Editing text #

I didn’t really care what my editor was until I met neel and pritam in my previous workplace.

looking forward to play w

• Urgent AF
• Sooner the better
• Lazy Sunday

• 95% doom emacs(heavily customized), 5% neovim
• I think I spent half of my year last year fighting with emacs, had me learn little bit of elisp and I am not sure if it was worth it, but if there’s one thing I cannot live without, it has to be org-mode. helluvadrug.
• For documentation lookup inside emacs, eldoc (using elglot), M-x man, dev-docs custom bindings for eww.
• When I quickly need to check the contents of a repo, I use GitHub1s  , pretty neat stuff. I use Replit for quick prototypes etc, pretty neat but need to get back offline as soon as I need to do anything that involves more than 2 files(when writing from scratch).

Interface and dependencies #

looking forward to play w

• Urgent AF
• Sooner the better
• Lazy Sunday
  • Checking how test containers  and dev containers  compare to my LXD workflow
  • Checkout NixOS 
  • I am planning to write some aliases and function wrapper around ffmpeg  and imagemagick for regular stuff. Most probably there are good tools out there, have to check.

• fish is my shell, have a love hate relationship ngl.
• pacman and paru mostly have me covered
• For different versions of stuff, I use asdf + direnv. I really like the global, local flexibility that asdf gives.
• For virtual environments, I use LXD system containers with a custom cloud-init script. It’s pretty neat. Thanks to the co-workers at my last workplace! (See my notes on lxd  )
• svu  is great for quick help on semantic versions
• entr  and running tests in watchmode is essential (also see this  )

JS/TS #

looking forward to play w

• Urgent AF
  • Getting better at Typescript
• Sooner the better
  • Experiment w workers  and nodejs threadpool libraries  .
• Lazy Sunday
  • Need to check what is unifiedjs 

useful/helpful links

• Info: Package Phobia  | bundlephobia 

Python #

looking forward to play w

• Urgent AF
  • Need to check fastapi  has to offer
• Sooner the better
  • Check memray and gaogaotiantian/viztracer 
• Lazy Sunday
  • Checkout tqdm and more-itertools, toolz
  • Check tuna  , jamesturk/jellyfish  (create something), networkx 
  • Use cog  in one of my projects, it’s the embed go thing in markdown that i used

useful/helpful links

• Info: PyPI Data 
• Reference: Common Gotchas 

• I use asdf + poetry for all my python virtual env setups. Even if it’s a project with a requirements.txt, I use poetry to create a venv there and pip install on it. I don’t think i’ll ever understand python virtual environments completely so I am going for the path of least resistance
• Understanding python’s import system  has done me wonders
• pudb with ipython is pretty neat for debugging
• I don’t have any linting, formatter preference honestly I just use the defaults that work with my editor setup. If any project needs specific style, the CI/CD system should catch it.
• Once joblib  was very useful to me but I can’t exactly remember when (also more-itertools)

Golang #

looking forward to play w

• Urgent AF
  • Try out failsafe-go 
  • Try out samber/lo  (lodash for go)
• Sooner the better
  • check autogold 
• Lazy Sunday
  • I don’t think I’ll immediately need it but gotraceui  looks neat

• Haven’t done anything in a while

C #

useful/helpful links

• References: C coding style 

Ocaml #

useful/helpful links

• References: OCaml Syntax Cheatsheet 

Web #

Working on web things is fun, I am terrible at anything that involves css but I think it’s pretty neat.

looking forward to play w

• Urgent AF
  • Really grokking HTTP, Headers, Cache, Cookies and Sessions
  • Experimenting w WebAssembly  , webworkers  other  web engineering fun.
  • Experiment w backends offering user auth, pocketbase  , supabase.
  • I think I need to explore webcomponts etc. what’s all the fuss about.
  • Also hypermedia. damn.
• Sooner the better
  • Experimenting w serverless functions (Mostly cf workers)
  • Faking libraries are great, need to see which one to use when. Candidates, json-server  , faker  , json-schema-faker  ,msw 
  • Explore more in web security side of things
  • Check out API testing stuff: stepci  , scanapi  , oha 
• Lazy Sunday
  • Check puck  , if we can do something similar for svelte
  • Elixir, Phoenix and LiveView. 
    • LiveView is different in a way that instead of using HTTP and large-grain data exchange, it uses websockets and sends fine-grained updates.

