Weekly Notes 14/2025

This week was a beautiful mix of celebrations. Yugadhi and Ramzan came together, and right in the middle of it all, Uma turned two! So, we ended up celebrating three festivals with lots of food, fun, chatter, and love.

• ⛅ We got the AC last summer (15/2024) but didn’t use it. This year, we just started using it. I like it at 25C. We also got some summer showers this week, just like last week. Hopefully, it will rain more so we can stop using the AC.
• 📸 I wanted a fun photo project, so I started 30DaysOfWallPosters, where I will post a photo of a wall poster for 30 days with a short description. You can follow it on Mastodon using #30DaysOfWallPosters. At the end of it, I will post the whole gallery here.
• 🌐 WordPress comes with a way to display the media files as a page. Since I don’t have a customized attachment template, it falls back to single.php template to display it. It’s not pretty, but useful. I am figuring out a way to customize it so it can be used in interesting ways to link or share.    
• 🎥 We watched L2 Empuraan at the theater. I wouldn’t have, but for the opposition by the right-wing and threats of censorship. We made sure to watch it before they did cuts. It’s a masala action movie, nothing special. The reason for the right-wing’s anger is that the villain is a Hindutva terrorist and mass murderer named Babu Bajarangi, inspired by Babu Bajarangi, who was convicted of killing 97 Muslims during the 2002 Gujarat riots. The Bilkis Bano incident also inspires a scene. Both of these real-life incidents show how the right-wing/Hindutva terrorists went after the minority in 2002. They were part of documentaries and art cinemas before; I think this is the first time a mainstream popular movie has shown it and, hence, the anger. To add to that, they have a Muslim leading man taking revenge. Given our society today, I think it’s a bold move by the director and producer, and they deserve my ticket. I am happy it’s doing well at the box office, too.
• 🌐 I have been hoarding a lot of content on my Are.na channels. I use it to collect, organize, browse, and explore. They have a great API to get content out of the service. I have been using it to sync the content to CouchDB, a database per channel. I am cleaning up the script. I will publish it once it’s ready. The goal is not just to keep backups but also to use this database to build websites. For example, I want to turn this Kannada movie Arena channel into a mini website to share with friends.
• 💳 I started adding new credit card details to online accounts. It’s a pain. Also, some of these services do pricing in USD, which makes sense to them because they are in the US, but I wish their Indian counterparts published pricing in INR. So I know how much I am paying. :( BTW, my credit card canceled the fraudulent transaction, so that’s good.
• 🩺 I have no pain as such now. I have stopped wearing a cervical collar. I am doing neck exercises now but plan to start physiotherapy soon to strengthen muscles.