Top 10 lists

I read 51 new books in 2024 (about the same as in 2023, 2022, 2021, and 2020.) But slightly differently. I only read Manga this year. Fullmetal Alchemist (Vol 12 - 27). What started off as a childishly illustrated children’s book evolved into a complex, gripping plot. Attack on Titan (Vol 1 - 34). I read it while I watched the TV Series (reading first, then watching). It started explosively and the pace never let up. I had to take breaks just to breathe and calm my nerves. The sheer imagination and subtlety is brilliant. It’s hard to decide which is better—the manga (book) or the anime (TV). The TV series translates the book faithfully in plot and in spirit. It helped that I read each chapter first, allowing me to imagine it, and then watch it, which told me what all I missed in the book. I absolutely would not have understood the manga without watching the anime. ...

I read 52 books in 2023 (about the same as in 2022, 2021 and 2020.) Here’s what I read (best books first). Fiction The Kingkiller Chronicle. I picked it up before a flight to London in 2014. Read it through the flight. Read it late into the night at our AirBnB. Skipped my workshop prep. Read it during the workshop breaks. Read it on the flight back. And I re-read it every year or two. The language is beautiful and the story gripping. I feel miserable this series isn’t complete. ...

From The Extended Mind I learnt that our environment shapes our thinking more than I’d expected. That we can arrange our environment to extend our thoughts. In 2023, each month I changed something in my environment to see: What does “changing my environment involve”? What can I change? Will I succeed? Does it affect my thoughts? Can I track this? Here are the results. ...

I add book recommendations to my GoodReads – To-read list. Then I sort by rating and pick the first one I like to read. In 2023, I’m reshaping my environment. Picking books I usually won’t pick. (Read The Unknown Unknown: Bookshops and the Delight of Not Getting What You Wanted if you want to be similarly inspired.) So here are 4 approaches I’m adding to my process. Algorithmic. Sort Kaggle books based on popularity, rating, and age. Pick the top 10 (or 50) Serendipitous. Go to bookstores and libraries. Pick the most popular books Award-winning. Pick from the Pulitzer, Booker, Nobel, Hugo, and other award winners Challenges. Pick from Popsugar, Book Riot, Goodreads, The 52 Book Club, and other challenges FYI, here are algorithmic results (for books with 100+ ratings and a 4+ average on Goodreads): ...

I read 52 books in 2022 (about the same as in 2021 and 2020.) Here’s what I read (best books first). Mind-blowing Man’s Search for Meaning. Viktor Frankl. It’s 75 years old and timeless. Who we are is independent of what’s around us. This book shows us why. This story is a great example. My best book of 2022. The Paper Menagerie. Ken Liu. I cried all the way from the beach to home. The skies joined me. It’s short. Touching. It healed a wound I can’t speak about. The most touching book of 2022. The Data Detective. Tim Harford. 10 powerful, down-to-earth rules for how to make sense of data, and avoid being fooled. I plan to incorporate every one of these into my talks. The most useful guide to working with data in 2022. The Extended Mind. Annie Murphy Paul. Explains how we think not just inside our brains, but in our bodies, in our physical environment, and in the people around us. The most effective guide to transforming my thinking in 2022. Life-changing ...

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 ...

My most-used apps in 2020 were: Everything. Locates files. Like Finder. Fast and brilliant. Chrome. But Edge is pretty good, and I’m using it for secondary accounts. Visual Studio Code. It’s my note-taker, TODO list, outliner, and IDE. Minecraft. I’m addicted. PowerPoint. I use it to make & edit videos, not just slides. Zoom. Thanks to the lockdown. Breakout rooms are great. Mail. It uses under 50MB. Gmail takes 250MB. VLC. It still plays all formats, but I’m looking for a replacement. Seafile. Our private Dropbox. AutoHotKey. The best macro tool, but hard to use. The new utilities I started using recently are: ...

My Goodreads 2020 Reading Challenge target is 50 books. I’m at 45/50, with little hope of getting to 50. (I managed 25/24 in 2019.) The 10 non-fiction books I read (most useful first) are below. The Lean Startup by Eric Reis. The principle of Build - Measure - Learn is useful everywhere in life too, not just in startups. Never Split The Difference by Chriss Voss. Shares principle-driven strategies to convince people. The 4 Disciplines of Execution by McChesney, Covey & Huling. Teaches how to build execution rigor in an organization. A bit long at the end, but the first section is excellent. Sprint by Jake Knapp. A detailed step-by-step guide to running product development sprints that you can follow blindly. How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams. Dilbert’s author shares his strategies for life. Very readable, intelligent, and slightly provocative, but always interesting. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni. Written as a story (like The Goal). Talks about the 5 problems in teams and how to overcome them. The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle. Explains the elements of strong cultures - belongingness, shared vulnerability, and shared purpose. Data-Driven Storytelling by Nathalie Henry Riche et al. Shares the latest points of view on telling data stories. My team and I read these chapters as a group. Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek. Inspiring when I read it, but I don’t remember what it said. Deep Work by Cal Newport. Shares tactics to focus. Practical and useful. I also started, by haven’t finished these four: ...

