The primary reason I bought this watch was the ability to display and navigate using proper offline maps. Garmin doesn’t have maps for India. But the OpenStreetMaps community has maps that can be loaded into Garmin. There are many community-built web services, such as Thukke’s OSM Downloads and Userbeam, that provide Indian maps...

It’s been a good week and a busy one too. I have started contributing to Pucar as a technologist. I will blog more once I settle down. It’s been a busy week, and it looks like September is going to be a busy month. Hopefully I will continue with my physical activities.

It’s been a good but busy week. Lots of work got done. Though I think I am still lagging according to my TODO list. On a side note, I have been fairly active, with standard two days of P.T. and two days of pickleball. I have not made any progress on running. I...

My interest in LLMs has increasingly shifted towards smaller models, small in terms of size and their ability to run on modest local machines. For some time now, I have been using models with fewer than 40 B parameters on my machines in some quantized way. Then I came across BitNet, a project...

With the Peppo team here in Bangalore and other commitments, the week was crazy busy. I met at least half of the Peppo team in person for the first time. We have a great team at Peppo. As Mohammed said in one of our conversations, the Peppo team is not only talented but...

I wanted a way to represent workouts by the muscle groups they activate. Most applications where you log do it. I thought it must be easy with SVG images. It wasn’t as easy. First, I had to get an image that is remake-friendly. I used this drawing by OpenStax & Tomáš Kebert &...

I ended the Netflix subscription. We have not been using it for a long time, and we were just paying; finally, this month I ended it. Sleep has won for me. If required, I can subscribe again. We still have Amazon Prime, mostly because of the free shipping it provides. That said, in...

It’s been a hectic but active week. As usual, I continued with my two P.T sessions. I played a game of Pickleball on Thursday. I also ran twice. This week has been my most active week in quite some time. I took some time to write a blog post about return to running....

I have not been running. The last time I ran anything serious was a decade back. The max I have been doing is walking. Though I must say I love walking, especially with friends and family. It’s a great way to have conversations. I tried running again a few years back and dropped...

This week has been good. It’s been a busy week, but it has been good except today. I typed a wrong Git command and pushed without verifying. Initially, it looked like I lost a couple of weeks’ work, but thankfully, since Git is distributed, we had a copy and recovered without much hurt....

Andhra Pradesh and Telangana are the least explored states in the South for me. I have been adding places of interest to my list. Gandikota has been on that list for a while. I wanted to do it post-summer and during monsoon so it would be cooler. Monsoon has not really arrived, though...

I have been to and seen many protests. But this one (#cjpprotests) is very different from the rest. I see them not only facing so much harshness but also having so much fun and so much camaraderie. It makes me jealous. All power to the younger generation. Though I am young at heart,...

Overall, a good but hectic week. I spent time planning for the next few months. Planning is my comfort zone. When things are planned, I sleep better. It doesn’t mean I can’t do unplanned things; I can, and I often do. But I like the regular parts of life to have a thought-out...

Photos taken on a mobile phone can include metadata. I like it for various reasons. My various projects depend on metadata, such as date, location, orientation, etc. But more and more, the phones are removing that metadata when I transmit it. Some of them also change the file name. But I care, and...

I started Weekly Notes in 2022, with WN-29/2022. With this week’s note, we will complete four full years. Except for a couple of notes published on Saturdays, I have been on time, publishing on Fridays. In one of the IndieWeb Bangalore discussions, I wrote something that I think that sums up my approach...

It’s been a hectic week. Lots of work, meetings, and things to get done. I still have things on my list. I might have to work a bit tomorrow. I continued with my regular P.T sessions. I could also play last Saturday, which was fun. BTW, welcome to the second half of 2026.

I was looking for an alternative to Tinkercad to simulate building, coding, and running Arduino projects. SimulIDE Circuit Simulator seemed like an ideal candidate. SimulIDE is a simple real time electronic circuit simulator, intended for hobbyist or students to learn and experiment with analog and digital electronic circuits and microcontrollers. It supports PIC,...

Embeddings are numerical representations of real-world objects, such as words, phrases, text, images, audio, and video. Since the real world is so complex, these representations are usually vector arrays of floating-point numbers. This helps computers process meaning, context, and semantic relationships using distances and directions between vectors. Word2Vec and FastText Embeddings are learned...

It was a short work week. I took Thursday off because we had some registration related work in Denkanikottai. The morning drive was easy and fun, but then, like any government work, it didn’t get done on time. So we entered the city during the peak evening traffic, with some rain. It was...

I wanted to visit TVC to monitor the construction of the house and help Kiran set up the fiber backbone for internet connectivity. TVC is roughly 90 kms from MG Road. It’s a good distance with a variety of road conditions to test my Yamaha and see how it performs over a long...

I am back from Chennai. It was fun meeting lots of students, hearing what they think, etc. This time I met some old-time friends, which was a bonus. Conducting the workshop was also fun. I hope to build on that workshop to demystify LLMs further and offer it again. In the last week,...

I sent this email to all workshop attendees. It made sense to publish it as a post as well. Thank you for attending the “Back to Basics: Build Your Own LLM from Scratch” session. It was great to see so much curiosity and many questions in the room, the feedback many of you...

This time, my trip to Chennai was also a road trip. I got a ride with friends in the car, and it also gave us lots of time for conversation. As we were going to the convocation, the discussions turned to education and degrees. Though there are lots of folks dissing college education...