Setting up my personal website using Nikola

Last year, I had to migrate my web pages very quickly to my own server because changes in my Institute's website made it difficult for me to continue to host my web pages there. My old web site was set up more than two decades ago using raw html, and it used php for on-the-fly…

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Markdown for Everything

I like to use markdown for everything: for my blogs, my emails (though they are mostly plain text), most of my short technical writing, and for most presentations. There have been many reasons for this shift: Markdown is so much faster. Creating a Power Point presentation from an existing writeup or notes used to take…

Moving to a tiling window manager

Over two blog posts, I have described my journey towards minimalism – from Windows to Ubuntu at the beginning of the decade, then to Xubuntu over two years back, and onward to Arch Linux a year ago. While moving to Arch Linux, I abandoned desktop environments in favour of a relatively minimalist window manager (Openbox).…

Migrating from R to Python

Many years ago, I shifted from Microsoft Excel and LibreOffice Calc to R data frames as my primary spreadsheet tool. This was one of the earliest steps in my ongoing move from bloat to minimalism (see my three blog posts on this process). Shifting to R yielded many benefits: Greater readability and maintainability Version control…

Moving to Arch Linux

Why I moved to Arch Linux I switched from Windows to Ubuntu Linux nearly 5 years ago and was quite happy with the move. About one and a half years back, while upgrading from 12.04 to 14.04, I moved to the more lightweight Xubuntu variant of Ubuntu and was quite pleased with this somewhat more…

Saying no to spreadsheets

The spreadsheet was the first and most important business application of the personal computer. Corporate America started buying PCs 35 years ago to run VisiCalc; they paid a couple of thousand dollars for an Apple computer only to run the hundred dollar spreadsheet program. VisiCalc gave way to Lotus 123, which in turn was supplanted…

Digital wills and printable password vaults

Digital Wills Digital wills are mechanisms that determine who has access to our digital data after death. One of the critical challenges for transmitting online and offline digital data is the transmission of passwords. Offline digital data is the data in our laptops and various storage devices. Transmitting this data is relatively easy because the…

From Software Bloat to Minimalism

Maciej Ceglowski has a fascinating blog post in which he argues that the popular form of Moore’s Law (“computers always get faster and more capable”) is beginning to break down, but it does not matter because “the devices we use are becoming ‘good enough’”. However, as Ceglowski points out, stagnating computing power turns software bloat…