Point Element

I owned a Maruti Celerio VXI AGS MY2020 for almost 5 years. And recently switched to a Tata Nexon Creative S+AMT. This post will talk about the difference in engines on both these cars and the effect it has on driving dynamics and mileage. First of all Maruti has 1L NA engine which is tuned frugally and returns very good mileage. I have seen it return 15kmpl in city with AC ON. And on highways it can hit 18-19kmpl fully loaded and with AC ON. Although this car is an economy hatchback and is not really tuned to cruising. That's why at 80-90kmph, engine is around 2800-3000 RPM and good mileage is observed around 80kmpl, and after that it drops. Plus the 1L 3-Cyl engine means not enough torque and so jerky driving in low speeds and ghats. Still for the low price even with AMT gearbox, very good value for money. Moving on to Nexon, the engine is 1.2L turbo-petrol. The turbo really spins at around 2000RPM and provides max boost. Although the engine maps provided are such that there'...

Bought a 1TB Samsung T7 SSD to replace the western digital one. Cost was 9000 INR. Quite costly but I'm hoping it pays off. It's specs as below: Samsung T7 1TB Up to 1,050MB/s USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10Gbps, Type-C) External Solid State Drive (Portable SSD) Grey(MU-PC1T0T) Performance of up to 1,050 MB/s, up to 9.5x faster than external HDD Interface: USB 3.2 Gen 2 (Up to 10Gbps). Backwards compatible. The host device and connection cable must support USB 3.2 Gen 2 to reach the maximum speed. Durable: Shock resistant internal frame lets the T7 withstand falls from up to 2 meters Security: Optional password protection and AES 256 bit hardware encryption Windows 7 and higher, Mac OS X 10.10 and higher, or Android 5.1 (Lollipop) and higher. Includes USB Type C to C and USB Type C to A cables Going to sync all the data to this one. I'm not moving the data right away. But I'm going to slowly move all of it to here while keeping other copies. If there's no ...

Current ones - Sennheiser HD439, Marshall Monitor II, Sony WI-C100 Past Ones from latest to oldest: Realme buds, Philips Wired Earbuds, Klipsch Image S3, Panasonic Headset, Generic Blues headset, Sony Wired earbuds, Generic earbuds. In last 20 years I have been through a bunch of earphones and headphones/headsets. I started with FM Radios and generic earbuds in my college days. This is around 2007-08, seems like an eternity away. We did not have mobiles back then. And the FM radios would take pencil cells. And would need new cells every fortnight. Anyway the music was good to ears. The first major upgrade was when I got my first Sony Mobile and it had inbuilt FM. I bought a decent pair of Sony earbuds at 600 bucks back then. That was $10 in 2008 I think. Those sound astronomically better than my earlier generic earphones. They did not last all that long I remember. Then thanks too recommendation from one of my gamer friends, I bought a Blues headset which was locally ...

So I'm in the middle of another HDD death. This time it's my WD 1TB. And by the name of this post I'm referring to my original post which talked about my earlier WD 320GB external HDD which died. And somehow I never made a post about it. And in fact I have never made a post about the tens of headphones which I tried and they died. Maybe I should make a catalogue of them. I don't really know what value such a thing to be for anyone except for a story. Anyway I don't listen to much music anymore. I just watch soaps most of the time like an old man. Anyway the thing is I observed that this drive was acting up for some photos when I copied them to the drive. It would hang up. So I'm thinking maybe it's about to die. Ideally I should buy another drive but as usual money is tight and so I just moved data here and there and then left non-critical data on the drive. Got some time today to dig into and found a very good program called Victoria that anal...

So I did continue playing with AI and got local GPT4All installation on my new lenovo ideapad 3. Before that I did one thing I had been dreading. I got rid of partition 2. Emptied it and deleted it, and then expanded Partition 1 into that area. This was needed because my WSL installation has been swelling up and up and I really needed more space in C: drive. And managing junk in 100GB had become a chore. Anyway after doing this, now I'm seeing regular hangups and issues with volume-mgr. So there's some negative effect, but screw it. I played around with GTP4All and found it to be a good enough solution for local offline AI. Unfortunately I don't have any use case for such a thing. I tried to configure it as an agent in Visual Studio Code and things just would not work. There were errors, documentation said one thing and another happened at runtime, and there were issues. So I gave up after some time. So yeah tools like Cursor which give you an amazingly well-...

