https://micro.setu.me/categories/text/Recent content in Text on Setu's (micro)blogHugoenSun, 19 Oct 2025 14:42:53 -0700https://micro.setu.me/posts/iphone-air/Sun, 19 Oct 2025 14:42:53 -0700https://micro.setu.me/posts/iphone-air/Exactly a month ago, I switched my phone from my adored iPhone 12 Mini to the new iPhone Air. In that month, I have been surprised by the iPhone Air in good ways and bad. I held onto my 12 Mini because I really didn’t want to give up the size, weight and form that it offered. It was a joy to use case-less and single-handed. Those years made me realize that I care about how the phone feels in my hand, and kept dissuading me from buying a new iPhone for almost 3 years (I copped out of a 16 Pro purchase at the Apple Store last year!https://micro.setu.me/posts/paris-2024-olympics-opening-ceremony-spectacular/Sun, 28 Jul 2024 17:22:47 -0700https://micro.setu.me/posts/paris-2024-olympics-opening-ceremony-spectacular/This past Friday, I watched the Paris 2024 Olympics Opening Ceremony as the flotillas of contingents sailed down the Seine to a backdrop of sunset, performers danced on bridges, the hooded man run past the Louvre and atop roofs, the Olympic torch traversed the lengths of Paris, decorated French sportspeople lit up the Olympic cauldron which flew up into a hot air balloon, and Celine Dion sang in front of a sparkling Eiffel Tower.https://micro.setu.me/posts/embracing-the-discomfort-skiiing-edition/Mon, 27 May 2024 16:58:19 -0700https://micro.setu.me/posts/embracing-the-discomfort-skiiing-edition/In February 2021, a friend took us skiing for the first time. In the excitement of the opportunity, I severely under-estimated the difficulty of skiing, especially for someone who had never skated before (on land or ice). We went straight to the lift, up the mountain, and down the slope. And I fell. A lot. But that was also the day I decided I wanted to learn to ski and that I would be back.https://micro.setu.me/posts/goodbye-tweetbot/Fri, 20 Jan 2023 17:41:56 -0800https://micro.setu.me/posts/goodbye-tweetbot/I have been actively using Twitter for years. I joined in late 2009 and have fond memories of using it. From a desktop first, then an iPod Touch using the official Twitter app, and then my old Sony Ericsson K790i by SMS-ing tweets, before switching over to using smartphones and using apps. I did use the default Twitter app for a bit, but Tweetbot was the first iOS app I bought on the App Store in 2013, and added it immediately onto my dock where it stayed ever since.https://micro.setu.me/posts/god-of-small-things-arundhati-roy/Sun, 08 May 2022 01:42:19 -0700https://micro.setu.me/posts/god-of-small-things-arundhati-roy/I don’t read much fiction, which makes me a very slow reader. When I started reading The God of Small Things, I had no idea what to expect. I had read some of Arundhati Roy’s essays, but none of her books. I was prepared to be surprised and stunned, but not this… There was something approachable in this book that kept me going. There was honesty that kept me coming back.https://micro.setu.me/posts/electricity-disruption/Mon, 01 Nov 2021 23:37:07 -0700https://micro.setu.me/posts/electricity-disruption/October 20, 2021 was a gloomy day. Gloomy enough that I had turned on the floor lamp by my desk even before I logged in to work. Just before noon, I was in the middle of an important meeting, listening to a colleague answer my question. About halfway through the answer, my lamp flickered, and then went off. Still trying to focus on the answer, which was starting to stutter, I said to myself, “Sigh, will I need to buy a new lamp now?https://micro.setu.me/posts/iphone-12-mini/Sun, 22 Aug 2021 19:19:57 -0700https://micro.setu.me/posts/iphone-12-mini/I walked out of the house this morning without my watch; one of the rare times I have done that in months. I tried to unlock my phone, and it asked me for my passcode because it couldn’t recognize my face. A few minutes later, same thing again. I wasn’t sure why it kept asking me for my passcode over and over. It felt unusual. And then it hit me: I was wearing my mask.https://micro.setu.me/posts/not-buying-iphone-2020/Tue, 27 Oct 2020 23:37:42 -0700https://micro.setu.me/posts/not-buying-iphone-2020/2020, like everything else, has changed my perspective