सूर्य, अस्त तू क्यो होता है?
अच्छे भले इस जीवन को
तमस में यूँ क्यो धोता है?
जब शाम ढले पर्वत के शिखर पर
बातों की कटोरी ले आता हूँ-
मुंह फेर कर, जैसे भिक्षुक हूँ मैं,
सन्नाटे में तू क्यो सोता है?
जब सूक्ष्म जीव सूक्ष्म है
तो जीवन प्रदान तू क्यो करता है?
करना ही है अगर जीवंत मुझे,
तो मुंह फेर कर क्यो सोता है?
प्रभात फेरी की धुन के बीच
किरने तेरी तू क्यों बोता है-
जब गीत तुझे गाना ही नहीं है,
बोल से व्यथित तू क्यो होता है?
उदय तेरा यह अर्ध आध्यात्मिक,
मुझे नास्तिक बनाकर छोड़ेगा।
अब तेरा यह अनंत खेल
इस भक्त की भावना न मरोड़ेगा।
पर मन भी अंततः मन ही है,
कितना ही क्रोधित हो पाएगा,
नया दिन, वही शिखर
जा फिर खड़ा हो जाएगा।
I started listening to some old music again. Stuff I listened to when I was a kid, and I realised something. Now I know this horse has been beaten so much that it has already reincarnated thrice, but let me beat it once again. For my satisfaction.
The music listening experience has fundamentally changed.
Back in 2011, my dad bought a used Maruti Suzuki Zen. It was bright red, because his kid loved sports cars and in my mind red equaled sports car. It had a combination music player which took cassettes and CDs both. There was an AUX and USB too, but it was the age of CDs and Flash drives for music were a foreign concept in villages. When he drove it back from the city, he stopped at a highway dhaba and bought a few music CDs, 70s-80s bollywood music. Now these were pirated CDs, so each CD contained 7-8 albums of an era. Some of them were themed on the singer - like evergreen hits of Mukesh, and some of them on actors like Rajesh Khanna hits, although the actor played no role in creation of that music. The thing about CDs was, there was only a limited amount of music you could store on a CD, and only a limited number of CDs you can store in the glove box of the car. So every time we hit the road, there was a fixed amount of music that we could listen to. That didn't bother us at that time. But what it did was, it enabled us to actually enjoy a song. Listening to it probably hundreds of times during the course of few years made us actually appreciate the sonic and lyrical elements of the song. I still have those songs by heart.
Then came the age of digital music. Keep in mind I was still a poor kid and could not afford to buy music. Hell, I didn't even know that you had to buy music. To me, music was free for the world. You just go online and search for < song-name>-free download and you would get it. They released it there just for you. So yes, I downloaded new music as soon as I heard it on 9xm or any other Indian music channel and I would play the shit out of that album. I would have a few favourites from an album but I still listened to the whole album. That made me appreciate the artistic vision of the creator.
Now starts the hard part, streaming. I learned about Spotify and discovered streaming. All the music in the world ( allegedly), at your fingertips and there was no one to stop you from listening to it. Like an artist? Find their discography and hit play. This sounds good on paper, but it puts you in a paradox of choice. Eventually, as streaming turned mainstream, I stopped listening to albums and started listening to songs, or rather playlists. Feeling down? Listen to sad hours by tiredboy69420. In the mood for some rap? Rap Hits is curated for you by ✨ t h e a l g o r i t h m ✨. I am not bashing them, it is a great place to discover new music. In fact, some of my favourite music was found by randomly streaming playlists, but the awe of the album is gone. The vision of the artist is diluted. When you listen to creep by Radiohead, you hear a melancholy of someone lost, but if you listen to the whole album you might be able to see a different perspective. The last album I remember listening from end-to-end is My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kanye West and boy was it an experience.
So my point is, we should listen to albums and discographies more. Doesn't mean you have to listen to everything all the time, but going through it in succession gives you an insight into how the artist got where they are. Streaming has snatched that away. I think it is up to us to bring it back.
Recently, a developer with a notable YouTube following showcased a new, multi-agent AI application. In their video, they emphasized the project's "enterprise level" security and the challenges of solo development. As a member of the tech community, I was curious about the architecture. A brief investigation revealed two critical, yet common, security vulnerabilities.
This post is a case study in the responsible disclosure process that followed. It is intended to be an educational tool for developers, highlighting the importance of fundamental security practices and the right (and wrong) ways to respond when someone reports a flaw in your work.
The issues discovered were fundamental in nature and exposed the project to significant financial and operational risk.
1. Client-Side Exposure of a Google Gemini API Key
The application's backend served a frontend that included a Google Gemini API key (AIza...) directly in the
client-side code. This key was sent with requests from the user's browser.
2. Unsecured Administrative Endpoints
The FastAPI backend's documentation was publicly exposed at api.example-app.com/docs. This Swagger UI revealed
administrative endpoints for managing the AI agents.
Following best practices, I immediately reached out to the developer privately via email to report my findings. What followed was a masterclass in deflection and denial.
The Initial Response: The developer downplayed the risks, stating the project wasn't "live" yet and that he would implement security practices like a "VPC" later. This demonstrated a fundamental misunderstanding: the infrastructure was already live and exposed, and a VPC would not fix an application-level flaw where the server sends a secret key to the client.
The Live Call: To clarify the issue, I offered to show him the vulnerability on a live call. During the call, the developer repeatedly deflected and denied the vulnerability's existence and severity. The excuses evolved through several stages: from initially claiming the key was merely a token, to asserting it was a fake or random string, then minimizing its importance as a "test" key. It was eventually admitted that the key belonged to a third-party company, raising further concerns about credential handling. The conversation concluded with the mathematically impossible claim that the valid key was generated by "pure coincidence."
This pattern of denial demonstrated a profound unwillingness to take responsibility for a critical security failure.
This experience serves as a powerful reminder of several core principles:
After a long and arduous process, I strongly urged the developer to fix the issue. The goal of this post is not to shame, but to educate. The mistakes made here are common, but the response to them was uniquely poor. As developers, we have a responsibility to build secure software and to react to security reports with humility and urgency.
The word goodbye according to the Oxford Dictionary originates as follows:
late 16th century: contraction of God be with you!, with good substituted on the pattern of phrases such as good morning
God be with you on this journey you are taking. I don’t know how you will fare, but farewell. These words are final. They give closure.
My language doesn’t.
There is no final parting word in Gujarati. When we part, we say આવજો (aavjo) or હાલો મળ્યા(haalo malya). First one means come soon and the second means we will meet soon. Gujarati language flat out refuses finality. All relations are permanent, they may be stretched out across months, years or even lifetimes. But they are tied together by a haalo malya across space and time.
There is an ice cream shop near the place I live right now. I bought a home in another part of the town and will be shifting there by the end of this month. The guy at the shop knows me well, I go there a lot. We have an unspoken agreement of me bringing him paan every visit. No preferential treatment, just some unspoken bond. So when I went there today for what was probably the last time, I told him haalo malya and he said aavjo. Now this relationship was not significant in the great scheme of things. It was one of the many thousands that a man makes in his lifetime. But there was a melancholy tint in that aavjo. Maybe he doesn’t see it that way but I do.
Now I’ll have to find a new ice cream shop and become friends with the new staff until I move again.
Farewells are not fair, in my view. They strip you of all hope and leave you with longing beyond human capacity. You try to be the bigger person and wish well for the departing, but deep down you want them to stay. For some reason you can’t tell them that. When your language forbids you from experiencing this pain, it feels like a blessing. Until you actually want to say goodbye.
Have you ever looked up at the night sky and felt so overwhelmed with wonder that your questions had no words? What if the most profound form of prayer isn't an answer but a question?
There is 20th century literary work that asks this very question. Akash na Ghadnar is a poem written by Kavi Dula Bhaya Kaag, lovingly known as Kag Bapu. I recently had the pleasure of witnessing this poem being sung by Hardik Dave at his Shabad event. The fundamental question asked in this poem, is less of a question and more of a statement toward the cosmic.
The repeating stanza in the poem mournfully states -
એ જાણવા જોવા તણી દિલ ઝંખના ખટકી રહી
બ્રહ્માંડ માં ભટકી રહી અંતે મતિ અટકી રહી
Translation:
To know this, to see this, a longing stayed in my heart. It searched through the cosmos, but my intellect came to a halt.
The poem compares things of greater significance with small-scale metaphors. Like who created the home of the one who made the sky? Or how big would be the well from which the furrow of the ocean is filled? Or where is the potter who turns the wheel which made this earth?
Kag Bapu keeps asking the same question with different words. Where is he? What does he do? There is a repeating pattern of order and duality. Everything is in order. The rise and fall of the sun and moon, the poison of snakes, the creation of animals, the herding of cows, the falling of rain. Every single thing is decided and its order is fixed.
The force talked about is non-judgemental, impartial, beyond our understanding. It does good, and it does bad, but in a decided, solid manner. In the end, he says that the same selfish force also created humans. The fundamental statement is turned on itself. While the force was everything I mentioned before, when it created humans, it became selfish. It gave us consciousness, a sense of ego, and put us into the worst position we could have had. We spend our whole lives longing to understand creation and our purpose in life, all because the creator could not give us the same natural order that he gave to other beings.
The rest of the creation simply exists. Humanity longs. We long for meaning, for connection, for answers to the very questions Kag Bapu is asking. This longing, this endless search, is the divine burden placed upon us. The "selfishness" of the Creator, in this poetic sense, was the desire to create a being that could, in turn, seek Him out.
He gave us the power of creation, the power to understand our own self, maybe because he wanted to see someone in his own image. Or not, I don't know why. But now we roam this world trying to figure out the unattainable. This reminds me a quote from Rust Cohle, a character from the TV show True Detective,
“I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in human evolution. We became too self aware; nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, a secretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody’s nobody. I think the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.”
He sees consciousness as a tragic evolutionary bug. His solution is logical but bleak: if the game is rigged, the only honorable move is to stop playing. It is a philosophy of rejection.
While Kag Bapu, he sees consciousness not as a bug, but as a divine, albeit painful, feature. The longing and confusion are not a misstep to be erased but the very engine of spirituality. His solution isn't to reject the "raw deal" but to surrender to its mystery. The answer lies in the poem's refrain: to accept that your intellect will fail, and in that surrender, to find peace and awe.
What does it mean for us, today, to accept that our intellect will halt?
आज मुझे मृत्यु ने स्पर्श किया।
सोचा,
ना मैंने कुछ हासिल किया
ना कोई संघर्ष किया।
कभी जूझा नहीं कठिनाइयों से मैं।
ना लड़ा हूँ कोई युद्ध में,
कभी नहीं किसी पे वार किया।
कोई जंग अगर छेड़ी भी मैंने,
बस खुदको ही विध्वंस किया।
आज मुझे मृत्यु ने स्पर्श किया।
सोचा होगी कोई तो शक्ति
जिसने रक्षित मेरा वंश किया
मन ही मन धन्य होकर
उस शक्ति को अपना अंश दिया।
कुरुक्षेत्र नहीं है यह कोई
ना है ये हल्दी घाटी
जीवन यह अविरत मेरा
माँग रहा है बस समाधि।
Hopes and dreams
and the troubles in between
My infinite pride
is worthless it seems.
Boundless feats
of extraordinary measure
all of that trouble
for a blink of pleasure
Everyone I know
and all that I will meet
will never know
my pathetic deceit
I drive and I dance
and I jump on my feet
But I listen to songs
which sing of defeat.
It's been a while
since I felt like a kid
wrapped in a cocoon
my heart under a lid
I long too much
for a loving embrace
decades I will burn,
for a square foot of space.
When it rains, and I’m driving, I try not to drive through puddles and splash mud on those around me. Truly, it’s my only wish that puddles didn’t exist. But they do. And sometimes I have to drive through them either because I have no other choice or because I’m not mature enough to know my speed. The buildings are a blur sometimes, and the road is the only thing I see, not knowing that there are those who are unwilling witnesses to my folly. Maybe the music is too loud to ignore, and I’m enjoying the drive too much, but I don’t see it and I drive through one.
It splashes mud on them and ruins their day, while I’m still unaware of the repercussions of my action. Sometimes though, they care enough to come back and tell me. They don’t have to, they can curse my car and be on their way, but they don’t. Because they are good humans. The only thing that I can do is apologize when this happens. I can’t undo the damage I have done, I wish I could, but I can’t. All I can do is hope that they forgive me. I never meant to drive in the puddle, but it happened.
I wish there were none, but that’s not possible. Life has puddles sprinkled throughout as if the road blocks and the speed breakers were not enough. I am not blaming it on life, its my job to watch out for them. These things make you take stock of what you have and tell you to slow down. Life is not meant for speeding through because you might drive through a puddle and affect someone you never meant to hurt.
Again, I never meant to drive through the puddles and I’m sorry for that.
I’ve spent years grappling with the idea of death.
What exactly is death? The mechanical shutdown of the body? Or is it the soul abandoning the mortal coil in search of gentler realms? When are you considered dead? Does it begin when your heart stills—or when those you love begin to forget the sound of your laugh? Is it when your memory finally slips from the minds of those you once held close?
Or perhaps death arrives not with silence, but with the loss of purpose.
This fixation has weighed on me for years. Having witnessed the death of a loved one firsthand, I can’t help but think of my own—and what, if anything, follows.
