Indian accent

About 50% of Indians use Hindi as their primary language. Hindi/Devanagari is fairly phonetic except when it starts to import foreign words. And that’s why many Indians, with Hindi as their primary language, end up with incorrect pronunciations of foreign, mainly English, words. Let’s look at a few specific categories of mistakes.

Aruba

Things to do in Aruba

Aruba, a small Caribbean island 29 km north of Venezuela, is a part of the ABC islands - Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao, which form the Dutch Caribbean and is a part of the Netherlands. It is famous for its white-sand beaches. Where to stay Aruba Downtown is very far from the impressive beaches in the northwest. Choose a hotel/resort/Airbnb near the world-famous Eagle Beach or Palm beach. Public transport consists of a bus that takes 5.2 US$ on a single ride and runs almost once an hour. Taxis, just like everything else, on the island, are expensive. ...

MusicSync: best alternative to Google Play Music and Google Podcasts

MusicSync: best alternative to Google Play Music and Google Podcasts

Google Play Music was great. Apart from one missing feature about the inability to upload music from the phone to the Google Play Music library, I had no other complaints. Then it was forcefully shut down .

React Native

There are tons of hyped-up claims surrounding React Native that are worth addressing. The reasons why companies run for React Native are usually, We already use Javascript for the website and now, we can build apps in that as well. We can use one codebase for Android, iOS, and web apps. Or at least, Android and iOS apps. Facebook uses it

Android: Catching NDK crashes

On Android catching Java exceptions is easy via UncaughtExceptionHandler . Catching NDK crashes is a bit more convoluted. Since the native stack is probably corrupted, you want the crash handler to run on a separate process. Also, since the system might be in an unstable shape, don’t send the crash report to your web server or do anything fancy. Just write the crash report to a file, and on the next restart of the app, send to your web server and delete it from the disk. I ended up using jndcrash package for this.

Hindi: The missing "v" sound

why do indians use w and v interchangeably

Pyramid of Giza

Egypt in 8 days

Egypt, locally known as Misr (मिस्र) is world-famous for its pyramids and ancient polytheist temples. I made a trip to Egypt in Nov 2020, during the COVID-19 era. Given the general lack of tourism, it was a great time to travel since I didn’t face any queues and in many temples, I was the sole visitor. Very few people outside the tourism industry understand English, so, it is good to make yourself aware of a few basic phrases. The equivalent of “hello” is “As-salamu alaykum”. To ask for a price, say " bekam da ". And of course learn the common numbers like five (hamza), three (thlath), ten (ashri), and twenty (ashrin) since these are what you will encounter on the street. And “I don’t understand Arabic” is “Ana mish fahem al Arabee”. ...

Docker: Be careful about the scratch image

After I wrote my previous post, some suggested that I can cut down the image size further by using a “scratch” image. And that’s true, “scratch i"s a reserved 0-sized image with nothing in it. And utilizing a scratch binary image did cut down the size of the final Docker image from 13MB to 7.5MB. Pretty good, right? Except the image cannot do an SSL cert verification because of the missing SSL certs!!! Bash 1 Failed to reach google.com: Get https://google.com: x509: certificate signed by unknown authority

Grinnell Glacier

Glacier National Park in 4 days

Glacier National Park, Montana is considered to be one of the most gorgeous national parks in the US. We went there in September 2020. It wasn’t snowing but the weather was still pretty erratic with random cold showers during the day. So, I would recommend going no later than August. Also, the east side, which has Native American reservations were closed to prevent COVID-19 spread. Dressing in at least three layers is highly recommended as the weather changes dramatically with heights and the time of the day. ...

Indeterminate Progress bar is an inferior UX design

60 milliseconds is when we notice something isn’t immediate. Any user interaction, that involves sending data over the network or doing heavy computation on it, usually takes way longer than 60 milliseconds. So, we end with a progress bar. There are two broad categories of progress bars, one that shows the absolute/relative progress, a determinate progress bar, and one that does not an indeterminate progress bar.