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.

Odroid U2 Tips: Overscan, emmc Adapter, HDMI-DVI Adapter

Shantanu Goel

So I’ve been spending a few hours on getting my odroid u2 up and running and here are a few tips that I’ve come across in the process.

**Overscan: **

So, many TVs have this issue that they miss out on displaying the corners of the image put out by the Odroid U2. The phenomenon is called overscan. Now, all you have to do is select settings such as “Just Scan” or similar on your TV that allows your TV to display image coming from U2 as is. This setting is called “Screen Fit” on Samsung TVs but I found something weird. My TV already had this setting set for the picture mode, but still I had the overscan issue. What I had to do was to switch to another mode and then back to Screen Fit and it started working fine.

Odroid U2 is here

Shantanu Goel

So, this little baby landed up in my mailbox a couple of days ago :). The Odroid U2. For those who don’t know, it’s a cheap dev board based around Samsung’s Exynos 4412 SoC and supports Android as well as Ubuntu.

I’ve got quite a few things planned on how to use it and will post more about my adventures with the U2 here soon.

Third Party Widgets on Android 4.2 Lock Screen

Shantanu Goel

One of the features I was really looking forward to with Android 4.2 was lock screen widgets but when I got the update on my Galaxy Nexus that it only had 5 pre-defined stock widgets that could be added to the lock screen.

I headed over to the Android developers site some time later and was pleasantly surprised to see that actually 3rd party widgets can indeed be added to the lock screen. They just need a small change for this. They need to add “android:widgetCategory=“keyguard|home_screen”” parameter to your xml where the appwidget provider element is defined. Simple enough :)

My Tasker Night Mode Profile For Android

Shantanu Goel

If there are two things that irritate me the most when I go to sleep, they are: Sync notifications going off and battery drained off in the morning (worst case being drained off before alarm time, making me late for work). I used to have a simple profile that turned off auto sync between 11 PM to 7 AM but it didn’t always work well because I work past 11 quite a lot and don’t usually have a fixed sleep time. Similarly I get up at different times. Sometimes I’m not even home and still the profile runs, making me lose sync.

BogusApple.com: Apple Screw Up Saved By Githubber

Shantanu Goel

So, I just came across a thread on apple discussion forums and it seems like that Apple has added a new feature in OS X Mountain Lion due to which it redirects a lot of web traffic to a domain called “bogusapple.com” to make sure that it is failing. Now, the problem is that Apple didn’t even register this domain. By design? To make sure that it fails? But if so, it was a very poor design decision because then anyone could have registered it and used it for benefit, like spreading malware or phishing attempts and what not.