Weekly Notes 12/2024

It's union election time in India. The results are going to be in June. Given we have a fascist right-wing party in power now, the next two and half months will be unbearable. Social media will be at its worst; WhatsApp has been and will be the source of all kinds of fake news. I must figure out a way to navigate this environment as I participate in the political/electoral process. If you have tips, send them on my way. 

• 🫂 On Saturday, we went to Muthanallur to visit one of my mother's friends. She is a retired Anganwadi teacher. She cooked food for us, and after lunch, we generally chitchatted. She has been touring all over Karnataka. Freebus is a boon to her, given how low Anganwadi's pensions are. She seemed happy to visit all the temples and pray. 
• ✍️ I wrote about how Uma's routine made me value time more than before. 
• 👨‍🍼 This week, Uma tasted her first mango. The first batch was not great, so she disliked them. But later in the week, we got good mangoes, which she loved. She has been eating it every day since. 
• 🐶 Echo arrived in our lives four years back. What a pleasure it has been to have him in our lives. Looking at how he interacts with Uma, he is the friendliest dog in the world. 
• 💻 My router/modem, TP-Link Archer C7, stopped working. It is not able to boot. The firmware must have been corrupted while doing an auto-update. It's a guess. I don't know how it happened because it has its own UPS. To unbrick it, I need a TFTP server to which the router can connect and reflash itself. I have not been able to find time for it. So, in the meantime, I got a TP-Link Archer C86. The internet is up and running. 
• 🕸️ I like Dave Winer's new blogroll experiment. Currently, I have a widget showing one random blog from my blogring. At some point, I want to add a page with listing and searching capabilities. Check his blogroll for inspiration. Speaking of blogs, Weekly Notes (JSON List) is developing into a social network of some sort. They are deliberate, slow, and use existing infra like RSS. I usually go through all of them during the weekend. Here is the screencast of my subscriptions. It reminds me of FriendFeed, which FB acquired and shut down immediately afterward. But this time, it's based on Open Protocol and Free Software, which are far from being shut down by a single entity. Pooja's weekly notes are this week's find.
• 💻 At work, it has been tough this week. Making decisions is always challenging. It has been one of those weeks.
• 📺 I watched Photo(2023), A Kannada film by Utsav Gonwar. It's a heartbreaking story of a child and its parents during the 2020,  COVID-19 lockdown. Since we tracked the lockdown/non-virus deaths during COVID-19, I felt I was going through 2020 again. It was an uncomfortable feeling. I will write in detail later. If you have time, go to a theater and watch it. It's a must-watch. It's not an entertainer but a reminder.