Last Updated: 02nd July 2025

While I was looking into past EmacsConf talks (just to explore Emacs…), I found this talk about hyperdrive.el: Peer-to-peer filesystem in Emacs in EmacsConf 2023, where Prot and Joseph explained about this decentralized drive and how to use it from Emacs.

This seemed to be a nice way to share files without any third party online services and also embraces privacy too (We can even stream audio/video as well !). So I just want to give it a try and explore this and so I’m going to share what I’ve done so far.

First I followed the manual to install it. There are two parts to it. One to install hyperdrive.el from NonGNU ELPA and after that install the gateway (hyperdrive-gateway-ushin) that helps in connecting with the network.

After the installation and using the default config, when I tried to start the gateway, I wasn’t able to and had following error,

Error running timer: (hyperdrive-error "Gateway failed to start (see #<buffer *hyperdrive-start*> for errors)")

in my Emacs 30.1. This persisted even if I installed the gateway manually.

I tried searching the web but coudn’t find a way to solve this (I think my searching skills aren’t good enough…), so I asked Joseph in XMPP chat room and he asked me to show the error that is being thrown out when run directly in command-line based on which we found that the gateway binaries being distributed has a dependency issue with cryptography library libsodium and a packaging problem as well.

So then I tried building the gateway myself from source and then it worked but not through Emacs and then Joseph pointed me to set these two path variables: hyperdrive-gateway-program & hyperdrive-gateway-directory and then it worked from Emacs itself and was able to access Prot and USHIN’s hyperdrives.

Still I get this error message when I access any hyperdrive: Error running timer ‘plz--respond’: (void-variable node) but able to access them.

In future, I plan to use this, whenever I want to share some large files or misc ones which I can’t share or post through my blog. Here’s the link to my public hyperdrive:

hyper://3y3fx1k4ifbw6uw7wzxhzkm5azp5gkbet53r6tc7a5qzsxeabeoo

Next, I wanted to delve more for e.g. on latest features like peer graph, hyperdrive-org-transclution, etc and it seems that we can also use it from mobile as well. Also explore how this hyperdrive works in contrast to IPFS and Torrent.

I will update those here when I complete them. Thanks for reading. Share me your thought about me or my blog to any of my social media handles.

PS: I also learnt about this keybinding C-x C-j (dired-jump) which opens the dired buffer of current file’s directory !.

More Emacs explorations to come… :)

Last Updated 24th Jun 2025

Here’s the list of books that I’ve read so far and about to…

Read

• 7.83 ஹெர்ட்ஸ்

a science fiction novel in tamil by K Sudhakar dealing with wolves, remote mind control and a whole deal of terror behind all those. An interesting, page turning read stuffed with a load of info on bio-chemistry, wild life etc.

• The American Trap

written by Frederic Pierucci, a senior executive in Alstom, who unfortunalely got held as a hostage for FCPA violations of Alstom, shares the struggles he faced to overcome it. Got shocked to know about these hostage based diplomacy and corporate practices.

• Bulls, Bears and other Beasts - A story of Indian Stock Market

written by Santosh Nair, former editor of moneycontrol and many other finance journals. Tells the history of our Indian Stock Market From 80s to pre-COVID from a trader’s perspective, covering everything from cartels, reliance, harshad mehta to bubbles, formation of NSE, SEBI and so on. Must book to know about the history so far in a story fashion.

• Learn Javascript in Tamil

written by Nithya long time back in Kaniyam. Had a glance over it, to learn about JS basics which I needed inorder to understand the JS in my dashboard and as well as for XSS payloads as well (I’d been learning about some basics of Web Security, from Cyber Adam as I got interested to know about common vulnerabilities found in webapps and how to check for that in my dashboard which I’d vibed). It’s a good book to get some idea about JS and JQuery.

Current

• அசிமவ்வின் தோழர்கள்

  an another tamil science fiction short story collection written by Ayesha Era. Natarasan. Usually used to read all his science fiction and popular science books. The book setting is in a “fantasy science fiction world” where popular sci-fi solves current sociological problems or expresses humor, etc.

• Bottle of Lies - Ranbaxy and the Darkside of Indian Pharma

  written by investigative journalist Katherine Eban, exposing quality issues found in Ranbaxy, the generic drug manufacturer and why it had happened.

