Last two weeks went super busy with office work, reading, library visits and few events.

Reading:

Completed reading the original book and rewritten version of “பெண் ஏன் அடிமையானாள்?” “Why women became slave?” by originally written by Periyar. That book describes why Indian women are still slaves of family, society due to various reasons like marriage, childcare etc.

The sad part is, even though that book was written few decades ago, it is still relevant.

Like any other devotional books/stories are retold for every generation, this book should also be rewritten,
once in every 10-20 years and it should be told on all modern formats like audio books, drama, shortfilms, shorts etc.

Reviewing and editing that rewritten version is one of the most satisfying action I did this year.
Hope we can release this as a print edition and free ebook edition. Checking with few contacts to publish this. Will share the progress soon.

Still reading the book “Attention Span”. May take few weeks to complete.

Easter:
Kids got some 4 days holidays due to Easter. They all went for a Easter egg hunting event.

HeartComonos:
At HeartComonos, a social non profit organization, is conducting many free events here. Participated on a Bollywood dance event with family. Celebrated its lead Hardy’s birthday, along with fun filled dancing.
Helped to capture the wonderful moments with Camera.

Library visit:

On the weekend, we visited Mississauga Central Library. It is one of the best places, as a family, we like to go anytime. Just being surrounded by million books itself a great feeling. Viyan is reading a lot. Iyal is still trying to read. Paari is yet to learn reading, but he can turn pages of books one by one for many hours. There are good comics books available. Both Iyal and Paari are creating their own stories, just by seeing and turning the pages. What else we need for kid’s mind to be filled with imagination?

Upcoming talk on Open Licensed Tamil dataset collection:
On May 05 2025, I will be giving an online talk on curation of open licensed tamil dataset.
Preparing for the talk along with collecting open data in Tamil.

KanchiLUG meets:
Every sunday IST evening hours, ( my mornings) are going useful with interesting discussions on Linux,
Free/Open Source software etc.

check https://kaniyam.com/events and subscribe to the calendar there for more interesting events.

Tamil Skills contest for kids:
Last saturday, attended a contest for kids with viyan. Good to see that around 100+ kids participated on the contest on Skills for Tamil reading,writing and speaking. viyan participated with last min preparation.
Next year, hope all three kids will attend. Happy to see many friends like Natkeeran, Suba, Kent, Selvanayaki madam.Took care of capturing some wonderful moments of the events.

After the event, spent few hours in a library at Toronto Downtown. I skimmed on few books on black/white photography, Instagram posting, video making and Toronto Photographers collection etc. Discussing many things with viyan is one of my favourite things. When we travel along, we talk about many things like world history, war, mythology, comics, manga, atheism, Tamilnadu political history etc.

ComicCon Mississauga:
Sunday, attended an event for Comics and Toy Collections. Around 100 sellers were selling old comics books, unopened hero toys. There were many kids buying those stuffs. I was wondering to see, there were many adults standing in line, exploring the old comics and toys, and buying them with wide open eyes.

First they create a cha rector, then bring as comic books, then toys, then computer games, then graphic novel, then text novel, then movies. This is how all the childhood characters are becoming immortal. The business behind this is very huge. Thinking why we the Indians can not bring such huge cycle of business, even though we have tons of stories. Among all the mythological stories, there are very little for children. We have to create more stories and do business with them.

Nithya’s Video series on GenAI

Nithya started text series on GenAI at Kaniyam.com and a video series on her youtube channel, in Tamil. We had some good outdoor shooting for the intro video. Released the first video here

Writing weekly notes after a long time. Life is going super busy.
We crossed a horrible winter, in the last few months.

Winter

The winter made me to live a minimalist life.
Was doing only the very essentials things for life.

The cozy lifestyle helped to do the activities very slowly.
Spent good time with books, movies, indoor games with kids and friends.

Winter days went with long office calls, many indoor events like daily dance, birthday parties, Deepavali celebration, new year party, library/museum visits, dance show by nithya & friends, movie times, Photoshoots, chess club hours, PyKids classes ( Python for kids), Python for adults, Few conferences, weekly tech meetings, community events by HeartComonos etc.

See Nithya & Friend’s folk dance here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6XYVAq60y0

Finally, Spring is here now. It is a mixture of winter and summer. But, we are getting few warm days, which are making us to walk on the roads and play in the parks. Waiting for full summer days.

