To quote the 1st Google result:

the traditional Hindu system of medicine (incorporated in Atharva Veda, the last of the four Vedas), which is based on the idea of balance in bodily systems and uses diet, herbal treatment, and yogic breathing.

To quote WIkipedia:

_Ayurveda_  names three elemental substances, the doshas (called Vata, Pitta and Kapha), and states that a balance of the doshas results in health, while imbalance results in disease.  _Ayurveda_  has eight canonical components, which are derived from classical Sanskrit literature.

Am I an expert of the topic ?

जीवन का सत्य, शमशान।

शिव का है स्थान।

काली का तांडव नृत्य।

शिव का करे अभिनन्दन।

In my ongoing quest to get Tablet-Mode working on my Hybrid machine, here’s how I’ve been living with it so far. My intent is to continue using Free Software for both use cases. My wishful thought is to use the same software under both use cases.

• Browser: On the browser front, things are pretty decent. Chromium has good support for Touchscreen input. Most of the Touchscreen use cases work well with Chromium. On the Firefox side, after a huge delay, finally, Firefox seems to be catching up. Hopefully, with Firefox 51/52, we’ll have a much more usable Touchscreen browser.
• Desktop Shell: One of the reason of migrating to GNOME was its touch support. From what I’ve explored so far, GNOME is the only desktop shell that has touch support natively done. The feature isn’t complete yet, but is fairly well usable.
  • Given that GNOME has touchscreen support native, it is obvious to be using GNOME equivalent of tools for common use cases. Most of these tools inherit the touchscreen capabilities from the underneath GNOME libraries.
  • File Manager: Nautilus has decent support for touch, as a file manager. The only annoying bit is a right-click equivalent. Or in touch input sense, a long-press.
  • Movie Player: There’s a decent movie player, based on GNOME libs; GNOME MPV. In my limited use so far, this interface seems to have good support. Other contenders are:
    • SMPlayer is based on Qt libs. So initial expectation would be that Qt based apps would have better Touch support. But I’m yet to see any serious Qt application with Touch input support. Back to SMPlayer, the dev is pragmatic enough to recognize tablet-mode users and as such has provided a so called “Tablet Mode” view for SMPlayer (The tooltip did not get captured in the screenshot).
    • MPV doesn’t come with a UI but has basic management with OSD. And in my limited usage, the OSD implementation does seem capable to take touch input.
• Books / Documents: GNOME Documents/Books is very basic in what it has to offer, to the point that it is not much useful. But since it is based on the same GNOME libraries, it enjoys native touch input support. Calibre , on the other hand, is feature rich. But it is based on (Py)Qt. Touch input is told to work for Windows. For Linux, there’s no support yet. The good thing about Calibre is that it has its own UI, which is pretty decent in a Tablet-Mode Touch workflow.
• Photo Management: With compact digital devices commonly available, digital content (Both Photos and Videos) is on the rise. The most obvious names that come to mind are Digikam and Shotwell.
  • Shotwell saw its reincarnation in the recent past. From what I recollect, it does have touch support but was lacking quite a bit in terms of features, as compared to Digikam.
  • Digikam is an impressive tool for digital content management. While Digikam is a KDE project, thankfully it does a great job in keeping its KDE dependencies to a bare minimum. But given that Digikam builds on KDE/Qt libs, I haven’t had any much success in getting a good touch input solution for Tablet Mode. To make it barely usable in Table-Mode, one could choose a theme preference with bigger toolbars, labels and scrollbars. This helps in making a touch input workaround use case. As you can see, I’ve configured the Digikam UI with Text alongside Icons for easy touch input.
• Email : The most common use case. With Gmail and friends, many believe standalone email clients are no more a need. But there always are users like us who prefer emails offline, encrypted emails and prefer theis own email domains. Many of these are still doable with free services like Gmail, but still.
  • Thunderbird shows its age at times. And given the state of Firefox in getting touch support (and GTK3 port), I see nothing happening with TB.
  • KMail was something I discontinued while still being on KDE. The debacle that KDEPIM was, is something I’d always avoid, in the future. Complete waste of time/resource in building, testing, reporting and follow-ups.
  • Geary is another email client that recently saw its reincarnation. I recently had explored Geary. It enjoys similar benefits like the rest applications using GNOME libraries. There was one touch input bug I found, but otherwise Geary’s featureset was limited in comparison to Evolution.
  • Migration to Evolution , when migrating to GNOME, was not easy. GNOME’s philosophy is to keep things simple and limited. In doing that, they restrict possible flexibilities that users may find obvious. This design philosophy is easily visible across all applications of the GNOME family. Evolution is no different. Hence, coming from TB to E was a small unlearning + newLearning curve. And since Evolution is using the same GNOME libraries, it enjoys similar benefits. Touch input support in Evolution is fairly good. The missing bit is the new Toolbar and Menu structure that many have noticed in the newer GNOME applications (Photos, Documents, Nautilus etc). If only Evolution (and the GNOME family) had the option of customization beyond the developer/project’s view, there wouldn’t be any wishful thoughts.
    • Above is a screenshot of 2 windows of Evoluiton. In its current form too, Evolution is a gem at times. For my RSS feeds, they are stored in a VFolder in Evolution, so that I can read them when offline. RSS feeds are something I read up in Tablet-mode. On the right is an Evolution window with larger fonts, while on the left, Evoltuion still retains its default font size. This current behavior helps me get Table-Mode Touch working to an extent. In my wishful thoughts, I wish if Evolution provided flexibility to change Toolbar icon sizes. That’d really help easily touch the delete button when in Tablet Mode. A simple button, Tablet Mode , like what SMPlayer has done, would keep users sticky with Evolution.

