I see that I’ve picked up this habit of keeping half finished articles in the backlog. Need to fix that. Anyway, let’s hope this article gets to see the light of day on the internet.
I wanted to write some of my current thoughts on the idea of slow thinking. I’d warn you before we start that none of what you’ll read in this article is a novel thought of my own. Rather, it is an aggregate of the various different books I read in the past three months, many of which pointed me towards this idea. It is just my interpretation of the idea, but I’d like to document it nevertheless.
What is slow thinking?
The way I understood it, slow thinking is the non-reactive way of thinking and responding to a situation. When presented with a situation that sets off strong emotions — especially negative ones like anger, fear or jealousy — the idea is to take a step back and recognize the emotion itself, thereby detaching ourselves from that emotion. It is also handy when dealing with situations that trigger an impulsive reaction, not necessarily a negative one.
From experience, I can vouch for the fact that reacting when in an emotional turmoil isn’t usually the best idea. I’d struggle to find an example of a situation in my life when bursting with anger, screaming at someone, getting violent or very negative brought me any net positive.
Similar, impulsively doing something can sometimes be beneficial, but often, and especially in the modern world we live in, impulses are unwarranted and just a reminiscent of the tribal and fight-for-survival past of humans. Being able to recognize when an impulse is justified and when not can come in handy in many life situations, and the ability to do so can be treated like a skill to hone.
Of course, none of this is to suggest we shouldn’t feel emotions. It is perfectly reasonable to feel sad about some of the world events we’re constantly made aware of, just as it is nice to feel excited about the thought of having a cake or petting a cat. I think the idea here is to recognize the complexities and different parts of the mind that are responsible for different emotions and reactions instead of abstracting it all under the one “you”. The idea is to go from “I’m angry” to “I’m feeling anger” and so on.
The following idea is from Robert Wright’s Why Buddhism Is True. Essentially, one can imagine there to be different modules that keep getting activated and deactivated as we go about our lives, and we live through those modules as long as they are active, like experiencing feelings towards the protagonist in a movie or feeling happiness upon hearing a good news. The modules may be triggered by external stimuli, and as such, we’re not really in control of the orchestration.
Since we’re not orchestrating how exactly we feel or react to a situation, it implies there’s no “you” but a lot of different parts that become “you” depending on the situation and the trigger. Lost a game, the “dejected” module activates. Had a nice time at the park with your partner, the “happiness” or “gratitude” module activates.
Yep, we’re talking in very abstract terms, but that’s okay. There’s no way to comprehend the immense complexities of the inner workings of the mind without spending a lifetime studying the subject like the people whose thoughts I’m borrowing and interpreting did. And like they say, all models are wrong. So as long as this way of thinking helps us better understand why we do what we do, it can be useful.
So how does one slow think?
I don’t think there’s one way to do it. The book I referred to earlier, Why Buddhism Is True by Robert Wright, suggests meditation techniques that can be put to use to recognize our emotions and detach ourselves from them. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman educates us about the biases that we might not recognize in our behaviors and that knowledge makes us more aware of our cognitive fallacies. Relationships by The School of Life, speaks about many of the inherent complexities in humans and human emotions and why people behave in certain ways from time to time (of course, with a focus on romantic relationships).
I think it doesn’t matter which way we choose to learn to slow think; it could be through mindfulness meditation, or educating ourselves on the topic of cognitive biases, or understanding the person we’re dealing with and recognizing them as humans and their emotions. The end goal is the same: to be less reactive, judgemental and impulsive, and more curious.
In conclusion
I hope this was a useful primer on the topic of slow thinking. I’m looking forward to putting it to use in my life and seeing how it works for me. That’s it for now. I’ll go back to getting entertained looking at all sorts of interesting people and the life happening at Catania airport.
We’ve just entered a brand new calendar year, so I’ll start with that. Happy new year everyone!
New year warrants some new learnings, I know. But I’ll start with something that I got into a couple of months ago and that has changed the way I see the world. It is digital photography.
Like probably many people at some point or other in their lives, I started getting unusually fascinated by pictures. Not just pictures for the sake of pretty pictures, but pictures as a medium to tell stories and pictures as a canvas for creativity. At this point, I know for a fact that no matter how trivial an activity looks, there’s usually a lot more than what meets the eye and surely this was the case with photography. After all, it isn’t one of the most popular professions and side hobby for no reason.
I started reading a book (Understanding Exposure by Brian Peterson) that was a gift from a friend and it got me very involved in photography. I understood the basics, and then a bit more. I put into practiced what I’d learned by taking pictures of the places I traveled to and people I met. I used photo editing tools to give extra character to my pictures. I shared them on social media as a reminder to my future self, and now I’m writing this article about how I’m feeling as a reminder to myself but also a general guide to anyone stumbling upon this from search engines.
I’ll list down some interesting avenues where I spent the most time on, and probably you will too in case you decide to take up this beautiful hobby!
Equipment
If you’re like me, this is where you’ll spend the most time in the beginning — finding the right equipment. Any seasoned professional will tell you that it doesn’t matter nearly as much as the many other things you’ll learn down this path. All I can add to that is that the most important aspect of having the right equipment is that you should be excited to use it and carry with you. It doesn’t have to be the most expensive or the most shinny, but it should bring a smile to your face when you pick it up to leave your house (you wanting to pick it up when leaving your house when you go for a walk is implicitly implied here).
