Weekly Notes 01/2026

by Thejesh GN · January 2, 2026

Welcome to the new year. I didn’t do much on New Year’s Eve or Day, other than maybe sleeping a bit. However, I took some time to write and publish the year-end post. This is the 18th year of publishing year-end posts.

At Kochi-Muziris Biennale/ 2025 — At Kochi-Muziris Biennale / 2025

My first and last blood donation in 2025 was this week. This is my first time donating outside Bangalore. Folks at IMA Blood Bank in Thrissur are very professional and friendly. It was a good experience. BTW, I missed the whole of 2024 too. Anyway, now I am officially in double-digit donations.
I reinstalled the Shazam App. Currently, there is no suitable FOSS alternative for identifying songs I know nothing about.
We did a quick visit to Kochi for the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2025. We spent most of our time at Aspinwall House and Pepper House. I did like a few of the installations. I loved Cop Shiva’s Being Gandhi, Moonis’ Typewritter, and a few others. I took pictures of postboxes and uploaded them to #OpenPostBoxIndia and OSM. Overall, a good day, well spent.
We went to the temple to visit the Elephant. Uma’s biggest request is to see Lakshmi whenever we are in Thrissur. This time, it was not Lakshmi, but it was still an Elephant.
I continued painting as part of #30DaysOfWatercoloring, I took a break on 1st Jan; otherwise, I am on it and liking it. So I might continue.
Added two more of my favorite albums to MusicBrainz; Pallavi Anu Pallavi and Bayalu Daari. I also added it to my playlists. I am also experimenting with generating and submitting fingerprints to AcoustID and MusicBrainz. It’s a large crowdsourced database of audio fingerprints. So we can identify and tag our music well. It’s open source code and data.
The work has been good. I think the next few weeks will be hectic. There are also quite a few interesting projects coming up. I am excited about them, will write when I have more details. It’s an indication that 2026 will be a busy year.
Watched Sarvam Maya, 3/5. Very watchable.
Since I use FediMeteo to follow the weather, it’s fun to read how it’s built and run. I also learned about snac. A simple, minimalistic ActivityPub instance written in portable C. It looks like a perfect candidate to run some AP services/bots like the vachana service I used to run.