https://abhinavsarkar.net by @abnv@fantastic.earth
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This week note covers the week of 21st–26th July. Last week was quite busy with a lot of running around. In the week prior, we celebrated our now 4yo A’s birthday. Since we were never able to have a big party for A for any of her important occasions in the last four years, we decided to throw one this time. We booked a party hall and invited all her school and home friends and their parents. The party hall had a children’s play arena attached to it and all the children had great fun. The…
Another round of answering questionnaires found on internet! This time is it 100 Questions for Webmasters. Here we go! This post was originally published on abhinavsarkar.net. Please introduce yourself. I’m Abhinav Sarkar, a person who happens to be a software engineer at work and a webmaster for fun. How long have you been making websites? Over 26 years! And what got you into the hobby? When I was first introduced to computers in the nineteen hundreds, I found web pages to be the easiest way…
This week note covers the week of 13th–20th July. Aliens vs. The Fish Since I’m writing this week note so late, I’ll throw in an extra day for free. Last week was the week of birthdays. Both my wife and our now 4yo A had their birthdays, and the whole week was spent in celebrations. For A’s birthday, we went to the Aquarium Paradise, probably the largest aquarium in Bengaluru. A had a lot of fun looking at all the fish and other sea creatures. The photo above is from the aquarium, which had a…
This week note covers the week of 6th–12th July. Last Day of Summer Yes, I was there at the foot of the Eiffel Tower 9 years ago, and yes, I took this photo. I visited Paris on my way to Berlin for EuroClojure 2017, where I talked about Moving People with Clojure. It feels like a lifetime ago, maybe it was. Today is a lazy day in sort of a contemplative way. I really did not feel like writing this week note, but this week is going to be busy so it’s now or never. Last week went too quickly I…
This week note covers the week of 29th June–5th July. Life# Last week I got back to work after a week’s break. And work I did! I switched my office cab time from 7:30 AM to 9:30 AM so that I could sleep a little longer. Now I have breakfast at home instead of office, and I start working right from the cab so that I get to work same amount of time. I’ve been sleeping 10+ hours every night and it is finally working! I feel much better than a few weeks ago, almost back to my normal health. I’ve…
The day after IndieWebClub Bangalore Special Anniversary Meetup, Ankur, Tanvi and I got together and did a retrospective on the event. We noted down what went well, what didn’t and what we should do the next time. This note summarized our discussion. What Went Well# We front-loaded many decisions, such as talk format, venue, date, topics etc., and didn’t second-guess them. This helped us later with our tight schedule. We were serious about the CFP from the get-go. We wrote a detailed CFP…
This week note covers the week of 22nd–28th June. Life# I took the whole last week off to recover from illness and fatigue. I’m happy to report that all three of us are doing much better now. I had a sinus infection, not major, but enough to give me headaches entire days. Thankfully, the medication worked, and now I’m almost over it. Earlier I had decided to not work on personal projects last week, but as I started feeling better, I couldn’t resist it. I worked on them for two days out of…
Almost nine years ago, I decided to write my own website generator. Static-site generators (SSGs) were sort of new back then, and somewhat fascinating to me. After failing to start a website/blog for a decade, I realized that I’ll never be satisfied by a ready-made solution, and I need to make something of my own. I started with Hakyll, a small SSG framework written in Haskell. Over years, I expanded my website by adding new sections and features. The website code has grown from 500 lines to…
This week note covers the week of 15th–21st June. By the Lake Life# Last week was a pretty bad weak for us health-wise. Wife, I, and A have been battling different illnesses at varying degrees. I have slept for only four hours last night. I shouldn’t even be writing this weeknote, but there is nothing else I can do at this moment. If you have been a regular reader of my weeknotes, you’d have noticed that we’ve not had a sickness-free week in what seems like a long time now. The blame lies in…
I wrote this post for a prompt given during our local Indieweb club meeting: “Capture the moment that led to starting your blog.” I bought this domain name “abhinavsarkar.net” in June 2007. A few years prior to that, my exposure to the internet had be expanded massively by me finally getting an internet connection over Ethernet. Dial-ups that I used before that were just too slow for me to actually have enough time to explore anything on internet other than going to particular websites I…
In the previous post, we learned how to get started with managing and building a Haskell project with Nix. In this post, we learn how to easily create statically-linked executables for Haskell projects with Nix. This post was originally published on abhinavsarkar.net. This post is a part of the series: Nix for Haskell. Getting Started Static Builds 👈 ContentsStatic BuildsEnabling Static Builds in GHCConfiguring the ApplicationRooting Static Build DependenciesFinaleBonus: Building a Docker…
This week note covers the week of 8th–14th June. Life# Last week was a little slow, in many ways. My health is improving, but I’m still not at a place to be able to do physical activities. I’m taking it slow, and mostly resting. I started doing regular meditation starting last week. It makes me feel calmer and more restful. I hope it aids in my recovery too. By the end of the week, I felt good enough to go out for lunch. After a gap of many months wife and I went out, to Burma Burma in…
feed-repeat is a small tool that selects old posts from RSS/Atom feeds you configure and puts them into a new Atom feed. Use it with your feed reader for a spaced-repetition-like experience for blog posts. See the announcement post for the motivation behind it, and more details. I just released v1.1 of feed-repeat. This release brings some great new features, and improves the security and performance. The biggest highlight: you can now run feed-repeat entirely on GitHub, no server needed! The…