If you do basic research before buying stuff online, it is hard to go wrong with your first equipment. You’ll find yourself asking questions like what size sensor the camera should have, or what lenses to go for, but if you have limited money like most people, you’ll quickly realize the best options for a given budget aren’t all that many and from among those, you’ll probably be fine with either as a beginner.
For me, apart from the happiness factor of the equipment, the other very important factor is knowing the limits of your equipment. If it is a beginner’s camera, or a used old pro piece of equipment (or any, for that matter, but especially these), it has to have some quirks that you need to be aware of. Lack of high dynamic range, poor low light performance, not weather proof camera body, lens performance quirks, lack of 4K video or image stabilization to name a few. When you know the limits, you won’t be disappointed when your equipment doesn’t perform as per your expectations. Given how good phone cameras are these days, this is especially important as your phone will most likely take better pictures (bright colors with good contrasts and HDR) than your camera right out of the box.
The last piece of equipment advice is to make it easy to take your camera with you. After the initial excitement runs out, you don’t want to just find an excuse to not have your camera with you. I read somewhere that the best camera and lens is the one you have with you.
Exposure triangle
Even after centuries after the first photograph was ever taken, some of the basics of this trade haven’t changed. At the absolute basic, a photograph is just some light projected on a light sensitive film. This opening of the light sensitive film to light is called an exposure. A good exposure has three important components, forming the exposure triangle. The exposure triangle is formed by a simple set of parameters
How long do we expose the film?
How sensitive the film is?
What’s the size of the opening through which light falls on the light-sensitive film?
They are referred to as shutter speed, ISO and aperture respectively. All three do the same thing — control exposure or amount of light information captured by the film or sensor (in case of digital photography) — but each has its own tradeoffs. A clear understanding of the tradeoffs and when to prioritize what will help you take more controlled pictures.
WClarke and Samsara, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Shutter speed refers to the amount of time the “shutter” of the camera stays open. The longer it is open, the more light the sensor (or film, but I’ll use sensor as I’m guessing the vast majority of people think of digital photography when they hear the word photography) gathers. But if the shutter speeds are too slow (as in, it stays open for longer), your picture can turn out blurred if the camera isn’t kept steady for the duration of the exposure. On the other hand, too high shutter speeds can result in darker images as there just wasn’t enough light to properly illuminate the sensor.
ISO is the sensitivity or gain of the sensor. Just like with a microphone, increasing the sensitivity or gain increases the amount of sound captured, but also the noise. Digital cameras usually have an ISO range, like 100 to 6400 that you can choose depending on the situation.
Aperture is the size of the opening of the lens that focuses the image on the sensor. Naturally, larger opening results in more light captured. But interestingly, larger openings create a narrower plane of focus (creating beautiful bokah effect) which, while beautiful for some kind of pictures, isn’t always ideal and you have to “stop down” or increase the aperture number or reduce the size of the opening to get the desired depth of field.
Lenses – Reading the specifications
If you are able to afford an interchangeable lens camera (which is quite an appropriate name for a camera that you can attach different lenses to) you’ll be presented with a wide array of lenses you can buy that have very cryptic specifications. While it gets more complicated the more you know, a lens will generally have a few key specifications
Focal length
Specifies how wide or zoomed the perspective of the lens is.
Wide angle lenses are useful to capture a wide exposure, like landscapes while zoom lenses are useful to get closer to the subject without getting physically close. As you can guess, zoom lenses rule in the world of animal and sports photography.
It usually is measured in millimeters, and is either one number (For example, 50mm for prime or single focal length lenses) or a range (For example, 18-55mm for zoom lenses).
(Peak) Aperture
It is the measure of how large the camera’s lens can open and as a side effect, how blurry the foreground and background of your picture can get. It is measured in f-stop numbers and just like with focal length, it is either one number (For example, f1.8 for prime lenses) or a range (For example, f3.5-5.6 for zoom lenses).
By KoeppiK – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=78136658
Something to note is that a lens can always “stop down”, or shrink the size of its opening. The number on the lens is the maximum it can open for the focal length.
Just like with focal length, you don’t necessarily need to know what that number technically means to be able to select and operate the lens correctly. But it doesn’t hurt to know.
Image stabilization
Image stabilization is the ability of the lens (or camera) to reduce the impact of shaking on the final picture. Zoom lenses typically have image stabilization, while prime lenses typically don’t. The larger the focal length (or zoomed perspective), the more important having a stabilized lens becomes because the more “zoomed” your perspective is, the more prominent slight vibrations of your hand become.
Composition, and how it changes the way you see the world
While I can spend hours talking about topics like DSLRs vs mirrorless cameras, Sony vs Canon and the like, I think we can all agree those are better suited for Reddit and other internet forums. Here, I’d like to be a bit more personal and talk about something a bit more abstract and not technical. The experience of photography.
I’ve used smartphones with really good cameras. On multiple occasions I’ve owned a mobile phone with camera that was considered “flagship” at the time I bought it. Even then, I wasn’t exposed to the way of photography until I actually got hands on my first DSLR, my first “manual” camera.
