Idea

What and Why? Personally, newsletters are the new blogs. While I don’t write or curate my own, I read a lot. And I am over-subscribed too. I subscribe to about 15 different newsletters but manage to read 1 or 2 in a week. That isn’t good. Luckily, I don’t yet pay to subscribe for any of them – and precisely for this reason. The only newsletter that I pay and subscribe to is the Blackbook newsletter by Vijay Anand. When I wondered how I would organise and streamline my newsletter subscriptions, there was a post on the Blackbook discussing the very problem in good detail. Perhaps, I was mulling over a problem that hadn’t been solved very well for the first time. Of course, even as I write this, I am sure dozens of startups are solving this and probably very elegantly too. ...

I had a #showerthought idea yesterday. I am just logging this one here as I don’t have the time to build this one. I hope to get to it if I can get some validation. TL;DR: The idea is a virtual open-mic platform where a comic can share his set as a video and people can react to specific jokes by clicking on emojis throughout the delivery. The comic can choose how long they want to get this feedback and get information on what works and what doesn’t. Additionally, depending on the participants, the comic can get demography information to see what works for whom. ...

It was a lunch time discussion between me and the wife. We were wandering multiple topics, as usual, and suddenly came to a point where we thought, there should be a coupon code to goto a specific place. And then I remembered my Dad was cribbing the other day about attending a wedding at some place so far away from the city, it almost felt like a picnic across the city. So we thought of this simple idea. ...

I posted this as a problem in the “Ideaspace” platform here. I usually end up paying for 30KG baggage + 10KG cabin when all I carry is <8KG in my flight. Can I just sell the other 32KG and get back portion of my ticket cost? Will the airline buy this back? Can there be a middle man who will do this on both our behalves? This, as I note on the platform, is a regulatory nightmare. God knows what can be pushed into such sold baggage space that would then compromise the security of the flight, its passengers or the destination country (at least its airport). With rising security issues all over the world, a new venture trying to add more nightmare is the last thing to have. But maybe it needn’t be a nightmare after all. Just maybe. ...

Here is my about.me page. I knew this existed for a while but never quite managed to create a page for myself. At last the cat got curious: Last week I went ahead and created one for myself anyhow. Looks quite ok, right? Yeah, I need to invest a little more time to make it look better than that. But I liked how I am able to present a coherent story. A coherent and relevant story doing justice to a portion of my skillset that I am quite proud of. Great place to start, especially if you have a good story to back yourself. Or if you are just starting out – you know what it takes to create a good story now. ...

For a couple of months, we decided to start tracking where our money got spent. We felt the need to see if we could do a little better each month. And maybe if we collected this data for a few months, we may see a spending pattern emerge that would help us budget our expenses way better going forward. There is just one hiccup: data entry. I still went ahead and did this for two months. I have excused myself this month and will resume for November and December. There has to be a better way, right? ...

I have fancied publish-subscribe middleware(pubsub) architectures for quite sometime. When we were still very new in CTS, I came up with a wild suggestion to try this for getting a data dump from a legacy system into our moodle instance. I was quite clueless about what this would entail in terms of development effort, but I could create a PoC setup within a few days which made me quite confident of being able to pull this off. ...

What I am about to discuss here is not a basic need. It is more of a luxury, good to have setup. Nobody quite misses it now, but maybe it will become essential in the future. Or maybe not. During the formative years of the foetus, parents get to see their baby(-ies) take shape through the months with the help of the ultra sound scans that the doctor uses. For the first 6-7 months, the baby is still not very active. But around 7 months, it becomes quite active and is almost able to listen to sounds from outside and maybe also responds to them. Usually, you would have to be in luck to see this happen during a regular checkup visit. And not a lot of us would be that lucky. ...

I got this idea as I was in the middle of my yoga session. I have this app called “noizio” installed in my mac. There is nothing special about this app and there are many variants on this app as well. It can generate ambient noises like being present in a cafe, beach, grass, etc. You can choose if it is raining, windy, thunderstorms, riverside and others. It works quite well, especially if you like to work in a noisier environment. I don’t, but I just installed it for seeing what options I can get 🙂 ...

I wrote about needing a good exercise timer here. I am using the yoga timer app that I downloaded and am reasonably happy with it. I hate quite a few things about that app. I could give feedback and make it better, but the app has a paid version. So chances are the paid version has these fixed already. Besides, it doesn’t do many things it claims to. So am quite unhappy with it. ...