Books
Completed reading முகங்களின் தேசம் ( Country of Faces ) by ஜெயமோகன் ( Jeyamohan ). The author travels across many Indian states and documents his experiences. There are many heart melting moments while reading the book.

https://www.commonfolks.in/books/d/mugangalin-desam

Travel only can give tons of learnings of nature and people. The author is blessed to travel often. The very simple people around India, are helpful to others always. On giving food, shelter etc. I hope this will be same, all around the world. Thanks for all the people who make the world as a wonderful place to live.

Currently reading – Attention Span – by Gloria Mark. It is a book on the research of how the internet, smartphone and social media are designed to take all our attention and how to regain ourself from these.

Reading the book “பெண் ஏன் அடிமையானாள்?” (How women become slave?) written by Periyar to compare/review/edit of a rewritten edition of the same book. The author of the new edition is following me for more than 6 months. Hope will complete and release soon as a low price print book.

Movies

Watched “A Minecraft Movie” with kids. They enjoyed a lot. It is a good watchable one. The 3D is not effective. I still remember how the 3D illusions were coming near to our nose, on the movies like “My dear kuttisathan”

Good bad ugly. The worst movie of Ajith kumar, as per my view. It is only for the fanboys, to enjoy some 3 hours joyful concert of Ajith in theatre.

Theatres should plan to show good music shows, concerts, sports matches, to give more vibe moments for the audience.

Amaran and Officer on Duty are good movies to watch on TV.

Nithya watched a Korean movie, “Forgotten” with her friends, on a movie night. Seems, It is a sad movie, but the discussions she had after the movie are good.

Meetings

Attended Python for Tolkappiyam meeting and KanchiLUG meet.
Asked for a talk on how to contribute for various Free/Open Source Software.
KanchiLUG team should bring more contributors to FOSS.

Did some video shoots of nithya, in nearby places of our building, as we see the good warm weather outside. She is working on a text and video series on GenAI in Tamil. Read the text content at https://kaniyam.com/tag/genai/

I started to write a tutorial on Python in Tamil, in a funny way.
Read it here – https://kaniyam.com/category/let-us-learn-learn-python/

Thanks Swaroop, for releasing your wonderful book “A Byte of Python” https://python.swaroopch.com/ in Creative Commons License.

Social Reading

I have to agree that I waste many hours on mindless scrolling on social media. Have to regain my hours from the phone and social media.

I go to social media, to read content and to know what others are doing.
In the search of little good content, we spent more time. The signal-to-noise ratio is too high nowadays.

I started to focus more on newsletters and RSS feeds, where there is no advertisement. We can get displayed only what the writers are sharing.

I am hosting a tech blogs aggregator here – https://blogs.kaniyam.cloudns.nz at my selfhosted homelab.

I am collecting the websites, blogs in the topics of Literature, books, tech, photography in Tamil. Thinking to host one more public website to deliver all the contents from these sites in a single place, so that readers can enjoy reading them without any distraction.

Emacs

Discussed with a tamil author, on the problems of text editors with huge tamil content. Wondered to know many text editors are showing wrong word count for the tamil text. Explored VSCode, it is good, but bulk.

Working with KanchiLUG friend Thanga Ayanar, to bend Emacs as a very simple text editor.

Read the explorations here – https://forums.tamillinuxcommunity.org/t/need-help-to-make-emacs-as-fullcsreen-edtior-like-writeroom/

What are you doing? Share the things you do as weekly notes like this, in your blog.

Writing weekly notes after a long time. Life is going super busy.
We crossed a horrible winter, in the last few months.

Winter

The winter made me to live a minimalist life.
Was doing only the very essentials things for life.

The cozy lifestyle helped to do the activities very slowly.
Spent good time with books, movies, indoor games with kids and friends.

Winter days went with long office calls, many indoor events like daily dance, birthday parties, Deepavali celebration, new year party, library/museum visits, dance show by nithya & friends, movie times, Photoshoots, chess club hours, PyKids classes ( Python for kids), Python for adults, Few conferences, weekly tech meetings, community events by HeartComonos etc.

See Nithya & Friend’s folk dance here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6XYVAq60y0

Finally, Spring is here now. It is a mixture of winter and summer. But, we are getting few warm days, which are making us to walk on the roads and play in the parks. Waiting for full summer days.

Books
Completed reading முகங்களின் தேசம் ( Country of Faces ) by ஜெயமோகன் ( Jeyamohan ). The author travels across many Indian states and documents his experiences. There are many heart melting moments while reading the book.

https://www.commonfolks.in/books/d/mugangalin-desam

Travel only can give tons of learnings of nature and people. The author is blessed to travel often. The very simple people around India, are helpful to others always. On giving food, shelter etc. I hope this will be same, all around the world. Thanks for all the people who make the world as a wonderful place to live.

