Debian-Blog

The Lotus story so far

My very first experience with water flowering plants was pretty good. I learnt a good deal of things; from setting up the pond, germinating the lotus seeds, setting up the right soil, witnessing the growth of the lotus plant, fish eco-system to take care of the pond. Overall, a lot of things learnt.

But I couldn’t succeed in getting the Lotus flower. A lot many reasons. The granite container developed some leakage, which I had to fix by emptying it, which might have caused some shock to the lotus. But more than that, in my understanding, the reason for not being able to flower the lotus, was the amount of sunlight. From what I have learned, these plants need a minimum of 6-8 hrs of sunlight to really give you with the flowering result, whereas the setup of my pond was on the ground with hardly 3-4 hrs of sun. And that too, with all the plants growing, resulted in indirect sunlight.

In my past, I’ve had experiences that have had me thinking. My experiences have been mostly in the South Asian Indian Sub-Continent, so may not be fair to generalize it.

• Help with finding a job: I’ve learnt many times, that when people reach out asking for help, say, for helping them with finding a job; it isn’t about you making a recommendation/referral for them. It, instead, implies that you are indirectly being asked to find and arrange them a job.

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I was quite impressed by the ability of this insect; yet to be. The way it has camouflaged itself is mesmerizing. I’ll let the video do the talking as this one is going to be difficult to express in words.

This blog post is about my observations of some of the plants in my home garden.

While still a n00b on the subject, these notes are my observations and experiences over days, weeks and months. Thankfully, with the capability to take frequent pictures, it has been easy to do an assessment and generate a report of some of these amazing behaviors of plants, in an easy timeline order; all thanks to the EXIF data embedded. This has very helpfully allowed me to record my, otherwise minor observations, into great detail; and make some sense out of it by correlating the data over time.

Why is it so hard to have a proper download manager in today’s day ? We had it in the previous decade. Or do tech giants self-proclaim that the world lives only in their cloud.

At one point, there used to be great download managers for all major web browsers, either in-built, or external. Then came the latest trend with Chrome and Firefox, where they make it difficult to have an external download manager work proper. On either one’s extension store, I find it difficult to see a proper download manager.

As a person who prefers full access to data in the simplest format, while at the same time having it useful with latest technologies, my quest for trying things out is an ongoing activity.

Earlier, I blogged about my needs of collating news feeds in a simple format, readily accessible offline, while still being useful and aligned with the modern paradigm.

In today’s age, the other common aspect of our life, is digitization of moments. With the advent of great technology and affordable economics, the world now has access to great devices to capture moments in digital form. Most people, these days, are equipped with smart devices, like mobile phones, that come with pretty good image capturing devices. Our lives, our societies, how we interact; a lot of it is now built around the assumption of smart devices and digital services.

I’ve mostly had the preference of controlling my data rather than depend on someone else. That’s one reason why I still believe email to be my most reliable medium for data storage, one that is not plagued/locked by a single entity. If I had the resources, I’d prefer all digital data to be broken down to its simplest form for storage, like email format, and empower the user with it i.e. their data.

KDE Impressions

These days, I often hear a lot about Wayland. And how much of effort is being put into it; not just by the Embedded world but also the usual Desktop systems, namely KDE and GNOME.

In recent past, I switched back to KDE and have been (very) happy about the switch. Even though the KDE 4 (and initial KDE 5) debacle had burnt many, coming back to a usable KDE desktop is always a delight. It makes me feel home with the elegance, while at the same time the flexibility, it provides. It feels so nice to draft this blog article from Kwrite + VI Input Mode

Curiosity

I guess this would be common to most of us.

While I grew up, right from the childhood itself, the sky was always an intriguing view. The Stars, the Moon, the Eclipses; were all fascinating.

As a child, in my region, religion and culture; the mythology also built up stories around it. Lunar Eclipses have a story of its own. During Solar Eclipses, parents still insist that we do not go out. And to be done with the food eating before/after the eclipse.

As we grow old, so do our computing machines. And just like we don’t decommission ourselves, so should be the case of the machines. They should be semi-retired, delegating major tasks to newer machines while they can still serve some less demaning work: File Servers, UPNP Servers et cetera.

It is common on a Debian installer based derivative, and otherwise too, to use block encryption on Linux. With machines from this decade, I think we’ve always had CPU extension for encryption.