Point Element

The other lenovo in the family - Lenovo G405 which my father is using, recently lost its battery and so father asked me to get a replacement (battery). But due to geographical constraints and COVID I could not do that. Also my recent visit was going to be only a day so I decided to just go ahead and overhaul my Lenovo G580 and give it to father. That meant a number of things - open up chassis and clean it up, replace it's dead battery, check out keyboard if it's going to fail again, and few small things. Luckily I had just couple of years ago opened this one up completely and replaced it's CPU's thermal grease, and it's been running quite cool. It seldom goes over 57 degrees which is great for a 2016, 28nm part with 35W TDP. So I spent 3-4 hours getting all this done. Got a Lapcare replacement battery for 2000Rs which will be good for another couple of years. Rest all looked great. Then last month I visited my hometown and exchanged laptops. Now the G405 which I got...

Driving in Indian road traffic is an adventure. And when someone may crash into you, you can never tell. So it makes complete sense to have some sort of surveillance for the car. I spent about INR4500 ($62) and got this below car dashcam.  https://www.amazon.in/A2-Continuous-Monitoring-encoding-G-Sensor/dp/B086XDLB6N This chinese-made ( There are some europian-designed made-in-china dashcams but they are costly! ) dashcam can record in upto 1080P resolution and supports upto 128GB SD Cards. I am using a 32GB SD Card and it can record upto 7Hrs of footage in 32GB, and then it starts overwriting older files. The footage is of decent quality, you can catch other vehicles number-plates in daylight. One good thing with this particular model is it comes with hardwire-kit and you can directly plug it into your car's fusebox and that means your single cigarette-lighter port remains free to use during driving. This camera has a capacitor inside which can help save emergency videos in case ...

This actually happened in Sept-2020, but I do have a backlog of things to share - tech or non-tech. So Celerio is a small hatchback, with 1.0Ltr engine that produces 68BHP power and 90nm torque. It's modest and cheap enough to fit my budget. It cost me about 6Lac INR i.e. $8250. This variant I bought is a middle variant and it comes with AGS a.k.a. AMT. AGS which stands for automatic gear shift, and AMT which stands for Automatic Manual Transmission. This particular automatic transmission is the cheapest automatic transmission, in that there's a simple sensor and actuator with a control unit to operate the actual manual transmission. And as such it's not performance oriented, quite slow to operate but does get rid of the clutch pedal and gives excellent economy. So my reason for buying an automatic was simply the city traffic. Another point is a simpler car to mess with for my wife who is not comfortable with manual transmission. What other things does this car comes with t...

#!/bin/sh # Uncomment the following two lines for normal desktop: unset SESSION_MANAGER unset DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS #. /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc /usr/bin/mate-session [ -x /etc/vnc/xstartup ] && exec /etc/vnc/xstartup [ -r $HOME/.Xresources ] && xrdb $HOME/.Xresources xsetroot -solid grey vncconfig -iconic & x-terminal-emulator -geometry 80x24+10+10 -ls -title "$VNCDESKTOP Desktop" & x-window-manager &

So here I was trying to install Stremio which is a video streaming program. And this was linux- a debian VM install. And I successfully installed the deb file I could download from their website. But it would not run. When I started it from the terminal I got a library version mismatch error for libx264. The version stremio was looking for was 152. I had 148 and 155 on the system but stremio would not take them. So I went ahead and tried to cheat my way via a symlink. The symlink to 155 would not work because of some change in one of the functions. But when I tried it out with 148, voila!! It worked! Small victories!

Recently I have been searching for various tools for UML diagrams. I checked out Dia, but did not like it because I could not figure out how to create a number of diagrams with it. Then I came up on plantUML and I thought to create a sequence diagram and see how well it works. Turns out it's great! ( At least with sequence diagrams as per my limited experience! ) Ex. Consider below file: @startuml actor Foo1 boundary Foo2 control Foo3 entity Foo4 database Foo5 collections Foo6 Foo1 -> Foo2 : To boundary Foo1 -> Foo3 : To control Foo1 -> Foo4 : To entity Foo1 -> Foo5 : To database Foo1 -> Foo6 : To collections @enduml This above file generates this beautiful graphics. Excellent! Cheers!!

Fixing the desktop Debain 10 I have this office provided desktop with me. And it has a version of Debian thats upgraded from Debina 7 to Debian 10. Frankly it's terrible at booting. Takes anywhere from a minute and half to 2-3 minutes sometimes. So I know a lot many things are broken inside. But I did not have time to take a look at the software side and just let it be. And another ting to note is, it has 16GB of RAM so once booted things run smooth. So with quarterly release done, the workload decreased and I got some time to take a look at this thing on weekends. First thing always is to note how bad things are, get hold of some logs and just list whatever broken thngs you can see around in first glance and then go about cleaning and fixing things one by one. So like I mentioned above it takes anywhere from 1.5 minute to 3 minutes just to boot up. My goal is to get it to boot in less than a minute, since this has a HDD. I have Linux Mint and a SSD in my 7Yr old laptop and it boot...