on how to decide whether to get a new phone. Some of the reasons I switch to a new iPhone are: a) Camera, b) Software, c) Design, d) Speed, e) Length of ownership. I compare the state of my current phone, with the new phones, to decide whether to buy that year’s iPhone to replace my current iPhone. Once I buy a new phone, I use it for years, and thus always buy the top-of-the-line phone from that series.https://micro.setu.me/posts/handwashing-apple-watch/Wed, 30 Sep 2020 22:37:00 -0700https://micro.setu.me/posts/handwashing-apple-watch/One of the two standout features in WatchOS 7 for me was handwashing. Today, it has been just over a week since I turned on handwashing notifications. Some background on the new feature: Apple Watch can now detect when hands are being washed and encourages you with gentle taps on your wrist to continue for atleast 20 seconds. When your return home, it can now remind you to wash your hands.https://micro.setu.me/posts/wwdc-2020-keynote/Mon, 22 Jun 2020 19:13:12 -0700https://micro.setu.me/posts/wwdc-2020-keynote/I am an Apple enthusiast, and I just watched the WWDC 2020 keynote. Here’s what I thought (in no specific order): iOS 14 Reaching for the top row apps on my iPhone 7 Plus is not easy. I can rarely, if ever, use my phone with a single hand anymore. So, I appreciate the new home screen layout. It definitely appears useful at first glance. I can see myself adding Dark Sky (wait, will it still be updated?https://micro.setu.me/posts/what-will-be-the-new-normal/Fri, 24 Apr 2020 00:17:34 -0700https://micro.setu.me/posts/what-will-be-the-new-normal/On January 31, 2020, when USA started restricting entry into USA from China, I felt lucky that it happened then, and not 20 days earlier when I was flying through Beijing on my way back to USA. Little did I imagine then that it was only the beginning of what was to come in the next few months (years?). Over the last 6-weeks, SARS-CoV-2 (2019-nCoV) has transformed the world as I knew it.https://micro.setu.me/posts/instagram-terrible-account-security/Wed, 15 Apr 2020 23:57:42 -0700https://micro.setu.me/posts/instagram-terrible-account-security/A few days back, someone reached out to me suspecting that their Instagram account had been hacked. What followed was me helping them work through every available way to lock down their account and then convincing them that they had done everything and it didn’t seem like it was hacked. In the process, though, as a proof-of-concept, I followed the same procedure I helped them go through. That brings me to what I learnt about Instagram and its account security practices.https://micro.setu.me/posts/why-use-apple-maps/Fri, 28 Feb 2020 19:33:14 -0800https://micro.setu.me/posts/why-use-apple-maps/For over 3 years now, since I moved to USA, I have primarily relied on Apple Maps for all of my travel and mapping needs. And the reasons for it, in more or less my order of priority, are pretty simple: Apple Maps has all the places and locations I have ever wanted to go to. There hasn’t been a single place that I have tried to go to and not found it on it.https://micro.setu.me/posts/statue-unity/Tue, 28 Jan 2020 21:53:14 -0800https://micro.setu.me/posts/statue-unity/Almost about a month ago, I visited the Statue of Unity (SoU), Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel’s statue near Baroda. Hailed as the biggest statue in the world, this was my first experience of visiting a tourist destination in India after living and traveling in USA for over 3 years. Here are some of my thoughts and observations from that visit, in approximate order of my visit: I was there on 26th December, 2019.https://micro.setu.me/posts/sapiens-yuval-noah-harari/Sun, 26 Jan 2020 16:53:14 -0800https://micro.setu.me/posts/sapiens-yuval-noah-harari/Over the years, one thing that consistently bothered me was my inability to read and finish books. I started a lot of books, but finished rarely any. Over time, I lost interest in reading books. I read a lot of articles, blogs and news stories, some tens of thousands of words long, but I never got around to reading books. In late November, I decided that I wanted to change this about myself and that I wanted to read more.https://micro.setu.me/posts/merriam-webster-word-of-2019-they/Wed, 08 Jan 