Currently reading – Attention Span – by Gloria Mark. It is a book on the research of how the internet, smartphone and social media are designed to take all our attention and how to regain ourself from these.

Reading the book “பெண் ஏன் அடிமையானாள்?” (How women become slave?) written by Periyar to compare/review/edit of a rewritten edition of the same book. The author of the new edition is following me for more than 6 months. Hope will complete and release soon as a low price print book.

Movies

Watched “A Minecraft Movie” with kids. They enjoyed a lot. It is a good watchable one. The 3D is not effective. I still remember how the 3D illusions were coming near to our nose, on the movies like “My dear kuttisathan”

Good bad ugly. The worst movie of Ajith kumar, as per my view. It is only for the fanboys, to enjoy some 3 hours joyful concert of Ajith in theatre.

Theatres should plan to show good music shows, concerts, sports matches, to give more vibe moments for the audience.

Amaran and Officer on Duty are good movies to watch on TV.

Nithya watched a Korean movie, “Forgotten” with her friends, on a movie night. Seems, It is a sad movie, but the discussions she had after the movie are good.

Meetings

Attended Python for Tolkappiyam meeting and KanchiLUG meet.
Asked for a talk on how to contribute for various Free/Open Source Software.
KanchiLUG team should bring more contributors to FOSS.

Did some video shoots of nithya, in nearby places of our building, as we see the good warm weather outside. She is working on a text and video series on GenAI in Tamil. Read the text content at https://kaniyam.com/tag/genai/

I started to write a tutorial on Python in Tamil, in a funny way.
Read it here – https://kaniyam.com/category/let-us-learn-learn-python/

Thanks Swaroop, for releasing your wonderful book “A Byte of Python” https://python.swaroopch.com/ in Creative Commons License.

Social Reading

I have to agree that I waste many hours on mindless scrolling on social media. Have to regain my hours from the phone and social media.

I go to social media, to read content and to know what others are doing.
In the search of little good content, we spent more time. The signal-to-noise ratio is too high nowadays.

I started to focus more on newsletters and RSS feeds, where there is no advertisement. We can get displayed only what the writers are sharing.

I am hosting a tech blogs aggregator here – https://blogs.kaniyam.cloudns.nz at my selfhosted homelab.

I am collecting the websites, blogs in the topics of Literature, books, tech, photography in Tamil. Thinking to host one more public website to deliver all the contents from these sites in a single place, so that readers can enjoy reading them without any distraction.

Emacs

Discussed with a tamil author, on the problems of text editors with huge tamil content. Wondered to know many text editors are showing wrong word count for the tamil text. Explored VSCode, it is good, but bulk.

Working with KanchiLUG friend Thanga Ayanar, to bend Emacs as a very simple text editor.

Read the explorations here – https://forums.tamillinuxcommunity.org/t/need-help-to-make-emacs-as-fullcsreen-edtior-like-writeroom/

What are you doing? Share the things you do as weekly notes like this, in your blog.

meeting minutes

2025-04-10

Participants:
Salman
Sakhil
Thanga Ayanar
Shrini

Minutes:

website:
https://tossconf25.kaniyam.com/ is ready.
We can keep updating it once the schedule is being prepared.

We will get volunteers from SJIT college and Payilagam.

We can give the below activities for volunteers –

web site design
logo design
promotion
event organizing
Free Software Demo
GNU/Linux Installation
any other pre conf events like hackathon, game jam, OSM party, packaging party etc.

Student volunteer should colloborate with any GLUG, to do any activities.
volunteer should prepare for a talk on any FOSS sofware.
prepare slides, write a blog, make a video and then show a demo on the conf event or pre/post event.

We can have a panel discussion with all GLUG team.

GLUGs/communities should have a stall to showcase their activities with computer or banner/poster.

Freebies :

For the partipants, we can give free stickers
For the speakers and volunteers, we can print Dhuruvangal book and give it as gift.

Book – 200 Rs/per book
we can print 35 book.
200* 35 = 5000

stickers
18 * 350 = 6300

Total = 11300 INR

events :

1. mini CTF
   plan for as a last item, if we get time.
   should host on a external server.
2. Linux Install Fest
3. FOSS demo stalls
4. Book sale

Give some gift for all the people who support from collge,
like hall arrangers, cleaners, lab incharge, AV team etc.