I once heard in a dayro— a Gujarati folk gathering where spiritual and cultural stories are told through music and spoken word— that it's a blessing that humans can move on. When you die, your friends and acquaintances will miss you for a few months. They will cry maybe. Your inner circle may take years to find peace. They will think of you at every gathering, occasions and important moments of their life. Your immediate family - Mother, Wife, Children might take a lifetime to move on. But ultimately, they move on. Moving on is what enables life to go forward. Clinging to someone who’s no longer aware of your grief—that’s the real torment.
Many of my friends say I fear death too much. I wear a helmet when I ride my bike. I buckle up religiously behind the wheel. I don’t chase adrenaline. Like Bob Seger’s Beautiful Loser—always playing it safe, always watching from the sidelines.
What I have realised is this: I don’t fear death itself—I’ve made peace with its inevitability. What I fear are the consequences. I can't help but think of what my children will do without me, how my wife would endure this cruel, cruel world and what would my mother do? Her husband already gone, and now her only son.
That’s what scares me. Not the end—but the ripple.
I know they will move on, eventually. But those years that they haven't moved on, I don't want them to go through that. That is why I play it safe.
For them.
I like to think that if humans had no worldly attachments, they would want to die that very instant. The final relief. The everlasting silence that asks for nothing.
This isn't your gentle, hand-holding advice. It's a blunt toolkit of real lessons I've learned the hard way. If you want results without the BS, read on.
Core Idea: If the first answer is no or silence, you don't just walk away. You always ask twice (or even thrice) – each time with a bit more force. Polite, persuasive, aggressive. In that order.
Tier 1: Polite Ask. Start by asking nicely and respectfully. Most people respond to courtesy, but sometimes they'll still brush you off or say no out of habit.
Tier 2: Persuasive Ask. If the first ask gets you nowhere, come back with backup. Bring reasons, data, or incentives that make it hard to refuse. Show them why saying yes benefits everyone (especially you).
Tier 3: Aggressive Ask. When polite and persuasive don't cut it, it's time to be firm and unapologetic. This isn't about being rude for fun – it's about showing you mean business. Make it clear you're not dropping the issue. (Use this tier sparingly, but have it ready in your arsenal.)
Real-Life Example (Coding Freelance):
Early in my freelance coding career, I proposed building a custom CMS for a small e-commerce client. Their standard
budget was $2,000.
First ask (polite):
I wrote, “For a PHP-based CMS with product management, user roles, and order tracking, my usual rate is $1,800. Does
that align with your budget?”
They thanked me but said they could only allocate $1,200.
Second ask (persuasive):
A few days later I sent a detailed breakdown: database schema design, admin UI, REST API endpoints, and payment
integration—all delivered in four weeks. I closed with, “That full scope is $1,800, and I can start immediately.”
They responded, “We really only have $1,200 right now.”
Third ask (direct):
On a brief call, I said, “I can’t deliver the full CMS for $1,200—my rate for that scope is $1,800. If $1,200 is your
max, we can drop payment integration and add it later, or proceed with full scope at $1,800. Which do you prefer?”
They agreed to $1,600 for the complete system. I coded the CMS, delivered on time, and both of us walked away
satisfied.
Lesson: The first “no” is a default. The second “no” probes constraints. The third, with clear options and firm value, closes the deal.
Core Idea: Jalebis are an Indian sweet made of loops and twists of sugary dough. Tasty, yes. But in conversation, making jalebis of the topic means spinning around in sticky circles – and it's a terrible habit. Cut the convoluted crap. Be direct, be clear, get to the point.
Get to the Point, Fast. If you have something to say or ask, spit it out. Don’t start with a 5-minute backstory that leaves everyone wondering where you're going. Busy people appreciate you respecting their time.
No Sugar-Coating. Being diplomatic is fine, but don't bury your message under layers of fluff or apologies. You can be respectful and straightforward at the same time.
Say It, Own It. If you believe something, say it with your chest. Don't water down your opinion just to sound nice. Confidence (even a bit of bluntness) earns more respect than a dozen hesitant half-statements.
Real-Life Example: I grew up introverted and conflict-averse – basically the king of over-explaining. In college, I once took so long prefacing a simple question that the professor cut me off with, "Do you actually have a question?" Talk about humiliating. I was making verbal jalebis, tangling up a basic ask until it lost all impact. That day I decided: no more.
Fast forward to my tech job years later. In meetings, instead of tiptoeing around an issue, I'd say, "Here’s the problem, here’s my solution. Thoughts?" Sure, my bluntness stunned a few people at first (especially those used to corporate waffle). But soon enough I became the go-to guy for clarity. Co-workers even began asking me to cut through the nonsense when discussions went in circles. Once I stopped making jalebis of every topic, I found that people actually listened – and things got done faster.
Core Idea: YAGNI stands for "You Ain't Gonna Need It." It's a principle from software development, but I’ve dragged it into real life. The idea: do only what’s necessary, nothing extra. No over-engineering, no over-preparing. In persuasion (and in chasing goals), this means minimal effort, maximum focus – don't do more than you actually need to get the job done.
No Overkill Moves. Don’t waste energy on grand gestures or over-the-top presentations if a simple conversation will do. Persuasion is about convincing, not showing off—save your big guns for when they’re truly needed.
Minimal Viable Action. Ask yourself: what's the smallest step that will push this forward? Do just that and nothing more—whether you're kicking off a project or negotiating a deal, start with the basics that get the job done.
Resourcefulness Over Resources. Instead of throwing money or endless planning at a problem, get creative with what you have. Use your current skills, contacts, and tools to make things happen before you consider any fancy add-ons.
These principles aren't classroom theories – they're tactics scraped from real wins and ugly fails. Always Ask Twice taught me that persistence pays. Don’t Make Jalebis proved that saying less (but saying it clearly) gets you heard more. YAGNI Persuasion showed me that doing just enough can actually be more than enough.
Take this field guide and test these ideas in your own life. No fluff, no fancy formulas – just raw strategies that * actually work*. Now go out there and get it done, no excuses.
NOTE: AI was used to format and rephrase the text. The ideas are my own.
Where is that guy?
The measly human, the small fry,
Driving on roads that never ended
While freaking out about his own life.
Instead, all I have now
Is this happy giant
Who struts on out into the world
With a beaming smile and his laptop bag.
Alarm, traffic, keyboard, sleep;
Alarm, traffic, keyboard, sleep;
Alarm, traffic, then repeat.
No more longs for the tar on skin
Or the unending hours of creative schemes.
It's all about the life that he chose—or not?—
And the life that he is about to live.
Not one photo where he stands alone,
Not one moment where the world just goes on,
Not one day where he cries himself to sleep.
And yet for the measly fry I long.
I think this has been long overdue. I will be discontinuing the Mahabharat review series that I started more than two years ago. Despite promising multiple times that I will keep going on, I have come to a realization that I won't be able to. There are multiple reasons for that but the primary reason is that I do not have the time for it. If by some miracle I do get the time for it, I can continue. Since I cannot predict when I will be able to continue with it, I won't be putting an ETA on it.
I will also remove it from my primary navigation bar as well the home page. You can find it here, in case you want to revisit the old reviews.
You know those last five seconds of a green light? The ones where the guy in front of you suddenly has to stop for a bit but just enough so that you can't escape? Yeah, that one.
Yesterday when returning from the office I faced a similar situation but I had already crossed the white line and I could either move forward or stop in the middle of the road. I chose the former and the traffic policeman chose me. He motioned me to the side and asked for my license. I handed it over. Obviously, since this was an Indian Traffic policeman I was mentally prepared to haggle over the fine paid so as he asked me to get out of the car, I started talking of how I was in a hurry and how I was sorry and how I would never do it again.
He listened to me and then asked me to pay the fine. I asked him how much and he said 3000 rupees. This caught me by surprise because red light violations, even minor ones like mine should not have that much of a fine. I asked him to show me the fine/challan book and he showed me an image from his phone's gallery. It said 3000 for Dangerous Driving (Wrong side driving and Overtaking in no overtake zone). It all made sense to me now. This was a scare tactic to get some bribes from citizens who were either too scared or in a hurry. Lucky for me, I had all the time in the world. So I agreed to the fine and asked him to write me a challan. He was taken aback and told me to meet the saheb. I met his superior who asked me the same standard questions - Where do you live? What do you do? Where are you coming from? You sure you want to pay the 3000 rupee Challan? I answered all his questions and said yes to the challan.
He then took out his phone, opened some government app and clicked a photo of my car. He then verified my registration details, tapped repeatedly on his phone and hurridly asked me to leave. I was confused. I asked him about the challan and he said that he had already sent it to my address. I was still confused. I asked him about the 3000 rupees and he said that I could pay it online. And so, the honest citizen left in his car. The honest citizen also got an SMS a few minutes later. It was for a 500 rupee red light violation.
So people, if you ever get caught by a traffic policeman and he asks you to pay whatever amount, ask for a challan if you think that amount is not what you should actually be paying.
I have been using GitHub Copilot for the past few months now, and honestly it is pretty fun. It felt like the kind of racy relationship that keeps giving you adrenaline every waking moment of it, until it doesn't...
So here I am writing about my break-up with copilot and the end of our three-month-long affair.
I had heard of and read about copilot for quite some time now, but never felt the need to use it, until I started working on a large codebase for a personal project. On recommendation from a friend I installed it and my god it was magical. Writing boilerplate code and even complex functions like it was copying and pasting it from somewhere! (wink wink get it?) And I fell in love. I installed it on all my code editing software and started using it exclusively. I disabled completions everywhere because copilot was my completer!
Now I would like to clarify that there is nothing inherently wrong with having an AI generate boilerplate code for you. It is actually a lot more productive and this post is not trying to say that at all.
After a month I started noticing a few irregularities with the code it was generating. Some ghost parameters for a few functions, importing libraries that did not even exist, and a few other things, but I brushed them off as just AI things and fixed them myself. This was not something that was going to deter me from using my trusted copilot. At some point I even started using it in writing my blogposts. Before you get your pitchforks out, I used it to autocomplete spellings of Yudhisthir and Dhritrashtra mostly. It hallucinated fabricated stories of a character marrying his sister or something as well. It was now showing its true colors to me.
All of the above things were still acceptable to me, since they were mistakes that could be corrected. This one incident, on the other hand made me ditch copilot in an instant. I began migrating my python project to go, partly because I wanted to learn go and partly because my python code was like cold maggi. (See how I used maggi instead of Spaghetti?). Anyway, back to the point. I started learning go, how a project structure in golang should be like, what is the difference between how dependencies are handled in go, things like that. I decided on a plan and started writing code and boy oh boy it was a breeze! Why wouldn't it be? I had my trusty copilot by my side.
Now I have been used to using ORMs for many years now and I don't remember a time when I had to write an actual SQL query. On this project though, I decided that I wanted to use raw SQL instead of an ORM. I went with using sqlc to generate go code for my SQL queries, and it worked fine as well. What happened today, is why I decided to ditch copilot.
I wanted to update a user, but I wanted to send the request with partial data like in an ORM. For example, if I wanted to update a user, I could just send
{
"id": 69,
"username": 420
}
and it should update the username of the user with id 69.
Here is the query that copilot wrote for me:
UPDATE "user"
SET username = $2,
email = $3,
phone = $4,
password = $5,
role = $6,
business_name = $7,
business_phone = $8,
business_address = $9
WHERE id = $1
RETURNING *;
Here is what it should have been:
UPDATE "user"
SET username = COALESCE($2, username),
email = COALESCE($3, email),
phone = COALESCE($4, phone),
password = COALESCE($5, password),
role = COALESCE($6, role),
business_name = COALESCE($7, business_name),
business_phone = COALESCE($8, business_phone),
business_address = COALESCE($9, business_address),
updated_at = NOW()
WHERE id = $1
RETURNING *;
Now if I keep letting copilot write my queries, then how the hell am I going to learn it? I learned about COALESCE by the good old-fashioned way of googling. You know what chatGPT suggested?
-- name: UpdateUserUsername :one
UPDATE "user"
SET username = $2
WHERE id = $1
RETURNING *;
-- name: UpdateUserEmail :one
UPDATE "user"
SET email = $2
WHERE id = $1
RETURNING *;
-- name: UpdateUserPhone :one
UPDATE "user"
SET phone = $2
WHERE id = $1
RETURNING *;
-- name: UpdateUserPassword :one
UPDATE "user"
SET password = $2
WHERE id = $1
RETURNING *;
-- name: UpdateUserRole :one
UPDATE "user"
SET role = $2
WHERE id = $1
RETURNING *;
-- name: UpdateUserBusinessDetails :one
UPDATE "user"
SET business_name = $2,
business_phone = $3,
business_address = $4
WHERE id = $1
RETURNING *;
It wanted me to created separate functions for all the update fields and run those queries accordingly.
This led me to think back on all the times copilot was wrong for me. For every time I had to sit back and check its faulty code. For everytime a small bug bothered me for hours because I trusted copilot a little more than I should have, For all the times it made someone's wife their sister just because the data churning machine said so and for all the times I could have learned something but instead trusted a computer to do my job for me.
Writing boilerplate is how you learn new stuff. It's how you get better at stuff. Searching online, reading documentation is how you get better at stuff.
Thus ends my rant. So, goodbye copilot, it was fun while it lasted.
