A glimpse of the past week and the few articles, podcasts, tools, videos and music that captivated my attention: With Diwali celebrations over the last weekend, the family moving over to Hyatt for their temporary stay until the government housing falls in place, Patti’s return from her holy trip to Israel and Mummyjaan’s 50th birthday, the week pretty much swooshed past! 30mins swimming on Monday, Biked 24k on Wednesday, 5K beach run on Saturday and a 4k beach run on Sunday. ...

A glimpse of the past week and the few articles, podcasts, tools, videos and music that captivated my attention: Most of this week was spent planning the next few months and chalking out various things we had to line-up. We’re super excited that Shasta will soon be able to experience the cold a bit and that we’d be able to take her on some long outdoor hikes in the snow. ...

I realised the raspberry pi that hosts my nextcloud setup wasn’t quite latching back on to the network if the router was turned off or if the internet was sketchy. Was a pain to hard boot the device manually to reset it. Decided to write a short script to reset the network connection when it noticed something was off. ping -c4 192.168.0.1 > /dev/null if [ $? != 0 ] then echo "SOS..Restarting eth0 for network latch" /sbin/ifdown 'eth0' sleep 5 /sbin/ifup --force 'eth0' fi A chron job runs every 10 minutes to take pulse of the network, runs the above code and picks up connectivity without manual intervention! ...

A glimpse of the past week and the few articles, podcasts, tools, videos and music that captivated my attention: Watched the Sky is Pink with Meena, while Shasta stayed at home. A touching story and at some level I believe it did nudge Meena to consider signing up for the Bone Marrow registry. While I fail to understand what’s holding her (and other folks in my family) back, hoping she does see this through over the next few weeks. ...

Morning muses with the little munchkin perched on top of her stack of books. Babbling, pointing, standing and now slowly trying to walk; this soon to be 11 brat is growing way too fast!

Philip, You could take practicing your compassion several levels over by driving in Indian traffic. Trust me, I’ve tried doing what your friend suggested several times and finally chose a better solution - let my wife drive. She’s either transcended to zen mode or got way too numbed down with the incessant honking and haphazard, needless lane shifting. And when I really have to drive or am able to get an eye-contact, I’ve started throwing flying kisses at strangers. It works a charm for that nano-second. Helps me keep calm and drive-on! ...

State of the network: With better access to the router and some re-wiring in the house, I got around rejigging my server setup. This will change once I get my Odroid shipped over. For now though, here’s my current setup: NexcloudPi installed on a Raspberry pi 3B+ board Diet-Pi installed on another Raspberry pi 3B+ board running the pi-hole The SBCs and the modem are now connected to the UPS inverter, so hopefully that gets rid of the hard shutdowns. Might consider getting a stabilizer at some point in time. I am also leaning towards a more robust homelab system. Yet to whet the core setup and will probably explore that a year down the lane. ...

Travel: We were in Hyderabad for a friend’s wedding. Wedding’s are a wonderful opportunity to meet some good old friend’s. This one was no different. Been a busy week otherwise shuttling between meeting friends and family, and finishing up some admin chores. Didn’t get around taking Meena to the ’touristy’ spots. Will have to plan another trip for that. Did visit the Infosys campus though. Back here after eight years! While not much seems to have changed, the space does look super green. The plants of the 2000’s are now huge trees almost shrouding the walkways. ...

Shasta’s almost standing! Yesterday we heard her say a coherent ‘Hi’ in response to random call from Meena. She’s growing way too fast! This was one good workout week. With S needing to work on her general fitness, we’ve been regularly hitting the beach for those early morning barefoot runs. The one day we had to turn around and head home because of strong rains, Meena got us to do a good round of Ashtanga. Also got around swimming thrice at the Madras Boat club. My legs ache in a very good way and I am loving it! ...

Another good one from radiolab! Real-life prisoner’s dilemma situation playing out in WW1.