Weekly Notes 13/2025

It's iftar time on Mosque Road in Bangalore. I went out for dinner with friends on Sunday evening. This time, we chose a restaurant instead of street food. Sharief Bhai had a special iftar meal for four. Even though it was for four people, it was a lot. We ate a lot and packed some food for home.

• We spent Saturday at Boondh, just outside Sarjapur. The road to Sarjapur is hell, but Boondh is quite calming. It rained pretty heavily on our back, which was nice as it lowered the temperatures. I love Bangalore's summer rains.
• On Sunday, I was at MisInfoCon to give a talk. I missed it because the organizers sent the wrong schedule. I am not blaming them; I should have checked the website and not just depended on emails. Organizers are constantly under pressure and tend to make mistakes (from my experience as an organizer). But it was fun to attend some talks, meet people, etc.
• Updates on this website: I updated the contact page to include chat as an option. I also updated the Keep Me Informed section of NMG to include details about the Friends of NMG.
• I canceled my credit card last week because someone used it to do a fraudulent transaction at FARMER BOYS - DIAMOND 909-444-6800 CA. This is the first time it has happened to me. My card issuer calls me every time there is a suspicious transaction. In the last 10 years, it has never been useful. This time, I got a call in the middle of the night ( in India). Usually, I would ignore it, but this time, I picked up, and for sure, it was a fraudulent transaction. So, I canceled my current one, requested a new credit card, and raised a dispute. All this is to say that a new card has arrived. I haven't activated it yet. I am curious how the dispute/chargeback will be handled. Apparently, it takes time.
• I am in Mumbai. It was a quick work trip on Thursday and Friday. Some interesting things are planned. Hopefully, I get to write about them someday. I did contribute to beaconDB during this trip. I also wrote a short post about it.
• If you plan to build a CMS or Website, try Wagtail, especially if you are into a boring yet modern Python web stack. I have had a positive experience building a flexible CMS-based website with it. It is very developer-friendly. It has good REST and GraphQL APIs. Their support for a headless version is coming along well. The content management UI is very user-friendly.