Weekly notes 46/2024

Thumbnail image: Sunset from Tannirbavi Beach.

What’s been happening #

It’s been a week since I’ve been in Mangalore. Mangalore hasn’t changed much - if anything, feels like the city has shrunk more. There seems to be less traffic than before. City seems emptier than ever. That, however, doesn’t prevent from the city roads getting clogged and jammed by vehicles - mainly because people can’t drive in proper lanes. Aaaah I’ll have this rant for later.

We’re in Mangalore for Jo’s cousin brother’s wedding. The past week has been pretty uneventful. I spent most of my time at home, just chilling/eat/sleep. I didn’t go to the gym here but managed to get about an hour’s worth of walking daily and kept my step count in check. For the first couple of evenings, I drove Jo from my parent’s place to her aunt’s for the Sangeet dance practice. After a few days she said she will stay at her parent’s house because it’s easier for her to get to her aunt’s place (it’s a few hundred meters away, vs a few kilometers from my parents' house). I’m famously uncoordinated and absolutely suck at any form of dance, so I quietly nope’d at the invites from Jo’s cousins to be part of the dance troupe. They asked couple of times but after my nopes, they agreed and didn’t force me to join in. Perks of the first in-law of the family I guess 😅

I went over to my sister’s place and gifted her and my neice some Tim Tams, ground coffee(a dark roast with chocolate notes specially for milk coffee, a light roast with floral/citrus notes to have it black) and dark chocolate that we usually get from North Sydney Produce Market. She doesn’t have any speciality coffee equipment, so I asked the coffee roasters to have it ground for Moka Pot - I’ve found the grind for Moka Pot suits South Indian filter well. Hope she finds it ok.

Speaking of driving, I got to drive Rosemary. Driving in India after a span of about year was hard initially - my Aussie habits were always on (keep to the left lane, use indicators to change lanes, try to maintain speed limits). All that did, however, was make me look like a weird dude and hinder me as I was driving through the city roads. Sigh. At least I stuck to my guns of no honking and was largely successful (honking a grand total of three times in the past week). Mangalore is a pretty small city and you can get from one end to another in about half hour, and despite this in the past week I was easily doing about 15-20kms daily. It’s still a miracle how we manage to drive here. It’s almost like cogs of gears falling in the right place just at the right time to avoid grinding.

One evening, we went over to Tannirbavi Beach to catch the sunset. As a kid, my parents would take us to this beach every Sunday evening and we’d spend a few hours just sitting on the sand and listening to the waves. The beach entrance and parking has undergone renovations a few times but it’s still quite sub par. Despite that, it’s one of the few places where I can spend hours at peace.

On another note, this week’s weekly notes edition is written from my iPad. I usually write the notes on my desktop computer with neovim in Markdown and commit to the Github repo. AWS Amplify Hosting then converts the Markdown files and generates a static site using Hugo and publish it as a site. I was trying to find a reasonable way to write the notes and commit it to the Github repo - the former was easy enough but the latter was more painful. Ultimately, I decided to use vscode.dev because it has the familiar VS Code interface that I am familiar with. What’s challenging are image uploads - I usually select the images from my Immich instance, covert the images to jpeg and resize them, and then publish to AWS S3, which is fronted by Amazon CloudFront as the CDN. On the desktop, I have the commands in my shell history that makes this workflow simple enough. On the iPad, I had to resort to uploading the images to S3 from the AWS Console (the iPad file picker lets me select the format and the size of the images - so the resize workflow gets skipped). If I were to do this more frequently I probably would look for alternatives but for now, this will do.

Later today, we drive to the town of Puttur as the Phool Muddi/Sangeet and wedding functions are there.

Music of the Week #

A little Banjo loop can transport you to another dimension, or at least John Butler will do that for you. Give it a listen.

Link of the week #

Australia shutdown its 3G network recently and as part of this shutdown, some 4G/5G phones ended up getting blocked from connecting to the network including not being able to call emergency services. This article does a deep dive into what went wrong.

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