Weekly Notes 18/2026

It’s been a busy week, both at work and at home. I think the heat also made the week much more tiring, but thankfully, it rained a bit yesterday. Hopefully we will get more rains.

I spent a bit of time organizing the NMG/2026 introductions and making them. It’s almost done except for three. More coordination is required there. There was also one small change in the NMG; one of the grantees couldn’t receive the funds, so I granted them to the next person. Also, I had missed adding Ganghadhar’s contribution to the pool. Ganghadhar has been a long-term supporter of NMG and a good friend. Thank you, Gangadhar. With that, we could award a bigger grant. All in all, good.

• Update the Idly Dose Vada Coffee price survey to have 2026 values represented on the graph. I have not added a year-on-year comparison chart. I plan to do that.
• I continued with my two days of P.T. I want to make it 3 days of workouts a week. I need to make changes to include it in my schedule. I couldn’t play this week, mostly due to the rain.
• I have been playing pickleball for more than 6 months, so I thought it was a good idea to buy a pair of paddles. I got a pair of Vinsguir Graphite Pickleball Paddles (the ones with colorful doodles). It’s an entry-level, affordable paddle. I have used them before; I found them decent, so I got a pair. I also got a pair of Impakto barefoot shoes and a set of Supersox No Show socks, mostly for gym use. Both are practical, affordable, and easy to pack.
• I rode Manju’s HD x440 for the first time. It rides well. It felt a bit long, especially on sharper turns, but it’s a comfortable ride even for my height (163 cm). It’s heavier than a CB350, but I didn’t notice it while riding.
• Added Weeknotes by Jon Sterling and Liam O’Connor to my list. Both are from academia. I also like the platform they use for writing online. It’s called Forrester. It’s a FOSS tool for authoring, exploring, and sharing scientific and mathematical hypertexts. BirdNET-Pi is a FOSS software system for the Raspberry Pi that does real-time acoustic bird classification. You can easily set one up at your home or office. Locus Sonus Stream Project offers a worldwide network of “open mikes” that permanently stream local soundscapes to a dedicated server. The resulting live audio can be used in a wide variety of artistic and scientific projects, including bird identification. Unrelated but similar audio project where, in the center of San Francisco, a microphone listens to the street and uses Shazam constantly, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
• SourceGit is a FOSS Git client. It’s not on Flathub, but they have deb, AppImage, etc. It’s really useful if you are new to Git or you want to explore a complete repo. Honker is an SQLite extension that provides durable queues, streams, pub/sub, and a scheduler. I would like it to be integrated with Dramatiq. I think it will be a great combo, though it can work on its own. One of the MAGA “Influencers” is an AI character created by an Indian Student to earn money. I wonder how many Indian influencers are AI characters. Talkie is a vintage model trained on historical texts from a specific period. It’s fun and also a way to see if they can predict the future. I introduced 32-Bit Cafe community, Codeberg, and Neocities to my class this week.