I think I understand part of the reason. With phone cameras, you’re an operator of a blackbox. Sure, most phones take decent pictures most of the times (especially these days). They’re consistent, compact, internet enabled and always in our pockets. They’re also quick to share pictures on chat and social apps, which is arguably the end goal for many people taking pictures.
And don’t get me wrong. My phone takes wonderful pictures. Right out of the box, my iPhone 13 takes pictures that are arguably better to look at than my massive Canon 7D’s pictures with their poppy colors and HDR. But there’s no spark, no connection. When I take a good photo with my iPhone, I think the phone did a good job. When I take a bad one, I think the phone did a bad job.
That’s what makes manual photography so interesting. I own the composition and exposure. I envision the result before I take a picture and see if it worked out, and not simply like or dislike it after.
And if I fail, I know why. Or at least I know it was something that I did and I can improve upon it. This realization to see failure, a bad photo in this case, as just another opportunity to learn something new is what’s different between taking a picture with my phone and my 12 year old Canon DSLR.
The photos themselves have character and a story to tell for they are just an extension of your imagination at this point.
In closing
Ever since I started carrying my camera around, I started seeing beautiful compositions in even the most mundane of things.
I started noticing everything consciously for that’s where my next best picture could lie. Everyday streets had graffiti that I had never bothered to look at, or birds and animals and the detail in their creation. Even people and their faces seemed interesting — people that I’d known for years, even my parents. It filled me with gratitude for the beautiful world that we live in, and this experience of being alive.
I learned what “pause and ponder” meant and I started doing that even when I didn’t have my camera with me. Interesting what a hobby can do to you.
I was going through my phone’s gallery when I spotted a photo of Izma from The Emperor’s New Groove. It took me by surprise, because I discovered the movie just this year and was absolutely in love with it, especially the Izma character. But the image in my phone’s gallery was from 2018 in the form of a meme. Weird internet stuff. Anyway, I digress. So what are we talking about today.
Ah yes, intentional learning.
Growing up, we all have natural interests. Be it art, science, music or dance, or computers (sigh..). We are motivated to learn new things around our interests. And from time to time, we discover new interests. School is interesting in that regard. You’re thrown in between a bunch of other kids with completely different and random interests, and there’s osmosis of interests happening when we see that other kid in the class drawing something or reading a book about the solar system or they see us playing a new game or so.
But that diversity of interests decreases once we enter university. The people we’re with have chosen a similar course and chances are that they had a similar set of interests. There’s still a fair bit of interesting diversity, and it is still possible to meet people from courses other than ours and see what life outside is like.
But for me the biggest difference was getting out of university and starting full time work. Many small to medium sized workplaces hire people of specific types depending on their culture and/or domain, understandably so. Many are open to diversity of thoughts and ideas, but of course not too open so as to not destroy the culture that they’re trying to cultivate in the first place (which, of course, is important but to what extent is a separate discussion in itself). What happens then is that we end up in bubbles of people with similar interests as us.
Of course, like with many things, this isn’t a black or white, good or bad situation. On the bright side, our spiked growth (say a particular hard skill we’re trying to hone) in a field can really skyrocket when surrounded by the right people and mentors. That of course has a very positive impact on our careers and professional growth.
But what I found lacking was exposure to experiences, interests and hobbies that were far outside of my bubble. And since I wasn’t exposing myself to interests and hobbies outside of the ones that already existed, I was also not meeting people who had these drastically different interests or hobbies (or opinions, for that matter).
For this very reason, I am trying intentional learning. The basic premise is very simple. Find a new skill, hobby or interest and just learn to get good enough, what ever that means, but not perfect. So far this year, I’ve worked on my Chess skills, learned some German, learned a couple of songs on Ukulele, tried my hands on sketching and painting and picking up some photography basics now. Of course, the goal is not to become proficient or professional in any capacity, but just experience the joy of being a complete novice in a new field and seeing how far I can take it.
The side effect is that the curiosity and learning muscles stays in good shape for when one has to learn something new (which proved to be useful when studying for a certification exam recently). The other side effect is becoming more conversationally accessible to a wider part of the population, sharing interests with more and more people. Yet another side effect is that it makes one more empathetic and open minded. Playing chess isn’t any more worthy than making memes or playing guitar or learning programming. Sure, some skills are valued more in the world we live in due to a multitude of reasons, but it takes effort to build any skill and as such nothing can and should be dismissed as unimportant or unworthy of pursuing.
The real joy, however, is in the process of learning; going from not being able to do something to being able to, building muscle memory, watching amateur and pro videos of people doing it on YouTube and being able to talk to someone or join communities with the same interest.
And instead of looking at people who’ve honed that skill their whole life and getting sad that you’ll never reach there, find joy in the fact that you can instead get good enough at it and then move on to hundreds of new skills and hobbies, getting a taste of the different ways to be alive, to exist. You’ll also retain this phase of your interest in your memories, which will feel nostalgic when long time from today you encounter this skill or hobby in some form or the other or meet someone embarking on their journey into it.
