Books read: 2024
ഖസാക്കിന്റെ ഇതിഹാസം (Khasakkinte Ithihasam) (Malayalam) - O. V. Vijayan | Wiki
மாதொருபாகன் (Maathorubagan)(Tamil) - Perumal Murugan | Wiki | Controversy - Court ruling
The Three-Body Problem(part 1) - Liu Cixin - | Wiki | 📽️ Netflix trailer
The Dark Forest(part 2) - Liu Cixin - | Wiki | 📽️ Netflix trailer
Complete works of William Shakespeare: The following plays
Hamlet
Macbeth
Othello
King lear
As you like it
Living with Shakespeare: Essays by Writers, Actors, and Directors - Susannah Carson
The Writing Life - Annie Dillard | Goodreads
The passenger - Cormac McCarthy | Wiki
Pale fire - Vladimir Nabokov | Wiki
Intertidal: A Coast and Marsh Diary Book by Yuvan Aves
Life Stories: Profiles from The New Yorker - David Remnick
Erasure by Percival Everett | Wiki | 📽️ Movie Trailer | 🏆 Oscar Award
Future Shock - Alvin Toffler | a reread from my college days | Wiki
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott | farnam street
The Kamogawa Food Detectives - Hisashi Kashiwai
Can’t We Just Print More Money? Economics in Ten Simple Questions - Jack Meaning and Rupal Patel
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals – Oliver Burkeman | Wiki
On the High Wire - Philippe Petit | 📽️ The movie
Started, haven’t finished:
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir | wiki | 📽️ Upcoming movie
Permutation City by Greg Egan
2666 - Roberto Bolaño
Bullet Park by John Cheever | wiki
Books Read:2021
Swann's Way - Marcel Proust
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower - Marcel Proust
The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust
Sodom and Gomorrah - Marcel Proust
The History of the Siege of Lisbon - José Saramago
Greed - Elfriede Jelinek
The Redbreast - Jo Nesbo
Headhunters - Jo Nesbo
Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie
Joseph Anton - Salman Rushdie
Pudhumaipithan - Short stories
Sa. Kandasamy - Short Stories
Iravukku Munbu Varuvadhu Maalai - Aadavan
The Man In The High Castle – Philip K. Dick
The English Patient — Michael Ondaatje
The Vaccine: Inside the Race to Conquer the COVID-19 Pandemic - Joe Miller, Özlem Türeci, Ugur Sahin
The Book of Disquiet - Fernando Pessoa
——
Man from high castle
Completed: Man from high castle, the last 20 pages gives you an “inception+matrix” level mind bending.
Running:Goals and tracking
This year’s goal for running is 1200 Kms in total. Tracking it on Beeminder via Smashrun via Garmin
I run with a 7 year old Garmin Forerunner 15 with a Garmin heart rate monitor strapped on to my chest.
My shoes are Adidas, Nike, Reebok, Artengo Badminton shoes. I accidentally, out of no choice, wore these for a run and surprisingly I found it more comfortable. I’ve run more than 1200Kms with them. Looks like the old adage, “The shoes will find the runner” has caught up with me.
Garmin Forerunner 15
Garmin Heart Rate Monitor with electrodes
Artengo badminton shoes bought at Decathlon.
Analysis on runs: Smashrun
I’ve been using Smashrun for the last 4 years. Unlike other running apps which gives you metrics that helps understand your past runs(ex post-facto), Smashrun helps you understand where can you go from here based on your past runs. For instance, the app lets you know what PRs(personal records) you can beat across various distances.(refer screenshots below)
It’s a paid app(1900 INR per year). The app is run by a two member team, it is a nice way to support them for continuously working on the new features and future updates.
They also have a free plan that gives you all the basic run metrics.
Dashboard: A general overview of all your runs.
Tracking annual run goal: 1200Kms
This reports tells you the percentage of your runs across different pace(speeds). One could clearly see I’ve been running at faster speeds for longer sessions over the past four months.
