Was
Last updated:
I was looking at one of my lists, wondering what to write about. There were a couple of good alternatives there, and I had almost made up my mind when I realized today was the last day of the year. Believe me, nothing is going to change. I will be in the office again tomorrow, wondering what to write about, or how to write what I know to write. Nothing will change, apart from that increment in the year portion of the date. The rest of the resets will function usually.
Then why this?
In part, because its fun to look at the stuff you did in the past three hundred and sixty five days; its fun to look at the year gone by, its fun to be reminded about the good mostly. Also, the other stuff that I was supposed to write about, required me to write something other than this first. So.
Also, somebody had written about her year, as it was, and since I did find a mention there, I found myself wanting to do something similar. That want however was momentary believe me.
This year was massive, change-wise. I graduated, started working, left the job, joined another firm; but then, I have never really given that much credence to situations; people have always been of far more value. So I think it would be fitting if I did it in terms of people: lost and found.
There are people you know, all your lives, but not really know ; and when you come to know them, you feel stupid. _‘ How could I not see this?’ _is the usual reaction. And you feel stupid, but depending on the nature of the revelation, you either feel awesome, or bad. It was by mere chance that we ended up on that trip together. But it wasn’t a mere fluke that I realized who she was. And I got someone who’d probably last for life. Thank you, Rashmi.
College ended soon after, and even though I had sensed the departure, I never really wanted for it to happen. I lost a person, I mean not lost as in dead, but rather lost as in, we stopped talking. Thank you, Saurabh for the moments we shared.
Then I met people, some sixty odd people. Some of them I wanted to know, some I detested, some I talked to, some I wanted to help, some I did help, some who were fun to be around, some inspiring, and some just plain crazy. It was overwhelming, and tiring to listen to so many voices. Okay, not tiring. I stand corrected. It was fun.
Thank you, Windows batch. Thank you, Mandar for the walks, Pandeyji for the talks, Nilesh for the bakchodi, Sahil for the iron, Rajeev for Shetty-anna, Rohit for nothing specific, and all of you fuckers for the songs! Sandeep man, it was nice knowing you.
OFIs were awesome because of you Purnima. So yeah. Prabhu, Devesh, Navin. Diwali! Thank you for that! The chants were good fun.
And you, woman. For being.
There are around twenty odd minutes left in this year, and I know soon, a new year would have begun, but it wouldn’t be the same without those who have been there. All along. Thank you. You know who you are.
412 Backlinks
Was it blood or water?
Here I stand
Just the two of us..!!
What is Justice?
Why do I like Shruti Hassan?
The Longing
Scared I was!!
Us against the World!
Inverse!
J&K- Territorial Problem or Causality Dilemma?
The Code
The Foragers
The Ranchos and the Silencers
Zombie Land
Cannibal!
it's Teacher's Day!!
The Living Sounds
The Gita, Religion and Dharma
What is the difference between Education & Knowledge?
Wake me up, when November ends!
Nobody woke me up, I'm up any ways!
Mistakes we make!
In your dreams!
Stolen mint
Daily Post: 1984 (Of Emptiness and Vastness)
A little something called Inertia
The Perfect* Road Trip
Why I need to blog
No Pressure, Really!
The Morality Factor
Daneel’s issue was with the scientific slowdown, the decline in the development of newer technologies or that’s how he illustrates his point. I on the other hand have my issues with the morality of the society, the civilization in large.
Happy New Year?
Photographic memory
My first memories of being captured, on a photo film that is, consist of me being rushed to the terrace, followed by a change of clothes and a brief touch up, which is followed by introduction of two more kids almost the same age and then one of my brothers clicking the picture.
Writers are
Writers are magicians; and inventors of time machines, and a lot of other stuff too.
Day Two: The Lone Patch
Photography Challenge: Day One
Day Fourteen: The Hungry Man/Dog
Day Fifteen: Voice
Do what you want to!
Whatever you do, make sure that you are not doing what your father, mother or society wishes you to do because you don’t want to end up where you don’t want to be
Title Matters. Really?
Success/Failure
Poems
Why planning is important, but irrelevant
There was this boy in school
Flow
Why should I read?
I lost me
What makes me happy?
The benefits of living with T1D
Five Seconds of Life: 1. The trip
We are all inspired!
Moving On
Moving On
Surprises, and good stories
How democratic is our democracy?
Writing about not writing
How important is grammar to a writer?
