Weekly Notes 38/2025

It was a good week. A bit hectic, but a lot got done. The weekend and the following week will be busy due to IndiaFOSS and work travels. I will be in Jaipur most of next week for work. Let me know if you are around, and we can get coffee (or your favorite drink).

• 😷 There is a viral going around in BLR. Wear masks if you are going to be at IndiaFOSS/2025. I will see you there, especially at the Open Data Devroom.
• 🤸 I have been playing sports alongside my workouts, and thankfully, there’s been no pain. But I can feel my traps and upper lats are stiff, tight, and a bit sore. I need to work on a recovery plan. In a related note, I only do the workouts that the coach suggests, but I also refer to MuscleWiki or @darebee to check my form or learn more about them.
• 🎁 I treated myself to a pair of walking/workout shoes, along with some gym shorts. I think I deserve it now that I have been working out for two months and have been doing physio for almost six months.
• 💻 I did a minor update to my readlist CLI to accommodate a change in the library it depends on, trafilatura. Otherwise, the code has not been changed in three years. Not bad for today’s software.
• 💻 I published the latest data of IDVC (Idly Dose Vada Coffee Rates in Bengaluru). Also, I have made the form on Kobo public. You can submit without logging in using either the App or a better web form. Every submission will be checked and approved by me before it gets added to the dataset. Also, remember every data item will have an attribute “submitted_by” which will contain the Kobo username or the name you give, else it will be anonymous.
• 📽 I watched Lokah: Chapter 1 – Chandra (Malayalam) in a theater. At least 25% of Lokah’s dialogues are in Kannada. I wish they had hired a native dialogue writer instead of a translator. This should be possible in 2025, even for small-budget movies. Otherwise, it was a fun and good watch. And BTW, in comparison Coolie (Tamil) was boring. I’m glad I didn’t go to the theater for it. I have yet to watch Elumale (Kannada). It has been successful and has received a positive response. Hopefully, it will stay in theaters for a bit longer.
• 🌐 I have fond memories of reading and writing blogs on Opera Mini on a slow 2G network. Thanks to the link shared by Sathya (from my ReadLater), I was able to relive it a bit. I thoroughly enjoyed that post. Also, we have come a long way.
• I also think I won’t see another Obama or MMS in my lifetime. Together is going to take multiple lifetimes. That makes me sad.
• 🫂 I do believe, no matter how small the action is, if you keep doing or showing up, it will add up. This week, I read about Brandon, who has been showing up every Friday at 9 PM at a corner in Chicago with homemade food, offering it to people. He has been doing it for 720 weeks straight now. Very inspiring.
• 🤖 I think I will consider LLMs/AI essential when I can work less than eight hours a day and achieve the same amount and quality of work. That way, I can do other things that I currently don’t have much time for—for example, sports. Currently, it’s just on the edge of being useful. I do use them.
• 🌐 I have written about Dave Winer’s Feedland before; it’s an RSS-based product for managing feed subscriptions and reading them like a river. Here is one for the Weekly Noters. It also gives you an OPML list if you want to take it somewhere else. If you are looking for something simple, then RSSRSSRSS is probably the way to go. It combines multiple RSS feeds into one unified feed, making it useful for sharing or subscribing to various feeds at once. It’s FOSS. Sci-Hub is completely blocked in India now, which I think is a shame.  Fifty Thousand Names (via tinyawards), which is a commemoration of every single man, woman, and child who, as of March 2025, had been killed as a result of Israeli attacks on Gaza following the Hamas atrocities. I wish I had made something similar to remember people who died during COVID, and not because of the Virus. Maybe it’s still not too late.