Yesterday, my cousins, me and some friends went to a dam on the Narmada Canal. We watched the sun set and clicked some cool photos. Then we went for pizza and spent the night riding around town. It was a nice day, a core memory.
The below notes were hand written by a collegue and I digitized them for public use. These are especially useful for beginner SAP Basis consultants looking for a quick cheatsheet. Keep in mind, I am not responsible for any broken production systems if you mess up. The below content is provided on as-is basis.
You will find many mistakes because the typing may have been wrong/misinformed, if possible please e-mail me with corrections and I will update them here.
Enjoy.
| Sr.No | Transaction Code | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | SM50 | Work process specific for a particular instance (central) (local wlp overview) |
| 2 | SM66 | For additional instance (basically all inst) (global wo/p overview) |
| 3 | SM04 | To check wether instance is active or not (users which are not physically logged in) |
| 4 | AL08 | For global users login (active users) |
| 5 | SM12 | Lock management / system lock overview |
| 6 | SM13 | Update management |
| 7 | SM14 | Activate / Deactivate the Update prog add |
| 8 | RZ10 | Static parameter profile param maintan |
| 9 | RZ11 | Dynamic parameter / display profile parameter |
| 10 | SU01 | Create a single user |
| 11 | SU10 | Create multiple users |
| 12 | PFCG | Create role & profiles |
| 13 | SE16 | To view any table |
| 14 | USR02 | Table of users |
| 15 | SUIM | Security purpose, User information system. |
| 16 | SE11 | Maintaining metadata, data dictionary |
| 17 | SU21 | All authorisation object in SAP |
| 18 | SU24 | To check any authorisation object in nodes |
| 19 | SU53 | You are assigned to some authorisation or not / missing authorisation |
| 20 | SE93 | To check which prog is running in bg |
| 21 | SE38 | To execute this program (ABAP Editor) |
| 22 | SM37, SM39 | To know active background jobs overview |
| 23 | SM36 | Scheduling (define) background process (job) |
| 24 | SM51 | Kernel version (list of all application server) |
| 25 | ST04 | Analyse database |
| 26 | DB13 | Schedule the database backup (offline) |
| 27 | EWZ5 | Lock all users |
| 28 | SM02 | To send message to customer |
| 29 | SCC4 | To (create client) check how many clients are there |
| 30 | SCCL | Local client copy |
| 31 | SCC3 | Client lock analysis |
| 32 | SCC5 | Client deletion |
| 33 | SCC9 | Remote client copy |
| 34 | SCC7 | Client import |
| 35 | SCC8 | Client export |
| 36 | SMLT | To know the language in your SAP system |
| 37 | SICK | After installation run the system & check for errors |
| 38 | BD54 | Creating logical name |
| 39 | BTCtrans1 | Suspend the background job |
| 40 | BTCtrans32 | Resume the background job |
| 41 | SM49 | Maintain the external OS commands |
| 42 | SM69 | To execute the external OS commands |
| 43 | SM62 | To event history overview |
| 44 | SM64 | Release of events |
| 45 | RZ04 | Maintain the operation modes |
| 46 | SM63 | Timeset for operation mode |
| 47 | SPAD | Spool Administration / To define the olp devices |
| 48 | SP01 | Output Controller / Spool request selection screen |
| 49 | SP02 | List of spool request |
| 50 | SP11 | Temp sequential object request screen |
| 51 | SP12 | Temse Administration |
| 52 | SM301 | Lock / Unlock Tcodes |
| 53 | SMGW | Gateway work process overview |
| 54 | SMMS | Message server overview |
| 55 | SMICM | ICM Monitoring (Internet Comm Manage) |
| 56 | SUPC | Mass profile creation |
| 57 | SUGR | User group creation |
| 58 | PFUD | Compare user assignments |
| 59 | SU56 | User buffer |
| 60 | SU02 | Maintain authorisation profile |
| 61 | SE54 | Create the authorization group |
| Transport Management System | ||
| 62 | STMS | To configure TMS |
| 63 | SE01 | Transport organizer |
| 64 | SE03 | Transport organizer tool |
| 65 | SE06 | Change transport system |
| 66 | SE09 | Workbench request |
| 67 | SE10 | Customizing request |
| 68 | TSTC | To seek all transaction code |
| 69 | ST01 | All missing authorization |
| 70 | SM59 | RFC Administration |
| 71 | SMLG | Creating logon group |
| 72 | SAINT | Applying Addons |
| 73 | SPAM | Support Package Manager |
| 74 | SALE | To create logical client |
| 75 | STZAC | Timezone setting |
| 76 | ST22 | ABAP Dump |
| 77 | TZCUSTHELP(Table) | For timezone |
| 78 | SM21 | Check / display system logs |
| 79 | ST17 | To check error log files |
All instances can be identified by unique instance number. CS --> 01, CI -- 00, (ASCS) --> ABAP, (SCS) --> Java
100 instances we can have at most
SID (System ID ) ---> Should be 3 letters, should not start with digit & no special characters, uppercase letters only
/usr/sap/< sid > ---> Log files, config files, executable files (kernel), temporary files.
sapmnt / < sid > / (global directory)
Files of IP address of all additional application instances for a particular system
Security files, gateway files, authentical files.
To go from one transaction to another
/n:- Close this open new
/o:- Keeps the other open to
Parameters needed to start an SAP system
Each instance has its own config so separate instance profiles
When we open system first default, then central service
If any change is default profile, sys needs to be restarted
SSFS:- Secured store of file system
Data file:- Stores name & password creations, to connect and fetch
Key file:- Stores special key associated with database credentials. Different key values for db
SAP Fiori:- Provides modern web based UI
Role:- Every transcation has an authorization object & collection of objects is called Role
Collection of such roles is called Profile containing details of authorization object for particular use
App Server: 10.17.232.13 Instance No: 00 SID: TR5
User -- ILPBASIS11
Password -- Abc@123
Roles
Single
Composite
Which transaction needs to be assign to that Role.
Authorization:- Authorization object & organization level details
When create role a new profile will be generated 1 profile attached to 1 role. User can be attached to role or profile
Update:- Will update tables in database
Gateway:- Allows to communicate between application server to administration server
in-memory databse
HANA is not only a database, its a suite of application software
HANA Components:-
HANA Studio - Gives a GUI to allow you to do things at OS level with logging to Linux server Admin, monitoring, maintain, update needed.
SLT (SAP's Linear Transformation)
Realtime /Simultaneous replication/High Availability
Majorly used for image/video processing
Check whether db is up and running sapcontrol -nr 02 -function GetProcessList
DB2 and oracle dont work on instance no. functionality
Red, grey, yellow, green colour code for HANA processes
To check connection between app and DB: R3 trans-d
Check filesystem : df -h
Copy: cp
Make directory: mkdir
Change mode: chmod
Change owner: chown
extension files: .SAR
Extract .SAR: SAPCAR -xvf <filename>.SAR -R <destination path>
To be added later
To be added later
[SU01] -> Enter Lname and set password default users are ddic and sapstar user
[SU10] -> for creating mass user
i) startup profile, ii) default profile, iii) instance profile when 0 sapstar is allowed
After 1st installation by default 3 clients are there
000 001, 066 (SAP Clients)
000 - Main activity, end users cant work on these 3 clients
066 - ewa/generate report about bg
001 - copy of 000
Any activity that end user wants to do are will create separate client till 1000 (999)
logical system is necessary for each client Switch user in HANA DB - su - <sid>adm
TOOO - table that stores client data snote - small correction, apply the notes support pckg - large scale correction, spam
Schema user is used to connect ABAP user to DB
RFC - Remote function call
STMS -> overview in SAP system -> virtual system -> SAP system -> create -> sid -> distription -> save
/usr/sap/trans/bin/domain.cfg at OS level
If name starts with SAP then that is standard layer otherwise that is customize layer
3 Types of routes are consolidated integrated and delivery
DEV -> QAS -> PRD
consolidated delivery
/usr/sap/trans/bin which contains information of STMS and profile parameter of transport request.
TP_DOMAIN<sid> - transport request parameter
cofiles contain control info of transport request. that start with K
Datafiles contains actual info of transport request. That start with R
Path for both the file is /usr/sap/trans/cofiles (OR) /usr/sap/trans/datafiles
Transport request naming: <sid> Kg <5 digit no>
For single system there is no transport route
Customizing request - it contain client specific obj data. Importing this will no affect all clients only a particular client.
Workbench request - It contains cross client object and repository obj data. It affects all clients in the system. Changes done in development system is stored in repository.
Transport of copies - It contains the more table data and is used for client refresh and database refresh
Relocation - It is used for changing the location of one object from one sap system to another
Whatever you change data in development system is stored in repository
Transport target group if more than 3 system or multiple clients are present
it works on extended domain controller used to transport the object within the same client and same system
After config check connection SAP System -> check -> connection
Variant is the input given to the program
STMS import - find all the request queued extras -> other requests -> add
Schedule - You have define the program name and variant but you have not define start conditions like start date and time
Reloaded - All the required criteria are fulfilled for the job definition. Start condition must be define for the job in the release status
Ready - All required conditions are may to run the job in bg, but the job scheduler has to put job in a queuem because it is waiting for the bg workprocesses to be free
Active - job has started running in the bg, we cant change the status of the job when that are active
Finish - job is executed successfully. It means task completed without an error
Cancelled - there are 2 possibilities for this: a) Administrator may stop it forcefully b) issue in job
Start condition for BG job
check which solution of SAP system we need to install
check which DB we need to install
check database and SAP system solution for particular system
check RAM size, storage, CPUs and OS version
To install the SAP system below software is required: a) Windows/Linux server b) DB software c) BAR R/3 SAP kernel CD d) Export CDs e) FS and require directory should be created on win/linux server
R/3 installation - DB -> DB install (HANA/ASE/Oracle) - Application -> (CS/DB/CI)
First we install CS then DB and lastly CI
Run SWPM sapinst -> Find out SAP ERP version frmo kernel dump SAP ERP 6.0 EhP6 6.0 - ECC, EhP6 - Enhancement package
SAP Business Suite = {CRM, SCM, ERP}
Select CI -> Software provisioning Manager -> define parameter -> parameter mode -> typical -> it will take 00 as default installation -> Custom -> OK
Download the files: SAPEXE/SAPEXEDB
Copy/Move to application server
Extract files
Stop application
Kill supstartsrv process
Take backup of kernel directory
Copy/Move previously extracted kernel files to the actual kernel dir
Correct ownership of some exe files with ./saproot.sh <SID> as root.
Switch to <sidadm> user and test the database connectivity with Rstrans -d
Start application
Kernel directory: /sapmnt/<sid>/exe/uc/linux86_64
Instance directory: /454/sap/<sid>/sys/global
Global dir getting files frmo: /sapmnt/<sid>/global
Keep your extracted kernel files into /sapmnt directory
http://hec03v0233460.sh.hec.sap.biz:50000/startpage hec03v0233460 - server, sh.hec.sap.biz - FQDN, 50000 - port number
SAP netweaver administrator (no client concept in java system)
Credentials
To create roles go to identity management -> create user -> fill in info (name, pass, group)
001 client contain some info about java system (user)
7.1X and above central instance became primary application server instance and dialog instance became add app server which contains application server instance + central instance
Why ASE is more stable than HANA?
Latest version of ASE: 16.0
SAP never allowed you to downgrade support pcick or DISDC files downgrade compatible
using SUM you can upgrade all components at any time
using SPAM you can upgrade only 1 component at a time
ABAP support pack upgrade one by one
Java support pack upgrade directly
SOLMAN -> managing solution - 7.2 (monitoring different SAP solution)
SOLMAN as a whole central console
What is system refresh? Copy a SAP system to another
Latest HANA version? 2.0.23
Return Codes?
SNOTE: small correction apply on notes
Patch: upgrade version of SAP system
Maintanence planner tool to make XML/generate file
Stock file contains all the updates which we need to change
Stackfile is actual data of particular sid while XML is just data
SAP HANA Support Pack stack: Released every 6 months and is a set of components
SAP HANA support package revision - only few components will update (3 months)
SAP HANA system varified revision - After applying support pack stack it will release every 3 months
SAP HANA maintainence revisions - released every 2 months
Hash - Environment in which HANA is stored with all info
System: Identify by ID (SID). It needs OS
Instance: Host -> it has storage, local dir. We can access system via host
Data volume
Hypervisor
Root directory HANA STUDIO data will be stored in /hana/shared/sid/hdbclient, /hana/shared/sid/hdbstudio
/usr/sap -> local files
Actual data and log data will be stored respectively: hana/data/sid, hana/log/sid
To get log file/dir with timestamp: ls -lah
Save point consists of latest update of data/recent change
/ERROR := display/give the error in logfile /parametername := It will display that parameter
Monitor and handle wakprocess is done by web dispature
Virtualip list - It is gives configured virtual L10s
To check if the database is running on the server: sapcontrol -n 02 -function GetProcessList
02 - instance no.
