Instagram has 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. Continue reading...

Why I 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. Continue reading...

I Went to Statue of 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. Continue reading...

Sapiens by 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. Continue reading...

Merriam-Webster Word of the Year 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. Continue reading...

Another Website Update

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. Continue reading...

For All Mankind

Among the first set of Apple TV+ shows, ‘For All Mankind’ excited me more than others. Over the last few days, I have watched some of the released episodes and I’m really impressed by it. I think it is a compelling story-line. The plot of the show is fairly simple: What if Russians landed a human on the moon before the USA? How would the space race unfold after that event? Continue reading...

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. Continue reading...

What Narendra Modi Should 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. Continue reading...

U.S. 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. Continue reading...