Archive

Review: Mast Mein Rehne Ka: 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 …

Review: Hi Papa: 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 …

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

It’s always Day 1. : 

Read book reviews later: 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… 📚

Pandemic: 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.

Can AI decode an Indus script?: 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 …

Aurangzeb: 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 …

GoPro Hero 10’s cloud auto-upload: 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 …

Google alternatives: 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 …

A tale of PDF compression: 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. …

How to improve your online reading?: 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 …

Book review: The Ride of a Lifetime: 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 …

Book review: Lifespan: 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 …

Book review: In Order to Live: 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 …

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

Spotify vs Apple Music: 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.

Hello, world.: Trying yet another blogging platform.

Thoughts on iPhone X: 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 …

How I Use My Apple Watch 4: 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 …