This week note covers the week of 1st–7th June. Life# Last week was a week of rest and recovery. I felt better with each passing day. I wonder if what happened to me in the last month was some sort of echo of my burnout and spell of illness of the last year. But this time I didn’t wait six months, I immediately started focusing on resting and nutrition. I hope this cuts down my recovery period substantially. Although I can walk ten thousand steps a day, I’m not forcing myself too, at least for…
It all started with a question about cake. IndieWebClub Bangalore had its one-year anniversary on 24 May 2026. After the meetup on 2nd May, I asked Ankur and Tanvi if we could get some cake to celebrate the anniversary. We agreed to it, but a bigger idea originated in my mind. Conception# On 5th May, I posted in the IWCB admins group chat: I was wondering if we could do a special meetup on 30th with no agenda and a little anniversary celebration. Or we could do a small unconference in…
This week note covers the week of 25th–31st May. Life# Compared to the week before, I was in good health for most of the last week. I managed to get a lot of work done, and attended three drumming classes as well. Though my playing is still quite sloppy, sight reading is slowly coming back to me. I recorded myself playing, and later cringed at the inaccuracies. I’m sad to see how much my skills have declined, but I’m happy to report that I’m progressing much faster than a beginner. I hope that…
This week note covers the week of 18th–24th May. The Bends Life# Last week was a mixed bag. I had some minor health issues that lasted almost through the week. It was annoying and uncomfortable, but I worked through it. My wife and child A also had some cough and cold because of the arrival of rains in Bengaluru. But I am not complaining. The rains have been a lifesaver for me. The temperature has gone down by more than 5 °C and my mood has improved drastically. I know that the rains caused a…
Have you ever wanted to reread that old article posted by your favourite author on their website? Do you use feed readers and wish that some great posts from your friends magically reappear in your inbox so that you can remember the good old days? Do you want to use your feed reader as sort of a space-repetition tool? Well then, feed-repeat is for you. I have just released the version 1.0 of feed-repeat, a small tool that does only one thing: it takes some posts from the RSS/Atom feeds you…
This week note covers the week of 11th–17th May. Life# Last week was sort of a rebound to the weeks before, that is to say, it wasn’t a great week. A was sick the entire week and I was worried sick. I made the mistake of having some coffee on Tuesday (only 10ml espresso though), and then going to the gym. My body just couldn’t take them together, and I messed up my sleep completely. Then to combat the sleepiness next day I drank more coffee, and it made me lose even more sleep. The lack of…
This week note covers the week of 4th–10th May. Paris? Paris! Life# After a gap of three weeks, I finally felt recovered enough last week to be more physically active. I was able to hit the gym twice, and also go for a run after a break of a whole month. I also walked 20kms. It was nice to feel the energy back in my body. The downside was the soreness and exhaustion I felt most of the time. I barely could do anything else outside work. I wasted a lot of time staring at the screens before I…
This week note covers the week of 27th April–3rd May. Life# It finally rained in Bangalore last week. There was a severe thunderstorm and lot of trees were uprooted. The rain lasted for a couple of hours. Thankfully, I made it home just before it became extreme. I had hoped that the rain will bring the much wanted coolness, but unfortunately the heat came back next day. I have completely lost the zeal to keep walking 10,000 steps a day because of the heat. It has been many days since I walked…
Exactly a year ago, an ambulance in Bangalore hit several people. The next day I was driving my scooter on the road besides an ambulance. The sight of the ambulance reminded me of the news story and I thought to myself, “it could happen to me, I should be careful.” We were stopped at a traffic signal, and I was lost in thoughts about the news. The signal turned green, we started moving, the ambulance took a sharp turn, and ran into me. Thankfully, both of us hit the brakes quite hard and the…
Trying a new note format inspired by Azan’s Playlists. Here is a playlist of songs that I find really hard to get out of my head once listened to: Anthems For A Seventeen Year-Old Girl — Broken Social Scene A Teenager In Love — Dion & The Belmonts Angel Of The Morning — Juice Newton I Only Want To Be With You — Dusty Springfield Such Great Heights — Streetlight Manifesto Just A Girl — No Doubt All Star — Smash Mouth What’s Up? — 4 Non Blondes Listen: On Spotify • On YouTube Music If you have…
This week note covers the week of 20th–26th April. This is going to be a short note. The summer is at its peak in Bangalore. The heat is making my body unable to do anything productive. I’m running in power-save mode, where I’m doing minimal possible work. So I don’t really have much to write about. I’m over the food poisoning from the previous week, but a little bit of weariness persists. I didn’t even go for my usual walks. Hence: Current daily average steps per month: 9183 Personal Projects#…
This week note covers the week of 13th–19th April. Life# After my wife and our 3yo A, it was my turn last week to catch the stomach bug. I had a case of bad food poisoning last Monday, and the sickness persisted till yesterday. Only today I started feeling normal. It was also the hottest week in Bengaluru. I heard about many folks getting food poisoning in last couple of weeks. I’m guessing it’s because of food going bad quicker in the summer heat. Thereafter, I spent all of my week groaning in…
I’ve been watching anime for over 30 years now. After such a long time, I’ve become very selective in choosing which shows to watch. These days I only complete a couple of shows per season. I’m tired and bored of repetitive themes and settings, sequels, long-dragging shows, and in particular the deluge of Isekai anime. My patience wears thin and I drop things I don’t like without a thought. Now, I prefer watching only shows with novel ideas or great execution. With that preface, here are my top…
microvm.nix is a framework to run NixOS based micro VMs on various platforms. In particular, it can use vfkit to run micro VMs on macOS that use the macOS virtualization framework to provide a more performant VM than QEMU. microvm.nix works well but the documentation is a bit lacking. I had to figure out some gotchas while setting this up on my MacBook Pro M4, so I decided to write this note. This tutorial requires Nix and Nix Darwin to be installed on the macOS machine. To build a micro VM, we…