useful/helpful links

• Info/Exploration: caniuse  | Browserleaks  | KeyCDN Tools  | CSP Evaluator  | Authentication Test  | Request Catcher  | WebBrowserTools 
• References: rosettatype/hyperglot  | image codec  | DOM Events  | worker playground  | TLSFast  | Console Utilities API reference 
• CSS & Animations: Almanac  | Animista  | Type Scale  | Utopia  | shadcn/ui  | tailwind cheat 
• SVG: SVG Artista  | SVG Reference  | SVGcode 
• Toolchain: Import Map 
• API/Requests: httpbin  | REDbot Caching  | Mozilla Observatory 
• Better no-code: mmm.page 

• Everything I learn here becomes obsolete in about six months
• But I like the web and I want to build on it too
• I am too bad at anything involving CSS so, tailwindcss is my best friend here.
• I once tried doing react+vite+storybook with all the right config and other stuff, later I felt that I don’t want to be worrying about a static site so much. So static sites or semi-static sites are basically an org-mode export or a next.js site for me now.
• I think I learned react about 3 times and everytime, the documentation gets overhauled(good thing). But the last time I learned react, I took notes  .
• Don’t ask me about framework preferences. I don’t think I agree with myself here.
• I played around w using verb  for documenting api calls. I like it. It’s not suitable for all usecases but for some its gold. Otherwise insomnia or postman as required.
• Finally tried svelte with my wscribe-editor project, it was fun. But need to play with it more to have better gasp.

UI & Interface #

I like building small tools and usually they need interfaces.

looking forward to play w

• Urgent AF
  • CLI stuff: imtui  , Textualize  , tview  , bubbletea  , ink 
• Sooner the better
• Lazy Sunday
  • Check out GUI stuff: wailsapp/wails  , tauri  , fyne  , imgui  , lvgl 

Systems #

This includes all things systems.

looking forward to play w

• Urgent AF
• Sooner the better
  • Check if I can write scripts faster with google/zx 
• Lazy Sunday
  • I don’t know many c/cpp libraries but would try to use zpl-c/zpl  next time I get an opportunity to work on something similar.
  • I don’t play w proto stuff that much but think protodot could  be v.useful
  • Learn what multiformats  is about. Specifically interested in multibase.
  • Memory profiling is interesting, I never got to try gdb, rr  (tried rr, some issues in nixos), valgrind  and friends properly. So someday/someweek might hack around and see how these can be useful. Valgrind and Address sanitizers  , simpler tools like bytehound 
  • Cool tool to see changes before making, check it out 

useful/helpful links

• Debugging: godbolt  | explainshell  | Dogbolt 
• Reference: coreutils  | Sysctl Explorer  | procps-ng  | sh-bible  | Map of Linux 

Distributed systems & sync & offline #

looking forward to play w

• Urgent AF
• Sooner the better
  • Play w maelstrom  probably via the fly.io challenge
• Lazy Sunday
  • Check out stateright 
  • Play w sync libs yjs  and automerge 
  • Play w Replicache  , Ditto 

Network programming & P2P #

I love networks, I love p2p more.

looking forward to play w

• Urgent AF
  • Experimenting w websockets  , WebRTC  and other fun stuff
• Sooner the better
• Lazy Sunday
  • Check if shadow simulator  will be useful to run p2p/learning experiments

useful/helpful links

• Tools: BGP.Tools 

Programming languages #

looking forward to play w

• Urgent AF
  • ohm  looks super interesting. Can be useful for creative programming stuff aswell I think. (This is something i want to explore for bml transpilation aswell)
• Sooner the better
• Lazy Sunday
  • Make  rails 
  • Check this  , this  , and this 
  • Check semgrep 

Creative programming & HCI #

So these are things I am just starting to learn. Creative programming is something I want to do for fun, HCI is something that really interests me. I have syllabus entries for it aswell iirc.