Prediction of personal records(PRs) one can break across various distances. This example shows that I could now try running a 10K and can expect a finish that is 3 minutes lesser than my current record.
Pace trends(increase or decrease) over a period of time.
Channels for News
News is everywhere, and everything is a news.
My channels for news are:
Dina Thanthi (தினத்தந்தி): Monthly subscription, print only. A local language daily. Consume them to know whats happening in and around your vicinity(city and state)
The Times and Sunday Times(UK) - Monthly subscription, online only. My window to the world. You’ll definitely find some wonderful writings on Cricket, the only game that I follow.
The New Yorker: Annual subscription, print and digital. The name has its reputation for insightful reportage.
Hackernews: Free. My go to place for FOMO cravings.
IRC chat/channels: Just be there and listen passively to what people are discussing about.
Twitter, Facebook and Reddit.
Need to Fix my Sleep
Less than 6 hours of sleep is totally not acceptable. Need to rethink and adjust daily routines.
Beeminder for goal Tracking
Beeminder for goal tracking.
Beeminder in simple terms: Goal tracking with commitment contracts.
You commit/pledge/bet, say, will do 10 pushups every day, so every time you don't meet the goal/derail, your credit card will be charged and the bet/pledge keeps on increasing.
Goals for this year(2021)
Run a total of 1200Kms.
Total productive work hours everyday = 6hrs
Total hours spent on hands on design everyday = 6hrs.
Started using IRCCloud
Started using IRCCloud for keeping up with IRC channels.
IRCCloud helps keep a persistent connection with freenode, meaning, you are always connected and hence you don’t miss out on conversations. When it comes to other apps like Hexchat and Kiwiirc, which I was using previously, the connection is terminated once you close the browser.
It is a paid app at $5/month
Uses This
List to software tools that I use to get things done at work and in life.
Core Work:
Adobe Suite
Figma
Sketch
Final cut pro
Webflow
Would love to use more:
Productivity:
Vim — a tool for all occasions, everything goes into Vim first, for thoughts, notes, and code. Also the smartest tool I’ve ever used.
Apple Mail — managing two email accounts, personal and work (Connects Proton Mail and Google Gsuite email)
Business Email — Google G-suite (Google, easily the worst offenders of privacy, I’ll never use their mail app and will avoid using their search engine, don’t even ask me about Youtube)
Proton Mail — Personal email, accessed via Apple Mail. (You also get calendar and storage space all encrypted)
Google Docs (Again, I loathe everything Google, used only when collaboration is needed)
MS office — By far the best productivity suite. You already know it’ll work. The only suite the allows for web, desktop, and mobile. After exploring the world of writing apps, everyone comes back to MS office.
Github — Git(version control) must be a common man’s tool(not just for devs). It just solves lots of problem, just like that.
Box — For sharing and storage, way better than Dropbox.
Amazon Drive — Project photos backup and for files. (cheapest of all).
Tmux - Terminal.
Lyx - GUI for LaTex
Other Work Related Apps:
Monodraw – For planning, workflow, flowchart, wireframes and mind mapping
Filezilla – FTP
Handbrake – Video converter
VLC - video and audio player
Clipy – clipboard manager
Pixel Snap 2 - Measure distance and dimensions of anything on the screen. I don’t have the experience nor the eyeballing skill to align objects while designing.
Communication
Telegram
Zoom
Google Hangouts
Work and Goal Tracking
Beeminder
(in that order)Be Focussed Pro(Pomodoro)
Apple Music(Already spent a lot of time with playlists, can’t move to Spotify)
Health
Knowledge Management(what ever that means..)
Roam Research – I don’t even know what the app does and what it helps to achieve. It is so buggy. So unreliable, some times you can’t even do the basic CRUD functions.
