2021

On my Goodreads 2021 reading challenge, I read 52/50 books in 2021. I managed 47/50 in 2020 (see 2020 reviews) and 26/24 in 2019. Here’s what I read (best books first). Mind-blowing The Almanack of Naval Ravikant. It’s the best non-fiction I’ve read in 5 years. It focuses Wealth and Happiness. It’s short. I finished it in a day. But it’s deep. I can spend a decade practicing just a single sentence. It’s available at navalmanack.com as a free e-book and audio book. Rhythm of War. The 4th book of the Stormlight Archives is an action-packed fantasy. A great gift for teenagers. In an extra-ordinary magic system, Brandon Sanderson builds up to the greatest climax I’ve read. What an ending! Death Note #1-#12. Light Yagami gets hold of a “death note”. If he writes a name on it, they die. “L” is out to catch him. In a cat-and-mouse psychological thriller, Light and L work next to each other, share their plans, and still try to outwit the other. It’s like chess. The pieces are visible. But it’s the strategy that counts. A brilliant comic series. Life-changing ...

An aspiring Malaysian actor posted on Reddit: I am a 18-year old biracial Malaysian kid who wants to be an actor in Hollywood. I’m taking a diploma for performing arts in a college called Sunway University in 8 days and I’m considering pulling out of it because why do something that I like when my dreams might never be fulfilled and the price for taking this diploma is seriously expensive. I am starting to doubt my chances of making it to Hollywood and I suffer from extreme anxiety. Is it possible for someone like me to enter Hollywood? What are my chances? ...

What do you pick for someone you don’t know well enough? I generally pick books. I know books well enough to match them to people’s personalities. Even if they’re not a book reader. (The risk is that they might have already read the book.) As for the kids, toys like the tiny tower diy playhouses for sale would bring them so much joy. The other safe item is food. Chocolates, dry fruits, etc. Everyone likes them. (Even if they’re dieting, dry fruits and dark chocolates are fine.) ...

I delivered a talk at PyCon India 2019. My slides are on Github. This is a transcript of that talk. What I’m going to be talking about is how you can get insights by joining two maps but before we go there, just some basic bookkeeping things. In case you’re tweeting, these are the hashtags, you probably want to be using the #PyconIndia, my hashtag my IDs, #SANAND0, you don’t need to worry about the slides, they are online. I’ve already posted on Twitter, the link to the slide deck, the slide deck that you’re using but if you desperately do want to take notes, then one small suggestion. Research has shown that taking notes on pen and paper is much better than taking notes on laptops if you want to remember stuff or on mobile phones. So this was a discovery for me. In fact, it was my discovery of the year and I’m following it diligently. Do give it a shot if you want to take notes. Let’s dive in. ...

LinkedIn has a page that shows the people who most recently followed you. At first, it shows just 20 people. But as you scroll, it keeps fetching the rest. I’d love to get the full list on a spreadsheet. I’m curious about: What kind of people follow me? Which of them has the most followers? Who are my earliest followers? But first, I need to scrape this list. Normally, I’d spend a day writing a program. But I tried a different approach yesterday. ...

I use PowerPoint instead of Adobe Illustrator or Sketch. I’m familiar with it, and it does everything I need. One of the features I’m really excited by in PowerPoint is the ability to manipulate shapes. Let’s say you have a rectangle and a circle. You can select both of these shapes and in the Shape Format > Merge Shapes dropdown, you can: merge them with a union combine them (like an XOR operation in Boolean algebra) fragment them, which breaks them up into pieces intersect them subtract them This is so powerful that you can create any kind of shape. Let’s take an icon from Font Awesome at random – say an address card – and create it. ...

Here are some famous funny dialogues by Tamil comedian Vadivelu. Can you guess which movie they’re from? Don’t worry about the spelling. Just spell it like it sounds, and the box will turn green.

At PyCon Indonesia, I spoke about a project we worked on with the World Mosquito Program. The World Mosquito Program (WMP) modifies mosquitoes with a bacteria – Wolbachia. This reduces their ability to carry deadly viruses. (It makes me perversely happy that we’re infecting mosquitoes now 😉.) Modifying mosquitoes is an expensive process. With a limited set of “good mosquitoes”, it is critical to find the best release points that will help them replicate rapidly. ...

There are more Bollywood actors in Hollywood. Some are even turning down Hollywood roles. So we wondered: How easily can a Bollywood actor connect to a Hollywood actor? As part of the Oct 2019 Gramener data story hackathon, Anand, Kishore, and Niyas created a Jolie No 1 — a data video where [Govinda](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Govinda_(actor) announces (in our imagination) that he will act with Angelina Jolie in Jolie No 1, but declines to comment on who introduced them. We picked a theme first The hackathon theme was “movies”. We explored 5 themes: ...

Here are beautiful first interludes from Harris Jayaraj's Tamil film songs. Can you guess which movie they’re from? Don’t worry about the spelling. Just spell it like it sounds, and the box will turn green.

Ganes and I created a data movie on speed-cubing records as part of a Gramener hackathon. Here’s a video of us talking about how we created it. Anand: We picked the Rubik’s cube story for this hackathon. Tell me more about how this excited you. Ganes: Since my son started solving the Rubik’s cube a few months back, I’ve been fascinated with these competitions. I still don’t know how to solve it, but I like watching it. ...

Contronyms are words that have two meanings that are the opposite of each other. Sanction, for example, may mean restricting something (e.g. sanction against imports) or approving something (e.g. sanctioning imports). Scan may mean to look at cursorily (e.g. scan a document) or look at in detail (e.g. scan an X-Ray) Fine may mean excellent (e.g. fine wine) or average (e.g. the wine’s fine). I enjoyed this list of 75 contronyms.

Minecraft lets you connect to a websocket server when you’re in a game. The server can receive and send any commands. This lets you build a bot that you can … (well, I don’t know what it can do, let’s explore.) Minecraft has commands you can type on a chat window. For example, type / to start a command and type setblock ~1 ~0 ~0 grass changes the block 1 north of you into grass. (~ means relative to you. Coordinates are specified as X, Y and Z.) ...

One problem I’ve had in Markdown is rendering a content in columns. On Bootstrap, the markup would look like this: <div class="row"> <div class="col">...</div> <div class="col">...</div> </div> How do we get that into Markdown without writing HTML? On Python, the attribute lists extension lets you add a class. For example: This is some content {: .row} … renders <p class="row">This is some content</p>. But I can’t do that to multiple paragraphs. Nor can I next content, i.e. add a .col inside the .row. ...

Here are dialogues from Nagesh's films. Can you guess which movie they're from? Don’t worry about the spelling. Just spell it like it sounds, and the box will turn green. Comments Hema Subramanian 2 Jan 2021 9:37 pm: Didn’t get 5 6 and 7