Day trip to Mekedatu Sangama

Day trip to Mekedatu Sangama

It’d been a while since Jo and I had gone for a day trip on the outskirts of Bangalore. Jo on a whim suggested going for a long drive. And since I had nothing else planned, we took the car out. Originally we planned to head out to Kanakapura and come back, but that plan changed soon.

We started out fairly late, at about 09:15 in the morning and stopped for breakfast at MTR on Kanakapura Road, near Art of Living Ashram. Jo had a long face when she thought that was the end of the long drive but I told her that we were just getting started.

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Day Trip to Melukote

Day Trip to Melukote

Starting this year, Jo & I wanted to resume our monthly outing to a place outside of Bangalore and we’d decided to head to Sravanabelagola during the Republic Day weekend. Unfortunately couple of days before the trip, Jo fell ill and we had to cancel the trip and thus January month went by without a trip. Few days later, Abhilash mentioned that he was arranging for a ride to Melukote and since this was the week after Barcamp Bangalore, Jo & I signed up for the ride.

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Of Z-Wave, SmartThings, Amazon Echo, Google Home, Kwikset Deadbolt and the colossal failure that is connecting them all – aka “Home Automation”

This is a huge rant I sent to Jo. Some backstory: Few months back Jo bought a Kwikset 910 deadbolt (more like I asked her to buy – hindsight I should have done more and better research) and I was trying to setup the remote locking feature using Alexa/Google Assistant via SmartThings Hub. Here’s a copy-paste of the entire message. I’ll have a separate post on my home automation setup.

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The Passport Seva Kendra Experience

So I just got my passport reissued this week and I’m amazed how far things have come. I got my passport done close to a decade back when I had to fly to Austin. Back then getting a passport done was a pain – I had applied from Mangalore in Tatkal and since Mangalore didn’t have a tatkal processing system, it was forwarded to the Bangalore passport centre. I still vividly remember the day I visited – I stood in queue at 8am (was told to go early because the counter was open only till 12pm), stood there for hours after some initial confusion on where to go(which lost me a whole bunch of spots) and when I was 2 spots away from reaching the counter, the guy at the counter shut down saying they’re doing for the day even though it was 11:45am. Was so pissed but really couldn’t do anything but go back. The next day I went and stood in the line at slightly before 7 and somehow got through the document submission and had to patiently wait.

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Mission Cooldown: Reign in on the burning Hellforge! [Aka: How I cleaned up the crud off my CPU heat sink/fan]

It’s been about 4 years since I built Hellforge. It’s gotten some updates:

  • Replaced Gigabyte 7750 with an Asus Strix 970
  • Added on a Samsung Evo 840 256GB
  • Memory upped to 16GB
  • Replaced the Logitech K210 keyboard with a Corsair K70 Lux RGB
  • Replaced the CM default case fans with Bitfenix Spectre

But the one thing that has remained constant: the CPU heat sink and cooler. My old house was dusty and no matter how much I cleaned, within a week or two there’d be quite a lot of dust. I did a  bit of superficial cleaning on the insides but never bothered cleaning the CPU heat sink/fan.

The hesitation comes mainly because I had a torrid time when installing the heat sink the first time and didn’t want to damage it. Off late the processor’s been running hot and the CPU fan’s been on overdrive pretty much all the time. Last week I was curious about the temperatures it was running at and HWMonitor – I wasn’t prepared for this.

Basically the temperatures were close to Tj Max and I wonder how come the CPU wasn’t throttling. With temperatures at this level, I had to do something about this. And egged on with support of Alpha, I decided it’s time to clean it up.

Here’s what I bought to clean up:

  • Compressed air can –  A blast of this can get a lot of dust off but you need to keep this straight, so difficult to use this for hard to reach surfaces
  • Hand pump – really useful for the hard-to-reach surfaces which can’t be reached above
  • Isopropyl Alcohol – You’re going to use this to wipe off the remaining gunk off the heat sink and the CPU.
  • Some tissues/cotton swabs to clean up the gunk
  • CoolerMaster MasterGel – I settled on this after extensive discussion with Alpha. He suggested to get the cheaper one, since the higher priced version is more suited for overclockers

Now, for the pictures. You’ve been warned. This was how it was when I opened the cabinet

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The 1800km Coastal Karnataka Roadtrip – Part 4 – Jog – Gokarna – Ponda – Palolem

I’ve always wanted to go on long road trips, but with both Jo and me working, trying to find a contiguous block of holiday has been rather difficult. With me taking a break and Eid holiday coming during middle of the week, we got a chance to do our road trip. Part 4 continues..

With our trip almost at the halfway point, we were beginning to feel a bit bummed out that we were at the mid-point already. Then again, we reminded ourselves that we have few more days remaining and rather than looking at it as half-gone, we should look at it from still 4-more days to go approach. With this in mind, we checked out from our rooms, had breakfast and had one more glance at Jog before heading out.

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The 1800km Coastal Karnataka Roadtrip – Part 3 – Malpe – Kavimane – Jog

I’ve always wanted to go on long road trips, but with both Jo and me working, trying to find a contiguous block of holiday has been rather difficult. With me taking a break and Eid holiday coming during middle of the week, we got a chance to do our road trip. Part 3 continues..

Waking up beach side in Malpe, I was more excited than ever – we had a long day coming up.Kavimane, Kavishaila and more importantly, I was really excited about the ride through Agumbe. Agumbe  is called as “The Cherrapunji of the South” due to heavy rainfall it receives, and the ghat roads leading to it are rather infamous. Plus driving through it in July meant that we’d be driving during the wettest month of the year and I wondered what would be in store.

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