New Life: Ties, and cufflinks!
That blue bird!
Universality
Communication protocol
Something new!
Decisions decisions!
Coming Home!
Who are you?
At work!
Life!
Incomplete
Observations!
Anonymous
Something about nothing!
The Human Connection
The journal
The therapeutic act of writing
The whorish aspect of things
All the motivation you need!
Children, and truth
In search of 'Routine'
Satisfaction
The Google or Windows dilemma
Why I decided to set a shipping date for my book
Progress
The idea of being a writer
(untitled)
On Possessions
On Tolerance
I'm back... again!
On Honesty
Letters to an imaginary girlfriend : One
On Honesty, Part-II
The hopeful human condition
Fifty plus one
The second one
New year, new rules!
On Killing
On emotions
My muse
Letters to an imaginary girlfriend : Two
On the competitive aspect of things
On s*x
On writing : the numbers
Why you should spend a little less time working
Why happiness never seems to last
Why persistence matters
What if life were a game?
What to say to someone who's feeling down
Does setting a goal really help you?
Some numbers
How it feels to finally finish that first draft
Are you afraid of dying?
Post a day!
What does it take to be a writer?
Thoughts on self-hosting
Let's talk!
Who am I to you?
Why standing still is scary
How I felt when my Jawbone broke
Why places matter in a story
Life, Death & Priorities
Here's how I plan to beat my laziness
A day of firsts
What is a blog?
They killed some more men today
Fiction takes time
Why I feel like an impostor at times
Things that I think about
A couple of rasagullas
Musings
Black box thinking: The surprising truth about success
This book talks about failures, how we treat them citing examples from industries ranging from aviation, healthcare, coding, cycling teams.
Do you trust me?
“If it were a dream”, he said, “would you spend it arguing what all this means, or..”
I wish I could fucking hibernate!
Windows Event ID reference
Three-tier CA setup
Ansible directory structure
Kubernetes Pods Certificate Related
Ansible Import
Install offline plugin notepad ++
Ansible Automation Platform Upgrade
Entra ID Governance
Celebrating Sakraat in Finland
Nord Letter #1 - Celebrating Sakraat + What is art
I miss walking
Nord Letter #2 - Walking
Year One
Nord Letter #3 - I love you Prerna
Decentralised identities
Azure Storage Account
Spring is here
Nord Letter #4 - Communal spaces @Iso Omena library
Azure Cosmos DB
Data flow
Federating again
Nord Letter #5 - Ghost Activitypub + Information Flow
Hyvä Vappu
Nord Letter #6 - Vappu + Costs of consumerism
Was I a good brother to you
You needed me, But was I there?
Life happens + iPads galore
Nord Letter #7 - Meeting people + Food + iPads
Cherries all around
Nord Letter #8 - Folklore'24 + Roihuvuori Cherry Park + AI
Oodi for all
Nord Letter #9 - Oodi + Toolo + Copilot PCs
Thoughts on AI
LLMs are AI models trained on the vast dataset of the internet. This allows them to predict, based on the earlier word, what is the most likeliest next word.
A trip to IKEA
Nord Letter #10 - Visiting IKEA, a pilgrimage
Postcard from Oitta
Nord Letter #11 - Pristine waters at Oitta
Yoga on Father's Day
Nord Letter #12 - Yoga celebration + WWDC announcements
Trek to Tallinn
Nord Letter #13 - Tallinn + bits around managing teams better
Replace CNO for cluster
We won!
Nord Letter #14 - World Cup win + lots of reading
Visit Porvoo
Nord Letter #15 - Day trip to Porvoo + a bit about fusion
A case for being kinder to others
About Fundamental Attribution Error + Be kinder
What Now?