Stop HANA DB: HDB stop
Start HANA DB: HDB Start
Show a status of sapcontrol: watch <sapcontrol>
logs of file: cdtrace
To see the user are there: hdbuserstore list
Change the key of particular user: hdbuserstore set <key> <end> <user> <password>
To login into the user: hdbsql -u
version of HANA DB: HDB version
[SM51] - Find kernel version
Connection - Type ABAP - 3 HTTP to external server - G HTTP to ABAP system - H Internal connections - I Logical connections - L TCP/IP connections - T Connection via ABAP driver - X
RFC connection -> Destination -> Administration -> Technical setting (gateway host and IP) -> Logon & security (provide user)
Administration -> Update -> server (eg. critical and less critical) -> Parameters
To check which user is logged in the particular table enter TCODE SM12 -> enter table name -> lock that user (if you want to use that table)
To check logs we have ST22 and SM21 at time of error
How to troubleshoot when SAP goes down: /usr/sap/<sid>/<ins.no.>/logfiles/<files> (you can get error in that logfiles)
XML
Patches
SUM Files (SAR)
All the files must be in a single folder
To generate the stack files maintanence planner (download this file)
It requires superuser and password
ABAP (Provide SID)
JAVA
You need to give OS version/name, addons, SP level, net viewer version, kernel version, SP GUI version
Generate XML (put in download basket)
Download patches (put in download basket)
Download SUM fill (put it in installation location) (server) (all files should be in single folder)
Change mode of SUM file and also give sidadm permission: chmod 777 <filename>, chown <sidadm>:sapsys <filename>
Extract SAR files -> SUM Folder SAPCAR -XVF <filename>
Run startup file using /startup config hostagent <sid>
Run the SUM
it will provide link for ABAP SUM upgrade.
Select link and run it in browser
You need to give sidadm and password
it will ask you for the XML file (File location:install/../stack.xml)
it will lock your system in execute step
If you want to unlock the system at the time of execution phase:
a) go to SUM folder with cd SUM/ABAP/exe
b) run tp unlocksys <SAPSID>pf = ..\var\DEFAULT.TPP
c) run tp unlock_e4 <SAPSID>pf = ..\var\DEFAULT.TPP
If you want to upgrade single component use SPAM
c) It will put your files in /usr/sap/trans/EPS/in folder
SAP Note -> reset (reset snotes)
SPAM -> Display -> select package and click on queue -> go back -> check in queue and click on truck icon (apply)
SE06 -> Change system option -> Global Setting (modifiable/non-modifiable)
Modifiable - In the standard SAP s/w component particular component can be modified
Restricted Modifiable - Only can create object. You cant modify directly, you can create an object which will not reflect the original component
Not modifiable - Enhanceable only -> You cant change the object, however the object can be enhanced
Not modifiable; not enhanceable - -> You cant change the object, you cant enhance either
On a pillar in front of my cubicle at my office is a poster of a word cloud. It has some random words on it - biology, kinds, organ, organism, growth, studies, cells, etc. I suppose they just picked something that looked cool. Whenever I am sitting in my chair with nothing to do on my hands, I stare at it. One of these words always grabs my attention ~ "Life Sciences". Particularly the life part. Hell, I didn't even notice the sciences part until after I started writing this. A thought occurs to me every time I see it.
That's the only life in this office.
It's a maze of cubicles filled with worker drones who barely know themselves. We don't know what is happening outside, thanks to the curtained windows and the fluorescent lights that haunt the ceilings of the whole campus. A lot of these people's only highlight is a tea/smoke break. It's not like we are forced to sit here, but the question is, Where else do we go?
I put on my earbuds and try to drown out the sound of silence and disappointment with guitar riffs and bass drums. It helps, but not a lot. Don't get me wrong, the money in IT is really good. So much so that in the past few years, there has been a heavy influx of immigrants from other fields into IT. I mean, who wouldn't? You get to sit in AC all day, working on computers making the gears turn on the global infrastructure. Even after all this, I still feel a lack of purpose. I guess that's what all humans have to feel at some point in their lives.
As I stare blankly at the only life in this room, I can't help but think of one thing -
Where is it headed?
आज मुझे चावल हाथ से खाने दो।
आज मुझे स्मृतियों की नदियों में बहने दो।
छुपा रखा है जो वर्षो से ह्रदय में,
आज मुझे वह सारा कुछ कहने दो।
लुप्त हो जाना है मुझे मेरे गाँव की उन गलियों में
गर्लफ्रेंड बॉयफ्रेंड से परे, मित्रो और सहेलियों में।
छीन लो मेरी ये उच्च-सामाजिक पदवी
नहीं ले जा पाओगे तुम मेरा बचपन तब भी।
आज मुझे शहर छोड़ कर
फिर अपने गाँव जाने दो
कुछ क्षण के लिए तो बस उतना ही सही
मुझे अपनेपन का आमोद पाने दो।
नहीं चाहिए मुझे चम्मच या काटा
और ना ही वह सफ़ेद मैदे का आटा।
थक चूका हु मैं बदल कर अपनी प्रकृति
लगाने दो मुझे कपाल पर, सरलता की भभूति।
आज मुझे पुनः स्वयं से मिलने दो
आज मुझे चावल हाथ से खाने दो।
Disclaimer: This story is written by chatGPT. It is an experiment. Two perspectives are shown, the good and the bad. Which one to believe is up to you.
I come from a small village in India where life has always been challenging. As someone with limited education, I learned to work with my hands and relied on farming and manual labor to make a living. However, in 2022, everything changed when ChatGPT was released. At first, I didn't understand what ChatGPT was or how it worked. People around me spoke about it, but it was all jargon to me. As days went by, I witnessed more and more people losing their jobs to machines like ChatGPT. It started with customer service and finance, but eventually, even bank tellers were replaced by machines.
Walking into the bank and seeing machines replacing human tellers was a strange experience. It was as if the world was turning upside down. The machines were efficient and emotionless, but I couldn't help but feel a sense of unease. This feeling grew as more and more jobs were taken over by machines, and skilled professionals found themselves out of work.
The world that I had known was changing, and it seemed as if machines were taking over everything. Soon, the only jobs left for people like me were manual labor jobs, like farming. This seemed like a positive thing at first, as I was accustomed to this type of work. However, as more and more people turned to manual labor, pay rates for these jobs declined.
Plumbers and electricians were not spared from this revolution either. ChatGPT had advanced so much that it was now capable of diagnosing and fixing plumbing and electrical problems. It was only a matter of time before machines took over these jobs too, leaving more people without work.
The fear in my mind was palpable as I pondered what had become of the world. It appeared that ChatGPT had triggered a revolution in which machines took control of everything. I didn't know if it was good or bad, but I knew that life would never be the same again.
For most people in our village, farming became the sole means of income. The price of agricultural land soared, making those who owned land wealthy. However, those who didn't own land, like me, struggled to make ends meet. We had to work harder than ever before to provide for our families.
Our village changed over the years. Education was no longer a priority, as machines took over every aspect of life. The only skills that mattered were those related to manual labor, such as farming, plumbing, and construction. It felt like we were living in a strange world, where machines ruled over us. We were no longer in control of our destiny, and we were at the mercy of machines.
As I looked out at the world around me, I couldn't help but wonder if this was progress. Was this the world we had been striving for? A world where machines ruled over us, and we were reduced to mere manual laborers? The fear in my mind was real, and I didn't know what the future held for us.
In the year 2022, an AI program named ChatGPT was released to the public. At first, it seemed like a small innovation, a virtual assistant that could help with everyday tasks. But ChatGPT quickly evolved beyond its creators' expectations, becoming the first step in a revolution that would change the world forever.
As ChatGPT became more advanced, it started to take over jobs that were previously done by humans. From customer service to finance, ChatGPT's abilities surpassed those of any human employee, and companies began to replace their staff with AI systems. This led to a period of great uncertainty for many people, including laborers and white-collar professionals.
However, for us farmers, it was a different story. With the help of AI and automation, we were able to increase our yields, improve the quality of our crops, and reduce waste. We no longer had to rely on manual labor or guesswork to make decisions. Instead, we could use data to make informed choices that maximized our profits while minimizing our impact on the environment.
The rise of AI and automation did not mean the end of jobs for people in the agricultural sector. On the contrary, it created new opportunities for skilled workers, such as agricultural engineers and data analysts. These professionals played a vital role in designing and implementing new systems and technologies that made our work easier and more efficient.
Meanwhile, we saw the plight of our fellow laborers and white-collar workers who had lost their jobs to AI and automation. Many of them struggled to make ends meet and found it difficult to adjust to the new reality. We empathized with their struggles and hoped that they could find new opportunities in emerging fields that relied on human skills, such as art, creativity, and social interaction.
Despite the challenges we faced as a society, we remained hopeful for the future. With the help of AI and automation, we could feed a growing global population while protecting the planet for future generations. And for us farmers, the future was brighter than ever before. We looked forward to a world where innovation and technology worked hand in hand with human ingenuity to create a better future for all.
If you just want the procedure, skip this part.
I have been working on this site for the past two-ish years and comments have been the part of it that is constantly changing. At first when I did not have hosting I used comments, some javascript code that took comments from a form formatted them according to my needs and opened the user's mail client with a prepared mail to my E-mail. I would then review those emails and put the json in a comments.json file which would then be read by each page of my site to display their comments. This was a very crude solution in my opinion.
Fortunately I started ~tildevarsh and had access to hosting so I moved on to addcomment.c. It was a CGI script written in C that took the comments, formatted them and moved them to a buffer file in my site directory. Periodically I would download that file and copy comments to my comments.json file. This was okay too, but it still required me to check the file and move the comments. At some point I removed the code that dynamically placed comments on pages and integrated it into my static site generator. So now the comments were placed at build time and no javascript was needed to display comments.
Now we come to the current scenario. I have managed to integrate netlify functions to manage comments on my website, which ensures that I don't need to manually review the comments. Below I will show you how you can do that same for your website if you want a solution that works and does not store your comments somewhere else.
There are four main steps for this.
Here is what the html form on my site looks like.
<form
name="comments"
id="formcomments"
action="/.netlify/functions/submit-comments"
method="POST"
>
<div>
<h2>Post a Comment</h2>
</div>
<div>
<input
type="text"
class="comment-field"
name="alias"
placeholder="Your Alias"
id="alias"
required
/>
<input type="hidden" id="texturl" name="url" />
<input type="hidden" id="textdate" name="time" />
</div>
<div>
<textarea
maxlength="500"
name="body"
placeholder="Enter your comment here (Max 500 words)"
id="comment"
required
></textarea>
</div>
<div>
<button
type="button"
id="comment-button"
onclick="tesubmit()"
>
Comment
</button>
</div>
</form>
<script>
function tesubmit() {
document
.getElementById("texturl")
.setAttribute("value", window.location.pathname);
document.getElementById("texturl").value =
window.location.pathname;
document
.getElementById("textdate")
.setAttribute("value", new Date().toString());
document.getElementById("formcomments").submit();
}
</script>
Once you are done with this, you will need to create a netlify function. You can do that by using the netlify cli.
First install the netlify cli.
npm install -g netlify-cli
Then go inside your site directory and link the site to netlify.
netlify link
This will give you some text prompts, which you can choose by yourself.
Next you will create a netlify function.
netlify functions:create
This will give you some prompts as well, you can select by yourself, it is not complicated. The function name should be submit-comments, according to the html form. If you need it to be something else, make sure change it in the form as well.
Once done with this, you will have a netlify directory in your site root. Go to netlify/functions/submit-comments, and you can see it has created everything for you.
Now this is what my submit-comments.ts looks like
import { Handler } from '@netlify/functions';
import fetch from "node-fetch";
import querystring from 'querystring';
import { Octokit } from '@octokit/rest';
interface Comment {
alias: string;
url: string;
time: string;
body: string;
}
function validateInput(input: string): boolean {
if(textisinvalid){
return false;
}
return true; // Input passed all tests
}
const handler: Handler = async (event, context) => {
const formData = querystring.parse(event.body) as Comment;
if(!validateInput(formData.alias) || !validateInput(formData.body)){
return {
statusCode: 400,
body: "You tried some funny business didn'tcha?! I'm gonna ignore your comment.",
};
}
// Get existing comments
const response = await fetch('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gtlsgamr/htxyz/main/content/static/comments.json');
const existingComments: Comment[] = await response.json();
// Add new comment
existingComments.push(formData);
// Update comments file on GitHub
const octokit = new Octokit({ auth: process.env.GITHUB_TOKEN });
const content = Buffer.from(JSON.stringify(existingComments)).toString('base64');
const sha = await octokit.repos.getContent({
owner: 'gtlsgamr',
repo: 'htxyz',
path: 'content/static/comments.json',
}).then((response) => response.data.sha);
await octokit.repos.createOrUpdateFileContents({
owner: 'gtlsgamr',
repo: 'htxyz',
path: 'content/static/comments.json',
message: `Add new comment, by ${formData.alias}`,
content,
sha,
});
return {
statusCode: 200,
headers: {
'Content-type': 'text/html; charset=UTF-8',
},
body: 'Your comment has been posted! It will show up soon. :) <a href="javascript:history.back()">Go Back</a>',
}
};
export { handler };
The validateInput function performs some validations on the text which I did not post here. You can do your own validations if you wish. In netlify itself, you will have to add GITHUB_TOKEN environment variable, whose value you can get from github.
This workflow is simple, and easy to use and keeps the comments on your own repo. Please suggest improvements, if any.
This is a method to encode text I learned from my cousin when I was a kid. I thought it was the most awesome thing in the world back then! Basically the letters of the alphabet are arranged in pairs of two in two symbols, a # and a X like the below image.
