Weekly Notes 22/2025

I met WeeklyNotes/Blogring friends in real life (IRL) this week. On Thursday, I had coffee with Mihir and Nidhi at KAARA. They were passing through Bengaluru on their way to a workshop in Coonoor and had some time before catching their bus. It’s fun to meet online folks in real life when you know so much about them; you feel like you’re meeting old friends, even though you’re meeting them for the first time. It reminded me of the early blogger meetups and tweetups—no agenda, just coffee, conversation, and a few good memories.

• My pain has reduced significantly, thanks to Physiotherapy and exercises. I have also not driven in the last six weeks. I will try and drive this weekend to see how it goes. It’s an automatic and on a highway, so it shouldn’t be a problem. But we will see.
• I stopped having breakfast in 2020, during the COVID-19 lockdowns, except on rare occasions, such as when I met friends for breakfast, etc. Now, I am starting it again; it’s also something to do with Uma: nothing grand, just two eggs with coffee. I hadn’t stopped for coffee, so it’s just eggs.
• I wrote a quick blog post (with many screenshots) about a tool I use frequently – Speech Note (also known as dsnote).
• I continue to explore weather alerts in India. This week, I spent some time exploring CAP and its usage in India. Previously: Simple IMD Alerts.
• I created a print, cut, and fold ezine for Surveillance in Bengaluru (PDF) contributors’ manual and Paper Games (PDF) zine. You can use browser print (zero margins, fit-to-page, and landscape mode) to print them. All magic is in the CSS by Rowan. Also, now that Glitch project hosting is closing down, back up your projects. As you can see, these static HTML files are hosted in WordPress Media Folder. Hosting HTML/JS files has downsides, like XSS risks (same domain, shared cookies) and the lack of easy updates without manual overwrites. But with care, these can be managed. The upside is that everything stays in one place, making it easy to embed as an iframe, and backing up is simpler.
• By the way, if you are looking for a decent hotel in the south of south Bengaluru (beyond Electronics City, in Bommasandra), the Holiday Inn Express is decent. It could be a good hotel if you want to stay just outside Bengaluru and plan to make an early start towards Tamil Nadu or Kerala.
• I have 49364 media items in WordPress, including images, PDFs, and other static files. Only in the last couple of years have I started assigning categories and providing detailed descriptions. This also means I have no real good way to find old images other than browsing by date. I have started a small side project to update them one month at a time. Hopefully, I complete them before reaching 50K.
• JWT is ten years old. Today, it’s hard to imagine a web service without them. At its 10th anniversary, the OAuth Working Group has updated the best current practices. It’s worth taking a look, even if you are just a user of JWTs.
• So, almost everyone thinks MCP ( Model Context Protocol) is probably the way to go – Kailash, Anil Dash, and Jon Udell.
• For me, productivity is about accomplishing many things within the 50-hour workweek bandwidth.
• What’s so dystopian? Robots are asking me to prove I am human, and all the AI innovations are used to sell me one more credit card.
• We were at the SBI Bank home loans division because they had messed up a standard instruction for EMIs. And no one in their branch knew how SBI Max Gain works.
• I have been using Old Roll App to take some pictures. Its fun. Interesting fact: this is the first time my Weekly Notes has more than one picture.