Music in the streaming age is weightless. It reaches you through the aether from servers thousands of miles away into whatever speaker happens to be nearby. It seems almost infinite, is completely free of friction, and incredibly easy to take for granted. I recently bought a record player and my first three records,...

Thank you @zyd for the request, and IndieWebClub Bangalore for the prompt that sort-of points to it. You probably don’t need coffee explained to you. It’s the most popular drug delivery mechanism in the world, and could be considered the lifeblood of modern civilisation (or at least jobs-oriented capitalism). That...

Curating a collection of music for a loved one to listen to is a time-honoured tradition, becoming accessible and a huge part of pop culture around the time cassette tapes and home-recording became possible. With the rise of music streaming, we mostly make playlists on Deezer or whatever now, sending a link to it...

The reasons to become vegan are well-known, (here are some reasons to go vegan), and it’s not as hard to go vegan as one would think. This post is specifically about why I never went vegan earlier than when I actually did. Reasons for me to not go vegan I did not grow up in a vegetarian family, and the inherent...

This prompt comes from IndieWebClub Bangalore. I have had 25 minutes to pen this down. Frankly, logistics are the main constraint. I would hate to spend my period of invisibility on an airplane flying to a different country in order to optimise my experience, but thankfully there is much to do within the bounds of...

I use git, as the version control system both at my workplace and to store my personal code (including the source of this blog). I use different e-mails for personal and work repositories, as well as different SSH keys for different accounts (this is because Github, at least, does not allow different accounts to use...

At work, I have to develop a service that has an API server, a web server that serves UI, and a Slack bot. This uses a database. I can either run it locally via podman, or connect to one which already runs in a development cluster. The web server requires the API server to provide some basic functionality, so even...

There's this podcaster in India known as BeerBiceps, his real name being Ranveer Allahbadia. I've been a hater of his for a long time because of his cosying with the right-wing and penchant for saying things that don't make a lick of sense, without a hint of irony. The Prime Minister gave him some sort of national...

Python is a batteries-included kind of language, and so of course it comes with an HTTP server module. Today I wanted to have something small running on my computer without dependencies to test a server-side example, so I looked into how to create a minimal server using python built-ins. This is what I ended up...

I’m a software developer by profession, and most developers have settled on a couple of essential tools: VS Code for writing code, and the Chrome browser. Obviously I have no problem with this; people can use the tools they want to (though the trillion-dollar corporations developing these tools do not have their...

Earlier, my site used to have two parts in my git forge; blog, and Solarized-Flex. “blog” contained just the text and the pelican config, while “Solarized-Flex” is my fork of another pelican theme with colours I like. I noticed that the font files and css used by my site was much heavier than what I actually needed,...

EDIT: I accidentally deleted this post without backups, so I have written it down again as I remember it. Subsetting a font means to remove all the characters you don’t actually use in order to reduce the size of the files. My site theme uses the font-awesome icon font, which maps code points to tiny images like the...