Weekly Notes 03/2024

We are back in Bangalore. This drive took a bit longer. We took two 45-minute breaks each for baby and pet-related work. Otherwise, it was a comfortable drive. We left at 3:20 AM and reached by about 1:30 PM. It makes a lot of difference if you start early. It's primarily long-distance truck traffic early in the morning, and they are much more professional Than others on the road. So it's much easier to drive alongside them. 

• We are in the seventh year of the NMG grant. Nagarathna Memorial Grant is a micro-grant that I run in my Amma's name. The applications are open till March 15th. Thanks to Shweta, Gandgadhar, and the anonymous contributor. The current grant amount is 1.9 Lakhs. Please do share or apply. 
• I have a set of static web apps that I like. They have no backend or server-side components. They are all FOSS. You can access them here. 
• BuzzWomen is 12 years old. I am very proud of what Uthara and her team have done. They were celebrating this week. I got to meet the team, which now has 180+ members. 
• We made an internal hackathon announcement this week at Peppo. It will run till we all meet in Bangalore next month. I am very excited about the ideas teams will come up with. 
• I met my friend Manju this week for tea. We usually don't plan to meet. We randomly call the other person when we are nearby (say home or office) and then meet for tea. Nine out of ten times, it works. And the success rate is much better than planned visits. I should do this with other friends too. Of course, I added the tea shop to OSM.
• Saregama is one of the oldest music labels in India. They do have some of the best songs in their collection. This week, I bought about 25 Hindi songs. You can buy any piece for Rs.4/song in standard MP3 (320 kbps) format or Rs. 14/song in an uncompressed format. I buy standard MP3s. They are also DRM-free. I load them to my local Navindrome and listen on my phone and computer. I also purchased a dedicated hardware music player. I will blog about it once I use it enough. There are also a bunch of CDs and cassettes that I want to digitize, and I have been delaying that project for a while now.
• Appa broke his tooth while eating kallu sakkare (rock sugar or misri) yesterday. So, we had to get his tooth removed today. Otherwise, according to the dentist, he has good teeth. I also added ORC to OSM.