In closing
I hope that was interesting to read and motivates a few of you to pick up some random new hobbies or learn something totally different, unrelated to your work or life and see how it goes. I am convinced it has some real merits over the demerits. From my perspective, the biggest demerit is that we end up spreading too thin over a bunch of thing, while not mastering anything. Personally, I’m okay with that right now. But depending on where you stand, it may or may not be. But having said that, it isn’t black or white and leaves a lot of room in the middle to play around and see what works best.
Thank you for reading. Following is a personal message unrelated to the article.
I took a long break from writing, but it is good to write something again. If you visited this website in the last four months anticipating a new post, apologies for the delay and thank you for being a super-reader of my blog. Until next time!
Like most things in life, WordPress isn’t perfect. But for a publishing platform, it is quite up there with the best in the business. For writing, I haven’t had any complaints so far, but when it came to customization or workflows around maintaining a theme, I was a little lost.
To me it somehow felt very liberating and restricting at the same time. Liberating, because of the ecosystem; themes, plugins, hosting platforms, tons of helpful resources and support. Restricting, if and when you want to build a custom theme and don’t speak much PHP, general added complexity compared to a static site generator, having to deal with hosting providers, updates and added maintenance work.
But depending on the requirements, WordPress might actually make a lot of sense as a publishing platform (well, of course. It powers 40% of the web). My blog used to be hosted on Github Pages with Jekyll as the site generator until I made the switch to WordPress a couple of months ago. What I did struggle with was finding a setup that offered a smooth workflow around managing a custom theme with self hosted WordPress instance.
This article is an attempt at fixing that and aggregating some useful tips. I’ll try to cover the following:
A self hosted WordPress website that’s affordable yet stable
Continuous deployment pipeline for custom themes
Backups that are reliable
CDN and caching
Securing the website
Let’s get started.
Platform setup
I decided to go with AWS Lightsail one click WordPress install. You’ll find more information on the Bitnami WordPress page about the stack. It is lightweight and runs perfectly fine on a 512MB RAM / 1vCPU instance. Once behind a CDN and page cache, the website can handle a fair number of visitors.
This step assumes you have a custom WordPress theme or source code of a theme available on a GitHub repository. You only need to follow this step if you think you’ll be making frequent changes to your theme files and would like to have a pipeline for the automatic deploy of the theme (say, for example, when you commit a change to the master branch of your repository). Alternatively, you can always create a zip file of the theme and upload it manually via the WordPress admin panel if you prefer to keep things simple.
Assuming you have a theme hosted on GitHub, you’ll need to make use of Travis CI to build your code (if there’s any CSS or JS that needs to be transpiled), test it (if there are any checks) and then upload the files to the AWS LightSail instance using secure copy (scp). Following are some resources to help you get started.
For backups, I’m using a couple of strategies but I think either one should suffice for my usecase.
AWS Lightsail snapshots
I’d recommend enabling automatic daily snapshots of your instance in AWS Lightsail. So if things go very south, you will lose 1 day’s worth of data at most. Since my blog’s content is rarely updated, this means this works near perfectly.
WPVivid is a nice plugin that offers more precise backups, meaning you can choose to backup just your database, or files, or both. It also has cron functionality and offer 12 hourly backups (more frequent if you’re a paying customer). WPVivid allows you to transfer the backups to Google Drive, AWS S3, Dropbox among many other third party providers.
Server health monitoring and alerts
I’m using New Relic to monitor the health of the WordPress instance. It isn’t necessary as AWS Lighsail already comes with basic dashboards for monitoring CPU performance and burst usage (giving a rough idea about whether the server is sweating under load), but if you’d like to go a bit fancy with the whole monitoring thing and set up alerts for throughput, error rate etc, New Relic is quite good.
New Relic really shines at showing you the external services your instance is talking to, database operations and the CPU usage share per plugin that you have installed on your WordPress website. That information can help you debug any services / plugins that are slowing down your website or doing something strange behind your back.
Metrics in AWS LightsailMetrics in New Relic
Both AWS Lightsail alerts and New Relic alerts support multiple channels, so feel free to use SMS, email, Slack or whatever your preferred way of getting alerted is.
CDN and Caching
My go-to CDN for any personal website is Cloudflare and that is what I’m using here. I didn’t have any problems with the admin interface behind the CDN and all seems to work very well. I have a page rule that overwrites cache control headers from WordPress and forces everything under /wp-content/* to be cached.
For page caching, I’m using a plugin called WP Total Cache. It was the most popular performance optimization plugin and was recommended to me. It has a “Page Cache” option which needs to be enabled and set to use disk as cache store.
Security
To secure the Lightsail instance, I’m following some basic good practices and a plugin to help me set up some blocking rules.
Lightsail instance is as close to stock as possible making sure there are no random packages installed from my side on the instance.
Disable port 80, and if you’re using a reverse proxy CDN like Cloudflare, only allow Cloudflare IPs to your origin server.
As with Lightsail, WordPress installation should be close to stock with minimal plugins.
Humans are fragile creatures. The illusion of stability and control we have in our lives is comical. Our mind seems to have mastered the art of separating itself from the world events. We almost know it. It is hard not to if you spend any time on internet social medias or any form of conventional news sources. Unfortunate things happen, lives end or get ruined for reasons so trivial that’d make you not want to believe it.
