Category: Technology

Wikidata Query Interface

Learning SPARQL with Wikidata

SPARQL has a lot of similarities to SQL and also is very different. Here I am going to get the English works of Rabindranath Tagore from Wikidata. I will use this as an exercise to learn SPARQL. As you will see, I have not tried to explain the terms here as I expect some knowledge of SQL and Semantic Triples. Since I go step by step, I think it’s easy to understand.

Linked List: FOSS Tools to Debug and Test Webhooks

Webhooks are part and parcel of today’s web applications. It’s the primary way to get informed about the events happening on an external system, whether it’s payment or communication. So any developer needs to know and use webhooks today. Here are some of the tools that I use daily to test and integrate webhooks (Also async APIs). I hope they are helpful to you too.

Music is back at home with Navidrome and DSub/Ultrasonic

I listen to a minimal set of music. I don’t try to find new music, but I usually have my ears open. If I listen to something new and I like it, then I add it to my list. For a long time I have bought my music; in the form of cassettes, CDs, MP3s. When music moved to mainly streaming world, I almost got disconnected. That’s because I listen to a small set, again and again. I have ripped audio cassettes, CDs and have brought them to digital form. So everything was in digital form on my music players, computers, and mobile. But it lacked the features that streaming or music on the network would bring, like keeping track of album art, maintaining different versions and formats, maintaining sharable favorite lists, etc. Now that I have a fairly decent home lab, I thought its time.

Drawings as Code – DOT and Graphviz

I like drawings to explain stuff. It’s probably the most straightforward way to document things. But the pain of traditional drawings is the inability to track changes to them. It’s easy to track changes to text or code by tracking them in a git. It’s not easy when it’s a binary blob which is what most images are. SVG format helps a lot. I use it as much as possible, but it’s still very verbose, and I think not easy to see the diff and understand what happened over time.