Nord Letter #16 - Better at Yoga + New phones
Colophon
Celebrating Annaprashan
Nord Letter #17 - Annaprashan + Global Crowdstrike outage
How to handle dependencies in Bicep
Nature trails - Nuuksio and Pihlajasaari
Nord Letter #18 - Nature trails + Beating procrastination
A day trip to Tampere
Nord Letter #19 - Tampere + foundations for a good life
Create a log alert in Azure
Missing home
Nord Letter #20 - What is home + Google is a monopolist
India Day
India Day + Reading the Egg
Ready or Not
Pixel Peeping + What is a photo
Azure Admin Associate
I passed the AZ 104 on 3rd Sep
Certified and it feels so good
Azure goals + Apple's DMA compliance
Thoughts on iPhone day
2024 edition
Further thoughts on certifications and trainings
And marrying well
Made you cry
That's the goal
iPhones and Typography
iPhone 16 launch event + learn about typefaces and fonts
Troubleshoot Entra Connect Issues
Basics of typography
Good typography conveys emotion
Notes from the new OS releases
iOS18 + MacOS15 + WatchOS11
The joy of reading
Books transport you
Spectacular Solar Punk
iPhone reviews + reading becky chambers
The good people of Finland
About going to sell my phone and unexpected kindness
What are trails
But paths other have walked upon
Everything in nature that is born, dies
Life is what happens in the middle
Losing someone
It's hard
Linkin Park are back
The emptiness machine
Our place in the world
Linkin Park are back + what is our place in this world
What is an iPhone
Answer - a computer
Where are we going
More iPhone (camera) reviews + AI future
Sing!
Go on!
The stories we tell
Of a place and a time
A world full of agents
Hey Siri fetch me a glass of water!
Everything can teach us something
Help us grow
Who will advocate for the future
Leave a better world than you found
The custodian for all human knowledge
AIs trained on the web make the web a worse place
A head full of dreams
Writing every day + AI + Metaverse
Why walk the same path every day
Ignore the path
Keeping promises
The problem with read-it-later apps
It feels like stripping character from the web
DNS delegation
How to tell stories
Stories need to surprise
Of shinobis and reading
Visiting Restaurant Shinobi + Reading on devices and the web
Look at the stars
Look at the sun
Hopes and dreams for the fediverse
Interop everywhere
The future of Kindle
More notes please!
Going home
To Delhi
Living with bindis
A tale of two airlines
Finnair good. SpiceJet shit.
Going back home
Trip to India
Bimba
The art hut
Untitled
Diwali + Tips + New Macs
The human condition
Curing cancer + e-Vitara + President of the USA
Visiting the Ashokan Pillar in Vaishali
Good business
Buying old furniture from failed startups + POSSE
Where is home
The expat's dilemma + Social Web + Net News Wire
Where you do yoga matters
Or, the poisonous Delhi air sucks ass
Trusting people to do the work they were hired to do
Curb micro-management
Life everywhere
But not in the way you expect
Helsinki Christmas Market
Two fun videos + two business concepts + something about rats
Love and Despair
Reading poems
Proprietary formats
A day spent copy pasting from Notes to Markdown
Why are there no small photo sharing apps
There is an opportunity here
Duo all the way
Learning (Playing?) on Duolingo
Types of workers in an organisation
Or, evolution of the type of worker you are
Building furniture
A traditional Ikea holiday
Beating death
Living forever
Before and after
Sinitarra + who owns your words + Intel drama
Notes on obsidian
Some things which do not work
A closed and Common Orbit
Birthdays are funny
Another year around the sun! Yay!
Music can remind you of things
It can transport you, across time and space
What is love?
An year hence
The things we don't need
We should let those go, no?
The families we make
2 hopeful things + electric cars might last longer + the age of average + one more thing about AI
We can have a fun conversation with max four people
Shakespeare got it
We don't own anything in this age of subscriptions
An accidents leads to a little peak behind the curtain
How do I know if someone subscribed to me via RSS
Fans everywhere. Fans nowhere.
Feels like Christmas
Delhi Rasoi + decaying internet + bad Spotify + solar probe
Sitting and talking
a place to be less alone
Two lessons on work
Show your work + Ask for help
Record of a Spaceborn Few
The third book in the wayfarer series
When to write
When you're away from the keyboard
Writing and publishing
Playing TT at Vox + Car makers merging + paper passports might die
Build a bridge to your corner of the web
Self host
Rain, like mist
Hard works trumps talent every time
Every damn time
Rethinking what and how I write on this website
How to add a linkblog here and about how I categorise things
I figured out what to do
How to write here
I do not know what to do
Part #3 of what to do and how to post my damn links
A happy new year
Most things are still the same + AI roundups + good things that happened in 2024
Sometimes all it takes is magic
Sometimes magic is working harder than imagined possible
Would you enjoy killing more human NPCs?
Nvidia’s AI NPCs can become your allies
Meta will not do fact-checking anymore
Meta goes MAGA?
Chambers, Becky - The Galaxy, and the Ground Within
The fourth and final book in the wayfarer series
Ice, Ice, baby!