Yet, when it comes to our own lives, we’re fairly certain about our timelines. There’s career, that promotion, getting a house, getting married and so on. There’s always the end of life to be content with what we have; be grateful. Now’s the time to be at unrest, to complain and wish for more, to hustle. And not like it is our fault. The society is truly designed to make you feel exactly this way, discontent at every single stage of your life. Get good grades or you’d not get into a good university, study hard or you’d not have a good job, work harder or you’d not get that promotion, don’t plateau in your career or you’d not be able to afford a house, keep working to be able to enjoy a happy retirement and so on.
And what if you’re still not able to enjoy your life finally at 65? Oh those are just the guidelines, too bad it didn’t work out for you. Guess what, it is called 1% for a reason. Try again in the next one. And of course, thank you for your participation in the rat race.
So, what’s my point?
The point that I’m trying to make is that if something is important enough to you, do it without waiting for some special phase of life to come by. No one knows how tomorrow will look like. If this entire pandemic has taught us anything, it is that we have no control over the future, not tomorrow and much less months or years in the future. The present is the only thing we have for certain, so why not make the best of it; by treating it like it is the peak of our health, wealth, social skills and so on.
And how do we do that?
By being grateful for what we have. It is only when we consciously recognize how lucky we are to have all the things that we do, do we start valuing it. Being able to move around on your own, see, hear, talk, travel, read, write, meet friends, drink coffee, enjoy a sunset or snow; little things that many people might not have the good fortune to experience.
The world is like a nasty slot machine. Luck plays a huge role in almost everything we do, and it starts right at the moment you’re born. We are the product of our circumstances. There’s not much we can do about that, except that we recognize our privileges and act accordingly. Have a chance to do something good for someone? Do it. Realize your actions might’ve caused hurt? Apologize. Have people that pull you back? Filter.
Time really is the only real currency that we have. While it does seem like a tragedy to not know how much more of it do we have left, I think it is a blessing in disguise. Think of the last time you had a deadline for an assignment. Did you wait for the very last moment to do it? If you’re like most people then probably yes. That’s probably what would happen if we knew exactly how long we have to live. We would procrastinate everything until the last moment, wasting away most of it. Fortunately for us, we don’t, and each day can be lived as if it is the deadline for that life’s assignment, doing the things that matter the most to us.
So to summarize, there probably will never be a better time to do certain things, and that’s if you’re lucky to live a full life without many problems. If you’re in your teenage years, you probably have the time to learn something thoroughly, spend time with friends and family, have fun, see clearly if you’re into that. If you’re in your twenties, you have the best balance between intelligence, energy, time and maybe some money too. Later in life you get better with relationships, your emotional intelligence grows and the life experiences you accumulate make you wiser while you’re getting rusty physically. Basically, we live through different interpretations of ‘peak’ throughout our lives, and there’s no one big peak that’s going to solve all your problems and make you happy.
So make the most of your now; make memes, draw comics, write code, learn music, dance, sing, make someone’s day, be vulnerable, be nice, prioritize yourself, talk to random strangers and share stories, gift without a reason, sleep, cry, hug, do whatever you have to. But make your now count.
We’re finally out of 2020, yaay! It has been, for lack of a better word, an interesting year. Not intending on becoming Abhi News Network, I’ll spare you from having to read about the events of the past year for the thousandth time. Like many people, I realized my full nerd potential and learned how to live indoors for weeks at a time. I also unlocked a new hobby, Chess. Some other things like traveling and in-person events definitely took a backseat but can’t do much about that.
This short post is about moving this blog back to WordPress. I say back, but the fact is that this website was never on WordPress. I started this blog on ghost.org back in early 2014, but had to quickly move it away from there in spite of absolutely loving Ghost (mostly because of the $5/month fees). Next up was Blogger before finally settling on GitHub Pages which, by the way, if you’re just starting out with blogging and can find your way around git on a terminal, you should give a try. Now, feeling the need for a much more elaborate CMS, I’ve migrated to WordPress running on AWS Lightsail. It does cost money, but this time I can afford it.
Before this blog existed, I used to write on WordPress on an older blog. That feels like an eternity ago, which it was in internet time. I used to write about latest smartphones and compare them against each other (nothing that actually needed to be done by hand, now that I think about it; 8mp vs 5mp camera, 1gb vs 2gb ram and so on). I would walk into Samsung stores and try to make ‘hands-on’ videos of their latest phones. I can’t imagine doing that today, mostly because of how much the smartphone industry has expanded since 2012-13. Also because it doesn’t interest me anymore.
With WordPress, I hope to be able to write on the go using nothing more than just a browser. “On the go” might take some more time to become a normal everyday phrase again, but when that happens, I’ll be ready with my Thinkpad and a backpack. To not need a text editor to write Markdown/HTML, terminal to commit and push, and to see previews without a developer server would be very liberating. I’m excited about this future.
I’ll end this article with a nice picture I took today. Hope you enjoy looking at it as much as I did looking at Stitch in my house today.
Back in May, I wrote an article on the basics of Chess. Today, I’m super excited to announce and celebrate the milestone of breaking into the 1500s on Lichess.org rapid (barely, but surely).