• 100$ Startup - Reinvent the way you make a living

• Crypto Confidential

Next

• Heart of Darkness

• Selected stories by Anton Chekov

• Bed of Procrustes

  • as a precursor to enter into Taleb’s world.

பீரங்கிகளைத் தகர்த்த பேனா !!

எழுத்தாளனின்    ஓர்     பேனா      முனை
சிந்தனைகளை கொண்டுச் செல்லும் ஏவுகணை 
அது    மனதை    தாக்கும்    ரசாயனவினை
இது    எழுப்பும்     பல      எழுச்சியினை !


இது  மனங்களில்   செய்யும்  யுத்தகாண்டம் !
பிற   உயிர்களைக்  கொல்லா       பலிபீடம்
நகரங்களைத்    தகர்க்காத    சக்தி     பீடம்
அதனால் பீரங்கிகள் தகரும் பேனாமுனையிடம்

NITT-ன் “NITTFEST’25” கலைத்திருவிழாவில், கவிச்சோலை போட்டியில், “பீரங்கிகளைத் தகர்த்த பேனா” என்ற தலைப்பிற்காக எழுதப்பட்டது. என்னுடைய முதல் கவிதை :) அதனால் பரிசு எதுவும் பெறவில்லை.

GDB க்கான பீஜின் விரைவான வழிகாட்டி (Beej’s Quick Guide to GDB)

I’ve translated the Beej’s Guide on GDB to tamil. It is based on this project idea put forth by Thanga Ayyanar aka Gold Ayan in Kaniyam Foundation’s Project Ideas. Initially I planned to do it as a part of Hacktoberfest but It took time and in the meanwhile I also got busy with other works. Finally the translation is out. If you found any mistakes you can raise a issue in the repo where it has been hosted. shrini said after some review it will be made as a series of few posts in Kaniyam website.

This is my First Open Source Contribution, so I feel happy that I’ve started to give back something to FOSS, Tamil community. It was also discussed by Thanga Ayyanar in Nov 3 - Kanchi LUG Weekly News. Hoping to contribute more in future!

• After a long time, I am writing this blog as I had an hectic semester (Semester 6) with acads, Spider R&D, BMS (Battery Management Systems) project and participating in TOP-IMSD'24 (Will write one about this in future!) (Ah Placement Exams too :|).

• Then I had went for an Internship to a company as a Hardware Research Intern but I was told to automate some testing instruments like DSO, Load Analyzer, Logic Analyzer etc.

• Finally after all these I entered into my final year and having some peace i.e time to work on some other exciting projects and improve myself!. So I'm planning to be a little regular in blogging which implies that I do will spend some time exploring new.

Notes from KLUG session

• Today I attended the Kanchipuram Linux Users Group's (KLUG) Weekly Meet for a while and I got to know about,
  • dotenvx and sujo

dotenvx

• To manage env, config management for whatever software, programs you develop in whichever language and also solving all problems previously was with dotenv !

soju

• It is a IRC Bouncer that can be used for logging data from IRC channels. Need to explore on how to use and configure it.

• Also got to know about how to generate PDFs of websites using headless chromium.

I was thinking about what I can do next with ESP32 and micro-ROS and so I thought to learn RTOS first as it is also used and then dwelve into microROS.

For learning RTOS(gonna a start with FreeRTOS itself), I came across this tutorial which looks good.

Then I learned about Policy Gradient methods to solve MDPs from Deep RL course I’m doing from HF. Really the math is little involved which I have to dwelve step by step. While going across Policy Gradient Theorem derivation, I came across few tricks and assumptions used, for e.g.

• Reinforce Trick: \(\frac{\nabla_{\theta}P(\tau)}{P(\tau)} = \nabla_{\theta}\\log(P(\tau))\)

• State Distribution is independent of parameters($\theta$) of policy (I think this implies that the choice of action from action distribution given by the policy isn’t covered by the policy i.e its not a part of policy I guess).

• Sampling m trajectories from the trajectory($\tau$) distribution

Next I have too do the hands-on and refer more about it.

RTOS

• We can use RTOS when we have to run many tasks concurrently or if it’s time demanding, which can’t be done in general Super loop configurations(I mean the usual setup and loop parts).

• ESP32 uses a modified version of FreeRTOS which supports its SMP (Symmetric MultiProcessing) architecture to schedule tasks by using both cores! (but this tutorials is only for multi-tasking in single core)

Task Scheduling

• Context Switching : How are tasks are switched from one to another.

• Task pre-emption