Every few years, I review the software I use. Here are some of my earlier lists. Right now, among browsers, Chrome is my primary browser. What’s interesting is that IE 11 has overtaken Firefox in terms of usage. That’s partly because we’re working with Microsoft a lot, but also because Firefox has a number of weird bugs like IE6 used to have, and is slowly lagging in the race. Next to browsers, I spend most of my time on the command prompt. I use Console2 for tabbed console windows. Given the number of command prompts I open, this is often necessary. I use bash in Cygwin as the default shell. Haven’t had the need for PowerShell. ...

When you start typing in the address bar, Chrome suggests a link to visit, based on frecency. What do my recommendations look like? A is for airtel.in/smartbyte-s/page.html – the page where you can check your bandwidth usage. I used to check it infrequently until I upgraded to a 125GB connection. Now I check it every few days and feel miserable that I’ve nowhere near used up my quota. This has coerced me to watch many Telugu movies, of which I don’t understand a word. B is for blog.gramener.com – I blog there on data stories. The last month or so has been fairly active thanks to the elections. C is for calendar.google.com – which has become primarily a shared calendar. It was always indispensible to manage my time. Now it helps my colleagues pick when to call me. Right now, my calendar has events booked about two months in advance. D is for docs.google.com – for effectively one single purpose: shared spreadsheets. This is such a common and powerful use case, and I’m surprised it hasn’t become much easier to use. E is for epaper.timesofindia.com – some of our content has been published by The Economic Times, and I keep doing ego-searches in the print edition. But close behind is eci.nic.in which I’ve been scraping a lot, and election-results.ibnlive.in.com which we created for CNN-IBN. F is for flipkart.com – not facebook.com. I’m not often on Facebook. G is for gramener.com. Naturally. (It’s not surprising that it’s not google.com: I search directly from the address bar.) H is for handsontable.com – a library that I’ve been using a lot recently, followed by html5please.com that tells me which HTML5 features are ready for use. I is for ibn.gramener.com – another property we created, but it only just beats irctc.co.in. J is for join.me – a clean way to share your screen without the audience having to install anything (though you the sharer do have to install the software.) K is for kraken.io – an amazingly efficient image compressor. As you might have guessed, I lead a strange life. L is for learn.gramener.com – our Intranet. Sorry, you can’t access this one. M is for mail.google.com. I’ll probably be moving away from gmail as a backend this weekend to Mail-in-a-box, though. Google’s pulling the plug on Google Reader has shaken my faith. N is for news.ycombinator.com. When I’m bored and want to watch something while I have dinner, I don’t open YouTube. I open Hacker News. O is for odc.datameet.org – the Open Data Camp. I’m quite into open data. P is for pay.airtel.com, but if you ignore the number of bills I pay, it would be pandas.pydata.org, the home page of a remarkable data processing library. Q is for quirksmode.org, PPK’s remarkable browser-compatibility guide R is for reader.s-anand.net, my self-hosted RSS reader. It used to be reader.google.com, but Google let me down there. S is for s-anand.net – this blog. T is for twitter.com. Unlike Facebook, I don’t dislike Twitter so much. U is for underscorejs.org. Clearly I need to get a life. V is for visualizing.org. They have a number of interesting data visualisations. W is for webpagetest.org – it helps measure the speed of web pages. X is for xem.github.io. I’ve probably visited this page once, but it’s the only one in my recent history that starts with X Y is for youtube.com. I lied. I spend an order of magnitude more time watching Telugu movies on YouTube than on Hacker News. Z is for zoemob.com. Again, a page I visited only once, but there’s nothing else in Z at the moment. Comments Software I currently use | s-anand.net 9 May 2014 6:24 pm (pingback): […] course, some of my apps apps have moved online, and my earlier post on the A-Z of my browsing history covers that. But there are a few applications that I’ve hosted which I must talk about. […] chandigarh 13 Oct 2015 7:27 pm: you can delete your web search history through link https://history.google.com/history