When I started playing chess back in late December last year, I had little idea where I stood on the chess skills ladder. I knew how the pieces moved and how a game is won, lost or drawn. I also knew castling rules and that queen is kinda important.
But alas, there was a lot more to this beautiful game than just knowing how each piece moved. So after losing a few games in a bar in Amsterdam, I created a Lichess.org account to practice with the computer and online strangers.
I quickly realized I played very bad. It came as a surprise (although in hindsight, I see why it shouldn’t have been one). To me, chess was like cycling. I learned how to play chess exactly like I learned how to ride a bike. You just learn it once (often at a young age) and that’s it, that’s all there is to it, you think.
But as with anything else, chess (or cycling) can be thought of as a skill that can be honed with training. What I think was happening was–I was in a competitive chess environment, playing with the bare minimum understanding of the game against people who treated it like a skill. I was losing most games I played, unsurprisingly. In fact, I had a losing streak of 41 games from January till March and also reached my lowest Elo rating of 863 in the same month.
That’s the 2-percentile among lichess.org users–a little embarrassing
Then came the pandemic and the whole world changed around us. Remote working, lockdown, stay at home etc meant there was a lot of time to invest in a new hobby. It could’ve been German language studies, or something useful, but no. My mind chose the game of chess to become obsessed with.
Over the course of the following months, I played hundreds of games in the evenings, watched videos on chess theory over lunch and thought about chess while in shower. Interestingly, I wasn’t alone. There’s a huge surge of people (re)discovering this game and getting into the community just like I did.
Finally, like the title says, I reached 1500 today. That’s more than 600 rating points gain since March this year. I believe it is purely a function of the time I’ve put into it and nothing else. While it remains debatable whether that’s a wise thing to do, I do recommend giving chess a shot if you’ve not played it in years, especially if you’re in some kind of lockdown or prefer staying indoors and are looking for a new hobby. It is even more fun if you can compete over Elo rating with a friend!
If there’s any general takeaway from this whole exercise, it is that with enough practice and motivation, seemingly impossible things become possible. The world is full of arbitrary things. Chess and other such games, surely, but also many more allegedly important things like career prospects or learning a new language. Just things made by us for ourselves. So it follows that mastering German or getting the dream job could be similarly approached–immersion, finding that bit of motivation, finding people to have friendly competition with and seeing the results and improvements immediately (and some of that sweet sweet luck, of course).
I leave you at that until next time. Thank you for reading!
Today, we’re going to learn how to be a 10x anything. We’re going to do that by putting slack on mute. But not the simple way. That works, but don’t expect 10x results. Also, this guide assumes that the most distraction during worktime comes from Slack. If that’s not the case for you, you might end up with ~4.5x results (scientific).
What we’ll essentially be doing is:
Set up Pi-hole on our home network. Pi-hole is a DNS based ad blocker which sinks requests if they’re for ad network.
Use Pomodoro app on KDE to trigger scripts when the focus session starts and ends. If you haven’t heard about Pomodoro technique, read up more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique.
The scripts themselves will block any website / app that you don’t want distracting you when the focus time is on.
Pi-hole
Pi-hole is amazing! No, seriously. It blocks all ads and tracking, has a very good interface which supports custom rules for each device, groups and more. All of this is free, open source and pure. Did you star the repository already?
Pi hole can not only block DNS queries for ads/tracking networks, but also anything you ask it to. We’ll use it to block Slack on our network.
Raspberry Pi
We need something to run the Pi-hole, so grab a Pi zero or a normal Raspberry Pi. A virtual machine / docker would work but then you need that thing running 24/7.
Pomodoro app that supports scripts
I’m sure your operating system of choice has a Pomodoro app made for it. The trick here is to find one that supports executing scripts on certain events like focus time start and end.
As you can see, Fokus on the KDE store supports this functionality and is perfect for me since I’m already on KDE.
Router with custom DNS setting
We need to change the DNS settings in our router and point it to our Raspberry Pi’s IP address. As a backup, we still keep 1.1.1.1. Most routers support this setting. If for some reason you’re not able to do it at the router level, you can still set custom DNS on each of your device, which is a bit more work.
Ability to not overthink
Given how futile this whole exercise is, if you start questioning yourself why am I even doing any of this when you could just mute Slack?, this exercise (or this blog) is not for you.
Tutorial (kinda)
The initial setup is very standard. Install Pi-hole on your Raspberry pi by following their official guide. Get the Pomodoro app up and running.
Once that’s done, we create a directory on our computer and create two files in it: focus-start.sh and focus-end.sh and mark them executable
As the file names suggest, the focus-start.sh will execute when our focus time starts and focus-end.sh executes when our focus time ends. It should look like this in Fokus, our pomodoro app.
So now that this is configured, we need to enable passwordless ssh access to our Raspberry Pi. I followed this guide here. What that enables is just typing ssh [email protected] will log us into the Pi without a password.
Next, we open our files and add the commands to enable and disable Slack’s domain using a wildcard blacklist/whitelist entry.
The focus-end.sh command is only different in that has the -d flag, which removes the wildcard domain from the blacklist. We can even try running that command on the terminal and verifying if it creates an entry in Pi-hole. Remember to substitute raspberrypi.local with your Raspberry Pi’s hostname / IP address.
