Weekly Notes 12/2026

It’s been another hectic week, but towards the end, it was a bit relaxing because of Ugadhi and Id breaks. Wish you all a happy Ugadhi and Id. The war continues. I doubt the folks who started the war know what they want or how they want it to end. This war is not just illegal but also foolish. I still think pushing India towards PNG (piped natural gas) is a bad idea. We should ideally move towards electricity, especially if you want to be energy-independent as a household, village, or state. Electricity is best suited.

• It’s been hot and dry in Bengaluru. It’s been raining also, not a lot, but just enough to cool down a bit. I hope it continues. We have started using AC for roughly an hour every day. Just to cool the room before we go to sleep.
• I played a game of pickleball with friends on Sunday morning. Now that seems like an ideal time for everyone. I also do two P.T sessions this week. I have started noting down the strength levels. Whenever I cross a milestone, I will try to add a record there.
• I wrote about my new hydration backpack. It’s been very useful. I hope to use it more.
• NMG/2026 application period is over. We have received 285 applications in total. I have started going over them slowly.
• Sathya has a map of cafes and restaurants in Sydney. I have been following and adding some of them to my TODO list. But this listing is very useful. List of public spaces across India to run all kinds of community events. It’s an FOSS and Open Data project. Instagram users have lost E2EE. I am not surprised. Instagram is just an advertising platform now and wants every signal. The next step for Meta would be WhatsApp. It seems like whatever progress we (India) had made in terms of transgender rights is regressing.
• There are lots of interesting things happening in the world of ActivityPub worth noting. Madblog exposes a bunch of Markdown files as a blog with full support for ActivityPub federation. It looks very easy to set up and run. Pubby is a Python library to manage everything related to the ActivityPub protocol. It makes it easy to bring AP to your Python applications. ap cli client is, as the name suggests, a command-line client to your AP server. And the most interesting one is holos.social, where you run the ActivityPub server on your phone (keys on the phone) and then expose it to the world through relay servers. Relay servers act as a middleman between your phone and the world. It also supports custom domains.

Note: This was written yesterday. But I forgot to post.