So we have gone on an AI bandwagon. Turns out AI in agent mode can be tremendous help in generating code and documentation. Prompt AI is good only for handling small problems but agent can integrate with IDEs and increase productivity by a few times. The next frontier is locally running AI and so this way one is free from AI provider plans and the only cost is for electricity and hardware. Now a good AI system needing a bunch of AI chips is still costly. But the control could be worth it. For an experiment I started on my now 10 year old Blue Lenovo laptop with Pentium B950. This processor is so old that it does not support AVX2 and so can not really do anything. I can still use this for coding. Actually the bootup was way slow at about 2 mins. But with generous help from chatgpt I was able to bring it down to a minute which is quite good. I also removed a bunch of unneeded things thus making it quite faster to work too. So my goal is to use my new laptop with windows to...

It was a pain to find latest Android 10 firmware for Realme 3. The official website did not have anything for these old devices. One tool I found was a paid service. And unlocking bootloader also stopped working officially. The unofficial process was too complex. And what baffled me was I was just unable to find stock update files anywhere. After a lot of searching, finally found stock Android 10 update at below website. It contains lot more updates besides Realme 3. https://realmefirmware.com/realme-update/ So now I'm back to Android 10. The phone camera is probably as useless as earlier and I think maybe it's damaged by lasers or something else. Anyway I have a DSLR or iPhone to take photos anyway. So quest failed, but I think this phone should run for couple more years at current 66% SOH. It's not perfect, like the GPS conks off once in a while which I think has to do with loose connections due to cracked frame. Anyway let it run for as much as possibl...

So iPhone provides it's own over-engineered challenges. One of that is jpg files are compressed to heic to save about 30% space. But grabbing the files to computer is a pain. And then again you end up with these heic files. There's no inbuilt support for these in windows and no real benefit where storage is cheap. So I decided to save myself the pain and just convert them to jpg using image-magic. Of course, I did not have to code anything, found one ready-made script on the internet. ---------------------------------------------------- @echo off for %%a in (*.HEIC) do ( magick "%%a" "%%~na.jpg" ) echo Conversion complete. pause -----------------------------------------------------

I was originally against bluetooth speakers and headphones. But then I ended up with an IPhone. I tried dongle-life with a USB-C to 3.5mm jack dongle. Then one day I was talking about bluetooth headphones with my friend and found out that with black-friday there are a lots of deals going on. Looked around for a Sony WH-1000XM5 but it was still going out of budget. Then found out Marshall Monitor II ANC was going to be around 12K INR. So asked friend to buy it and finally friend was in India last month. Got the headphones and found them to be good quality and good value for money at the same time. Anyway now here's specs: PLAY TIME 30 hours with Bluetooth and ANC 45 hours with Bluetooth only WIRELESS CONNECTIVITY Bluetooth 5.0 There's nothing else to add. It's a closed-cup style design with foam-fake leather earcups that do good seal on their own. The ANC is good enough with very good suppression of noise. One problem I'm facing right now is a b...

It was a sunny morning of December 2024. My cousin Ketan had joined me for a trek to Torna Fort some 45km from home. We had couple of good flights for the drone. Some time later we reached the top of the fort and had one more flight. It was supposed to be a short flight with just 2-3 shots. I got the shots done, and was about to recall the drone. And then disaster struct, and the drone crashed to the hillside. It fell into some grass on a very steep hillside. getting there to retrieve the drone was not possible without any mountaineering help. Unfortunately so such help was available. So that was the end of drone 1.0. Sucked bad, but we did not let it dampen our spirits. Completed the trek and headed home. Feeling bad and letting it bother us was not possible because my cousin was here for few more days and I had a packed schedule with one more trek and couple of days of outings planned. So we did not let it bother us and instead completed the vacation. Aftermath was for me to look at ...