That’s it. The other command works as expected too, removing the slack.com’s wildcard entry at our discretion.
So, how does it (not) work?
Theoretically, we’re sinking any DNS query for slack.com and any of its subdomain meaning the APIs won’t work once the blacklist entry has been created. But there are a couple of problems with our approach.
One, Slack’s messages are transferred over Websocket and once that’s established (when you open the website / app), it doesn’t need DNS to work (resolve) for sending and receiving messages.
Even if it did, DNS queries are cached (by a variety of entities like browsers, operating systems etc), so it isn’t like this is fool proof and starts working the second it is turned on.
Third, many apps use their own DNS and have little regard for your home DNS. For example, I tried to block Whatsapp this way (using this list) and it just doesn’t work, at least on Android.
A complete fail then?
Not exactly. You can still block websites that you open in browsers, like reddit.com and youtube.com if you spend too much time on those like me. In any case, it is a fun way to learn about how web apps, DNS and ad blocking work and involves a lot of trial and error to get things to work. Oh and yes, we do have a network wide ad blocker which is what Pi-hole does best, so there’s also that.
I’ve long established that adding heavy duty analytics and tracking scripts to my blog pages isn’t the right thing to do. Personally, it is also a bit liberating to not know which article of mine is getting a lot of traffic and which isn’t, because then I’m not biased by what the internet is searching for and can write about pretty much anything that I feel like writing about. 10 programming languages you should learn in 2020 has exactly the same weight as Let me tell you a funny story from last night, so which one do think I’d write about?
The analytics and tracking world has come a long way and is viewed very negatively in the light of recent internet incidents. But it started off very simple and had a very simple and non-malicious idea at its core: Getting to know your user better so that you can serve them better.
That thought made me search for a simple analytics solution that I could run on my blog for a couple of weeks and get enough insights to make informed decisions regarding the frontend design changes while not compromising on the privacy of the visitors. If I’m completely honest, I was also just curious to know these things with no agenda behind it.
I looked into Simple Analytics, a nice solution that does exactly what I needed (perhaps a bit more than that), but a little expensive for me at USD 19 a month. There are also self hosted analytics solutions like Plausible, but that was too much work for realizing this simple thought. So I decided to put something together quickly and the following is what I ended up implementing.
Client side JavaScript
On the client side, I needed to get the data that interested me. It was details like the browsers used by my visitors, platform, width of their screens etc. More technically, the user agent, platform, screen width, referrer and the current page’s url (although I don’t plan on using it for this article. Spoiler: One of my lowest effort articles is pulling more than half of all pageviews which is a bit saddening).
There’s not much happening here. Just checking if the user prefers to not be tracked, else get the desired data and POST it to our analytics endpoint using the navigator.sendBeacon API.
Server
We need to implement the endpoint that’s listening for the POST requests from our client browsers. I decided to go with Firebase’s functions for handling the request and Firebase’s realtime database to store the data.
constfunctions=require('firebase-functions'constadmin=require('firebase-admin'admin.initializeAppconstcors=require('cors')({origin:true,exports.handler=functions.https.onRequest(async(req,res)=>{if(req.method==='POST'){constsnapshot=awaitadmin.database().ref('/hit').push(JSON.parse(req.bodyreturncors(req,res,()=>{res.json({message:'success'}else{res.json({message:'have a good day!'}
Now this is super bad code for a variety of reasons, but it worked for my temporary needs. I deployed this, waited for a couple of weeks and had some data to answer some basic questions about my blog’s visitors.
Parsing data
So at this point I had let this code run long enough to have accumulated couple of hundred entries. It was time to analyze. Firebase allows you to easily export the database in JSON format. Using some basic Python-fu, I created lists of each dimension and passed these lists to Python’s builtin collections.Counter (which is perfect since I’m only interested in aggregated stats), and then take the top 5 most frequent items using the .most_common method. Finally, we plot bar charts for these top 5 values across each dimension using Matplotlib to visualize the results.
I would’ve guessed this to be the case for browsers, but not in Chrome’s favour to this extent 🙁
What are the most common platforms?
Win32 is still the majority platform among my visitors and there’s some Apple action going on. There’s also a healthy chunk of Linux X86_64 visitors. The armv7l and armv8l may contain Android devices but hard to tell.
What are the most common referrers?
Unsurprisingly, most of the traffic comes through Google.
What are the most common screen widths?
There’s a healthy mix of screen resolutions with the most frequent being 360px.
In closing
So that’s it for this little article. I’m happy with the outcome given how little effort went into this whole assignment. I hope you enjoyed reading it. As always, write me an email in case you have any comments!
Similar to the last two articles, this one is about the little improvements I’m making to my workstation. So far, I got a gaming mouse and a mechanical keyboard, a nice desk pad and a 24in full HD monitor from Dell to add to my existing setup (while we’re at it, do checkout my setup page here).
For this one, I’ll be talking about internet speed, and the upgrade associated with it. This upgrade is special in more than one way and hence, I want to go into a bit of history, my history with internet bandwidth.