2020 11:58:52 +0530https://micro.setu.me/posts/merriam-webster-word-of-2019-they/There were a few things towards the end of 2019 that made me happy. ‘They’ being chosen as word of the year, was one among them. Over the last year, I have started using ‘they’ frequently as pronouns for people whose pronouns I did not know, and it started from something really simple: I choose to not give pronouns to someone else. I want to let them be them, pick their pronouns, respect their identity, and not judge them.https://micro.setu.me/posts/website-update-2019/Tue, 31 Dec 2019 18:48:52 +0530https://micro.setu.me/posts/website-update-2019/I have had my personal website since early 2012. Since then, I have used a typical website hosting model and relied heavily on CMSes like WordPress to help me host things that I write. Over time, I have realized I was ambitious with what I set out to do and didn’t actually keep up with the various sub-sites that I created. That led to many of those WP installations becoming unused.https://micro.setu.me/posts/archived-blogs/Sat, 30 Nov 2019 22:41:27 -0700https://micro.setu.me/posts/archived-blogs/I have been guilty of not updating some of my old blogs for years now. Namely, my ‘Unwind’ and ‘I Talk Tech’ blogs. Even though they were unused, I still had to maintain their WordPress installations over the years as I migrated across web hosts and migrations. It was laborious to keep updating WordPress to the latest version for zero-traffic web blogs. Today, I finally migrated them off a static WordPress installation that I had moved to a few months back (that was riddled with broken links and no theme CSS), to my Tumblr.https://micro.setu.me/posts/narendra-modi-fix/Tue, 01 Oct 2019 20:21:39 -0700https://micro.setu.me/posts/narendra-modi-fix/A few days ago I posed a question to Twitter asking people what their tipping point for supporting Modi was? To put it in a different way, if you support Modi today (and / or have for the last 5+ years), what is the one thing, that if he does it, would make you cease supporting him. It is not a very difficult question (but it can be). If you are someone that does support someone, anyone, something, I think this is a question you should ask yourself.https://micro.setu.me/posts/national-park-service/Sat, 17 Aug 2019 16:56:58 -0700https://micro.setu.me/posts/national-park-service/It has been just over 3 years since I have been in the USA, and in this time I have come to realize that one of my favorite things about USA is the National Park Service. I have visited more than 15 national parks in various parts of the country, hiked across most of them, and marvelled at the things I saw. I have experienced snow-clad mountains, scorching deserts, canyons that have been shaped over millions of years, hot springs sitting on volcanoes, tiny streams, glacial lakes, and rivers with lush waterfalls.https://micro.setu.me/posts/data-science/Mon, 01 Jul 2019 23:01:17 -0700https://micro.setu.me/posts/data-science/‘Data never lies; people do.’ Data is an amusing artefact. It exists all around us, in many forms, and unless we know exactly how to read it, we are oblivious to it. It is no wonder that most professions are based in the ability to understand one specific type of data. We spend a quarter of our lives just learning about different types of data and figuring out which one we want to spend the rest of our lives around!https://micro.setu.me/posts/using-instagram-2019/Fri, 28 Jun 2019 18:27:21 -0700https://micro.setu.me/posts/using-instagram-2019/8 years. That’s how long I’ve had an Instagram account. My Instagram profile is a curation, it is a reminder of everywhere I have been, some of my best photographs, akin to a portfolio. I have seen it go from a niche, Facebook acquisition, ads, it becoming a popular app, adding stories and messages. I’m not a fan of most of Instagram’s changes, so here’s a little bit about how I use Instagram these days, in 2019.https://micro.setu.me/posts/game-of-thrones-finale/Mon, 20 May 2019 19:27:53 -0700https://micro.setu.me/posts/game-of-thrones-finale/I watched the Game of Thrones finale about 24 hours back and have had the time to gather my thoughts about it. Unpopular opinion, but I liked it. (Of course there are spoilers ahead!) TL;DR: It was an acceptable