Time for a new laptop, and to replace software. Here’s my new list. A lot has changed in the last 5 years. Mainly, I use the browser, cygwin and Portable Apps a lot more. (The last is to escape jailers, not registry bloat.) Media Chrome [new]: For browsing and development. Fast, light, and stays out of the way. Firefox: I keep it just for printing. Chrome sucks at printing. Media Player Classic: Nothing against it, but I decided to stick to just one app, which is… VLC: Continues to be the best media player, IMHO. WinAmp: I just manage my playlists as M3U files, using Python programs. Audacity: Still the easiest way to record audio. Camstudio: The simplest free portable screen capture software I know. PicPick [new]: Lightweight, powerful screenshot grabber VirtualDub: Not the simplest, but still good for what I need: cropping and joining video. MediaCoder [new]: Good for video/audio conversions. Maybe I’ll install this later. Foxit Reader: The simples free portable PDF reader I know, better than… NitroPDF Reader [new]: … which is good for Printing PDFs – better than… Primo PDF: … which has trouble on rare occasions. Microsoft Reader: I have a lot of ebooks in .LIT. Kindle for PC [new]: I don’t own a Kindle, but I’ve bought a few ebooks. Paint.NET: Good enough for cropping and adjusting colours on images. Windows Live Writer [new]: The best way to write this blog WYSIWYG Inkscape [new]: I occasionally edit vector graphics. Google Earth. Google Maps is good enough. ImgBurn: I no longer use CDs/DVDs. Just flash drives and external hard disks. Picasa: I’ve stopped browsing pictures. No time. Sharing ...

Time for the annual update on software I use. This time, I’ve got Wakoopa to help me with the relative usage as well. Here’s the top 100 software / web apps I’ve used recently, and how long I spent on them. Gmail 186361 seconds Notepad++ 130641 seconds Google Chrome 79879 seconds GitHub 43780 seconds Windows Command Prompt 40967 seconds Microsoft Excel 32578 seconds Microsoft Word 27067 seconds Microsoft PowerPoint 27059 seconds Windows Explorer 20902 seconds Google Docs 17989 seconds Foxit Reader 17001 seconds Microsoft Outlook 15855 seconds Internet Explorer 15830 seconds Google Search 15616 seconds Skype 14423 seconds Media Player Classic 14159 seconds Google Groups 7061 seconds Google Calendar 5531 seconds Wesabe 2814 seconds Google Analytics 2665 seconds TeamViewer 1985 seconds RGui 1875 seconds LinkedIn 1528 seconds YouTube 1400 seconds Stack Overflow 1167 seconds Acrobat Connect 964 seconds Kongregate 914 seconds HTML Help 871 seconds PicPick 790 seconds Zoundry Raven 684 seconds Mockingbird 657 seconds Twitter 655 seconds iStockphoto 590 seconds 7-Zip 584 seconds Buzznet 552 seconds Inkscape 516 seconds Bitbucket 499 seconds Microsoft Visio 496 seconds Paint.NET 474 seconds IrfanView 461 seconds Tableau Public 436 seconds µTorrent 435 seconds HandBrake 422 seconds Check Point Endpoint Security 411 seconds Windows Task Manager 385 seconds Microsoft Project 372 seconds IETester 347 seconds Google Maps 340 seconds eBay 310 seconds Spokn 270 seconds Firefox 269 seconds Google Calendar Sync 259 seconds Windows Calculator 247 seconds PayPal 246 seconds JsonView 220 seconds Windows Live Writer 184 seconds Junction Link Magic 152 seconds WinDirStat 142 seconds Kindle 139 seconds XAMPP 127 seconds Wakoopa 105 seconds Dropbox 100 seconds Office Help Viewer 99 seconds PrimoPDF 94 seconds PuTTY 84 seconds Python 80 seconds Flavors.me 75 seconds Google Sites 71 seconds Process Explorer 70 seconds Windows Volume Control 63 seconds Wikipedia 58 seconds Nitro PDF Reader 57 seconds Management Console 47 seconds PythonWin 45 seconds Windows Based Script Host 45 seconds WinDiff 45 seconds VLC Media Player 39 seconds ClipX 35 seconds Windows Installer 35 seconds The Internet Movie Database 32 seconds ImageShack 31 seconds WordPad 25 seconds TeraCopy 22 seconds Skype Portable 22 seconds Picasa Web Albums 20 seconds Syncplicity 17 seconds Google Reader 16 seconds Google Talk 15 seconds VirtualDub 12 seconds Adobe Manager 10 seconds FreeCall 10 seconds Notepad 8 seconds Codebase 5 seconds eTrust ITM 5 seconds Google Checkout 5 seconds GDI++ Tray Notifier 5 seconds ImgBurn 2 seconds Virtual Desktop Manager 2 seconds Tesseract201 2 seconds TortoiseHg 0 seconds Comments Somnath 1 Mar 2011 4:38 pm: More time on Gmail than browsers - how are you accessing Gmail then? S Anand 6 Mar 2011 8:51 pm: @Somnath, mostly breaking through proxies – see http://goo.gl/6wyg0 and http://goo.gl/DNtui. @Thej, no idea I’m afraid, but before I used Wakoopa, I was using https://gist.github.com/857652 which worked just fine, except that it wasn’t social and didn’t have the pretty charts. You might want to tweak that for Linux. Thejesh GN 5 Mar 2011 5:29 pm: It doesnt run on Linux (only PC n MAC). Anything for me? Shankar V 28 Feb 2011 3:10 am: hi Anand how do you generate this list? Wakoopa is blocked at Infy. So could not check that one out. Also, surprised to note that you are a Chrome user against FF. I have used both and my preference is still FF. S Anand 28 Feb 2011 6:38 am: I work out of client sites – so sites aren’t blocked. Plus, it includes software from my home laptop. I shifted to Chrome a while ago, even for development, mostly because it’s faster than FF. The only thing I miss is Firebug, really.

