main part of the workout on Strava for later reference and to measure progress. I also have a reliable partner to play now, so we played two games. I couldn’t run today as I was driving back home :( I do recognize that I can dedicate an hour each day to physical activity because I work mostly from home and save my commute time. A couple of months back, I got a pull-up bar for a door frame. Until now, it has been used mostly by Uma and me for dead hangs. This week I was able to do two proper pull-ups at home. I have been practicing assisted pull-ups during P.Ts, so it’s not a surprise. That said, I have not yet reached the goal (WN 23/2026) of 3 proper pull-ups.
• I had an interesting conversation with Abhishek from OpenConsultancy about Frappe and related products. I know about Frappe; I have used their libraries but not their main product. But it was good to catch up with Abhishek and learn more from a fellow FOSS enthusiast.
• Tomorrow is a holiday, so only one class this week. I left at the wrong time today. At 5pm and it took me 3 hours to reach home :( that’s why no run.
• Appa was here over the weekend for his dental treatment. My dental treatment is almost done! Maybe two more months :(
• I have this book, Coders at Work. I was wondering: with AI and agents, does it still make sense? It makes more sense than ever. Get a copy or borrow from me. I have a hard copy. You would have seen GPX/Map animation videos in my previous blog posts; those are created using a FOSS tool called GPX Animator. It has lots of features to explore.

• As long as Caste exists, reservation must exist. Even after reservations, big institutes have institutionalized caste-based discrimination; we have seen many cases of that. The rot is deep. So if you think caste-based reservation has to go, then you work on the root cause. Annihilation of Caste is the only way.
• I have five or six Indian UNCLES (Some are five years younger than me and others are at least ten years older than me) on Twitter. They are very sweet and agreeable when you meet or talk to them. But full of venom on Twitter, once in a while I check their Twitter posts to see what troubles them. Gen Z seems to be troubling them a lot these days.
• I wrote a blog post about my ride to Gandikota and the struggles. I am yet to test ride (long, like 100+KM) a KTM AdvX.
• I continued with P.T, and no games. I had to skip today’s P.T because of an emergency. I have restarted running. This week I ran thrice. I ran today because I skipped P.T. Otherwise it would have been only twice. But the plan is to run three times a week if possible. I capture the path using GPSLogger and send it to my CouchDB. I am also logging it to Strava to find community, especially as I want to run a 10K in October. Hopefully I will be ready. I got myself a pair of Nike Stride Aero Fit. Usually all shorts give me chafing. But this one has been great. I do own Puma ForeverRun NITRO; it’s a good pair of running shoes that I have not used much. Sometimes you buy things in enthusiasm but never use them. This was one such buy. Just after that buy, I had neck issues, and I couldn’t jump or run much. Now at least they will get used. Also my 12 year old jersey from 2014 Tata 10K still works and looks great.
• I have been using Impakto Barefoot Shoes to walk around and also use them inside the gym. Impacto has been a surprise; they have been very comfortable. They are affordable and very lightweight to carry. I will have to write a detailed review about them.
• I registered myself at the Independent Director’s Databank. I am yet to go through their online course, but if you are looking for one, you can find me there.
• I really like this CheapFoodMap. We have enough data for IDVC to build something similar. I used Claude to build it. It’s hosted with the data, and it’s live. Let me know what you think. You can contribute data to IDVC using a simple form. I review and approve it before it goes live. I love Pocket Bird. It’s a small bird that lives inside your browser that you can interact with. You can set it up on your site for your users to play, or you can install the add-on so you can play on any site.

Like many others, I had become pessimistic about this country’s future. I thought that once my responsibilities here were over, I would simply leave. But now, my optimism is slowly returning. I believe we can still change. I believe the people of this country are capable of thinking rationally, getting involved, and shaping a better future together.

– A young friend of mine, who has worked with me for couple of years.

• rode to Gandikota today with Manju. It’s a simple two-day ride. And Gandikota is about 285 km from Bangalore. The idea was also to test ride the KTM Adventure X (2025). I felt that just a 5 km ride was not good enough to test it, so I planned a 500+ km ride. But unfortunately, Royal Brothers couldn’t give me an acceptable bike yesterday. So I had to settle for V-Strom SX (250cc) instead of canceling the whole ride. This also means I will have to plan another ride soon. I will write more once I am back in Bangalore.
• Friend gifted me an HMT Gandaberunda ಗಂಡಬೇರುಂಡ. It’s one of the best gifts that I have received in recent times. You know who you are, Thank you.
• I continued with two sessions of PT. I couldn’t run or play this week.
• Sometimes I use JavaScript/TypeScript. I try to run them without using Deno. I just realized that I can now install and manage Deno from Python. Nocturne is a Linux GUI client for your music on Jellyfin, OpenSubsonic, and Bandcamp. It can connect to an existing Navidrome or manage one for you. It’s FOSS. I use it with my existing Navidrome server. AI Potluck is a tracker for the progress of all the FOSS components of the ecosystem. There is also AI as a public infrastructure project.

• I had a DEXA scan done at Vital Insights. Overall, it shows improvement from last year. My BFP is 28 now, three percent lower than last year’s 31. My total body weight has decreased by 2 Kgs, but what’s important is that my fat mass has decreased by 3 Kgs and my lean mass has increased by 1 Kg, which I think is good progress. My next goal is to reduce the BFP to < 25% within a year. Also, run 5K in 30 Min. Both are not big goals.
• I played on Saturday. Singles are quite tiring. I played four games, won two, and lost two. Not bad. I continued with my two days of P.T.
• Added Madhavan Park PO, Denkanikottai PO, and Gummalapuram SPO to the OpenPostboxIndia project. Also updated IDVC with new samples from 2026.
• I have been adding GPS coordinates as text overlaid on the image. I know how it sounds, but it’s not that bad. I have also been exploring adding some metadata as a QR code on top of the image. That way, my metadata always remains with the image, regardless of how it’s transmitted or which operating system it runs on. I documented the tools and process this week.
• I am planning a Friday/Saturday ride to Gandikota in AP with a friend. It’s a short ride; ping me if you like to join.
• SIR in Karnataka continues to be a mess. Apparently, if you were added to the voter list as part of the 2002 ‘supplementary rolls’, your name may not appear in the 2002 SIR list. And I am not the only one facing this issue; many are. Also, many have differently formatted names and are forced to do it offline. I can’t understand the mindset of a country that can’t even officially announce and pay respect to the folks who died for it. Sonam Wangchuk has been fasting for the past 16 days. The government previously arrested him for no real reason and released him before the courts granted him bail, thereby avoiding the courts setting a precedent and, of course, public shame. Now they are shamelessly supporting a minister who has caused enormous harm to the education system. You know the kind of leaders who are not even ready to talk, even when they are on the wrong side. Climate.us is the public archive of previous climate.gov run by volunteers. I use OpenCode for new development and Aider for small additions or fixes. I am sure there are many new tools. But for now, these two seem to be working well for me. Pada Sanchaya is a good aggregator of Kannada dictionaries online.
• Pelican’s have been sighted at Halasuru (Ulsoor) Lake. I embedding videos sent by a friend.