Upgrading to Debian 8 from 7  Jessie from wheezy 1. Perform full system backup  2. Upgrade existing os version.  apt-get update && apt-get -V upgrade 3. Get current status  lsb_release -a  uname -a  4. Change repositories  Replace wheezy with jessie manually or as below: sed -i 's/wheezy/jessie/g' /etc/apt/sources.list  Also update any files if present in /etc/apt/sources.apt.d  5. Perform full system update  apt-get update && apt-get -V upgrade  If required reboot  Update 1: Debian 7 Wheezy to Debian 8 Jessie update done. And Debian 8 Jessie to Debian 9 Stretch upgrade also complete. The upgrades were taking too long. And looking at the terminal messages I realized, I could have saved a lot of the time if I would have cleaned up the system earlier. There's a lot of stuff like mono, OpenJDK, perl, python,  ruby which I'm never going to use. Anyway to Buster now. Update 2: I spent a lot of time cleaning up the system and then made the changes to start Bus...

Recently I decided to do a bit of TCO calculation on this Hero Duet scooter that we have been using. It's not the greatest experience I have had, but then this is the first family vehicle that I have owned. And I expected it to be a little pricey because of the number of repairs we have had to do. But for last year or so the scooter has been running great with only helping of regular servicing. So check out the TCO! Cheers!!

I use a Reliance Jio SIM as my one and only cellphone number. I used to have another, but I found little use for that. So I discontinued that other SIM card. It was a Vodafone SIM and I had bought it thinking I would be using it when I visit my hometown. Turns out it's not usable there. So adios. Coming back to Jio, it was working so far so good for a while. And it was quite cheap. Then they increased the fares about 4-5 months ago. And it was costing ~Rs 7 per day. This was for unlimited Jio-Jio calling, ~300minutes free to other telcos, and 1.5GB daily cellular data. Now I got home internet, so I thought to cut costs on this. The current plan goes for INR555 for 84 days. This includes 1.4GB 4G cellular data per day, 300 min calling to other telcos, and jio-jio free. That's Rs 6.6 per day. Now I'm not even using 30minutes calling per day. And due to home internet my cellular usage has gone down. So I decided to go for some other cheaper plan. This one is INR1299 for 336 da...

As you all may know India has been on Lockdown from 24March to now 3rd May due to COVID-19 pandemic. My current company has thankfully provided us with Work from Home facility. Things are grim in industry, with many companies cutting work force even though Govt and labor ministry having specifically asked companies not to cut work force. My company has decided to provide as many facilities and with one hardware setup locally available, and couple more with other peripherals available remotely, I'm having good productivity. Also on financial side, we are not asked for paycuts for at least this month, so it's good going so far. Though I am not sure similar things would continue next few months. Anyway I am prepared with enough finance to last at least 3-4 months. Few points regarding work from home: 1. Working in office is very comfortable. I don't have a proper desk at home. Or rather the nook I call desk is ill suited for heavy work involving more hardware. It's good en...

Last month I finally went for a broadband connection. From 24th March, Lockdown was announced all over India. Thankfully my current company gave us work from home facility. I had this old laptop with few upgrades made couple of months back which was good enough. But I have been using only a cellular data connection since a long time back (almost 5 years now since I moved to Pune from Mumbai). Anyway with work needing more bandwidth I decided to go for a Cable Internet solution. I had 2 options - Tikona Wireless internet, which has narrow-band connectivity. But I had heard of issues with Tikona's uptime. The other option was local distributor of Fivenet. Fivenet is a cable internet company. I decided to go Fivenet way. Called the local distributor, got cable installed and then visited his office which is nearby. Paid INR1750 (1250per month service + 500 installation). I.e. ~$17.85 per month for 25mbps unlimited service. Now it's almost a month and service has been great so far. ...

Yesterday I bought 4GB of DDR3 RAM and a 240GB MAXTOR SSD. Installed it in the lenovo laptop. And the started the vicious OS installation drama. I won't write the whole tale, but there were two issues. 1. Linux Mint's GRUB bootloader crashed when installing with UEFI on. 2. Windows won't recover existing installation. Anyway after about 5 hours I was done and Windows and Linux were humming along nicely. Now about performance improvement: things have become great. The processor is the only slow thing in this laptop now. And even then it's adequate for most of the things I am doing on this. Windows 7 boots in about 30 seconds. Linux - even faster. I have about 10 tabs open in Firefox including 1 GMail and couple of google drive documents. Nothing is slow. Anyway, the cost was a bit high because I got the hardware from a local shop. Online it would have been cheaper, but getting good RAM online is tricky. Anyway it was INR 2000/- ($29) for 4GB DDR3 RAM and INR 3250/- ($47)...

After dual booting I started getting this issue. Time would be incorrect when I switched from windows to linux or vice versa. Cause is the OS's consider RTC to be UTC time. And switch it to local time. And when both consider it UTC then actual time is messed up. So I decided to have windows keep using UTC time and switched ubuntu to local time. 1. Disable UTC and use Local Time in Ubuntu: In previous Ubuntu editions, you can edit the config file /etc/default/rcS to disable UTC. In Ubuntu 16.04, open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run the command below instead: timedatectl set-local-rtc 1 --adjust-system-clock To check out if your system uses Local time, just run: timedatectl