looking forward to play w

• Urgent AF
• Sooner the better
  • Get started w creative programming, see notes  . Think it’ll be p5 for the start. Also check G9 
• Lazy Sunday
  • Create explorable explanations, check Idyll  . also want  to check cindy  , matter.js  and manim  , mathbox  , mafs  , Motion Canvas  , also check making of a circle 
  • Explore hypercard related  projects. vipercard 

useful/helpful links

• Reference: Web render benchmarks 
• Showcases: Explorable Explanations  | awesome-explorables  | wolframdemos 
• Helper tools: drawingbots  | SPACE TYPE  | shapecatcher 
• Layouts and elements: 98.css  | winbox  | RoughNotations  | cursor-effects  | omnio 

Database #

looking forward to play w

• Urgent AF
  • Check centerofci/mathesar  and see if can help in learning
  • Go through the excellent MySQL intermediate series by PlanetScale
• Sooner the better
  • Experimenting more with SQLite (and ecosystem), Postgres (and ecosystem), Clickhouse, DuckDB, Redis.
• Lazy Sunday
  • Check what’s PRQL  ’s about
  • Checkout sqlglot - sql parser 

useful/helpful links

• Resources: DB-Engines Ranking  | Database of Databases  | Troublesome words in SQL 
• PG: PG Lock Conflicts  | Postgres locks explorer  | PGTune  | PostgreSQL Observability  | postgresqlco  | pg-browser(wasm) 
• PG EXPLAIN viz: EXPLAIN Visualizer(pev)  | Explain Viz 

• I don’t play with DBs on the daily but plan to.

Data Engineering #

looking forward to play w

• Urgent AF
• Sooner the better
• Lazy Sunday
  • Try out steampipe 

• jq w ijq has been useful in the past. I think there are 2 totally different projects named ijq, it’s the one that I have installed. dasel was also pretty neat once.

Data Analysis/Viz #

looking forward to play w

• Urgent AF
  • Try viz platforms: Datawrapper  , Desmos  , ObservableHQ  , quarto  , rath 
• Sooner the better
  • CLI stuff 
  • Checkout streamlit  , gradio  and datapane 
• Lazy Sunday
  • Try viz tools: D3, SandDance  , ObservablePlots  , Vega  , plouc/nivo  .
  • Check out Directus  , baserow  , nocodb  if it can replace airtable for me.
  • Play w kats 
  • Check out Gephi Lite  , Perspective  , Quadratic  , marimo 
  • check nomic atlas 

useful/helpful links

• Showcases: Visualization Browser  | Flowing Media  | datavizproject 
• References: Eng Statistical Methods 

• I use Airtable extensively as my data-store for things. I’ll probably move to something else if I ever hit limits.
• Occasionally I’d use Datasette but I want to use more of it. esp the sqlite-utils stuff looks interesting.
• To explore datasets I use visidata. It is awesome  . Not only csv, parquet but also json, sqlite, postgres, shapefiles/mbtiles, pcap files! etc.

AI/ML experiments #

I by no means know anything about what’s happening in that space but I’ve been watching from far and I can tell, I cannot afford to blink. I have to take the dive sometime. I already have courses and stuff lined up and brushing up on math.

looking forward to play w

• Urgent AF
  • Properly checkout Huggingface  and what can I do with auto  ML? 
  • Check Web AI Model Testing 
• Sooner the better
  • Check if I can add semantic search to my wiki using txtai  and stenence transformers 
  • Check label-studio  and if I can use it for some of my usecases
• Lazy Sunday
  • whisper.cpp (also bark  ), llma.cpp  et al, Web LLM  looks  pretty sick.
  • Read nanoGPT  , check weightwatcher 
  • What’s up with paddle  paddle  and other  document  extraction  stuff  .

useful/helpful links

• Visualizers: netron  | Attention Viz  | Diffusion Explainer  | VRAM Calculator 
• Reference: Cloud GPU Guide  | Timeline of AI Models  | LLM Benchmarks 
• Leaderboards: OpenLLM  | HumanEval  | lmsys  | AlpacaEval  |oobabooga  | chatbot 
• Tools: chub  | lllmahub 

