Greetings, Earthling 🖖

I’m Shantanu, aka Shaan.

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.

TIP: WordPress Posts Scheduling - Back To The Future (or Blast From The Past?)

Shantanu Goel

If you are like me (I mean underpaid, overworked, coding zombie), then the only time you find for blogging is weekends. To keep your readers happy and satisfied through the week, the only options you have are burning the midnight electricity (what? You still use oil? :P) or paying up your son/nephew/wife/etc to push the publish button regularly for the drafts you wrote on weekend. Right? WRONG….

Matt and his AutoMattic team took care of bonded labour like us, and had the good heart to put in the capability of scheduling posts in WordPress (More commonly known as “future posting”). So, all you have to do is say “Hey Wordy boy, here is a bagful of my posts, but don’t you dare release them before I’ve gone for my hawaii vacation. And yeah, one at a time so it can keep your tummy full till I return.”

HollowMan Redux: Google Presents Gmail Users the Invisibility Cloak

Shantanu Goel

Google gave us a nice little present today. The power to be all-seeing but yet still remaining unseen. Yes, now you can be “invisible” in your gmail chat session.

Gmail_chat_invisible_status

But beware, don’t fire up your gtalk, or you will again be as visible as a 100 watt bulb in a 4x4 room at night.

X-Men Are Here, Only That They Are In Your Hands

Shantanu Goel

Who wouldn’t agree that Morph is most probably the coolest mutant (besides Wolverine of course :) ). Now, it seems that the Finnish Giant Nokia has a lot of X-Men lovers as well, as they put out their latest offering to us lesser mortals. They call it The Morph Concept.

Nokia Morph Concept Nano Materials

The Morph concept device is a bridge between highly advanced technologies and their potential benefits to end-users. This device concept showcases some revolutionary leaps being explored by Nokia Research Center (NRC) in collaboration with the Cambridge Nanoscience Centre (United Kingdom) – nanoscale technologies that will potentially create a world of radically different devices that open up an entirely new spectrum of possibilities.

TIP: Automating Website Backups - Part II (Reducing Backup Size)

Shantanu Goel

Last week I had written a short guide on “Automating Website Backups”. I received some good comments/suggestions about it from Jasvinder through e-mail about other aspects that should be addressed. So, thought of doing a few follow ups to that post. This is done in more of a FAQ fashion, so as to answer some of the questions that may arise after reading the first post. Each post will answer one of the questions listed below in detail

Project: shantz-wp-qotd Updated and shantz-wp-prefix-suffix released

Shantanu Goel

I updated my wordpress plugin shantz-wp-qotd. (A feature rich, customizable wordpress quotes plugin) today to version 1.2.0. The new version has the following changes:

  • Added option to exclude pages from displaying quotes

  • Fixed a bug that quotes source selection checkboxes always remain checked after updating settings.

  • Cosmetic: Fixed a few spelling mistakes :)

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