Technology: articles and tips
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Why mechanical keyboards
In recent years mechanical keyboards have seen a resurgence in popularity, mainly because of enthusiast and professional gamers. On Amazon, a search for mechanical
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Alternative touch screen device input methods
I am not a big fan of touch screen devices for input. I may be old school, but I think touch should not be a primary mode of input for any reasonably complex computer with a small display area (which most smart phones/tablets are). Touch input is best used for simple menu based information retrieval…
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Pre social-media online presence and disappearance
A recent blog post from my brother on social media led me to think of online networking before social media giants like FaceBook and Twitter became popular. In those days, the main source of online networking was through blogging, internet forums and sites like Flickr which catered to a fairly niche audience (in Flickr’s case,…
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The limitations of mobile photography
Of late, I’ve been doing quite a bit of photography with my mobile, earlier on my old iPhone 5s and now on my new Samsung Galaxy M31s, a decent mid-range Android phone. Though I appreciate the advances in mobile photography in recent times, it’s obvious that there are quite a few limitations with mobile devices,…
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Static vs dynamic personal blogs and interacting with readers
In this day and age when the average internet user’s online presence is mostly restricted to social media sites where the main form of interaction is clicking/tapping on `like` and `fave` buttons on a mobile screen, having an online identity like your own website seems like an extravagance, particularly when you choose to own a…
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The non-content of the Internet
Beware, this is a bit of a rant. Today I clicked on `Pocket`, Mozilla’s built-in content aggregator and offline reader which is sneakily advertised in Firefox. Then found this apparently “Pocket-worthy” article among others. From its very title, I knew that it was one of those empty “non-content” articles — where a bunch of inane,…
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WordGrinder – a distraction free open source word processor
A long time back, when I was writing a novel, I discovered WordGrinder, a console word processor that’s designed to string prose together without any distraction. In the creator’s own words: WordGrinder is a word processor for processing words. It is not WYSIWYG. It is not point and click. It is not a desktop publisher.…
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Collabora Office – a full fledged LibreOffice port for mobile devices
A while back, I searched for a decent Office suite for opening and editing documents on my iPad and found Collabora Office, a full-fledged port of LibreOffice for Android and iOS / iPadOS. This is one of the few Open Source office suites for mobile devices around and one of the few that are almost…
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My fascination with the Civ-style 4X genre has waned
I have always been a big fan of Civ-style 4X games. I’ve played Civilization III, V, VI and FreeCiv for countless hours in the past, roleplaying historical national leaders trying to build that supreme civilization to dominate all other civilizations and the ultimate empire to conquer and destroy all other empires. If you’ve never played…