If any one wants to try Roam wait for two years at least, you won’t miss anything, right now they don’t even have a mobile app and 2FA. Please at all cost avoid following #RoamCult. (pure BS)
Security and Privacy
Proton VPN - Always connected to it (They don’t log data and are under Swiss jurisdiction, comparatively safe than other providers)
GPG Tools – GUI interface for GPG encryption . Encrypt email, text, files, folders, and hard disks. Signing photographs and files for verifying authenticity. (no one does it or no one cares)
Running a Studio on a command line
Tools:
Mutt for email.
Task Warrior for to do.
Time Warrior for time tracking on tasks
CMUS - music player
Vim for text/code editing
Heuristics for laying out problems.
Just picked up The Algorithm Design Manual, by Steven S. Skiena.
The first chapter talks about the different kinds of heuristics to solve a problem.
Just picked up The Algorithm Design Manual, by Steven S. Skiena.
The first chapter talks about the different kinds of heuristics one can use to solve a problem.
I thought these techniques could be used anywhere, not just for algorithms.
Search engines doesn't work
For design(and dev): Sometimes default search engines(google/DDG) doesn't work at all.
For design(and dev) related queries, sometimes default search engines(google/DDG) doesn't work at all.
Now a days I directly go to:
* Hacker News search
* Orielly book search
* Internet archive book/documents search
* Stackexchange(of course)
Better, search what you want on Google;
Tools > select custom time range > Select any time before 2008
* No SEO manipulated pages
* Plain html/text pages
* More often takes you in the right path.
* This won't work in YouTube.(new content creators can't monetise then)
Faster way to do emails
Want to try new way of doing emails, have some time to burn, want to have fun:
Why not try Mutt? It’s been there since 1995
Every one wants to do faster emails now! — but why? that is an altogether different question, as in, why would any one want a lite-help-desk-software for managing emails?
But hey Hey.com[1]
To every one who is eagerly waiting to get an invite from Hey.com
If your question is: How is this problem being solved now? How are power email users managing emails?
Want to try new way of doing emails, have some time to burn, want to have fun:
Why not try Mutt? [2]
It is free under General Public License, been there since 1995.Refer [5][6]
Typical Mutt setup:
Your fav terminal > Mutt > Vim[3] > GnuPG[4]
In a way, it is a faster way to do emails:
* Entirely command line.
* Plain text only
* Key bindings that you can learn and master
* Configure your favourite editor to compose(a good opportunity to learn Vim)
* GPG end-to-end encryption support
Caveats
* Take just minutes to get it up and running, but configuring perfectly will a be work in progress.[4]
* High learning curve, but hey any thing worth doing is.
[1] https://hey.com/
[2] http://www.mutt.org/
[3] https://www.vim.org/
[4] https://gnupg.org/
[5] https://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/the-homely-mutt/
[6] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Mutt
[7] Mutt in action: Video
After thoughts:
Quoting Hey.com from this link:
Either they rely on everyone using the same service/app (good luck converting everyone you email with to use the same setup as you!). Or the emails aren’t really emails, but links to a website where the encryption is then applied. Or you use a clunky external tool to encrypt and decrypt the messages (like PGP). This really only works if you’re willing to give up on email as we commonly understand it. If you absolutely must have end-to-end encrypted email, checkout something like ProtonMail.
This posturing, I don’t understand, Hey.com’s narrative is don’t believe in Google, but believe us, why should anyone? — without end-to-end encryption.
Users must control the encryption. That is why end-to-end encryption(PGP) works and has been around for more than 25 years.
PGP is a difficult concept to grasp at first, but once you wrap your head around it, you’ll feel more liberated and safe.
It is not clunky? Is terminal window clunky?
For anyone who wants to try PGP on a mac try GPGtools.
They have made a commendable job of making encryption and decryption of emails, and files easy.
This is how GPG integrated email looks on the native Apple mail client.
All emails are encrypted and signed using GPG. You own the encryption keys.
Encrypt and decrypt files, folders and disks with a click
Extracting colour palettes from an image
Trying out Colorthief a python package extract colour palettes from an image.
Trying out Colorthief a python package extract colour palettes from an image.