I’m totally hooked to portable apps now. You don’t need admin rights to install them. You can run them off a USB stick. They won’t make your machine slower. All the reasons not to install an application vanish. PortableApps.com is a good starting point. For what it’s worth, here are my portable apps by category (most used on top). Platforms Firefox. If you’re using IE6, please die. Lack of admin access is no longer an excuse. Cygwin brings you UNIX commands to Windows. Portable Ubuntu run Ubuntu as a window in Windows. Tiny utilities ...

While hunting for a VoIP service to call India, I found a fair variety of services that I'm sharing below. FreeCall appears the cheapest when calling India, at 2.5¢ per minute to a land line. I'm listing the rate from London to Chennai below. I'm not sure of the difference in voice quality between these. The only one I've tried is VoIPDiscount, which is not too bad. As a benchmark, remember that Reliance offers a calling card at around 7.3¢ per minute. ...

Between July 17th and August 22nd, I saw 57 movies and read 7 books. There were Saturdays when I watched four movies back-to-back. (I tried five. Couldn’t stay awake.) Amidst this, I also cooked, cleaned, shopped… and went to office. (Oh yes, I was working 10 hours a day.) And managed to build some interesting sites which I’ll release in a while. But first, let me share the books with you. ...

Now that I'm well on my way to watching the Top 250 movies on IMDb, I'm slowly turned my attention to fiction. My interest is mainly in the Fantasy & Science Fiction area. Unfortunately, I don't know of any list like the IMDb Top 250, but there are a few awards that could take the place of the Oscars for books. That's probably a good place to start. The most popular awards in Science Fiction are the Hugo award and Nebula award, followed by the Philip K Dick award, John W. Campbell award, Arthur C Clarke award and other awards. I collated a list of all the awards (from LocusMag) into the spreadsheet below ...

Since I like Tamil songs and statistics so much, I did some analysis on the ~1,400 Tamil songs I'd listened to in 2006. The trends are around the length of a typical film song are interesting. For example: Songs have gotten longer over time. On average, a song in the 60s was 4 minutes. A song in the 2000s is 5 minutes. Each decade adds about 14 seconds to the length of a song. ...

Here are the top 1000 most popular movies on the Internet Movie database, along with their ratings and number of votes. I've also marked whether I've seen them or not, as of today. This list, incidentally, is part of my source for the post on popular lousy movies. Here is the Excel list of Top 1000 movies on IMDb. Comments Arch 1 Dec 2006 10:14 am: Your site is too good.I browse thru so many blogs every other day, but hav found nothing as entertaining and as informative as this one. U must be really gifted fella…Y dont u post some pics of ur kid … err 1 Dec 2006 10:04 pm: is to do. S Anand 1 Dec 2006 10:35 pm: Thanks, Arch. I haven’t gotten around to posting any family stuff. No specific reason. Maybe I will… Michelle 5 Dec 2006 12:36 pm: You have been writing movies, do you have top 10 books? DeuceLee 11 Dec 2009 2:37 am: Hi, I really love your imdb top 1000. Seriously it’s great info. Can you get an updated version from imdb and swivel? Looks like it’s been a while (2006). :-) Andreas Beer 20 Oct 2010 4:38 pm: Dude, you seriously should watch Yojimbo! Masterpiece! :D

If you plot all movies by their number-of-votes on IMDb and their rating on IMDb, you get the chart below. Movies with more votes usually have a higher rating. I was interested two things: Which are the unpopular, but good (highly-rated), movies? Which are the popular, but lousy, movies? The answer to the first question is: there are no unpopular good movies. The cluster of dots on the top-left (in red) are not movies – they’re TV shows (Band of Brothers, Pride and Prejudice, Arrested Development). ...

And so, thanks to Infosys Consulting being spun off as a separate legal entity in the UK, I got my new laptop. (Because our old laptops were legally the assets of Infosys Technologies Ltd, and not Infosys Consulting Inc. Weirder things have happened, but who’s complaining?) My old Toshiba Portege A200 has been replaced by a Dell Latitude D420 (which I was dreaming for, after having just read Jeff’s post on big laptops). ...