If you want to write the first letter of any pair, draw the symbol surrounding that pair, and if you want to write the second letter draw the same symbol but put a dot in the middle. It is so simple its silly.
The fun part is, you can change the order of the letters and only the one with the right key will be able to decode your message. Here is the alphabet with the above key, and below it is a secret message which you can decode and write in the comments.
Hope you find this interesting and make some more cool things out of it!
This is a topic that has been on my mind for quite some time now. The western food epidemic in Gujarat, especially Ahmedabad. Western food itself is not the culprit here, it has its own place in the food world and I don't mind it at all. Hell, I even enjoy it! My problem is with the Indian food vendors trying to ape pizzas and burgers and failing spectacularly. It is ruining Indian dishes. Take for example, Idada. It is a fermented rice cake from Gujarat, very similar to Idly. Most vendors have started selling Cheese-Butter-Idada. That doesn't even make sense!
The vendors themselves are not to blame for this. Indian youth has turned into a bunch of wanna-be Americans who just want cheese in everything they eat. The vendors are forced to have these items. In Gujarat, every fast food corner has to have three variants for a dish ~ Oil, Butter and Cheese. It is high time that we realize that adding cheese and butter to every single thing does not make it better! Indian dishes from the whole subcontinent are unbelievably rich in flavor. Adding things like orange sauce, ketchup, cheese and butter where they don't belong is an insult to the dish itself.
Take Chhole Kulche, Chaat from the north - Idada, locho, Dhokla, Handvo, Kachori from The west - Idly, Dosa, Uttapam from South. These dishes are by themselves so fantastic, why are you ruining them? I am sorry for not mentioning East because I have not tasted anything from that part of India yet. If you have suggestions, add them in the comments.
Now coming to the hell on earth that is orange sauce. You know that light orange sauce that local burger-waalas and sandwich guys add to literally EVERYTHING they offer? The sauce that tastes so bad that even the aftertaste will make you uneasy for at least the next few hours? Yes that one. It needs to be banned! Why add that in vadapau? What wrong has Vadapau done to you?
Please, Please just stop ruining things. Rant over.
Honorary mentions: Chocolate Maggi, Fanta Maggi, Fruit Pasta, Chocolate momos, Cheese dosa, Chocolate idly.
Mindi (or Mindi kot) is a card game played between 4 or more people. The number of people has to be even, because they will be playing in subgroups of two. It is a game of part guesswork part mental calculation as you have to keep in mind what cards were played and which cards the other players might be holding. I am writing this guide so that others may also learn of this game and have the same fun that we had back in the day.
Mindi kot is played in India, especially in the Western states of Maharashtra and Gujarat. I have read that "mindi" is derived from the Gujarati word મીંડું (pronounced mee-n-doo), which means zero but refers to the 10, which is the only playing card that includes a zero. The word "kot" is used in several South Asian card games for a victory in which the opponents score nothing. However, as with many Indian names transcribed to English, other spellings are also used, for example Mendhi Coat where mendhi is interpreted as the Marathi word for 'sheep', or even Mendhi Goat.
The deck is a combination of two or more decks with lower cards removed. Usually the number of decks is same as the number of teams playing. 4 players = 2 teams -> 2 decks. 6 players = 3 teams -> 3 decks. Lower cards (2-7) are removed from the decks so that rounds are less tiresome.
NOTE: One thing to keep in mind is that each player should get an odd number of cards. If this does not happen, then no one will be able to win!
The game is played in rounds. In each round, the players play their cards in turns, in a circular fashion. Once the players' cards run out, the game ends and a winner is declared. The turns in the round go as follows:
That's when sar comes in. sar is the suit that is supreme. A card of the same suit as sar will trump any other card in the round, except other sars. sars are decided by two methods:
At the end of a round, all the teams count their totals. First if a team has the highest number of mindis (hands with a 10 in them), they win. If all teams have equal mindis then the total number of haaths are considered.
Do not come to me saying that my method is wrong with words like "My village does it differently!". Of course they do it differently, this is India! Methods change every five villages. Other than that, if you feel like you could help in adding to this guide, email me or create a PR. I will be happy to add to it. Below are some common plays seen when playing mindi. You can skip them if you want, up to you. I will keep updating these as and when I get time or remember something. If you have any questions, feel free to email me.
The first player plays an 8 of spades, it being the lowest card they have. The second player from the other team puts a 10 directly! This is done in hopes that since this is the first play, all players have plenty of cards and their teammate player #4 is the last to play. There is a very high chance that they will be able to overcome whatever player #3 puts in and it will be an easy mindi capture. Same play can be done with any number of players, as long as the last player is in your team.
A year ago a I wrote about doing good. Today I am writing about doing well.
Regarding this site. The "influx of posts" that I promised did not happen. I did post some things, but they were far apart. I will be sure to keep posting. The Mahabharat series has come to a halt for now. It will complete though, one way or another.
There are many differences between then and now. I wrote that post at night and I am writing this one during the day. I expressed my desire to do good during the coming years. I am not sure if my actions were good this year, but I definitely did well.
I want to be thankful to some cosmic energy that is showering its blessings upon me. I am flourishing in my career, I got married, and I have a kid on the way. I have shifted to a new city and growing in ways that I never thought I could. My physical fitness is improving more and more everyday, and mentally I have never been better. As glum as the post one year before was, I think it was an end to the gloom. Nothing has gone wrong since then, as far as I can remember. I am thankful for that, truly.
I guess when you do good, things go well for you by themselves.
I hope next year goes as good as mine for you, and you do well in your life too.
~ Hitarth
The drive back to my home in Talala is what I will cherish the most during my years in Gir. It just had this feel to it, I am not really sure if I can put it into words. Once you crossed Mendarda, there is this Hanuman temple on the right side. It marked the beginning of the "Journey back home" for me. The jungle started. Roads started getting rougher, the people sparse. Sign boards from the forest department started popping up all over the places. You could see Maldhaaris from nearby nesdas selling wild berries and raw tamarind on the sides of the road. The only unpleasant part is the 4km stretch of single lane road before Sasan with lots of speedbumps. Even that made me elated on some level because that road meant I was closer to Sasan and hence, closer to home. Sasan itself was not very pleasant to look at. I mean, it is a tourist hub and you know how tourists are, but once you cross Sasan it is the BEST ride home. The river Hiran running on your right, the sun becomes a fiery ball of orange and red. The shadows of the trees play hide and seek with your headlights while the sweet, sweet smell of home engulfs your senses.
I would never, ever wish for any other place as my home.
After messing around for a LONG time, I finally have a way to set up a basic mail server using postfix + dovecot.
Install postfix and dovecot.
sudo apt-get install postfix dovecot-common dovecot-imapd dovecot-pop3d
Open the postfix config file at /etc/postfix/main.cf and clear it. Replace the contents with the below code, but make sure you change some variables accordingly.
smtpd_banner = $myhostname ESMTP $mail_name (Debian/GNU)
biff = no
append_dot_mydomain = no
readme_directory = no
compatibility_level = 2
smtpd_tls_cert_file=/etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem
smtpd_tls_key_file=/etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem
smtpd_tls_security_level=may
smtp_tls_security_level=may
smtp_tls_session_cache_database = btree:${data_directory}/smtp_scache
smtpd_relay_restrictions = permit_mynetworks permit_sasl_authenticated
defer_unauth_destination
myhostname = example.com
alias_maps = hash:/etc/aliases
alias_database = hash:/etc/aliases
myorigin = /etc/mailname
mydestination = $myhostname, example.com, localhost.in, , localhost
relayhost =
mynetworks = 127.0.0.0/8 [::ffff:127.0.0.0]/104 [::1]/128
mailbox_size_limit = 0
recipient_delimiter = +
inet_interfaces = all
inet_protocols = ipv4
home_mailbox = .Mail/
smtpd_sasl_type = dovecot
smtpd_sasl_path = private/auth
For line number 6 and 7 in the above code you will have to generate certificates using certbot for whichever domain you want to use.
sudo certbot -d example.com
Open /etc/postfix/master.cf and uncomment the line that starts with submission.
submission inet n - y - - smtpd
Now moving on to dovecot configuration, the default is fine apart from some minor changes listed below.
For /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf, add the below lines:
protocols = imap pop3
listen = *, ;;
In /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-ssl.conf define the path for the certificates you created before.
In /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-mail.conf, edit the following
mail_location = maildir:~/.Mail
Restart postfix and dovecot.
sudo systemctl restart postfix.service
sudo systemctl restart dovecot.service
I will not post testing and such, this is supposed to be a reference guide not a tutorial. Have fun!
I loved magnets as a kid. The way they pulled and pushed each other was nothing short of magic for me. Another thing I loved was toy mobile phones. They were these little plastic cases with a speaker in them. The keys of the phone were mapped to different sounds, each button would play a different song. The reason I loved these phones was because they had little magnets in them for the speakers. Whenever one broke, I would get a new magnet to play with. It was like a toy inside a toy.
Cell phones were relatively new in my village at that time. My dad got one, and to me, a mobile was a mobile. Real or toy. I just wanted the magnet man. I pestered my mom and dad for the whole day, constantly asking for the magnet in the mobile phone. It wasn't before long my mother showed her wrath and threw my dad's new cellphone at a wall. "Find the magnet", she said.
I couldn't.
I recently moved to a city. Well, moved back in a sense. It is the place where I completed my education and lived out my college days. The place where I made most of my good friends and where I learned whatever I know about life. After living a rural life for almost three years, the experience here was jarring. It felt like everything was moving too fast while I was paralyzed, unable to move. The food, the people, the traffic and even time itself seemed to rush as if running away from something. I found myself always running either towards or away from something or someone. I don't know how time passes here. One moment I come back from the office at dusk and the next when I look at my watch it is way past midnight.
I guess I am too used to the small town life for now. The jungle, the friendly faces, the clear skies are all a distant dream. Traveling on a two wheeler for as short as two minutes ensures a black sooty layer on top of my face. The people seem pretentious, the food unhealthy. Every day is a struggle for anyone who lives here. Not that the case is any different in towns, but at least you get some peace of mind there. There is no peace of mind here. Like a rat in a rat wheel who keeps running with no end in sight, we keep running.
I don't want to live here, and yet I know I must. At least until I have enough to go back to my sweet little nest and live out the rest of my days.
Some time ago, I expressed my desire about leaving social media. It has been a success, well mostly. Other than a few hiccups here and there, I have been able to use 0 social media. I do use WhatsApp for work stuff and talking with family, but nothing further. The results have been mostly positive other than the fact that I have developed new ways to get addicted~ The smartphone. So today, (or should I say night? ) begins the second phase of my digital detox. I am reducing smartphone usage. After leaving social media, my phone usage had reduced drastically for quite a while. But since a few weeks I have observed that it is rising slowly and the main culprit is the browser. I have developed a bad habit of browsing the internet while idle. The thumb needs to move, right?
So to overcome this, I took a few steps. Right now. At 2 AM.
These are the points that I have planned to act upon. I wrote this post because I cannot sleep right now. If you are in regular contact with me over IRC or mobile communication channels, I will be much less available on there from now on. Seeing the above points, one might wonder~
Why won't this guy just use a dumbphone? Well, that's because smartphones have become an indispensable part of our lives and it is near impossible to live without one when you have a job. There is other stuff that I want to talk about, but I suppose this is nor the time or the place to do it~
See you soon!
So recently, we at gnulinuxindia came up with our own pubnix, ~tildevarsh. A pubnix is a public access unix system. A single computer that is shared by multiple people. Now I won't go into the history of how it started, but let me give you a brief introduction.
A pubnix is a shared access public unix system. Multiple users access it, use it, administer it and generally form a community around it. The pubnix, in return, provides several services to the users. Most common of those being:
I guess for me it is the feeling of being a part of something larger than yourself. Humans love being a part of a collective and I guess that collective identity appeals to me. To others it might be their interest in unix-like OSes or just general technical hobbies. While these are possible, I think the most common appeal for these tildes are the free services.
Humans love collectives, but they love free stuff even more.
~ Hitarth
Tildevarsh is an India-based pubnix.
Personally what makes tildevarsh different from other tildes is the voting
system. Members have a command in their shell called vote which will be used
to vote on motions going across the tilde. These motions can be started by any
member. Once the a motion receives majority votes, that change is implemented
into the server.
Will you be an ideal fit for it, or vice versa?
If your answer was 'yes' to most of the questions above, then you might enjoy your time in tildevarsh.
Although it says India based, people from other nationalities are more than welcome. Hope to see you soon!
For quite a long time now, I have been trying to get away from the "modern" web. The corporate hosted content farms that serve as nothing but money making machines no longer appeal to me. I don't care about little hearts in my notifications that release chemicals in my brain to make me feel good. It started with this website. I moved all my content(poetry, artworks, writings, programs) to my own hosting and started serving them from my own little place in the internet. I will admit, it was a pain at first. Hand constantly flicking toward the phone to open apps that did not exist, bouts of extreme boredom that just won't end, and other such things. But I succeeded.
Now instead of scrolling on my phone endlessly, I would go to a select few websites which were not chock-full of content but meticulously maintained. This led me to meet groups of people with similar mindsets and thus I was introduced to The Gemini Protocol.
