Fun

Immutable Atomic Linux Distirbutions

Of late, I’ve been hearing a lot of (good) things about Immutable Linux Distributions, from friends, colleagues and mentors. It has been something on my plate for some time, to explore. But given the nature of the subject, it has been delayed for a while. Reasons are simple; I can only really judge this product if I use it for some time; and it has to be on my primary daily driver machine.

The Lotus story so far

My very first experience with water flowering plants was pretty good. I learnt a good deal of things; from setting up the pond, germinating the lotus seeds, setting up the right soil, witnessing the growth of the lotus plant, fish eco-system to take care of the pond. Overall, a lot of things learnt.

But I couldn’t succeed in getting the Lotus flower. A lot many reasons. The granite container developed some leakage, which I had to fix by emptying it, which might have caused some shock to the lotus. But more than that, in my understanding, the reason for not being able to flower the lotus, was the amount of sunlight. From what I have learned, these plants need a minimum of 6-8 hrs of sunlight to really give you with the flowering result, whereas the setup of my pond was on the ground with hardly 3-4 hrs of sun. And that too, with all the plants growing, resulted in indirect sunlight.

I was quite impressed by the ability of this insect; yet to be. The way it has camouflaged itself is mesmerizing. I’ll let the video do the talking as this one is going to be difficult to express in words.

This blog post is about my observations of some of the plants in my home garden.

While still a n00b on the subject, these notes are my observations and experiences over days, weeks and months. Thankfully, with the capability to take frequent pictures, it has been easy to do an assessment and generate a report of some of these amazing behaviors of plants, in an easy timeline order; all thanks to the EXIF data embedded. This has very helpfully allowed me to record my, otherwise minor observations, into great detail; and make some sense out of it by correlating the data over time.

As a person who prefers full access to data in the simplest format, while at the same time having it useful with latest technologies, my quest for trying things out is an ongoing activity.

Earlier, I blogged about my needs of collating news feeds in a simple format, readily accessible offline, while still being useful and aligned with the modern paradigm.

In today’s age, the other common aspect of our life, is digitization of moments. With the advent of great technology and affordable economics, the world now has access to great devices to capture moments in digital form. Most people, these days, are equipped with smart devices, like mobile phones, that come with pretty good image capturing devices. Our lives, our societies, how we interact; a lot of it is now built around the assumption of smart devices and digital services.

Pandemic

With COVID-19, this was the first nation-wide lockdown in my lifetime I’ve witnessed. I guess the feel must be same for many many more people across the globe.

It was almost the same time, a year ago, when this lockdown first struck.

It being the first time, I wasn’t then really prepared on how to handle it. With everything literally shut down, there was nothing to do than sit where you are. But personally, it wasn’t that difficult. That’s because I’m not much fond of moving around frequent.

I’ve mostly had the preference of controlling my data rather than depend on someone else. That’s one reason why I still believe email to be my most reliable medium for data storage, one that is not plagued/locked by a single entity. If I had the resources, I’d prefer all digital data to be broken down to its simplest form for storage, like email format, and empower the user with it i.e. their data.

Curiosity

I guess this would be common to most of us.

While I grew up, right from the childhood itself, the sky was always an intriguing view. The Stars, the Moon, the Eclipses; were all fascinating.

As a child, in my region, religion and culture; the mythology also built up stories around it. Lunar Eclipses have a story of its own. During Solar Eclipses, parents still insist that we do not go out. And to be done with the food eating before/after the eclipse.

Setting up a Sony PS3 Blu-Ray Disc Remote Controller with Kodi

TLDR; Since most of the articles on the internet were either obsolete or broken, I’ve chosen to write these notes down in the form of a blog post so that it helps me now and in future, and hopefully others too.

Raspberry Pi

All this time, I have been using the Raspberry Pi for my HTPC needs. The first RPi I acquired was in 2014 and I have been very very happy with the amount of support in the community and quality of the HTPC offering it has. I also appreciate the RPi’s form factor and the power consumption limits. And then, to add more sugar to it, it uses a derivative of Debian, Raspbian, which was very familiar and feel good to me.

Integrating Comments on Hugo with Isso

Oh! Boy. Finally been able to get something set up almost to my liking. After moving away from Drupal to Hugo, getting the commenting system in place was challenging. There were many solutions but I was adamant to what I wanted.

• Simple. Something very simple so that I can spend very limited time to tickle with (especially 2 years down the line)
• Independent. No Google/Facebook/3rd Party dependency
• Simple workflow. No Github/Gitlab/Staticman dependency
• Simple moderation workflow

Simplicity

First, the migration away from Drupal itself was a PITA. I let go of all the comments there. Knowing my limited web skills, it was the foremost requisite to have something simplest as possible.