Curated blog posts

We are in this world to help each other, and what better place than the Internet for sharing knowledge. This page contains a curated list of interesting blog posts I've written which you may find useful.

Technical

• PGMPy tutorial.
• Haar features tutorial for Viola Jones algorithm.
• Hidden Markov Models tutorial with Forward Trellis (with some nice visuals I created).
• Bitplane Slicing.
• Otsu thresholding with Differential Evolution.
• Solving the puzzling MokManager problem in Ubuntu (this became quite a popular reference worldwide). 
• Apache Storm concepts.
• Apache Storm tutorial.
• A better branching model for Git.
• Solve Git merge conflicts with KDiff.
• Configure NTP between two Linux machines.
• C++ virtual functions (somewhat popular worldwide).
• Cleared a lot of confusion about CSS with a tutorial.
• What a virtual SIM is .
• d3.js tutorial (presents a rather complex syntax in an easy to understand way).
• Verify website links during development.
• Mutex tutorial (became extremely popular worldwide).
• Prevent compiler optimizers from reducing output precision.
• Trigger Jenkins build on Git commit (somehow this became popular worldwide).
• Install Jenkins plugins.
• Contribute to the open source community.
• N'th permutation without swapping and without recursion.
• Does Android really need an antivirus? (digging into this truth gave other people some helpful pointers too). 

Fun Projects

• Snacker: An "AI" for choosing office snacks.
• Smartphone hologram.
• Other hobby projects I built.
• Machine graded programming tests. 

 

How I used analytics to analyze real problems

• Women's safety issue at office.
• What caused the drop in blood donors?  

Volunteering (CSR) 

• Painting pillars.
• Realize when to stop donating to charity.
• How to start volunteering. How to start a volunteering team.
• Measure how good your volunteering team is.
• How to analyze volunteering activities.
• Cleaning up garbage beside the road.
• Subway cleanup.
• Build good volunteer reputation.
• Mr. Somebody Else.

Conferences and science meetups 

• Useful tips from IIM-B's startup conferences I attended.
• Industrial methods and tools for formal software verification, at Indian Institute of Science (IISc). 
• National science day at Raman Research Institute. 
• IISc open day 2020. 
• IISc open day 2023. 
• IISc open day 2025. 

Artificial Intelligence

• Hopes for AI in 2026. 
• Concepts: Generative AI with large language models (LLM). 
• Prompt engineering tips. 
• Free image generators and copyright issues. 
• Free LLM access without login. 
• Free local LLM use. 
• Using ROCm on AMD. 

General How-to's

• Super-detailed planning for visiting Lakshadweep (I created this since various travel blogs/vlogs and even official sources didn't understand just how much detail is required to plan such a vacation).
• Open source licenses simplified (my manager was so impressed with this that he asked for it to be converted to a formal reference in the company). 
• Remove EXIF data from photos.
• Reduce monitor brightness more than what the system controls allow.
• Convert pgm files to jpg or png.
• LaTeX on Ubuntu.
• Reset BIOS password.
• Search for trends on Google Books.
• Dual booting with UEFI.
• MySQL: quick summary of tables and rows.
• MySQL: Speed up inserts.
• Avoid crashes due to memory problems on AWS.
• Repair pendrive corrupted by virus.
• Networking at conferences (networking is about giving).
• Waterproofing with cement (it's important to understand what workmen speak).
• bashrc for Windows.
• Transfer data between computers at high speed with an Ethernet cable.
• Understanding the disk usage analyzer on Linux.
• Applying for a passport in India.
• Renewing your driving license without going to the RTO. 
• Exact steps to renew your vehicle registration certificate (RC). 
• Quick help with End User License Agreements (EULA).
• Destroy Windows viruses with Linux.
• Push to GitHub without the authentication problem.
• Access GitHub with authentication token instead of password.
• Avoid special-character problems while posting code on websites.

Good health

• The real cure for eye strain (the Medium version became quite famous with time).
• Organic food: Oota from your thota and health effects of various chemicals.  

Removing metadata from photos

When you take a photo with modern digital cameras or your smartphone camera, there is a lot of information (EXIF data) that the device embeds into the photo that can be viewed in the image properties. When you share the photo with other people, if you don't want them to see that data, you can remove it with certain tools.

An internet search for "How to remove exif data from photo" will lead you to a lot of tools.

• GIMP users: Just open the image in GIMP, choose "Export as" and when exporting the file, uncheck the "Save EXIF data" option.
• Ubuntu users: Simply open a terminal in the folder that contains the images you want to remove exif data from and type  mogrify -strip *.jpg to remove exif data from all jpg files. Else instead of "*.jpg", specify the particular filename.

Unable to copy files from computer/laptop to phone SD Card / internal memory

It can be puzzling when you encounter an error that simply says that a file can't be copied from your computer to your phone.

It could simply be one of the following issues:
1. The filename has special characters like a comma or colon which is not supported by your phone's operating system as a filename.
2. The filename may be too long, and long filenames may not be supported by the phone's operating system.

Simply change the filename to something that contains just alphanumeric characters and you'll be able to copy it. 

How to reduce the brightness of your monitor to lesser than what the operating system allows

Yet another reason to love Linux.
Sometimes you really need the brightness of your monitor to be lower than it already is, and I've found the best solution is to use xrandr. It's installed by default in Ubuntu.

First, you need to know which device is connected to your display (even if you are using a laptop).
Type:

xrandr -q

You'll get an output that looks something like this:

Screen 0: minimum 8 x 8, current 1366 x 768, maximum 32767 x 32767
DP1 connected primary 1366x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 256mm x 144mm
   1366x768      60.06*+
   1360x768      59.80    59.96 
   1280x720      60.00 
   1024x768      60.00 
   1024x576      60.00 
   960x540       60.00 
   800x600       60.32    56.25 
   864x486       60.00 
   640x480       59.94 
   720x405       60.00 
   680x384       60.00 
   640x360       60.00 
HDMI1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
VGA1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)

Look for the one that says "connected", and use that in the next command.
Type:

xrandr --output DP1 --brightness 0.5

And tadaah!!! The brightness goes to 50% lesser than what it was.
Enjoy!!!



Create aliases

Still better, create these two aliases in ~/.bash_aliases.

alias br='xrandr --output eDP1 --brightness 0.5'
alias brightness='xrandr --output eDP1 --brightness '

Now you can just type br or brightness 0.3 or brightness 0.6 etc. instead of typing the entire command.


Update: Oct 2019: Redshift can be manually controlled and can even alter gamma. So rather than use xrandr, use Redshift: https://nrecursions.blogspot.com/2018/03/alternative-to-flux-for-ubuntu-is.html 

 

Update 2022: At least from Ubuntu 22.04 and Windows 10 onward, there's no need of installing redshift or similar apps, since the OS comes pre-installed with a NightLight app. Even Android has it.