My wishful thought is that people write (free) software, thinking more about usability across toolkits and desktop environments. Otherwise, the year of the Linux desktop , laptop , tablet; in my opinion, is yet to come. And please don’t rip apart tools, in porting them to newer versions of the toolkits. When you rip a tool, you also rip all its QA, Bug Reporting and Testing, that was done over the years.

I finally made full switch to SSL for my website. Thanks to [this](https://hblok.net/blog/posts/2016/02/24/lets-encrypt-tls-certificate- setup-for-apache-on-debian-7/) simple howto on Let’s Encrypt. I had to use the upstream git repo though. The Debian packaged tool, letsencrypt.sh, did not have enough documentation/pointers in place. And finally, thanks to the Let’s Encrypt project as a whole.

PS: http is now redirected to https. I hope nothing really breaks externally.

During my recent travel, I had quite a long layover at the Doha International Airport in Qatar. While killing time, I watched an interesting programme on the Al Jazeera network.

The program aired on Al Jazeera is Lifelines. This special episode I watched, covered about “Leprosy in India”. After having watched the entire programme, I felt the urge to blog about it.

First of all, it was quite depressing to me, to know through the programme, that the Govt. of India had officially marked “Leprosy” eradicated from India in 2005. As per Wikipedia, “Globally in 2012, the number of chronic cases of leprosy was 189,000, down from some 5.2 million in the 1980s. The number of new cases was 230,000. Most new cases occur in 16 countries, with India accounting for more than half.”

Dasha (Ten) Mahavidya – Part I

Posted by VIBHOR MAHAJAN on [JANUARY 6, 2016](https://vibhormahajan.wordpress.com/2016/01/06/dasha-ten- mahavidya-part-i/)

There is a deep quintessential need in the human psyche for a mother. It is said; the Goddess was humankind’s earliest conception of divinity. Among the Shakthas who worship Mother Goddess, the source of all existence is female. God is woman. She is the principle representation of Divinity. She is that power which resides in all life as consciousness, mind, matter, energy, silence, joy as also disturbance and violence. She is the vibrant energy that makes everything alive, fascinating and wonderful. She is inherent in everything and at the same time transcends everything. Her true nature is beyond mind and matter; she is not bound by any limitation. She is Arupa. When she is represented in a form, her intense representation is a Bindu the dimensionless point about to expand immensely. The Bindu symbolizes her most subtle micro form as the universal Mother, womb, yoni, creator, retainer and also the receiver of the universe.

Narada Curse Lord Vishnu–Part II

Posted by VIBHOR MAHAJAN on [MAY 14, 2012](https://vibhormahajan.wordpress.com/2012/05/14/narada-curse-lord- vishnupart-ii/)

As Narada moved on from Lord Vishnu’s adobe, he suddenly saw a beautiful city like he had never seen before. Curiously he entered the city and asked a passerby, “Who is the ruler of this big and charming city?”

“It belongs to the glorious King Sheelanidhi”– replied the passerby.

Hearing that Narada had come to visit him, the king came out to receive him and welcomed him. Just then a beautiful girl came and bowed before Narada. The beauty of the girl took Narada. She was King’s daughter Shrimati. A Swayamvara was being planned for her.

Narada Curse Lord Vishnu – Part I

Posted by VIBHOR MAHAJAN on [MAY 14, 2012](https://vibhormahajan.wordpress.com/2012/05/14/narada-curse-lord- vishnu-part-i/)

Once Narada practiced severe austerities in the Himalayas. Indra (King of Gods) became suspicious of Narada and decided to tempt him with worldly pleasures to break his penance. With this in mind, Indra asked Kamadeva (God of love) to break Narada’s penance.

Kama came to the spot where Narada was sitting, deep in meditation. As he shot the first arrow the scene suddenly changed into a beautiful valley and a beautiful damsel appeared before Narada. She began to dance before him. But Narada’s eyes where closed to her charms.

Incarnation of Goddess Ganga as river Ganga

Posted by VIBHOR MAHAJAN on [MAY 11, 2012](https://vibhormahajan.wordpress.com/2012/05/11/incarnation-of- goddess-ganga-as-river-ganga/)

[](https://vibhormahajan.files.wordpress.com/2012/05 /ganges_over_shiva-222x300.jpg)

King Sagara the ruler of Ayodhya and an ancestor of Lord Rama successfully performed the Ashwamedha Yagya (Horse sacrifice) for 99 times. Each time, he sent the horse around the Earth it returned to the kingdom unchallenged. He decided to perform the Ashvamedha Yagna for the 100th time, that would make him emperor of Earth.

Lord Vishnu as Vamana and Birth of Goddess Ganga

Posted by VIBHOR MAHAJAN on [MAY 11, 2012](https://vibhormahajan.wordpress.com/2012/05/11/lord-vishnu-as- vamana-and-birth-of-goddess-ganga/)

Bali Chakravarthi was one of the greatest kings. Though he was a demon by birth, he never deviated from the path of Truth and Dharma (religious ethics). His power and strength kept on increasing as he has been following Dharma. With the help and advice of his preceptor, King Bali had conquered all the three worlds, and dethroned Indra from Heaven and occupied Amaravathi, the capital of Indralok.