Links

This website runs on Statamic and I display webmentions here, powered by my Webmentions add-on for Statamic. This is ongoing development of a plugin by Matt Rothenberg, the ownership of which Matt was kind enough to transfer to me. The plugin is free and released under an MIT licence.

I use Obsidian a lot, especially academically and for zettelkasten, so I built a neat little theme for it based on the Carbon design system from IBM, of which I am a big fan. You can find it on Github but you can also search for it on your Obsidian installation within Settings → Appearance → Themes → Manage and search for “Carbon”.

This website is conscious of its environmental impact and maintains as low a carbon footprint as possible. It is currently around 0.06–0.09g of CO₂ per page view, which makes it cleaner than 95% of the websites on the internet. For this reason, the Low Carbon Websites showcase rated this website A+ and listed it as compliant for having a low carbon footprint as on 28 November 2023. This measure remains valid till date.

The critical archival of excellent use cases for typography, Fonts in use, featured this website on 17 November 2023. The typefaces featured in use were Martina Plantijn and Söhne from Klim Type—read the colophon for more.

I did not have the foresight to archive redesigns of this website from back when it started in 2007 until 2023 (during which it had stints on Vox, Wordpress, Tumblr, Kirby and Hugo). Since moving to Statamic in March–April 2023, though, I have archived working versions numbered from 4 up to 6 as listed below. The current iteration of this website is version 7.

• v6alt (Cambridge) This was a stop-gap design while the current v7 codenamed Gonville was being worked out with the codename ‘Cambridge’ a nod towards the codename of v7;
• v6 (Book) This was a book-like design that was perhaps a minor misstep, or an overzealous attempt, depending on whom you ask but led in important ways to v7 and offered invaluable lessons along the way;
• v5 (Bradford) A minor iteration of Britania, v4. This introduced small visual changes but major backend refinements intended as long-term ‘features’ on this website viz. text sizing, better RSS feeds etc.;
• v4 (Britania) A major switch in design philosophy bringing in my learnings from previous iterations, with a renewed focus on typography, clean design, cleaner code and intended to provide a design framework for this website in the long term;
• v3 (Carbon) The final iteration of this website on Hugo before moving to Statamic, a design I like to look back on if only to see how my design sensibilities have changed over time.

Although there have been more than two iterations of this website before v3, I like to think of them more broadly as two ‘phases’ instead. The second phase was on Kirby and the first was on Wordpress. I have copies of these scattered but no time to recompile them into working archival editions of the site like I have done for the ones above.

Prehistoric editions of this website, before versioning began, whatever that means in this context, are as follows:

• c. July 2011 A fullpage screenshot of the homepage when this website first moved to Tumblr (PDF, 415kb)
• c. 2011 A screenshot of the homepage (PDF, 415kb)
• c. April 2011 An embarassing screenshot of a ‘branch’ of this website has been captured by the Wayback Machine

Update This special section was archived at the start of 2024. Read more about changes made in 2024.

A novel coronavirus brought the world to its knees at the start of 2020. Three months in—as India, the US, Italy, the UK, Spain and nearly every other country on the planet went into a lockdown—it became clear that this event would define our generation in ways we never expected. Starting from the first day India was locked down, a set of daily notes were published as the COVID-19 diaries that would record the views of a handful of people, but primarily of the owner of this website, of life under quarantine and several thoughts on how India and the rest of the world were handling this crisis.

Other articles have also been published on the SARS-Cov-2 virus: read about the bright side of humanity’s capacity for survival; the global economic impact of COVID-19.

Apple runs a free programme where they train educators to use Apple products in the classroom. From programming to films to presentations everything an Apple product can do and how you can use it to improve your lessons in the classroom, whether at school or university, is taught for free in the Apple Teacher Learning Centre. Although you can get an Apple Teacher certification for any tool of your choice (iPad, Mac or coding skills) the programme is a continuous learning experience that can spark creativity in many ways. Also join #AppleEDUChat every week on Twitter for discussions and continued learning.

Back when I was using Ulysses (I bid goodbye when they moved to a subscription-based model) there was this specific theme I had designed for myself that took inspiration from a typewriter but tweaked things to adapt to a modern, digital screen. I eventually submitted it to the official Ulysses Styles & Themes collection where it was accepted and has since received a modest amount of love and installs. Take a look for yourself.

The lovely Vaishnavi M. Kulkarni and I got married in December of 2018. This was our wedding website and since I coded it I gifted myself the right to unabashedly use my favourite typeface of all time, Minion, almost everywhere. (The wife approved.) While this website is not of public interest, it is certainly in my personal interest to archive the link here for posterity.

The currently live version has been edited so everything is in the past tense and our wedding day counter has been removed. However, there is a frozen version of the site that still looks exactly as it did before the wedding except with the countdown timer reading zero for obvious reasons.

In 2016, a couple of years after I had fully settled into the Apple ecosystem, I was interviewed by The Sweet Setup about my iPhone, iPad and Mac set-ups, choice of apps, and about other technology- and workspace-related questions. Although not an accurate representation of the current state of things, my fundamental approach to technology has remained somewhat consistent since this interview to this day. The full interview is available on The Sweet Setup.

In 2016 I first sat the political compass test. Before then I had thought of myself as a socially modern liberal but fiscally conservative person. After the test I was told I was staunchly in the middle of the third quadrant of the political compass. I expected to be further left and closer to the x-axis but the test refused to oblige. I sat the test a few more times over the next few years and the result remained the same. The last time I sat this test was in December of 2019. You can see the latest graph which is quite representative of its predecessors. I am unsure about the accuracy of this test (although I have seen many people believe it is reasonably accurate, even academically) but it certainly is a fun activity to partake in.

Back in 2015 when Enlight was just entering the mobile photo editing game where it is now quite a big player, I was invited to write an article that would guide users on editing their photos. I had chosen to speak about using curves effectively. Read the article on the Enlight website.

From 2011 to 2017 this website was powered by Wordpress. In 2017, to mark its ten year anniversary, there took place what I like to call the great purge: I removed over 500 essays permanently from the database to allow for a leaner collection of articles with an increased baseline quality for the entire archival. Since 2017 this website has eschewed databases and moved to Hugo (after a brief stint with Kirby) for a more modern framework on which to run the site; and articles made since that time, including a handful from the 2011–2017 years, can be found on this website. You are welcome to browse the archives anytime.