Weekly Notes 03/2025

Time flies faster than we can think of. Nagarathna Memorial Grant – 2025 is open for applications; this is our eighth edition. When I started it, I didn't think much about how it would turn out in a couple of years. So, there were no expectations. But it has grown into its own thing in these seven years. I have met so many interesting people and their work. It has been a very humbling and fulfilling experience. I hope to continue doing this forever :)

• We went out for lunch with Appa at Āhāra(ಆಹಾರ) at Ottera in Electronics City. The food was decent but expensive. We loved mandya mutton sukha amongst what we had.
• I like adding new business POIs to OSM. I also want to maintain some of them in my neighborhood., OSMBiz is an interface that makes it easy to add/edit business data to OSM.
• My Blogring and Weekly Notes Blogs are now available as an OPML subscription list. 2025 brings an additional set of Weekly Noters, Adhavan Sivaraj, JoShenoy, Shrayas, and Saurabh. It's always a pleasure to read more.
• I am back at Yoga classes from W01/2025. I didn't do any in Dec/2024, so I still feel rusty. I have to start self-practicing at least one day a week; that way, I can do something while away from Bengaluru.
• I have published the IDVC stats for the year 2024. In 2024, I couldn't collect much data; my plan for 2025 is to collect at least 50 data points by myself.
• Seems like 2025 is going to be a good year for reading. I finished Do Interesting, which I loved. It's a simple book that focuses on doing something interesting, mostly on the Web. I picked it up because Walk Notes mentioned it. I have a couple of photo projects that I want to revive; this is a great inspiration to start them. As the book implies, you just need to keep doing things regularly; interesting patterns will emerge from most ordinary things. Based on Jeff's recommendation, I started on The Effective Executive by Peter Ducker. I am loving it. It's also a "DO" book.
• I got two JioTag Gos for Echo and Pathu. They work natively with Google's Find My Device network. The tracker network is currently a duopoly between Apple and Google, as both own operating systems. It makes it easy for them to expand their proprietary logging network natively. BLE protocol itself is open; you can see and track them individually in the wild, but logging them to a central network is the key strength that these two own. For anyone else, for example, Tile, an app must be installed and running constantly with location enabled, which operating systems make impossible. So, as consumers, we don't have an option. I like Apple's BLE design compared to Google's, which is very complex. I wish the BLE Location Trackers would allow adding a URL as part of the initial setup, to which these scanned and E2E encrypted location messages by Apps could be sent. That way, it is fully decentralized, and anyone could run a web-service for family and friends. But I doubt these companies will allow that.
• I always end up paying balance taxes at the time of ITR; it's usually a couple of lakhs. They charge around 1% PM, which is a lot. This year, I want to pay early so I don't have to pay interest, so I got the calculation done and paid a part. Plan to pay the rest in the next two months.