Two days in Minneapolis, Minnesota

Ashish on February 15, 2020

Day 1

If you are arriving at MSP airport, then start your journey with the Mall of America. It is the largest shopping mall in the United States and is pretty close to the airport. Next, head to Minnehaha falls. It is the favorite fishing spot for the locals.

Minnehaha Falls

Hereafter, you can head towards the downtown. There isn’t much to do in downtown during the day time. And I would recommend checking out Sculpture Garden and the Lake of Isles in the evening.

Sculpture Garden

Lake of Isles

Day 2

Start your day with Mill City Museum. The museum shows the history of Minnesota. You can see a beautiful view of St. Anthony’s Falls, the only natural waterfall on river Mississippi. St. Anthony’s Falls provided hydropower and made Minnesota the hub of white flour production in the world. The museum gives a beautiful view of the Stone Arch Bridge as well.

St. Anthony’s Waterfall

From there on, head to the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota. It is free and worth a small visit if you have time. Coming back to the downtown, Sidewalk Harp and Sculpture Clock are worth a shortstop.

Sidewalk Harp – walk below it to see the music play

Sculpture Clock

In the evening, watch a live show at either Brave New Workshop Comedy Theatre or The Lab Theatre.

Note: Most of the city, including the main airport, MSP, is well-connected via inexpensive public transport. So, you don’t need a rental car to get around.

Android: Using “Die with me” app without killing the phone’s battery

Ashish on February 8, 2020

Die with me is a chat app which can be used only when the phone’s battery is below 5%.

Here is a fun way to use the app without draining your phone’s battery. Connect the phone via ADB or start Android emulator and fake the battery level to 4%.

sudo pip3 install adb-enhanced
adbe battery level 4 # Set battery level to 4%

1 2	sudo pip3 install adb-enhanced adbe battery level 4 # Set battery level to 4%

And now, you can use the app. After playing with the app, reset the battery level with,

adbe battery reset

1	adbe battery reset

The first two statements of your BASH script should be…

Ashish on January 11, 2020

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -euo pipefail

1 2	#!/usr/bin/env bash set -euo pipefail

The first statement is a Mac, GNU/Linux, and BSD portable way of finding the location of the bash interpreter. The second statement combines

“set -e” which ensures that your script stops on first command failure. By default, when a command fails, bash executes the next command. Looking at the logs, you might feel that the script executed successfully while some commands might have failed.
“set -u” which ensures that your script exits on first unset variable encountered. Otherwise, bash replaces the unset variables with empty default values.
“set -o pipefail” which ensures that if any command in a set of piped commands failed, the overall exit status is the status of the failed command. Otherwise, the exit status is the status of the last command.

References:

Barcelona (Spain) in four days

Ashish on January 4, 2020

Barcelona

Public transport is good, get a Metro card with ten tickets, it can even be shared simultaneously.
Beware of pickpockets.
Credit card acceptance is high, but not 100%.
Paella, a rice dish, is famous in Barcelona

A Punjabi (Gurmukhi) primer for native Hindi (Devanagari) speakers

Ashish on December 17, 2019

Most native Hindi speakers like me are familiar with Punjabi vocabulary through Punjabi music. Out of curiosity, I decided to spend some time learning Gurmukhi. I was a bit taken aback by the fact that most articles and videos were aimed at teaching Punjabi (Gurmukhi) to English speakers. However, it is much easier to map Punjabi (Gurmukhi) to Hindi (Devanagari) letters for a native Hindi speaker, as almost all Gurmukhi letters map really well to the Devanagari counterparts. Here are my notes.

Madrid (Spain) in two days

Ashish on December 7, 2019

Madrid, originally Myrit, was set up by Moors in about 700 AD, to fight against Catholic Spanish stronghold of Toledo which used to be the old capital of the Castile kingdom.

Public transport is good, get a Metro card with ten tickets, it can even be shared simultaneously.
Beware of pickpockets.
Credit card acceptance is high, but not 100%.
Churros + hot chocolate are famous in Madrid.
The city has pedestrianized itself over time, so the city center is entirely car-free.

Keep your dotfiles bug-free with Continuous Integration

Ashish on December 1, 2019

Just like many software engineers, I maintain my config files for GNU/Linux and Mac OS in a git repository. Given that, I wrote a fair bit of them in interpreted code, notably, Bash, it is a bit hard to ensure that it is bug-free. The other problem I face is that packages on homebrew, the Mac OS package manager becomes obsolete and gets deleted from time to time.

I added CI testing on Travis CI to prevent these breakages and to ensure that my dotfiles are always in good shape for installation. The great thing about Travis CI is that it is entirely free for open-source repositories even for testing on Mac OS containers.

Why not abolish employer-provided health insurance?

Ashish on November 26, 2019

Car insurance in the United States is a system that more or less works well. You call up insurance agents representing different insurance companies with similar policies but the varying quality of service. Then you buy it based on how much insurance premium they charge and how good/bad quality of service you are willing to accept. If you have an expensive car or you are a reckless driver, you end up paying more. The less you use your insurance, the lower your premium becomes over time.

Rome (Italy) in three days

Ashish on November 2, 2019

Rome has a rich history pertinent to western civilization. There are three different aspects of roaming in Rome, namely, architecture, history, and religion (Catholic – Christians). I was profoundly interested in history and to some extent, in architecture, and that influenced my itinerary.

Programmable Money and value capture

Ashish on October 12, 2019

Money serves three purpose – unit of accounting, a medium of exchange, and a store of value. Cryptocurrencies have been compared to Programmable Money. Anything programmable requires an experimentation platform for iterations and improvement. Bitcoin seems to have won the “store of value” battle. Ethereum has the developer mindshare and is the preferred experimentation platform. Multiple cryptocurrencies are still fighting the battle to be the medium of exchange.

BTC dominance chart from CoinMarketCap

The amusing part is that every cryptocurrency startup envies Ethereum’s developer ecosystem and is trying to attract developers. But there isn’t any real value capture being the experimentation platform. A successful product has a high chance of leaving Ethereum and migrating users to its chain. The real battle, I believe, remains in becoming the medium of exchange, being the programmable Visa & Mastercard equivalent.