• When SD came out, played a lot with AUTOMATIC1111 

Archiving and Scraping #

looking forward to play w

• Urgent AF
  • I have some Scraping  and Archival  notes that I have to go through
• Sooner the better
  • Check webrecorder  and  friends 
  • Setup archivebox  , I feel guilty because I don’t contribute to the archive-warrior team and use their service heavily. I’ll 100% contribute once I start making money or something.
• Lazy Sunday
  • Check out out kiwix  , Internet in a Box  , piratebox  , dwebmirror 
  • I need to setup linkchecker in my sites, candidates are muffet  (used prev), deadlink  , lychee  , awesome_bot  and linkinator  . I also want to write my own link checker but if one of these work out, which i think it would g2g.

useful/helpful links

• Query: Quarry for Wikipedia 
• Bot detection tests: Bot / Headless Chrome Detection Tests  | Pixelscan  | Antibot  | CreepJS  | Detect WebGL Fingerprint 

• If the page is somewhat structured, Can use underlying parsers(lxml, html5lib, requests-html etc.) directly. See my Reconnaissance Checklist :)
• Playwright  : When requirement is rendered browser.
  • Playwright > Puppeter > Selenium
  • Randomize mouse movements, consistent combination of device to emulate, slow_mo option, brave browser etc
  • Support multiple web browsers, such as Chromium, Firefox, and Webkit-based Safari, out of the box
  • Suggestions: playwright_stealth  , Making Chrome Headless Undetectable  , recorder and codegen  , crawlee(anti-bot/scraping framework) 
• Scrapy  : Fist thing to reach out for.
  • Useful for complex projects that require scraping multiple sites in various ways. ez flow when no anti-bot.
  • Suggestions: scrapy-splash  , adv-scrapy-proxies 
• BS4
  • Minimal version of Scrapy with only a fraction of the functionality. Good for unstructured HTML pages
  • Use it for simple projects where all you need to do is scrape the elements of one web page.
  • Extensions: MechanicalSoup 
• cheerio  : Like BS4 but in Javascript
• colly  : Like Bs4 but in Golang, no js rendering.

Geo stuff #

I am interested in maps because it’s crazy how we managed to actually map the real world into some other form and reason about. It’s just mind blowing to me. Basically I think it’s a notation  and notations  are fascinating to me. Also I want to do a lot of geo based visualizations and study.

looking forward to play w

• Urgent AF
• Sooner the better
  • Checkout felt 
• Lazy Sunday
  • Check out Literate Visualization  for I am a sucker for Literate programming
  • Try out Every Door  and StreetComplete  and see which one I’d want to use
  • Check terra-draw 

useful/helpful links

• Map services: mapy.cz  (see this  ) | mapcomplete 
• Helper tools: OSM filter  | mapshaper  | BBBike extract 
• Reference: Web maps examples 
• Others: GPSJAM GPS/GNSS Interference Map 

• The openinfra  map is interesting
• I really need to make a page for all map stuff man

Infrastructure experiments #

looking forward to play w

• Urgent AF
  • Haven’t played w containers in a while, get upto speed w podman. Also check, distroless  and slim 
  • Check if I should include earthly  and ctop  to my workflow, also see cdebug 
  • Haven’t touched k8s in a while, kubectx & kubens  , k9s  , lens 
• Sooner the better
  • Check tunneling stuff 
  • think useful k8s-capacity  , netshoot  , krane  , kubiscan 
  • I plan to manage my personal infra via nomad  so need to check that out.
  • Play w localstack 
  • I like pipes and glued together scripts but node based automation is probably more useful in certain cases, checkout n8n 
• Lazy Sunday
  • some file sharing  tools
  • steampipe  looks interesting, problem is i do not have monie for cloud but would explore, would this work w localstack? hmm.
  • I currently use goatcounter free on my homepage, but I find it a little rigid for my workflow. I want to checkout alternatives and status pages for my other services etc.
    • Analytics: umami  , plausible  , ping  , fathom  , shynet  , analytics  , offen  , counterscale 
    • Status: uptime-kuma  , vigil  , gatus  , upptime 
  • Hit my stuff w k6 

useful/helpful links

• Reference: CPU info  | GPU info  | CIDR.xyz  | syscall table 
• Tools: traefik.me  (xip.io, wildcard dns) | dns.netmeister.org 
• Info: DOH providers 

• Ansible and Github actions are enough for my regular automation
• See my summary on Logging 
• I haven’t fiddled with infra stuff in a while but I plan to streamline things eventually.
• Mostly use github and bitbucket for hosting code repositories
• Netlify or Vercel for semi-static sites
• Have not got around selfhosting stuff yet, except locally on my pi/laptop when it makes sense.
• I mostly use github actions for personal projects, I found that the local runner act is only useful for basic things like debugging why some environment variable etc is not getting set, playing around with “contexts” etc. Neat tool when learning.

