Mast Mein Rehne Ka is a slice of life, dark movie disguising as a comedy. It touches upon many themes: poverty, struggles in a large city, loneliness in old age. Specially hard-hitting is the take on difficulty of making friends as you grow older. In the U-curve of story telling the movie doesn’t take time to get into the valley and keeps going down, only to have some easy tropes pull you out of the trough - like the mean son returning to take her mother abroad, almost reversing the villain.

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Hi Papa (“Hi Nanna” originally in Telugu) is a movie about parenting, a love story which is slightly different than run of the mill masala ones. However, at a broader level, it is no different than typical Telugu rom-dramas (similar to Jersey, also ft. Nani) where you will see the male hero victimized and glorified, and the female lead being in the morally wrong territory, only to realize her mistake later and continue the sob-fest later on.

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Dave Perell in his wonderful Guide to Writing Online talks about collecting the dots (reading) vs connecting the dots (writing).

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Don’t judge a book by its cover, and in some cases, by its reviews. This article postulates (and I concur) that reading the reviews “after” you’ve read the book can be your window to interesting perspectives. bookriot.com/why-you-s… 📚

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Nothing has ever brought humanity closer than this pandemic. Think about it. In all the negatives, all the grimness, all the darkness, if there is one silver lining, it is that there’s hope.. empathy and working together is the only way to survive.

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Technology, meet history. History, meet future. An ancient language has defied decryption for 100 years. Can AI crack the code? - Rest of World Here’s a TLDR version: The Indus script is a complex writing system used by the Indus Valley Civilization, but its meaning and purpose are still not fully understood by scholars. Deciphering the Indus script has been a challenging task that has occupied scholars for decades, with no clear breakthroughs in sight.

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Here’s an excerpt of a book excerpt from the book The World: A Family History of Humanity (Goodreads) by Simon Sebag Montefiore. This historical snapshot of Mughal emperor Shahjahan’s fall and Aurangzeb’s ascent shows how the most hardworking yet cunning and zealot leaders can lay havoc on a family and on a country. This micromanaging puritan tried to limit sensuality, banning women from wearing tight trousers and, in Kashmir, ordering people to wear drawers instead of nothing.

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Wouldn’t it be nice if a feature just worked? GoPro recently introduced a neat feature where you can transfer your GoPro media, directly and automatically, to GoPro cloud without needing a cable, a phone or a laptop. Start here with GoPro’s official documentation: GoPro Support: Auto Upload Your Footage To The Cloud. However, this feature is still quite finicky and often requires troubleshooting. Took me a while to get it working.

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This is a great article on Google alternatives The Next Google | DKB. There are now new solutions coming out, which even if they can’t replace Google, solve many a painpoints: Quickly accessing information without ads and trackers is one. Google is incentivized to show you a list of search result webpages, including ads and SEO optimized shitty websites, and then redirect you to them to earn 💰. These alternatives, however for the most part, let you find the information you’re looking for without leaving the search page - recipes or technical code questions are a representative example.

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How difficult could it be to reduce a PDF file size? Apparently, in this instance, very! Google Docs generated PDFs have risen to monstrous sizes, relatively speaking (and I’m not alone). Recently, I needed to convert a Google Docs generted PDF, from 5MB to under 2MB, due to an upload limit. I tried to compress the said PDF through MacOS Preview’s built in “Reduce File Size” filters which in this rare instance didn’t work.

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Most people don’t care about readability of an online article, few of us however, do. No matter how good the content is, if the website (and hence the article) is littered with inline ads, bad formatting, or even gaudy typography - I prefer not to read it as is. Here are some tips to get around such websites, and have a great reading experience. I have divided my suggestions in multiple levels, with Level 0 being reading an article as-is.

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Finished reading: The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company by Robert Iger 📚 I picked up this book based on my buddy Bill’s recommendation (pun intended), he calls it one of the rare business books he’d actually recommend. With such high praise I was naturally curious, and boy did I love this book! Part memoir, part business wisdom, Bob Iger (CEO, Walt Disney company 2005–2020) shares his story of growing through the ranks at ABC Network to become an executive, and then joining Disney as COO when ABC was acquired by Disney in mid 1990s.

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Recently read: Lifespan: Why We Age and Why We Don’t Have To by David Sinclair 📚 This book was a random pick from the local library. I challenged myself to read a book on a different domain, and it turned out to be great. The premise, that you can increase your lifespan to 150 even 200 years, was mind bending and the book lived up to it. Lifespan talks about latest research from cellular biology about aging and how it can be slowed, heck, even reversed.

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Recently finished: In Order to Live, A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom by Yeonmi Park 📚. This memoir is honest, heart-breaking and hard-hitting. It shows the things we take for granted, say, being able to eat eggs in morning (Park mentions, they’d eat eggs once or twice a year (!!) in N.Korea) to basic human rights and freedom, are far more valuable than we presume. Despite its heavy subject, the book reads like a thriller and oddly, is even funny in places.

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Shenandoah National Park was all cloudy and misty today. Beautiful drive!

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Spotify vs Apple Music UI (circa Fall 2021). I like the Spotify UI better, it looks almost the same but is more functional (for e.g., shuffle/repeat button isn’t hidden away), also the cover image is bigger.

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Trying yet another blogging platform.

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When you hold iPhone X, the first thing you notice, is that it is heavier than it looks. Apple has this trend of not being the first but rather being a good implementer of technologies — they recreated the tablet as iPad, finger print sensor as TouchID, applied NFC as Apple Pay, voice assistant as Siri and recently facial recognition as FaceID. There are many novelties as well, like, being the first to launch a 64 bit processor, arguably building a mobile AppStore (Appstore transformed iPhone the way newsfeed transformed Facebook), and, make phone cameras mainstream.

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I was apprehensive when I bought the Apple Watch 4. Do I really need it? Will it fit comfortably? Can I handle the constant barrage of notifications on my wrist? Is it worth the price? How long will the battery last? Does it really help with fitness? Will it help save battery on my phone? I had just bought the bigger iPhone 7+ (still find it difficult to hold) then and wanted a companion device to check notifications without having to take the big phone out of my pocket every time.

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