Was reading through an enhancement request on Pillow's github page. Currently Pillow does not give an built-in way to identify all dominant colours on an image. The suggestion was to port "Colorthief" package into Pillow.
Trying Colorthief.
Fairly simple and direct, pip install it.
Follow the instructions here and with little bit of help on how to map numpy arrays it is easy.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 | from colorthief import ColorThief import numpy as np import matplotlib.pyplot as plt color_thief = ColorThief('/home/pk/Desktop/bd.png') dominant_color = color_thief.get_color(quality=1) """dominant_color 0 = 147 1 = 66 2 = 46""" color_palette = color_thief.get_palette(color_count=12) color_palette = np.asarray(color_palette)[np.newaxis, :, :] """ Color_palette = 0 = <numpy.array at 0x7f64b92173f0[6x1]> 0 = [136 53 35] 1 = [40 14 22] 2 = [195 117 89] 3 = [232 168 152] 4 = [213 130 107] 5 = [209 136 134]""" plt.imshow(color_palette); plt.axis('off'); plt.show(); |
Project and Task Work Flow
Managing work - Git is the way to go. Even for non-coding related work.
This is my current workflow for managing tasks and projects at Friday Matinee Studio.
Still a work in progress.
Goal is to figure out a workflow that unites managing projects, managing tasks, documentation(wikis), handling project files with version controlling.
Git is the way to go. Even for non-coding related work.
*Ascii art made using MonoDraw by Milen Dzhumerov
2020 | Reading | Watching | Listening | List
What I’m reading, watching and listening this year(2020)
Books
Fiction:
Lincoln in the Bardo — George Saunders
The Book of Disquiet — Fernando Pessoa 👌
பூனாச்சி(Poonachi) அல்லது ஒரு வெள்ளாட்டின் கதை — பெருமாள் முருகன்(Perumal Murugan) 👌
கோபல்ல கிராமம் (Gopalla Gramam) — Ki. Rajanarayanan 👌
தலைகீழ் விகிதங்கள்(Thalaikeezh Vikithankal) - நாஞ்சில் நாடன்(Nanjil Nadan)
Salmon Fishing in the Yemen — Paul Torday
Vivisector — Patrick White
Killing Commendatore — Haruki Murakami 👌
Crime and Punishment — Fyodor Dostoevsky — Pevear & Volokhonsky(translation)
Crime and Punishment — Fyodor Dostoevsky — Constance Garnett(translation) 👌
The Plague — Albert Camus 👌
Death in Venice — Thomas Mann
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion — Yukio Mishima
The Secret History — Donna Tartt 👌
The Ghost —- Robert Harris
The Second Sleep — Robert Harris
Drive — James Sallis
Non-Fiction
The Peregrine — J.A. Baker 👌
Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions — Alberto Manguel
Walden — Henry Thoreau
Working — Robert Caro 👌
Unix — A History and a Memoir — Brian Kernighan 👌
I Am a Strange Loop — Douglas Hofstadter
Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language — Douglas Hofstadter 👌
Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies — Douglas Hofstadter
Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking — Douglas Hofstadter
Musicophilia — Oliver Sacks
The Leonard Bernstein Letters — Leonard Bernstein, Nigel Simeone
Selected Letters of Norman Mailer — Norman Mailer J. Michael Lennon
The Naive and Sentimental Novelist — Orhan Pamuk
Reporting at Wit's End: Tales from the New Yorker — St. Clair McKelway 👌
Films:
All these films were watched before the COVID lockdown(jan & feb). Never got to watch one after that.
The Light House | English | Supernatural Thriller
Climates (İklimler) | Turkish | Drama
The Wild Pear Tree | Turkish | Drama
Winter Sleep | Turkish | Drama
Burning (2018) | Korean | Thriller
Parasite | Korean
Koudelka: Shooting Holy Land | English | Documentary
Before My Eyes (1988) | Mani Kaul | Documentary
Ford v Ferrari | English | Sports Drama
Knives Out | English | Crime Drama