Observability stuff #

looking forward to play w

• Urgent AF
• Sooner the better
  • Need to check how useful continuous profiling be for my usecases, parca  , pyroscope 
  • Lot of logging tools, some of these I used once or twice but want to do proper check and write a comparison blogpost as a summary maybe and link it back here. angle-grinder  , logmine  , rhit  (nginx), goaccess  , lnav  , pidcat 
• Lazy Sunday
  • I see so many elastic search alternatives quickwit  , sonic  , zinc  , manticore  , toshi  , Typesense 

useful/helpful links

Prometheus references: exporterhub.io  | promql cheatsheet  | promlens(promql explainer)  | relabel explainer 

Security, Network and Tinkering #

looking forward to play w

• Urgent AF
  • Often find myself needing to inspect AF_UNIX, I am not sure how to do it w socat/tcpdump  but this one using ebpf looks interesting: sockdump 
• Sooner the better
  • Check out assh  for managing ssh stuff
  • Check cilium/pwru  and sniffnet  , also check if nudin/iptable_vis  does what it says because it’ll be so cool.
  • l7 tcpdump: netpeek 
• Lazy Sunday
  • Check sipcalc  , trystereo  , janus  , p2pcf 
  • Experiment w ghidra  , see notes 
  • These two identification tools look juicy pywhat  , ciphy  , unblob  .
  • Check if i need to replace qbittorrent w tribler  , think not.
  • Want to up  my  port scanning  game  and do some experiments on the  web  .

useful/helpful links

• Investigation: PimEyes  | Browserleaks  | εxodus android  | dnsdumpster 
• Vulnerabilities: OSV Database  | OpenCVE  (signed-in) | HackerOne Hackactivity 
• Tools: adhoc webhook 
• Reference: GTFOBins  | LOLBAS 
• Info: CPU info  | GPU info  | SLSA 
• Visual: CIDR.xyz  | Virtual x86 WASM 

• I have a dedicated page called Plumber Manual for things related to this.
• vulnix  is pretty cool, it lists the CVEs for your installed packages and then you can spend hours reading source-code of the dependencies you use and also learn a thing or two about security.

Planning/Brainstorming/Curation #

looking forward to play w

• Urgent AF
• Sooner the better
  • Understand 4+1 architectural view model  and c4model 
• Lazy Sunday
  • Try out some weird  mindmapping  like  tools. Also check whimsical  and eraser 
  • Experiment w  idea  drawing  tools  , Mermaid  being  talked  about  a lot. Also check typograms 

useful/helpful links

• Mindmapping: Kinopio 
• Diagramming: Swimlanes  , text-to-diagram-tools-comparision  🌟 (maybe selfhost this)
• Helpful tools: Loudreader 

• org-mode supremacy, notion and various markdown wiki veteran.
• I have a page dedicated to notetaking
• Github issues and Linear for project progress tracking.
• Key is to think how to think about the specific problem and choose tools based on that. Meta.

Communication and Discussions #

useful/helpful links

• Translations: Words2Emoji  | emojikitchen 
• Deciding: dont.build  | Bootstrapping Calculator 
• Search: netsplit  | IRC Driven  | subredditstats 

• I have a communities page but I have serious problems  communicating my thoughts, but that’s another story.
• Chat
  • Matrix: Element as the backend  , cinny as the chat ui
  • IRC: The Lounge  runs locally on my pi
  • Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, Discord
• Email
  • Gmail, Zoho Mail (K9, Delta Chat) w SimpleLogin 

Research #

I have never done any real research but I want to experiment things and write about those this formally. I have some nice stuff in syllabus which I’ll move over here when I go through them.

looking forward to play w

• Urgent AF
• Sooner the better
  • Check mathpix
• Lazy Sunday
  • I’ve been planning to setup a nice zotero & org-ref workflow  but I am not an academic and I am not exactly sure how things will play out.

