This is definitely going to be unique. I am writing from an airport. Yeah, typing stuff on a laptop (even if it is gibberish or this) is an experience worth recording somewhere. I am in the Calcutta Airport, waiting to get on a flight to Chennai in about 90 minutes from now.
The shenanigans of gettting to the airport are hard enough, if you live in IIT Kharagpur or studied there. You get on a taxi from the institute to the KGP train station, a train to Howrah (one of Calcutta’s train stations), then get on a taxi from Howrah to the airport. There are so many legs you must go through to do a simple 2 hour flight.
This is one of the posts that I hope to be proud of when I am done with this 100 days of writing marathon.
For a long time, moods and music have been closely connected. I think temperatures are too. Stay with me.
On a hot summer day (hot is about 35-40 degrees celsius, here in India), listening to an Arctic Monkeys song that is racing through is hard. I might listen to it for a bit, but I eventually end up feeling hot. Especially, songs from Favourite Worst Nightmare. The best example is If You Were There, Beware.
The songs starts out slightly less heavier than it gets, which makes it a bit...
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Some more bizarre things happened today, 27th April, 2017. Not so bizarre, now that I know that Internet shutdowns were common. This is definitely the first internet shutdown that I have seen in the papers. Actually noticed. Kashmir now has a block on 21 social networks for the next month. These are the social networks:
I just had to laugh when I saw Tumblr, Pinterest and Snapchat on that list. Seriously, who is sharing even the anticipated objectionable materials.
More bad news for LastPass’ security team and all users of a password manager that is either Lastpass itself or something else. I have never been comfortable giving anyone access to my passwords. Even...
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Ah, I have been running two days late now. Right now is 27th April, 1733. This post should have been out on 25th April before I slept. I came down with a bad cold and fever yesterday. So, now I have to manufacture two posts in quick succession. I still have one more exam to give tomorrow. Nah, no big deal!
IIT Delhi’s website got attacked, alongwith a lot of other Indian websites. Now, apparently, it wasn’t the website servers themselves that got hacked but the DNS provider, ERNET that got hacked. And after the DNS providers got hacked, they remained in that state for about 12 hours.
Ironically, on the same day, only a few hours before this fiasco,...
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At school and college, there is a laid back approach to exams. 5 exams in a month, in some places. Some study leave before the first exam: in the order of a week to a month for practical exams. Lots and lots of free time. Before the exams begin, before each exam. All of this is wasted time.
Not here. Both the mid term and the end term exam sessions are 7-8 working days. They generally start on a Monday and end the next Tuesday. Sometimes, they start on a Thursday and end the next Friday. There’s no official “study leave”. Professors start to wind up their teaching about a week before the last class if they have planned it...
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Handmaid’s Tale was released as an audiobook. That’s not the best part of the news. The best part: It is narrated by CLAIRE DANES. OH MY!
I found the above excerpts on Audible’s Soundcloud, and they are DOPE!. This audiobook also has some new material, that was added by Margaret Atwood herself!
The TV series of this book is going to premiere on 26th April, in 3 days. The trailer for that series (which is going to be on Hulu) is also stirring. There’s a lot of new material for this book coming out this year. AH, SUCH GREAT TIMES!
I was rather stunned with the Audiobook version that Claire Danes performed. I have...
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Yesterday, a friend shared [this Quora answer]https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-psychological-facts-that-people-dont-know-1/answer/Dorottya-T%C3%B3th) which ended up with it appearing on my news feed.
I read the answer and instantly disliked the contentions made by the author. I was going to let it go, until someone asked me to ellaborate on why I disliked the answer. I had to think about this for just a bit, after which I came up with this extremely long answer:
Ah, thanks for making me think more about it! :D
First of all, if writing was Tom’s true dream, he ought to have done something concrete towards it. But let’s not talk about that, because he probably has a lot of reasons why he can’t do it.
This is going to be a rather short one. There was a suicide in IIT KGP today.
Everything seems trivial for now, it’s become a HORRIBLE DAY and it’s a horrible
thing to happen to someone.
Emma has been out of this blog for a few posts now. I have made absolutely no progress with it! Frustratingly, I am still stuck at around 38%. With exams Saturday, and 4 days of the next week, there is absolutely no way to read any more.
There was no resisting such news, no possibility of avoiding the influence of such a happy face as Mr. Weston’s, confirmed as it all was by the words and the countenance of his wife, fewer and quieter, but not less to the purpose.
– Mr. Weston just told Emma that Frank was going to visit the next day, at dinner time.
Okay, I read till about 40% in the past 15...
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2 days ago, I wrote this list about improving your security online and practices that you should follow. The last point on that list was Tape your webcam. The question that most people seem to have is:
Are there any existing exploits which can turn on your webcam without turning on the light that is there next to it? How widespread are these lights?
Why should I tape the webcam if I have nothing to hide? (This was the argument used by Shailene Woodley’s character in the movie Snowden (2016)).
I think the FBI director Comey answered both these the best:
I saw something in the news, so I copied...
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