Weekly Letter 22/52
Hello world
I had great time in Bangalore. Met a lot of friends and made new acquaintances. One such acquaintance is Balu Babu. He runs Absurdity Central, a hacker community in Bangalore. His talk at FOSS-United Bangalore on hardware and 3D printing was very inspiring. At the beginning of this year, I got a Raspberry Pi for some self-hosting and to learn more of hardware. He reminded me that I had taken rather a long break from it. So, I resumed my hardware learning. Started with building a morse code blinker. It takes any sentence as an input and the LED blinks corresponding morse code. Here’s a video of me telling “hello world” :)
And then I worked on push buttons. Seemed simple but it required reading up some theory. I’m journaling all my learnings here - IoT Github
Looking forward to more learnings. I’m awaiting my HAM license. After which, I think I can explore something in the intersection of electronics and HAM radio. Balu Babu told me about SDR - Software Defined Radio. Let’s see!
I was part of a panel discussion at FOSS United Bangalore. My notes from the discussion are here: FOSS & Public Policy
I completed Tapi Dharmarao’s “Pelli” (Marriage). I wrote about it here - Link. I was initially expecting a negative take on the institution of marriage. But I felt he argued to recognize it is a human-made institution and subscribe to it for right reasons. Nanda and I once recorded our long phone conversation on the same topic. Got reminded of that.
A few lines I liked reading this week:
“If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, that is a sign that you are subconsciously aware of having no good reason for thinking as you do. If someone maintains that two and two are five, or that Iceland is on the equator, you should feel pity rather than anger, unless you know so little of arithmetic or geography that his opinion shakes your own contrary conviction. The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.” — Bertrand Russel
Reputation is a form of wealth.