Weekly Notes 38/2026

It’s been a busy week, but not as busy as last week, mostly because Monday was a holiday and I got some rest. Uma was away over the weekend with her Atte to celebrate. Belated Ganesha Chaturthi, if you celebrate. As a kid, my parents celebrated only Gouri Habba; Ganeshana Habba was there just to end the Gouri Habba. We kind of never celebrated Ganesha Habba at home; it was mostly on the streets. It wasn’t as aggressive as it is today.

• I did a long walk/run with friends on Sunday, along with a huge kaalu soup (paaya) breakfast. Otherwise, it was a regular week with one game and one P.T. session. I should be back to two sessions next week. Also wrote a post about why I chose the Forerunner 965.
• The Hyphen Journal is here. I subscribed a long time ago, but their system somehow didn’t register my payment. So I had to ask customer support. Thanks to Pradeep for reminding me to subscribe. It was on my list, but as it often happens, I had made a mental note of it and promptly forgot about it. The journal looks pretty; I haven’t read it yet, maybe this weekend.
• Many times, I try to remember the sites I’ve already visited and struggle to do it. I have used bookmarks with tags, but it hasn’t worked because I forget to bookmark them. What I need is a search engine that remembers every site/page I visit and indexes it for searching. Turns out Hister is exactly that. It’s FOSS and self-hosted. Ducklake looks simple and powerful at the same time. It uses SQLite/PostgreSQL for the catalog and Parquet files for the actual data to build a data lake. WebMCP looks like a very interesting addition; it could be useful for websites that don’t support APIs or where the user wants to see things as they happen. Jeff sent me ebook2audiobook, which seems to support Kannada through Facebook’s mms-tts. I haven’t tried it yet; it’s on my list. Tante’s article on Power Grab and Fascism in FOSS is a must-read. There is a lot of fear-mongering about open-weight models, especially from the V.C. and S.V. community. I remember Bill Gates calling FOSS developers communists almost two decades ago. In that regard, open-weight models have already won.
• Kerala women MLAs walk out of a workshop where Hindi was the only language used. Why is it so difficult to run a bilingual event for a government organization when they are forcing kids to learn three languages?