Weekly Notes 42/2025

We spent the birthday weekend at Kumarakom. It was a slow and lazy weekend. It reminded me of a similar slow and lazy birthday weekend thirteen years back. Time does fly fast.

• Back to daily programming starting Thursday, though I tried to catch up on the essential things by spending about 60 minutes a day. A week’s absence means a lot of catching up. So the rest of the week was hectic.
• I sent postcards to friends and family from Kumarakom. India Post has started delivering, and some of them have already received it. I have sent another batch of postcards from Thrissur. I had this plan of sending custom postcards a long time back. This is the first step towards it: a card of Pink Flowers in Bengaluru, painted by Shalini. I want the next one to have a poem that the receiver can enjoy. I have a ton of poems to pick from; it’s going to be a challenge.
• I also continued to map postboxes and visiting new cafes in Thrissur this week.
• I added a minor feature where I tag the posts by Week Number, so one person (mostly me) can explore all the posts from WN-41 (4 posts for 4 years). At some point, I want to add a side widget to show all the posts from this week for the last few years.
• Interesting study about the lack of protein in the Indian diet by ICMR. It came up in my feed as I was try to organize my diet.
• Most people think FOSS is free of politics, but fail to understand that the birth of Free Software is due to politics. It’s the politics where the user of the software is at the center. Without politics, it’s just software with code available.
• Even in big democracies, you have freedom of speech only if you belong to the majority by Religion, Caste, Race, Language, etc., and numbers do not always define the majority. If you are a minority, you don’t have it. What the law says doesn’t matter as the *majority* thinks otherwise.