Ever since adolescence, internet has been a basic necessity for me and the people from my age group (even before it becoming a source of livelihood for many of us). One of my first memories of the internet is this screen:
I distinctly remember this from my first computer*, an HP desktop PC with a Pentium Dual Core processor and 1 GB RAM, since it also had 100Mbps LAN card. Not knowing the difference between hardware capabilities and internet bandwidth, I naively assumed that when I get a broadband connection, that’s the speed I’ll see. But little did I know it would take more than a decade to reach this milestone.
*which practically didn’t exist by the time I started writing on this blog, and as a result there’s very little, if any, mention of my first computer here.
Life at 10KB/s
Back in those days, in around 2008-2009, we didn’t have broadband at home. My PC was barely 6 months old and I had realized that there’s only so much GTA Vice City one can play and be entertained.
My dad had this Nokia Expressmusic 5310 phone that supported Edge network, so slightly faster 2G. I figured out that if I can get internet on that phone, I could use the CD that came it to tether internet to my PC. I remember it was INR 98 or 99 for unlimited 2G data then.
It worked, but the speeds were really miserable. On a good day, keeping the phone on the window sill, I would get around 10KB/s or 80kbps which is close to the promised speed of 16.8KB/s or 135kbps. At those speeds, speed test websites like speedtest.net just don’t load, much less show you your network speeds. Facebook, which people used back then, took more than a couple of minutes, literally, to load. Needless to say, Youtubing or any sort of video streaming was out of question.
Even download small files, like a couple of megabytes, was a challenge, and I would almost never download directly using the browser. I would always use the fancy bloated download managers which supported resume functionality and parallel connections (not like it made a difference, but who knew).
I was on Windows XP, no firewall or antivirus software, downloading these shady browser plugin and download mangers. Those were the wild days!
Nmap download adventure
One incident worth mentioning is the download of Nmap, a network scanning tool. It was around 15MB in size, and believe it or not, it took me many months worth of trying to finally download it. The download would always fail and no download manager helped. But when it finally did, my joy knew no bounds and it genuinely made me happy. It is a bit weird that I still remember it so vividly, but it was special in a way.
So anyway, the struggle continued for a while. For the next couple of years I would ask friends or my aunt to download me anything that was more than 20MB in size.
Emergence of broadband
I finally got a broadband connection. It was a 2Mbps connection capped to 1GB of data. 1 whole gigabyte of data for the whole month. It definitely improved things a bit, but on the whole it was still painful. Now the internet was fast enough to watch a Youtube video in 720p. But if I did, that’d pretty much be the only thing I did that month.
I ‘upgraded’ to a 512Kbps unlimited connection which was a lot better. This was, in fact, my first real broadband. Usable, and unlimited. 65 kilobytes a second isn’t bad, especially for browsing the web or download a GB or two of data overnight. That also started this whole phase of my life when night time was download time. I remember the disappointment I used to have after checking the download progress first thing in the morning and realizing the download failed halfway through.
But yes, the internet was within reach.
Real broadband speeds
I changed ISP a couple of years later as the first one was too bad in terms of service, and got a local one with Google and torrent peering. Basically, any website owned by google would work at higher speed, which would typically be around a couple of MB/s. Even speeds of up to 40mbps weren’t unheard of, as long as you’re able to find it on a Google service. This same ISP later upgraded my connection to some 8mbps for free.
That was my first time breaking the 1MB/s barrier. Major achievement.
The upgrades after this were incremental, if I’m being honest. I think I was at 25mbps by the time I left for Germany. After settling down here in Germany, I opted for a 50Mbps link. 50Mbps is exactly like 16Mbps for 90% of the time (unless of course you’re downloading stuff in a hurry).
So in that sense, I already knew that going 100Mbps isn’t going to bring any meaningful change to most of my surfing habits. But it does feel like a big change, psychologically. Remember that image from before, the one which says 100Mbps speed on the LAN interface status page? I’ve finally maxed that out, a little over 11 years later.
My 13 year old self might find it unimaginable to think of what a 12MB/s broadband connection feels like, which is a bit of a jump from his humble 10KB/s flaky dial-up connection tethered off a 2G mobile phone.
Edit – 31/07/22
I moved into a new flat that supposedly has a gigabit internet connection. I’m getting 500+ mbps speeds consistently which is unbelievable. I also got a phone that supports 5G which also pulls data at rates upwards of 500 mbps. I’m living the dream!
In closing
I’ve mentioned this a few times before, but I’ll do it again. Adulting, getting a job and living on your own has little meaning to it if you don’t realize those childhood dreams, which for me is overkilling on tech stuff and buying 8 year old laptops off ebay.
Having said that, I might actually make use of the bump in upload speed, which does bottleneck my offsite backup plans. Stay tuned for updates on that front. Also, downloading ISOs and doing system updates are a delight these days.
Finally, I’d probably never feel the same level of joy that I felt on getting a real broadband after years of doing sub-10KB/s on mobile data. But that makes me think of all the things that I’m getting started on, my professional career, a new language that I’m learning, Chess, or anything that I’m a newbie at. With each passing milestone, the next one becomes a little less exciting. Keeping that in mind, I should try to celebrate any incremental progress that I make in any of these things. That was just a long way of saying that the journey matters more than the goal.
