Day 52 - A Hexahedral mesh in Ansys; Reddit Android clients comparison

Today was almost like yesterday, continued. More LaTex editing, more Ansys simulations inside Static Structural. It’s been so long since I saw YouTube tutorials for things (I think the last thing I saw them was for figuring out how Python’s IDLE worked! That was 5 years ago, I guess. I had no clue about what a Python shell was.) It’s surprising how easy it is to find Ansys tutorials. It probably tells people that it’s an insanely complex software.

I am sure it’s for good reason, but couldn’t it be made just a little bit easier? All I wanted was a fine hexahedral mesh. I had to watch 3 tutorials to figure it out, and it was actually a very... Read More

Day 51 - Writing tex, music I heard through the day, r/BigLittleLies and bad critics

I spent most of today staring at a tex document inside vim. I was listening to some different kind of music throughout the day actually. I started with RHCP’s Stadium Arcadium. Specifically, the three songs Stadium Arcadium, Hey and Snow. I LOVE Hey. “HEY, Oh yeah, How long?”

Then, I switched over to The Neighbourhood’s #icanteven, which is a nice upbeat rap included song. The beat is really good to get you out of sleep and really concentrate on the text on your screen. Or anything else, really. Now, I am listening to Arctic Monkeys. I somehow always end up listening to them. Either AM or Favourite Worst Nightmare or Suck It and See. One of those three albums. Their... Read More

Day 50 - HALF WAY MARK, tweets_analyzer repository

HALF WAY THERE!

I have been writing a daily blog post for the past 50 days. A lot happened and through that time, and I will probably write a summary of all of it once I am totally done with the #100DaysOfWriting challenge.

Today, I ran the x0rz/tweets_analyser repository using a Twitter API key and I must say that the data that it threw out was very very fun!

Of course, I first analyzed my Twitter account: @_icyflame

In the timings that I have tweeted in most over the past 1000 tweets (in 372 days or there abouts), I have NEVER tweeted between 3 am - 4 am and between 5 am and 7 am. I would have believed... Read More

Day 49 - Western Groups in the wee hours, MFQP PR 30, Homeland finale

Today is going to be an interesting day. My day isn’t over yet, not in theory anyway. The Western Groups Interhall event is going to happen in about 4 hours(?) from now. There’s no way to know when it would happen.

I finally opened PR #30: Add ability to pre-fill the search bar from URL param. This particular change has been on my fork of this repository for quite a long time. It should find it’s way into the repository’s master branch soon. The most important functionality that it would add to MFQP would be the addition of mfqp as a search engine in Chrome! So, typing mfqp TAB query ENTER should complete the search. Earlier, the... Read More

Day 48 - Updating my RSA keys to 4096 bit after reading Gert's article

I came across this article yesterday, which urges everyone to move from RSA to Ed25519, EC-based public keys. Totally legit article, and covers all possible corner cases.

I was using 2048 bits RSA keys till now, I have updated them to a 4096 bit key now. An Ubuntu 14.04 LTS server refuses to accept Ed25519 keys. When specifying the pubkey protocols that it understands, it says rsa, 535, blen and one other suite. The OpenSSH version is 6.6, and the post says that anything about 6.5 should support Ed25519 keys. I need to investigate this.

There is a sherr size difference in the RSA keys and the Ed25519 keys. Although both afford the same amount of security,... Read More

Day 47 - Updated About page after 2 years, Homeland 6.11 complicates the TV show more

I updated my About page. I should have done that a long time ago, I last updated that page on March 31, 2015. That’s two years and 1 week before today! A HUGE amount of time in which my outlook about a lot of things has changed. I glanced at the diff again and I noticed the change in the tone of the text in that page. Having written history to compare yourself to past selves is an interesting experience, sometimes my past naivete intrigues me in the same way that understanding after learning something, it’s hard to imagine a time when didn’t know that thing. I am pretty sure that whole situation is called something, I don’t know what... Read More

Day 46 - Re-watching Seinfeld on Amazon Prime - The Stall and The Stake-Out

I set a goal to read 40 books this year on Goodreads at the start of this year. Last year, I read 30 and I did that pretty peacefully (December was totally free and I crammed about 5 more to go over the goal to 35). Now, I am “on track”, which means that if I don’t finish the book this week (week 14 of the year) then I will be “behind the schedule”. THAT is going to happen. This sounds so much like the iconic Taken scene:

This was a completely new take to action cinema, the hero always used to RUN for the person being kidnapped, reach there on time, or after.... Read More

Day 45 - r/place shuts down after 72 hours, WHY was it created?, Emma is an ENIGMA

If you didn’t know about r/place, I will give you a lowdown on it. It first started as an empty canvas apparently. When I went to it, there was a lot of pixel art there already. Anyone can place a pixel anywhere, with one catch: you can only place a pixel once every 10 (later 5) minutes. This is how the canvas looked at the very end, about a couple hours ago when r/place crashed and the whole project was ended. Initially, I thought this was a social experiment to prove that there are more constructive art-makers on reddit than there are trolls who only want to destroy everything good and honest. Was it, though? I... Read More

Day 44 - Learning vim, installing plugins and spending time on tooling

So, yesterday I wrote a couple of scripts. These are mainly to make the counting of the posts easier. Till now, in the month of march the post number was simply the date + 11, but now and going forward it will be pretty hard to keep track of this number and at the same time save a few keystrokes in opening the editor and typing the number in, removing the TODO tags from the template. Anyway, the ruby script was fun to implement. It probably doesn’t need to be this big(?), I just wanted to be sure that I would get the right date for the post on the first attempt itself and I won’t have... Read More

Day 43 - MISSED; Clock issues on Windows-Ubuntu Dual Boot

Ah, this is going to be my sixth MISSED post. The irony of it all is that yesterday, I really had a topic to write about. A topic that a friend asked me about earlier in the day and one that I have faced many times myself. Uh, irony.

Managing your Clock on Windows-Ubuntu Dual Boot

Switching over to Windows and seeing the wrong time or switching to Ubuntu and seeing the wrong time, it’s all pretty irritating. It keeps happening, there’s no easy way to fix that, this is my recipe. It’s pretty easy, I think.

1. Turn off the Update time from Internet option on all your operating systems
2. Boot into Windows, and open the registry editor. (Read More