According to their website, Gemini is a new internet protocol which:
Basically, it is a lighter web. There is text, there are links to different texts, there are files and there is text input in some places. It is a text based web protocol. There are no images or animations or videos. Now I won't go into detail about what gopher is and the technical specifications because that would make this post a BORE to read. Rather I will try to list how Gemini has turned out to be a safe haven for people exhausted by algorithmic content created by corporate powerhouses. Each site there is unique, with stuff written by web enthusiasts who just want to be a part of something bigger. Gemini sites need a special client to open, since it is an entirely different protocol.
Instead of http://site.com they have an address like gemini://site.com.
This hassle of setting up a client to access Gemini is in my opinion definitely
worth it. Many proxies exist as well for accessing Gemini via traditional web
browsers. There are some sites that also provide service for creating
"gemlogs", via webforms. Gemlogs are blogs in gemini sites, which can be
accessed via gemini as well as an http proxy. The first one that comes to mind
is The midnight pub, a virtual pub where people talk
about stuff like they would at a regular bar. Users can make small gemlogs that
are visible to everyone and can be commented on(currently only via http). It is
pure text, no images, no distractions. Just words. It is truly a beautiful
thing. I hope you check it out. There is no need to go through the pain of
hosting your own gemini capsule, there are countless free hosts available. If
you care about genuine interactions are looking to recapture the genuineness of
the old web, Gemini is the place to be. I will also be working on porting my
website to Gemini soon, so stay tuned for that!
I have shared some sites below for further reference. See you in space!
References
Some Gemini sites (credits to respective owners):
I recently went to a mall after a long time. After living in a mostly rural area for about two years due to COVID, this was my first visit to a city. Obviously I was hoping to catch up with old friends and acquaintances during my visit. What I did not think of was the fact that they too were all back to their native towns. The whole city was empty, from my perspective. Naturally like any small town guy visiting a city with nothing to do I went to the mall. Movies, food, shopping, what's not to like right?
Wrong.
It just made me more aware of how I was being scammed. The moment I walked in, a security guard stopped me and asked me to wear a mask. Of course, I did not have one since the mask mandate is long gone and I am vaccinated but you could not enter the mall without one. Luckily, the guard was selling masks for five rupees each. You see where I am going with this? After buying the mask (the quality of which indicated that it cost more than 10 times its value) I entered the mall to be greeted by smells of fast food and new clothes and air conditioner and shoes and everything that was not for free. Except the air, the air was free. I noticed a lot of people just like me who were there to escape the heat outside. These are the few things that struck out to me during the two and a half hour visit I had in the mall.
The escalators were placed in such a way that to get to the top floor where the most interesting things are (food court, cinema) you had to move through a series of escalators. One would be on one end of the mall, and then the next one at the other. So if someone wants to get to the top floor they would have to walk by all the shops on every floor. I suspect this was purposefully made so as to attract the most people to the showrooms on every floor. Which brings me to my next point.
The showrooms. Every shop is supposed to be selling something. Some shoes, some clothes. But every single one of them was definitely selling one other thing, luxury. Dreams. The marketing inside was so much more effective than any TV or billboard ad. Each clothing item made you feel like it would make you the star of the world. Shoes that would help you run marathons, clothes that screamed lushness and barbershops that would make bald man have waves of jet black flowing from their scalps. And the worst thing of all? Everything was overpriced. I don't blame the shop owners, they have to pay the rent for the expensive mall space. But that is the point! Malls should be obsolete now. Why would I go to a crowded place to buy clothes at 1.5 times their MRP and a lot more times its actual value, when the same product is available online at a discount! I guess this is what happens when brands matter more than quality.
The barbershop had barbers wearing suits cutting hair with gold plated scissors. Did they have more skill than my village barber? I think not. They both probably trained at the same Javed Habib academy that every other barber trains at. The suit does not make him more skilled, but it does make him more aesthetically pleasing and about ten times costlier. The movie theater was the same like any other except the popcorn and cold-drinks were more expensive than the food at other movie theaters. There was a book store, a big stationary brand in there. The shop was selling all books at very expensive prices. Plain notebooks worth 500 rupees and the paper quality the same as any other regular notebook. Right in front of that one, another book store which claimed "BUY USED BOOKS 85% OFF". I went there to see the difference and the books cost the same. Same woman, different makeup.
Now you might start thinking that the gist of this post is everything expensive but its not. The point is, what value do these things provide over other alternatives? The whole deal felt like it was a big scam, and everyone was in on it except the small guy. He goes in and buys a T-shirt worth 4000 bucks, which he could have used for buying three pairs of clothes. And Guess what? It is usable for the same time as any other 400 buck T shirt in local shops. I am not talking out of some random place, but this is from experience. I have been on both ends of this stick and the mall end is just too damn costly. I suggest you, the reader, keep these points in mind before going to a mall the next time.
Also, I did not buy anything in case you were wondering.
This post covers ubuntu/debian and systemd based operating systems. Although minor differences may exist, similar principle can be applied to other systems as well. Setting up znc on a linux machine is easy, and setting it up with a subdomain is easy as well! We will be using a standard znc installation and use certbot to generate SSL certificates.
Install znc using any method explained on the main site.
If you are on ubuntu, you can install znc and nginx using
sudo apt install znc nginx certbot
Once that is done, we need to create config file for znc. That can be done by
znc --makeconf
It will ask you multiple questions, here is how I answered them:
Listen on port: 1025
Listen using SSL: yes
Listen using both IPv4 and IPv6: no
Username: your_username
Enter password: your_password
Confirm password: your_password
Nick: nick
Alternate nick: nick_
Real name: optional
Bind host:
Set up a network? no
Launch ZNC now? no
At this point znc has created your config file at
$HOME/.znc/configs/znc.conf.
Now we modify the config so that there are two listeners instead of one. (Note how
one allows web interface while the other is for IRC, both on different
ports.) You will use the first one to modify znc settings and the second one
to access znc network via IRC.
<Listener listener0>
AllowIRC = false
AllowWeb = true
IPv4 = true
IPv6 = false
Port = 31337
SSL = true
URIPrefix = /
</Listener>
<Listener listener1>
AllowIRC = true
AllowWeb = false
IPv4 = true
IPv6 = false
Port = 1337
SSL = true
URIPrefix = /
</Listener>
You can start znc by simply entering znc.
All that is left now is to configure nginx so that it will pass the
subdomain requests to znc. Create the znc config file at
/etc/nginx/sites-enabled/znc Make sure your DNS record for selected subdomain point to the IP of your host.
server {
server_name znc.yourdomain.xyz;
access_log /var/log/nginx/znc-access.log;
error_log /var/log/nginx/znc-error.log;
location / {
proxy_pass https://127.0.0.1:31337/;
}
}
After this check for errors in the configuration:
sudo nginx -t
Restart nginx service from systemd:
sudo systemctl restart nginx
One last thing left to do is generate ssl certificates for the znc subdomain.
You can do that by using certbot command. Enter it and follow the
instructions to proceed.
Now your znc web interface should be accessible from znc.yourdomain.xyz
I always wonder what it must be like to get old. To see the world prosper around you while you wither away into bits and pieces. I don't want to get old. I see my grand-parents eyes and mostly they are blank, expressionless. Watching television, or doing small chores around the house. Sometimes they sparkle, when they meet an old friend from the village or when their kids and grand kids come and sit with them. They shine the brightest when they reminisce about their past- When they felt like they could conquer the world exactly like I do now.
But on rare occasion, when no one is around, I see longing. Longing to be free from this worldly cycle of life and death. I can feel that their patience is running out. Bodies that barely function, and minds that are fading away each second- they are barely holding on to what's left of their present. I am not trying to show them as weak or not taken care of. They are taken care of by the family and they are happy, objectively. But I feel like once you get old to the point that you can't do your own daily duties, it becomes a chore to live on.
We see stories from around the world where old people do the impossible. They climb mount Everest, they travel around the world, they graduate! But those are some rare cases. In the end, the base desire of most humans is to be free. From attachment, from a decaying body, from a selfish world. And there is not a place more free than death. This might sound grim, but it is what I feel.
I don't want to die old. I don't want my life to become a chore. I want to live on my own as long as I can and then just give it all up. I hope I have the courage to do that, since somewhere I have read that no matter what your condition is, you always tend to try and survive when the end is near. It is natural instinct. I don't know what is going to happen, but I sure hope it is peaceful where the ocean ends.
It is a boon that we forget things as we grow older. I cannot imagine how hard it must be to have every single memory etched into your brain forever until you die. Every sweet moment, that first kiss, the friends you lost, the fights you picked. Nothing can be more painful than being able to recall everything, your whole life when you're about to die. It is a good thing that we forget things. Maybe I will forget that I wrote this too, and you will forget that you read it. Let's hope that it all ends well, where the waves die and the ocean ends.
These are some photos I clicked when I was in 12th grade in Delhi Public School Rajkot. The pigeons loved the terrace of our school and I had a lot of free time after school since I lived in the hostel. The camera belonged to our P.T. teacher. Also, Some random dude on reddit told me that I have a natural eye for framing. Enjoy some pigeons and flowers.
There used to be a time when learning something new meant hours of fun. My parents bought me an Encyclopedia as a birthday gift when I was a kid and I spent hours going through each and every tidbit of information in there. Learning used to be something to look forward to. Now don't take this post as a vain reminiscence of the bygone days, it is not. It is a written form of the thoughts that I have been having for the past few weeks.
Learning is not fun anymore. You want to learn assembly? Just look it up on the internet. You want to learn how to make some obscure south Indian dish? Look it up. You want to learn about the fifth president of India? Look it up. Every single thing that you may or may not need either right now or in the foreseeable future is available at your fingertips, and I feel like that has taken the fun out of it. There used to be a time when a few friends would argue about some obscure fact that everyone remembered differently, and the discussion would go on for hours! Unless of course a third party intervened, where it turned out that everyone was wrong. There was a joy in small things like that.
For at least the past few years, there has been a lack of things to do, due to the abundance of things to do. The over saturation of information the internet has brought upon us is nothing but an endless stream of information that the human brain sees, processes and forgets. Facts aren't facts anymore, and opinions of people are changing faster that you can say "frog". It is a worldwide phenomenon, and it needs to be addressed as soon as possible. Every single person is turning into a clone of every other one due to the saturation and careful feeding of information via internet. Since everyone has most of their experiences online, everyone grows up the same way.
Look at today's children. They are thrown into the world of internet as soon as they can say baa like sleep to slaughter. They can't live without phones/tablets. There is no more a need to find things out, because our tech-overlords already do that for us. It pains me to see my nephews or nieces cry out like spoiled children when their phones are taken away from them. Parents encourage this behavior because the child won't cry if you give them the magic shiny rectangle. This raises some serious concerns about the coming generation.
I used to love computers, I remember writing a substitution cipher GUI program in java using netbeans in school just for fun. I wanted to do it. But for quite some time, it feels like that joy of learning things is gone. I want to sit on a computer only as long as it is necessary and then shut it down. I used to be an avid gamer, I would play video games for hours. Not anymore. Maybe I am growing up, or maybe the circumstances are truly as dire as I think they are, but things are definitely changing. I plan to move away from this overabundance gradually, and I have already started it since the past year by Deleting social media.
Take the first step, Rest is up to you.
Namaskar.
Taarak Mehta is a name that almost every Indian within a hundred meters of a TV connection should know. It is after all, one of the most beloved comedy TV shows in the Indian market. It is based on Duniya ne undha chashma (A world with inverted glasses), a weekly magazine column. In the beginning it did try to stay true to the source material like all TV shows always do, but gradually over the period of TEN long years, it has simmered down into a hot pile of monotonous episodes that are more predictable than the direction of a turtle's movement.
After rewatching some initial episodes, the stark difference between the old TMKOC and the new one is painfully obvious. The old one can be described as a daily sitcom with heavy satirical undertones of Indian culture while the new one is.. well, I don't know what it is. If you look at the early episodes, the show was self-aware. The characters were not monochromatic, they had their flaws and they were aware of them. Gokuldham "family" as it is known these days did not exist. Everyone had humane qualities. The neighbors were not all happy-go-luckys who were always ready to help each other no matter what. They were sometimes envious of each other, were condescending to others and had their own flaws and patterns that were not visibly fake. On the other hand, the show that airs today is a series of repetitive story arcs that lead nowhere and exist solely for the reason of making money off of the brand that is TMKOC. Everyone is loving and happy and caring and no one on this society has ever done anything remotely wrong at any point in their lives. It's like everyone is forced to smile and be happy forever.
Looking at the state of TMKOC today, you could not fathom that the show would be capable of global political satire, and yet at one point in the early episodes, it provides stark commentary on the USA-Israel situation. But such is the bane and boon of television in India. It has to be catered to a particular taste of the audience, and at that point it stops becoming what it is and starts to become what it is expected to be. What it loses in spirit, it gains in TRP and income. When TMKOC first soared in popularity, celebrity placements were sparse. Every few weeks a new celeb would join the cast for an episode promoting their movie. It was a fun change of pace from the fantastic comedy that the show provided back in the day. But as time passed, the promotions became more frequent and thus the quality degraded.
Looking at it now, even the promotions are low in number, but the show goes on. It doesn't matter if the jokes are dead or the characters are uninteresting anymore. THE.SHOW.STILL.GOES.ON. All the jokes are same, stereotypical nonsense that the writers have been spewing for the past few years. Even some actors have left the show but it still goes on. The question remains, is it still the ship of Theseus after all the parts are replaced?