end to the show, but not a satisfactory one. Here’s why: Daenarys’ turn into an evil overlord may have been sudden(-ish) but it has been brewing, even if it didn’t latch on to the audience.https://micro.setu.me/posts/reboot/Sun, 19 May 2019 22:35:21 -0700https://micro.setu.me/posts/reboot/It has been just over a year since my last post here. Things have changed a lot since then. I moved to a different city thrice, I graduated from my Master’s program and started my first real job. Those are the highlights, but there are also a lot of nitty-gritty details that matter. During all that time, a few constant thoughts have strongly been on my mind. One of them has been this space, my micro(blog).https://micro.setu.me/posts/next-phase-of-life/Thu, 17 May 2018 15:58:01 -0500https://micro.setu.me/posts/next-phase-of-life/The last few months have been some of the most gruelling ones I have ever encountered, personally and professionally. I was supposed to graduate next month with my Masters, but I pushed that to December because a marvellous opportunity presented in the nick of time. In about 24 hours, I will leave Indianapolis, which has been my home since I arrived in USA in August, 2016, to pursue a research internship at one of the biggest technology companies in the world.https://micro.setu.me/posts/india-and-politics/Sun, 25 Mar 2018 14:53:32 -0500https://micro.setu.me/posts/india-and-politics/Indian politics is one of the most complicated and divided in the world, and it is amplified by the diversity of the country. I came across this forum discussion about why self-driving cars remain and will probably remain a dream in India for the foreseeable future, while the developed world inches towards policies and laws governing such vehicles. Much of the blame with a lot of India’s problems starts with the polity, but fairly trickle down to the people who put them in power.https://micro.setu.me/posts/aaai-2018/Thu, 08 Feb 2018 02:25:41 -0500https://micro.setu.me/posts/aaai-2018/Over the last few days, I attended AAAI 2018, which is among the premier conferences on AI conducted in the whole year. I feel honored that I got a chance to present my research project under the ‘Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence’ (IAAI-18) track, and attend the whole conference. Having attended two much smaller and more specialized IEEE conferences in the last 6 months, the sheer scale and expert knowledge of AAAI has been an overwhelming experience.https://micro.setu.me/posts/short-films/Fri, 12 Jan 2018 00:37:14 -0500https://micro.setu.me/posts/short-films/For the last few months, I have been watching a bunch of short films on YouTube, with most of them being from Indian directors, actors and storytellers. And everytime I watch a good one I am amazed at the amount of talent in India. Not just actors or directors, but also photographers, videographers, editors, sound engineers, etc. It has been a pleasant experience, and one that I am sure to continue for quite a long time (my YouTube Watch Later playlist is full of short films that seem interesting).https://micro.setu.me/posts/website-update-2018/Tue, 09 Jan 2018 00:35:23 -0500https://micro.setu.me/posts/website-update-2018/I have spent a couple hours in the last few days moving my website to a new host. I knew that when I did this, I wanted to add a new CMS to start writing more often. I did that. And then, I spent some time updating the content on my home page to reflect my recent work, projects, etc. A lot has happened in the last ~18 months. I graduated with a degree in Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering from Pune University, and started pursuing a Master’s degree in Computer Engineering at Purdue School of Engineering and Technology, Indianapolis, USA.https://micro.setu.me/posts/new-beginnings/Mon, 08 Jan 2018 17:47:13 -0500https://micro.setu.me/posts/new-beginnings/Ever since I have been blogging I have had the desire to share more and more. But for most such thoughts I don’t intend to write a whole blogpost. I have been toying with the idea of starting a micro-blog for quite a while now. I often stumble upon things that I want to write about, but not to the extent of a full-fledged blog post. I want to use this space for all such thoughts and things.