useful/helpful links

• Search Engines: oa.mg  | scisapse  (claims to be better than GS) | searchArXiv  | semanticscholar  | googlescholar  | alphaxiv  | allenpaperfinder 
• Literature mapping: litmaps  , connectedpapers  , researchrabbit 
• Paper management: Zotero, fermatslibrary 
• Deep Research: scite  | elicit  | consensus  | Stanford STORM | Gemini/OpenAI/Perplixity/Grok Deep Research

See Aaron Tay’s Musings about librarianship : List of Literature mapping tools 

Match & Problem solving #

useful/helpful links

• Calculators: derivative  | integral 

Music #

• https://chord.rocks 

Art/Design #

looking forward to play w

• Urgent AF
• Sooner the better
  • Well, video editors. Long story. Anyway need to check LosslessCut  , Runway  , Source Filmmaker  , remotion  , FFrames 
  • Check muted  and making videos 
• Lazy Sunday
  • Experiment more with MagicaVoxel
  • Experiment w pixel editors, rx  , pixelcraft  , piskel  , aseprite 
  • Try creating some posters with sharkdp/binocle  and do some weird  shit

I wants to do art/design but not at the moment. I also wanted to make weird game videos using assets etc (Neel, if you ever read this, yeah still at it). But I might have to pause that for a while as it does not directly feed into my primary goals but I definitely want to make time for it.

Mobile experiments #

looking forward to play w

• Urgent AF
• Sooner the better
• Lazy Sunday
  • Some emulation tools I want to try, remote-android/redroid-doc  , scrcpy 
  • I want to check some apps, see if this helps 

useful/helpful links

• Tools: Mobile JS console 

Firefox Extensions #

Arch Official Packages #

Arch AUR Packages #

Mobile Apps #

Absolute dump. I use the List My Apps  app to generate the csv, the csv is then uploaded to dropbox from where airtable pulls it. When generating the org file my custom script fetches from airtable. I did not want this to be a rube goldberg machine but there doesn’t seem to be a very clean way out in the way I need it at the moment.

Notion  ○ Adobe Acrobat  ○ Habits  ○ GuitarTuna  ○ Adobe Scan  ○ Zomato  ○ Embiggen  ○ Snapseed  ○ List My Apps  ○ 1.1.1.1  ○ Ping Test Tool  ○ F-Droid  ○ PlantNet  ○ Paytm  ○ Quit Smoking  ○ Binary  ○ Tasker  ○ Forest  ○ Planta  ○ Kite  ○ Wolfram Alpha  ○ Uber  ○ Keep Notes  ○ WhatsApp  ○ Awesome QR  ○ Track  ○ Replit  ○ Google Podcasts  ○ CRED  ○ Protractor  ○ Pocket  ○ Grapevine  ○ Bluecoins  ○ Url forwarder  ○ AnkiDroid  ○ Crayon  ○ SoundCloud  ○ Track & Graph  ○ Unit Converter Ultimate  ○ Pinterest  ○ GitHub  ○ VLC  ○ Telegram  ○ Airtable  ○ Niagara Launcher  ○ BHIM  ○ Shazam  ○ Drinkable  ○ Goodreads  ○ Wikipedia  ○ Termux  ○ Discord  ○ Signal  ○ Product Hunt  ○ Coin  ○ SimpleLogin  ○ Syncthing  ○ Tapo  ○ Lithium  ○ Snipd  ○ Brave  ○ NetGuard  ○ PhonePe  ○ HTTP Shortcuts  ○ BigO  ○ Splitwise  ○ Relay Pro  ○ Zoom  ○ Binance  ○ Just Another Workout Timer  ○ Chess  ○ WiFiAnalyzer  ○ Tasks  ○ Rapido  ○ DiskUsage  ○ TrebleShot  ○ Authenticator 

Datasets #

looking forward to play w

• Need to read this 

useful/helpful links

• Hubs: /r/datasets  | Our World in Data  | WBO Data  | awesomedata/awesome-public-datasets  | kaggle  | HDX  | AWS DE  | public-apis  | FreeGIS500+  | Academic Torrents  | HugginFace Datasets  | devdatalabs  | Socrata  | Components One Datasets  | moar datasets  | datacommons