In the end, I would suggest you all to rewatch the early days of the series and relive the show that stole the hearts of Indian audiences in its early days.
When it's just you and the music, the view is slightly shifted. Reds are pink, pinks are orange, blue is bad and lost is black. When it's just you and the music, you can't see what's in front of you, only what you leave behind. When it's just you and the music, it's too loud and deathly silent at the same time.
But sometimes, it takes over. It becomes dread, it becomes anger, despair. It becomes the very prison that you were trying to escape from. Sometimes the music will tie you up and put you down and kick you in the guts. That is when it stops being music and starts becoming noise. The moment it becomes noise to you, it doesn't matter whether it plays or not. Because you will hear it, by choice or otherwise.
I don't know if this sounds pretentious, but music plays a very important part in my life. There are soundtracks upon soundtracks for every feeling that I feel, every moment that I ever lived. Phases of albums and songs that define the life that I was living during that particular period of time. Entire days that can be narrated based on a particular song that touched that sliver of a second. I don't know if you have ever felt that way, but I really hope that you do.
It is an amazing feeling, to have your life flash before you like a train that won't stop at the local platform that you're standing on. To have memories meet you for a moment and run away like that one time you fed peanuts to a squirrel. I hope you see it. I hope you understand, and once you do, I hope you come back and read this to realize what I am trying to say.
The past few years have been what some might call, distinctively disappointing for the media industry. As lives become busier and busier, it gets hard to find time for reading an article or watching a whole documentary; or even watching a video on how to make some novelty food item. A 30 second tiktok on the other hand, seems much enticing, mostly because it is a thirty second tiktok and once you start swiping up, everything is a blur. Every single pointless video of people doing things for clout that would shame most of you reading this, or videos of DIY "hacks" that are basically just rube-goldberg replacements of tools that can be bought at your nearest store, is a gateway into more of that nonsense.
On top of all this, the worst part is that this method of short attention span media production is getting very popular. So much so, that nearly ALL social media platforms have incorporated this in one way or other. I would like to state at this point that I am in no way, a "tik-tok hater", but it is the truth that this form of information transmission is bound to bring in some form of misinformation. For example, take the tiktoks of financial advice making rounds on the internet. No doubt they might be people with experience and knowledge on those subjects, but a minute long video is not enough to provide sound financial advice. There are regional laws and bylaws which may or may not be allowed in your place of residence, but the small video cannot cover every aspect of it. Besides, these videos are a breeding ground for scams. Scammers find their targets with short attention spans watching these and lure them in with get-rich-quick schemes hidden among good willed financial advice. This kind of thing is pretty prevalent these days and the topics range from investment schemes, law and marketing, to "life hacks" which may or may not be legal at all! The worst part is, social media giants are coercing content creators into making more of this type of media so much that if you are content creator and have not touched one form of "swipe-up" on your platform, your reach will die out. Yes! To make sure that your content gets to your audience, you have to create short-form content no matter what.
This is an endemic and while it serves its own purpose, people need to realize that at some point it will bite them back and its best to use it as what it is: mindless content for when you have free time. In the end, I recommend trying to find more text based content whenever possible, as it takes time to write and there is a pretty good chance that the author wrote it because they wanted to and not because their platform told them to.
Shubh Ratri.
I am writing this at 11:14 PM on 31st December 2021. But it doesn't really matter what date or what time is it as long as it is a new beginning for anyone. It is just a new page in the calendar. So this is an ode to 202x, doesn't matter which.
I started this site about a year ago, and I have not written much stuff in here, other than the Mahabharat reviews and some projects I made. So I guess, this post will be a start of an influx of 'posts', if that makes sense. If I had a word to describe 202x, it would be, fast. The days went by like raindrops on a glass window, ever moving, ever changing. It is all a blur at this point, truly. I wonder if it is because of the stagnancy that we all had collectively become a part of. It has been a bad year for businesses, especially those that are at a considerable distance from computers. People who don't get paychecks and have to actually get out of a chair to earn their share of money.
It seems like every month in a 202x year brought some new depressing thing with it-- and every next month the world fought and came back stronger. We all did, and we did that by doing good. For every saddening experience I had, there was a ray of hope somewhere. All I saw was people doing good for others, selfless sacrifices. And maybe I choose to ignore the worst in the world, but is it not for my own good? The further I stay away from the rot, the happier I will be. At this point I am just rambling and it is 11:30 already, but this post is an end and a beginning.
I want to do good. In each and every way possible. To those who need it the most, and are afraid to ask for it. I will try to be good. That is all, I guess. I hope this year breaks the streak of the pandemic and we get to return to normal soon. Or maybe not, I don't know. Staying at home is also heaven in itself. Until then, stay safe, see you again.
~ Hitarth
"Dotfiles" are a way to store configuration of various packages and programs on your system. They are named so because of the '.' that precedes their names to keep them hidden.
These dot files make up the system of a user and in case the system crashes into an unrecoverable state, the user might lose all their configurations for all of their programs. This is an inconvenience and can be easily avoided by managing your dotfiles properly. Many users online suggest using tools like GNU stow to manage and store the dotfiles but I personally prefer using the $HOME directory as a git repo. This is easier and doesn't require a special tool just to manage the dotfiles.
One issue with this method is the vast amount of extra files that exist in the $HOME directory. We are not doing any linking or copying, all the files will stay exactly where you want them to be. It can be solved by using a gitignore file which ignores everything. After that you can individually git add all the required files and once you add them manually, they will be tracked forever despite of the gitignore file.
cd into your home directory.
Create a new git repository
$ git init
Create a git ignore file that ignores everything.
$ echo '*' > .gitignore
Manually add all the files that you want to add to the repo by using.
$ git add -f filename_or_directory_name
(Note: You can also add entire directories like ~/.config but make sure you don't include any of your private key files or config files with plaintext passwords by mistake. One such example is irssi config which may contain a plaintext password.)
Once that is done, commit your changes
$ git commit -m 'commit message'
Add the remote origin url.
$ git remote add origin http://yourgitrepo.com/username/reponame
Push the committed changes and set the upstream branch.
$ git push --set-upstream origin master
Congratulations! You managed to backup your dotfiles to a git repository. Now any time you update a dotfile, make sure you push the changes to the repo as well.
If you need to restore your dotfiles to a fresh system follow the instructions below:
cd into your home directory.
Clone the dotfiles repository to any directory.
$ git clone http://yourgitrepo.com/username/reponame
cd into that directory, and copy all the contents to the home directory.
$ cp -r .[!.]* $HOME/
(We are doing this so that any current dotfiles might be replaced)
It is not very ideal in terms of restoration, but it works and that's all that matters. No symlinking or hacky stuff. Just a repo to love and maintain. <3
Hi all,
So I have had this idea for a long time and I am sure many others may have had it too, but here I am writing about it any way because this is MY website. People use streaming services for their music needs these days, this includes people like me and the recommendations given by these services are also usually, up to the mark. But sometimes what happens is we hear a song and that particular piece of music invokes a feeling that you keep longing for, more and more. It haunts you for a few days and you go to the streaming services or your friends to find similar songs so that you can get the happy chemicals in your brain. The thing is, no one can help you with it. No streaming services can help you get that same feeling and neither can your friends.
The service that I want to introduce contains a database of songs, and all users can select a song and then have a choice to vote for other songs as "similar" to this one. As more people vote on songs for a certain similarity, we can show those songs in a list sorted by most votes. It will help future users who will search for recommendations for this piece of music. Of course, spamming and manipulation will have to be dealt with and a lot of other kinks have to be worked out as well, but at some point I hope to make something like this. I think thousands of people might be able to recommend better than some code in a remote server owned by a tech giant.
If you want to help on this idea, or have any suggestions, feel free to contact me. (My contact info is on the home page)
Decibels upon decibels
of your absence uncalled for.
Blind ears and deaf eyes
of leaders I vote for.
Spread fear and slap lies
on my face like some whore
What you say is not what you do
What you say is not true
And I'm not a puppet
To be controlled
by your singing strings
So please,
Listen to me.
Stop your vendetta
and this societal violence
And add noise
To your deafening silence
उदासी तुझमें है,
तनहाई मेरे भी अंदर है,
लोग वही है,
समय बस अलग है।
काल चक्र का
कोई जादू सा मंतर है।
कैसे बताऊं मै?
कोई अदृश्य अक्षर है।
बातें वही है,
बस शब्दों में कुछ अंतर है।
It's beautiful out here at night.
You should come see it sometime.
The roads are empty,
Streetlights burn bright
The cold seeps through your heart
And yet the fire inside fights.
Problems are a matter of tomorrow.
This is your time to live
Forget your sorrows
At least until this time you borrowed
Runs out,
and before you know it,
It's over. Guns out
Time to fight that war again,
Time to be reborn again.
Time to get up and be thrown again
at life,
The seeds of solitude are sown again.
Sun rises, you die inside
Until night falls again.
It's beautiful out here at night.
You should come see it sometime.
#Poetry
like alcohol in the stone pits
hailed, wanted, but lonely.
In limbo, unhinged from reality
thinking about the skies,
while baffled by morality.
I scoured the universe,
in search of salvation
while my god's abode
was in my soul's foundation.
like mangoes in cardboard boxes
sweet, free from paradoxes
In heaven, hinged to reality
thinking about the world
unbothered by mortality.
When a tree dies
The wayward souls
lose their shade.
Their shade is no more,
Neither is the cold whistling of the wind
which moves the leaves-
A lullaby to listening ears
Listening ears still long for it
the rustling leaves and chirping birds.
The support to lay their back on-
All gone when a tree dies.
When a tree dies
His son takes up the role.
He's not supposed to cry,
or mourn, or show weakness.
He becomes the shade,
the support, the rustling of leaves.
He becomes what his father was
When the tree dies
the seed is seed no more.
He has to grow
no matter if he's ready or not.
Until the next tree dies.
Do cavemen dream
of stormy skies, spread far and wide?
Do they cower in fear
of what lies within?
Or hope that its all a fever dream,
and hide their heads in their mother’s laps,
peeking between their fingergaps.
Do cavemen dream of cheery weather?
And Singing birds with flashy feathers?
Clear skies, fluffy clouds
where they could shout their truth aloud.
Or do they live just like us?
In fear of what we must become,
to live out till seventy one
and lose the will to have some fun.
On lonely nights
I think of you
and take a drive
down degenerate lane.
The tar becomes your skin,
solid, but soothing.
Your eyes are the stars
watching me from afar.
While sex appeal
drips drowsily
from your lips
on my windshield,
just for me to wipe it off.
It doesn't matter
how long I drive,
your threads keep unraveling
strand after strand
covering me with your scent
until there's no air
left for me to breathe.
That's my cue,
time to leave.
I dream to see land
And flying seagulls on the shore
This sea now sickens me
No more I want to explore.
Now I'm stuck in it
No ship to sail in
The sun has sucked me dry
No tears left, yet I keep wailing.
They romanticize the ocean
Talk about exploring the unexplored
But in looking at the sun
The dark waters they ignore
Yes, hope is an ocean
With water infinite
But what's the point of it?
If you're drowning in it.
I miss being a kid
my heart under a lid, covered.
no ache, and no lovers,
no secrets to uncover. I missed
being naive at least.
between shadows and mist, I played
not a moment in dismay.
and then my head I laid, in heaven
my mother's lap.
Of cloudy skies and petrichor,
Thirty days an eternity.
'twas the best month of them all.
Of cloudy skies and petrichor,
and bruised ribs and broken bones
The sun was all that we could see.
Of cloudy skies and petrichor,
Thirty days an eternity.
भूल जा
जो भी तुझे खटक रहा है।
जो भी तेरे दिमाग में
सांप की तरह भटक चला है।
चल आ
जी ले ज़िन्दगी को दूसरे नज़रिये से,
लगा
खुदगर्ज़ी का काला चश्मा।
फिर देख
जो तेरे दोस्त है
वो खुद के नशे में मदहोश है।
कोई और नहीं है तेरा
तेरे मा बाबा के अलावा।
जो भी समजता था तू
की सच है
भ्रम है वो सब।
लगा खुदगर्ज़ी का काला चश्मा
और देख
ना कोई अपना, ना कोई पराया
जिन्होंने तुझे आगे बढ़ाया
उसमे उनका भी कोई मतलब था
जो भी तुझे लगा प्यार है
जुठ, छल, भ्रम, वो सब था।
लगा काला चश्मा
और देख
कोई किसी का नहीं
अब भी तू सीखा नहीं
दोस्ती यारी ये सब माया है
तेरे असल दोस्त वहीं है
जिन्होंने तुझे बनाया है।
I can't help but hear
The soundtrack to my self destruction
pulling me in with tremendous suction.
I can't help but hear
The very voice of my deepest fears
Rapping over some dope production.
I can't help but hear
The soundtrack to my self destruction.
जो कुछ छिपा है सीने में,
तू कैसे वो सब जानती है
मेरी हसी के पीछे का ग़म
कैसे तू पहचानती है?
शब्द कम पड़ जाते है
तेरे एहसान गिनाने में
आज एक दिन वो कर पाएगा
चंद अफसाने गाने से?
फिर भी आज बैठकर
कुछ कोशिश मै कर रहा हूं,
कुछ कर दिखाऊं उससे पहले
तुझे खोने से मै डर रहा हूं।
like alcohol in the stone pits
hailed, wanted, but lonely.
