Blog Posts

Wow. I picked this up sight unseen from a recommendation on reddit. Great holiday read, and different. The aliens are refreshingly different and the middle half of the book is quite a ride.

This is a tricky recipe - sometimes it turns out awesome, other times no one wants to eat it.

Ingredients

uv looks like a very promising new python package manager. Its fast, does global python tool installs, and has sensible defaults.

This khichri recipe is modified for backpacking, at home this would include a bhaagar and a few different steps. Normally you would have a seperate pot for rinsing and soaking, and another one for frying, but here we have just the one larger pot and one smaller frypan.

python-dotenv makes it easy to read in secrets from env or a .env file in the project folder.

Number format: 0,"k"

The Joe Walker podcast has a great inteview with Katalin Karikó, one of the scientists/founders behind mRNA technology.

I don't like butter chicken, or the many spices or sugar which goes into it. So this is basically a karhai recipe with a bit of added ghee and cream.

tl;dr buy if a google tragic, else for almost any conceivable use any recent ipad is better.

I first started out with scratch, which is pretty awesome and kids can create some pretty awesome (and complex!) projects very quickly. However, I noticed that it is hard to go back and read - the scratch blocks once assembled are hard for the same kid who put them together to quickly read and iterate on.

Matthieu Aikins follows a brown refugee from Afghanistan through to Europe. It gives you an inside view of a refugees journey, starting from the why, to the how.

A vegetable biryani. Cooked using a round cast iron enamelled casserole.

My one and only pasta receipe.

This is a book about climate change, all hung about on characters. Now Neal is great at learning things and telling them to you, and I've enjoyed his earlier works, info dumps and all. I like fantastical characters, like Jack, Eliza and Enoch Root in the Baroque Cycle, but this book... has a lot of ideas and interesting exposition on how a thing could practically happen, but don't read it for the ppl.

Recipe in progress in an attempt to recreate a vegan version of homestyle aloo keema.

Shamsad ki recipe, punjabi style. This is what she makes at home for her family. Its the first time I ever had this dish in Pakistan.

Recipe from Lahore. Smokey yummy goodness.

Recipe from Lahore.

A good, easy to read book on how the British exited their Indian empire and left behind a fractured subcontinent.

The rise and fall of Arif Naqvi is fascinating, but I found this book a bit wanting.

CSS makes sense, I mean, who doesn't want to seperate styling from code? Semantic html has been the web's dream for a long time, but over time as web browsers became operating systems css has grown into a hugely complex kludge of a tool.

Hermitage Foreshore track

The basic aloo sabzi. If made right, its awesome. This is the staple breakfast/lunch/camping/everything Pakistani dish.

A very tasty salad, suitable for a side dish or an easy lunch.

It's a awesome political, economical and yes, climate overview of the planet and where its headed. Too much of future looking literature really holds its tongue. This is a no holds barred overview.

The book to read to get a handle of where Australia is today, and how politics works at the state and federal level.

Notes on a lilygo eink board, which didn't get very far, but interesting nonetheless.

I've been wanting to try out a IOT board to do something for a while, and somebody lent me a mystery ESP8266 based board.

Exercise

There are many excellent blog engines out there, but to customise any of them takes so much understanding of how they work, the template and theme engines they use, that its easier to just use them exactly as is with an existing theme.

Factory reset

So many ideas. It's my favourite first contact book. While some of the ideas might be over the top, they keep coming. Whats really impressive is that this is just book 1 of a trilogy and the ideas keep going.

cucumber + mint raita

Recipe from Lahore. Needs some more tips from the original cook.

aka spicy chickpeas with a ton of ginger.

A faster daal recipe. 30 min, good for 3 ppl, 4 with a small side dish.

Makes kebabs for frying or grilling. Goes well in burgers.

My collection of tips and tricks for using jupyter lab.

Omelette, Pakistani style. If made properly, this is the best omelette.

Home made recipe from FDT. This is a basic desi karhai receipe which can be used as the base for anything.

This is a great statistics primer - Alex Reinhart explains commonly used statistical techniques in use by not just showing how ppl make mistakes, but by explaining them in simple english which actually makes sense, unlike most "real" statistics books.

ChromeOS supports a built in Linux - running inside a container running insde a VM. Turn it on by going to settings and pressing the on button for Linux (beta). This gives us a bare bones Linux install running Debian 11. So here goes all the things I did to customize it.

Andrew Trask is an AI superstar, having come up with the idea for Generative Adverserial Networks (GANS) - one of the most exicting new AI techniques today - in a bar.

This is a awesome read. In many countries, many people have long stopped wondering or caring about how their country actually functions, and this book takes us through a bunch of really useful government functions, from providing food and shelter to the needy to... just about everything you can imagine.

It had been a while since I finished Udacity's Deep Learning course, so as a refresher I signed up for Andrew NG's deeplearning.ai course.

This was one of Udacity's first computer science MOOC's, and I really liked it. Its a great fast intro to computer science concepts and python.

Oh goody, yet another book written through colonial tinted glasses.