Greetings, Earthling 🖖
Your friendly neighborhood co-inhabitant of this tiny speck of dust, I maintain this site as a stochastic log of my calculations towards the futile aim of weeding out the anomalies from the equation that gives me my “42”.
In my Clark Kent mode, I spend my day at The Trade Desk, trying to crunch through petabytes of data and trillions of queries every day to understand the human behavior and make the advertising technology world a little bit better.
Before that, I spent a couple of decades in the Semiconductors world at Qualcomm and Google, building processors and AI accelerators, tinkering with chips, operating systems, device drivers, human interface devices, security et al.
When the lights go out everywhere, I like to don my maker hat and build stuff that no one wants.
I like to make and break things around me ranging from my smart toaster/TV to my web and phone apps to my car, strumming a bit of guitar, 3d printing stuff, and of course, shit-posting on twitter @shantanugoel.
Sometimes I post some of my travel and 3d print outputs on instagram, because I’ve been told by my gen-z interns that that’s a thing to do.
Do check out some of the other subdomains that I run.
I installed google toolbar (linux version) today in firefox and for this blog, it says that its page rank is 7. I can’t believe my eyes. I suppose it’s a google glitch may be (but have a wishful thinking at the back of mind that its true :-) ).
Are you getting the same result for this blog (or weird page rank results for other places that you frequent?)
Some of you might know that I was in the hunt for a decent mspaint alternative recently. Note that I didn’t go for GIMP / Inkscape etc because they were overkill for what I wanted to do. Many a times, I just wanted to touch up a screenshot or make a simple flow image by drawing a few boxes, use a few pointing arrows, and add some text here and there. All this could be done with the previous mentioned programs as well but took a bit more steps than I wanted (stroking the selections / paths for lines, boxes, circles, and even then, no arrows). I didn’t find an adequate replacement at the time but got it now, so thought of writing about it. Basically I came across 4 apps: tuxpaint, gpaint, kolourpaint and mtpaint. Won’t discuss tuxpaint here cuz I found it a little too kiddish.
I’ve known about ImageMagick tools for quite some time now but never dabbled with it. A couple of weeks ago I played with it for some time (notice the new cascaded polaroid pics header above) and was amazed even more. Few of its shining features:
It has almost unlimited features to manipulate your images through its tools like convert, montage, mogrify etc and their long list of options.
It is available for Windows, Linux and Mac as well.
Disclaimer Notes:
I wrote this because these things just came into my mind today while I was reading about the impending “Hardy Heron” release related things and saw that there is a lot of FUD being spread still. So, thought of jotting down my likes/dislikes and not making it a linux v/s windows campaign. Though at a few places, it might be necessary to compare the two just to put things into perspective.
**Update: **Modified the “Oxios Hibernate” app as well on public demand. Please redownload the below mentioned package. It now has Oxios Close as well as Oxios Hibernate.
Oxios developed a very useful tool for Windows Mobile (WM2003/5/6/6.1) called “Oxios Memory” sometime ago. On running it, it’ll flush your RAM (kind of) and recover substantial amounts of memory that can be used by the currently program. It is so good at this that many people run it regularly on their phones, and most of them want to run it in an automated mode (through a scheduler or a script). But the problem (so far) was that it generates a Message Box at the end for which the user has to press “OK” button to make it go away. There is no known way of disabling this message box and many attempts to work around it by scripting the “press OK” action have been very unreliable at best. Hence, it took it upon me today to remove this nagging problem and 5 minutes later we have a “clean” Oxios Memory.