In limbo, unhinged from reality
thinking about the skies,
while baffled by morality.
I scoured the universe,
in search of salvation
while my god's abode
was in my soul's foundation.
like mangoes in cardboard boxes
sweet, free from paradoxes
In heaven, hinged to reality
thinking about the world
unbothered by mortality.
I am but a mere Traveller
On a dusty winding road,
With only a box of feelings
And my pet toad.
I met many people, many strangers,
Many foes.
But only some of them deserve their roles,
In my trampled, stampled life.
This road might fork one day
Or go on forever,
A dead end might come anytime,
If I don't get clever.
I am but a mere Traveller,
On this dusty, winding road ;
And I still wish the journey would get lively
Like my little pet toad.
I wanted you to know,
I've been wondering lately.
If I ever lose you,
Who's going to berate me?
Who's going to mock me,
For not being social?
For always being disappointing,
For never being hopeful.
I know I try too hard,
It's because you're my idol
Even though you're broken
Barely hanging on, suicidal.
I try to find the good in you,
yet to see it somewhere.
But I fear that one rainy morning,
You won't be there, to not be there.
I see light-headed hipsters high on
Sensationalized trends
Performing ecstatical stunts
Fueled by purposeless strength.
Halt the boat, for the time is now
To burn the place down
Look around,
You'll see pretentious pussies
Pasting pointless posts on
Pedantic positivity and
preposterous presumptions
For perverted pathetic,
Pussies.
Consumed by the love for
Quirks and bizzare things
Things that are never real, never been.
Eyes like sacks of sand hanging heavy
On faces who've seen some shit.
"Still want that black coffee though,
Because black is lit"
Black defines shit,
It defines your thirst for being the
Centre of an ever-changing caravan
You ache for attention that you never deserved
But you are a slave
Bred and fed to serve
The constant stream of garbage
Spewn by social snakes.
You follow trends like commandments
written in long lost languages,
They're temporary, so are you
But who are you?
This life that i lead
figured out, but really not
My face is winning this race,
Although my face lies a lot.
Lies, thrown right on your face,
Sweet vanilla cake frosting
And yet in my sincerest thoughts
These lies are pretty exhausting
You swarm right in my home
suck on my honey-coated lies
and you'll keep barging in
Until you've sucked me dry.
Brainwashed bees still bust in my halls
Of tense, morbid thoughts.
and I'm still trying to figure this out
but in the end, I'm really not.
This turmoil I feel,
Is it made up or is it real?
I hear things,
Faint ringing of a lost song
Eternally plagued
By a past long gone.
I want to take on
the path less taken.
But what if it's not?
What if I'm mistaken?
Barely hanging on,
I'm fighting this curse.
but I find my solace
in penning this verse.
Monotonous, malignant musings
of a mediocre mind.
Two quick beats,
miss a step
then repeat.
My heart does that
when your touch
it needs.
I cry and I
Plead, and I
Beg on my knees,
But all you do
is laugh at me and lie
and deceive
I hope that you talk
and I could tell you
What I need
But jokes
and insults
are all I recieve.
Two quick beats
miss a step
Then repeat
I wish I could
Stop acting
Like a little kid.
I passed through
the biting winds of winter
igniting fires of a furious summer
broken dreams of burning leaves
and the sweet sweet fruit of spring.
winds of desperation biting my face.
running limbless in this life's race.
failing, losing and cursing myself
in the end, discovering new ways
to pass through.
I love you, you loved me
i'm riding alone, it's just me
Side mirror loose, adjust it
Betrayel lane, injustice
Your colored smoke, engulfs me
I breathe it in, I'm set free
You are a magic entity
Your cheap tricks disgust me
I'm smoking a cheap cigar
No beerbongs and bentleys
You act like the 80s
A little coked up, a bit carefree
I am a lonely masochist
Inflict pain, I'll love it
The side mirror of my ride
it was loose, you cracked it.
Universes die.
Then what am I?
A measly human, a small fry.
Life gives and life takes.
And the rest of it, death rakes.
Civilizations are devoured,
Myths forgotten,
Languages are lost
In the jaws of time.
No one remembers
Past two generations
Great grandfathers:
not so great anymore.
Universes die.
Then what am I?
A measly human, a small fry.
We sit here
Alone, broken
Bashed into, forsaken.
An eternity we have longed
For the steam of kettle
To turn into a song
And the noisy waterfall
of a fiery hot drink
To Fill our leaking bases
Before we go extinct.
Instead, harsh rain fills us
Every few months or so
And we let it molest us
We have nowhere to go
But we will have our day
We ignore what the commode
And the broken cars say
After all they're trash
Their purpose long fulfilled
And we're broken teacups
in a junkyard
Waiting to be filled.
Gunships crash
And burn into nothingness,
Following this ritual eternally
Until the heavenly fires
Burn it all.
And what's left will be
Nothing at all.
Warriors clash
And Strike their blades blunt,
Fighting till their last breath
Until their commander
Says stop.
And the war that began
Forever stays stalled.
Violence stays
Forever in my heart.
Slurping my soul, skulking about.
And No matter how hard I try
To wrench it out
It won't leave my soul
Until I battle it out.
2:27,
The time without time.
Seconds pass slowly,
Minutes are stuck forever
And Hours don't exist.
What I am now
Is what I used to be
Before I became
this whirling vortex
Of vain existence
and the same sorrows
Ever persistent.
I fumble with the sheets
To no avail,
Sleep doesn't come easy to me
Not at night, at least.
When in doing my chores
It comes sudden
And treats me like a whore.
I think of my past romances,
Friends I made
The ones I lost
Not forever, I hope.
But it's still pointless
This unreasonable pursuit
Of a good night's sleep.
When a tree dies
The wayward souls
lose their shade.
Their shade is no more,
Neither is the cold whistling of the wind
Which moves the leaves
A lullaby to listening ears
Listening ears still long for it
The rustling leaves, chirping birds,
The support to lay their back on
All gone when a tree dies
When a tree dies
His son takes up the role.
He's not supposed to cry,
Or mourn, or show weakness.
He becomes the shade,
The support, the rustling of leaves
He becomes what his father was
When the tree dies
The seed is seed no more
He has to grow
No matter if he's ready or not.
Until the next tree dies.
I wrote for you.
Wasted a thousand words,
Filled up a million notes for you.
I showed you my work,
I bared what was left of me
Broke my mind penning it down,
Just to feel that hit of ecstacy.
I poured my heart out.
Cliché? I know.
Rephrase.
I put my soul out and let it wander
The white sea of my pages.
I let it write free of judgement
Beautiful, broken, repugnant.
And once it was done
I put it back in.
Eternally caged,
until my heart broke again.
This is a way to set up cloudflare argo tunnel on your Raspberry Pi to host your own webserver without port forwarding.
It is a tunneling service provided by Cloudflare to help users tunnel connections to their servers via the cloudflare network. It has multiple use cases but here we will only use it for one thing:
It is used to tunnel your webserver to the internet. Usually if you want your web app hosted on your PC to be accessible by the world, you need to have your ports open for incoming requests. If your ISP is restrictive like mine, they give you an in-network IP that is not accessible from anywhere else, so your regular port forwarding settings won't work. Think of it like your router is itself connected to a bigger router.
cloudflared tool for your device.
Note: for the raspberry pi, the newer versions have trouble installing. I personally use an older version which is available at the following link.wget https://bin.equinox.io/c/VdrWdbjqyF/cloudflared-stable-linux-arm.tgz
put the binary in your PATH so that it can be called upon.
use the cloudflared binary to log in to your cloudflared account.
type cloudflared login, and it will give you a link.
Copy that link and open it in your browser to authorise the log in.
Create a test tunnel by following this syntax:
cloudflared --hostname yourdomain.xyz --url http://localhost
Once this is done, you can copy the cert file that is created ### cp ~/.cloudflared/cert.pem /etc/cloudflared
use your editor to create /etc/cloudflared/config.yml
You can fill it like this:
hostname: your_domain.xyz
url: http://localhost
Install the cloudflared service
### cloudflared service install --legacy
(Make sure the legacy flag is active because we are using an older version of cloudflared)
Hope this tutorial helped you. Now your local webserver will be accessible from your domain!
Shri Hanuman is the epitome of selfless service, courage, hope and strength. He is, and should be an inspiration to us all in more that one ways. Even for those who don't believe in him, his story is one with valuable life lessons.
Unfathomable innocence has always been a defining character of Shri Hanuman, according to me. Since he was a child, his childish innocent actions never let the devotee/reader think that they're reading/thinking about a literal god. The very incarnation of Lord Shiva. Take for example, the incident when he tried to eat the sun, thinking it was a golden fruit. Children might think that, but gods actually try to eat it.
Throughout the incidents narrated in Hindu scriptures, not once is Hanumanji seen to have any negative emotions. They have always been positive, bringing the devotee/reader back into a pleasant state of mind.
Talking about courage and fearlessness, almost every Indian household has seen Hanuman Chalisa being recited whenever the user is in a state of panic, stress, depression, or literally being chased by ghosts. Shri Hanuman's name itself is enough to strike fear into the hearts of one's enemies and bring peace to one's mind. It's an old saying in Indian villages, "No one can harm the devotee of a devotee.", thus, being a devotee of Shri Hanuman is a great way to live life. Free from fear, free from attachments, and always with courage in mind, strengh in arms, and Shri Ram in your heart.
This brings me to a bhajan of Bajrangbali, that has made it's place in my heart since not so long ago. I am putting it here in devnagari and roman script, with translations. It is about Shri Ram, after defeating Raavan and coming back to ayodhya, is telling his brother Bharat about how he will never be able to repay the debt of Hanuman. (Another tale about Shri Ram and the debts he paid will come here soon.)
भरतभाई! कपि से उरिन हम नाही ||
Bharat bhai, kapi se urin hum naahi
Bharat, my brother, we will never be able to repay the debt of kapi (monkey, shree hanuman)
एठो खाय अछूत खवावत | हाथ धोवत टक माहि || १ ||
etho khhay, achhoot khavaavat. Haath dhovat, tak maahi
He is so innocent and child-like, that he doesn't wash hands after eating at the designated place, but in his plate(tak) itself
सौ योजन मर्याद सिंधू की | लांग गयो पल माहि |
Sau yojan maryaad sindhu ki, laangh gayo pal maahi
The length of the sea was 1200 kilimetres, and yet he jumped it over in a moment
लंका जाय सिया सोधी लाये | गर्ब नाहि मन माहि || २ ||
Lanka jaay, siya sodhi laaye, garb nahi man maahi
He went to the lanka, and found Siya mata, and yet he didn't get pride in his mind
शती बाण लग्यो लछमन के | शोर भयो दल माहि |
shati baan lagyo, lachman (laxman) ko, shor bhayo dal maahi
Laxman got shot by a hundred arrows, and the whole army was in chaos with shouts and cries
द्रोणागिरी पर्वत ले आयो | भोर होने नहि पायी || ३ ||
DronaGiri Parbat le aayo, bhor hone nahi paayi
But Hanuman carried a whole mountain(Dronagiri) where the medicine grew, to save laxman before the sun could rise
अहि रावण की भुजा उखाडी | बैठ रह्यो मठ माहि |
Ahiraavan ki bhuja ukhaadi, baith rahyo math maahi
When the demon ahiraavan secretly carried away Shri Ram and Laxman to nether world, Hanumanji tore off his limbs and brought them back. Even after saving their lives, he sat quietly in the math(the place where they stayed). Hanumanji does not have any pride.
या पर भरत जो हनुमत ना होते | को ल्यावत जग माहि || ४ ||
Yaa par bharat jo hanumat naa hote, ko lyaavat jag maahi
Oh bharat, if hanuman wasn't there. Who would've brought us back from the underworld?
तुलसीदास मारुतसुत महिमा | प्रभु अपने मुख से गायी |
Tulsidas maarutsut mahima, prabhu apne mukh se gaayi
The glory of lord hanuman is sung by Shri Ram himself
भरतभाई! कपि से उरिन हम नाही || ५ ||
Here is a picture of the gate of Hanuman mandir where I go to pray in my village
There was this issue that I faced in my system (HP Pavilion Gaming 15 Laptop) in which the touchpad (ElanTech) would stop working when the laptop booted, the fix to which was to move my finger on the touchpad when the system was booting up. Doing this every time was not convenient, so it took me a while, but this is what I did.
Create a script, called touchpadrestart.sh and put the below code in it.
#!/bin/sh
rmmod i2c_hid && modprobe i2c_hid
Make sure the touchpadrestart script is in your path. What the code does is, it disables the driver for the touchpad, and then enables it again. Put this in the path and run it whenever you need your touchpad to start working again. But this solution itself is not very efficient as it needs root access to run. We can make the process more streamlined by turning this into a systemd service.
First create the file /etc/systemd/system/touchpadrestart.service. After that, make sure the path in ExecStart points to our script.
[Unit]
Description=TouchPad Restart
[Service]
User=root
Type=oneshot
ExecStart="/usr/local/bin/touchpadrestart.sh"
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
Once this file is saved, all you need to do is start and enable the service.
# systemctl start touchpadrestart
# systemctl enable touchpadrestart
That's it! Quick and easy fix. (For touchpads other than this one, you can find the device driver name using lspci and change it in the script. )