Weekly Notes 06/2026

It’s been a hectic week. I was in Mumbai for a day on Wednesday, a quick but tiring trip. I had so much to do this week that I couldn’t play or do P.T. To be fair, I did go to P.T on Tuesday, but couldn’t go on Thursday. In hindsight, I could have, but I gave more importance to a meeting than it required. Something to remember when I face a similar situation.

• Welcome to Feb/2026 already. January was okay with respect to work and blogging, but not painting.
• The last Saturday return drive from APU was horrible, and this morning it was bad again. Mostly because something on the road was broken, slowing the traffic. In such cases, it would be great to have CIFS Closure and Incident Feed (CIFS) from the city government and police department. It can also be a community-contributed and published feed. But I don’t see any FOSS map app (Waze is not FOSS) that can use it now. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem. Anyway, we have to start somewhere. So I started working on an app that anyone (city governments) can use to produce this feed. My initial target would be the Bangalore Traffic Police, who can use it alongside publishing to Twitter. Even if they don’t use it directly, we can scrape their tweets and produce CIFS. Give me a couple of weeks, and I will publish the code and set up an instance to try. The other option is to publish a GeoJSON feed at a URL with the same details, and at least some existing apps can display this info, if not use it for routing.
• IndieWebClub BLR is meeting this Sunday (08/Feb) at noon. Suppose you have time and are in Bengaluru. Please come. They also have a webring of members if you like to participate.
• Bandcamp has a post on Best field recordings from Jan/2026. I love soundscapes and field recordings. This post has a fantastic collection of soundtracks and artists. I personally use the Dolby On app on Android to record, unless I’m using a Zoom H1n. An interesting article on Science Daily about how exercise can make the brain younger. Yes, this one is about the brain, not the body. It is based on a year-long study of MRI scans of adults doing at least 150 minutes of aerobic exercise per week. A pretty sad and alarming incident (trigger warning: Suicide) of kids who were addicted to phones and tv, from Delhi. There is another story of a kid from Australia who swam over four kilometers to save his family. Both appeared on my feed on the same day. BTW, I love OpenMoji, a FOSS emoji set in both PNG and SVG formats. I have not used them a lot here, but I have used them in other projects. But I intend to use them here too.