Snow falls + Dark energy may not exist + why is American diet bad + kids can't use computers
I’ve become afraid of keeping thoughts in my head
The consequence of thinking while writing
The value of consistency
Discipline and repetition
Sakraat redux
Second year of celebrating Makar Sankranti in Finland + 2 things about social apps
You can’t have one without the other
Actions and consequences
The two factors that allow services to be terrible
My WhatsApp story
The next four years are going to be a drag
Spent in dread
I need to talk to more people, more often
And hear their stories
What a mess!
Living with a kid in a messy home
Embracing the light
Light mode / dark mode
Celebrating the Republic
Republic Day at the embassy + OpenAI announces Operator + Trumps first few orders + some life lessons
Why do I read more on the web
The phone, that’s the answer.
A week of AI news
Deepsek and the others
Murakami, Haruki - Men Without Women
I love the book, and the object that it is
Sleep well
Yoga helps you know your body
Good food, good life
Finland's PR changes + VPNs + Why are so many people wearing glasses now + a succinct take on AI
Once upon a time, we almost lost everything
A story of a near victim of a cyber crime
The last work left in this world
Train the models!
Preparedness Day
Fighting flu + smaller AI models + timeline apps
Why work?
The myths of work
Sync less, please?
About reading on NNW
About the marshmallow experiment
And the value of providing kids with a good environment growing up
A year of mornings
Week of love
Celebrating our second anniversary by having a date night at Classic Pizza
How the coffee breaks have changed
Answer: more time on phones
Savya-Sajal
Coalescing into my son
About reflections on writing
From people who have been doing this for many years
Reading is better than watching movies
If it’s the same story
About Garbage
And how its our responsibility
Writing meet-ups
Shutup and write + 2 opposite views on where the society is going + save your attention
Liu, Cixin - The three-body problem
The first book in the remembrance of earth's past series
Things change when you become a parent
Life goes on
LLMs are being deployed in factories
How does that make you feel?
Walk a little
All work is creative
Spring already?
Seeing it for the first time
Following Apple rumours
Warming up to LLMs
Using copilot to update my book page
About the Pareto principle
And the value of putting in the work
How I use Obsidian
Notes on note-taking
what matters to you
A year of mornings available everywhere now + EV for the masses + new Apple stuff
Sit on the floor with your child and play
Spend time playing with your child
Don’t call me a writer!
I hate the spotlight
Which iPad do I get in 2025?
About the state of the iPad lineup
Providing customisation options to users is a great thing
Adventures in configuring tools to work better
Holi redux
Playing Holi + Death Stranding 2 + black hole universe + some bad news in AI land
What is Nordletter about?
Or, how to write about the same thing perpetually?
Ghost announces beginning of the public beta for the social web
Public beta for fediverse support is live now
Maybe we should not have connected
Mixing DS2, Mastodon and Fediverse
Re-designing my home screen and the way I use my phone
Focus modes + Shortcuts magic
The contexts in which I use my phone
Thinking about phone usage + productivity
The things we make
Apple rumours + Learn some AI python
A weird day
Something felt off
My ego would not let me say sorry
Boiling frogs and global warming
How would the web work in an increasingly AI-fied world
It does not matter how many times I do surya namaskar
I don’t need to count anymore
Balancing new tech and its maintainance
Temu as a form of soft power
A realisation amidst assembling cheap stuff from Temu
Elections in Finland
About the local elections
The three places where I noticed Apple Intelligence
Apple Intelligence comes to India (English)
Election time
Election stories + Apple AI is not a bust, AI is a bust + some things to change on your phone
I voted for the first time in Finland
In the municipal + county elections of 2025
Organizing the things in our life
The value of knowing where things are
Everything you type in your iPhone could be used to train a digital you
Make more detailed notes
I want to share little ephemeral messages with my family
Like this picture of the skies I took while out on my walk
Moving my home on the web
Just because you can do something does not mean you should
A writer's apocalypse approaches
What would you do?
Teenagers + AI can be a partner + Meta doing Meta things + Love Death and Robots!
What would you do without me?
Remarry (Bad jokes and me)
Reading children’s books
They are so damn beautiful
A tale of four chat bots
Going northern light hunting
And a bunch of AI use cases + Zuck shot himself in the foot
Attending the Global AI Bootcamp in Helsinki
Cixin Liu - The dark forest
The second book in the three body problem series
Tribes
We join them