Next,
plan for agenda
plan for stickers
plan for book print
plan for cost
plan for registration ( 100 INR min for external participants )

prepare a sheet for all the contacts, action plans and share.

plan to host a online game session for volunteers.
veloren
luanti (minetest)
xonotic
supertuxcart
0ad

Thanga ayanar will check with kalai for other network games.

plan for a OSM event, with all the volunteers.

Let us connect once in two weeks till may end.
then we can meet, weekly once, till the conference.

meeting minutes

2025-04-10

Participants:
Salman
Sakhil
Thanga Ayanar
Shrini

Minutes:

website:
https://tossconf25.kaniyam.com/ is ready.
We can keep updating it once the schedule is being prepared.

We will get volunteers from SJIT college and Payilagam.

We can give the below activities for volunteers –

web site design
logo design
promotion
event organizing
Free Software Demo
GNU/Linux Installation
any other pre conf events like hackathon, game jam, OSM party, packaging party etc.

Student volunteer should colloborate with any GLUG, to do any activities.
volunteer should prepare for a talk on any FOSS sofware.
prepare slides, write a blog, make a video and then show a demo on the conf event or pre/post event.

We can have a panel discussion with all GLUG team.

GLUGs/communities should have a stall to showcase their activities with computer or banner/poster.

Freebies :

For the partipants, we can give free stickers
For the speakers and volunteers, we can print Dhuruvangal book and give it as gift.

Book – 200 Rs/per book
we can print 35 book.
200* 35 = 5000

stickers
18 * 350 = 6300

Total = 11300 INR

events :

1. mini CTF
   plan for as a last item, if we get time.
   should host on a external server.
2. Linux Install Fest
3. FOSS demo stalls
4. Book sale

Give some gift for all the people who support from collge,
like hall arrangers, cleaners, lab incharge, AV team etc.

Next,
plan for agenda
plan for stickers
plan for book print
plan for cost
plan for registration ( 100 INR min for external participants )

prepare a sheet for all the contacts, action plans and share.

plan to host a online game session for volunteers.
veloren
luanti (minetest)
xonotic
supertuxcart
0ad

Thanga ayanar will check with kalai for other network games.

plan for a OSM event, with all the volunteers.

Let us connect once in two weeks till may end.
then we can meet, weekly once, till the conference.

On searching this, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26356268/call-to-undefined-function-imagecreatefromjpeg-and-gd-enabled

found that we have to install gd library of PHP.

we had installed this already in the server as

sudo apt install php-gd

Now, checked the php version.

php -v
PHP 8.1.31 (cli) (built: Nov 21 2024 13:10:15) (NTS)

installed the gd version for it.

sudo apt install php8.1-gd

and restarted apache

sudo systemctl restart apache2

That’s all.

Now, unpublished the catalog. re-uploaded the cover images and published again.

Now, the thumbnails are generated.

But they are too small.

Hi everyone,
KanchiLUG’s Monthly meet is scheduled as online meeting this week on Sunday, Dec 08, 2024 17:00 – 18:00 IST

Meeting link : https://meet.jit.si/KanchiLugMonthlyMeet

Can join with any browser or JitSi android app.
All the Discussions are in Tamil.

Talk Details

Talk 0:
Topic : my Elisp ‘load random theme’ function
Description : I wanted to randomly load a theme in Emacs during startup. After i search in online, I achieved this
functionality using Emacs Lisp. this my talk Duration : 10 minutes
Name : Krishna Subramaniyan
About :GNU/Linux and Emacs user

Talk 1:
Topic : PDF generation using python
Description : To demo a python program which will generate a PDF output. Duration : 20 minutes
Name : Sethu
About : Member of KanchiLUG & Kaniyam IRC Channel

Talk 2:
Topic : distrobox – a wrapper on podman/docker
Description : Intro about the tool, why I had to use that and a demo Duration : 15 minutes
Name : Annamalai N
About : a GNU/Linux user

Talk 3:
Topic : Real Time Update Mechanisms (Polling, Long Polling, Server Sent Events)
Description : To demo Real Time Update Mechanisms with JS and Python Duration : 30 minutes
Name :Syed Jafer (parottasalna)
About : Developer. Currently teaching postgres at
https://t.me/parottasalna

After Talks : Q&A, General discussion

About KanchiLUG : Kanchi Linux Users Group [ KanchiLUG ] has been spreading awareness on Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) in
Kanchipuram since November 2006.

Anyone can join! (Entry is free)
Everyone is welcome
Feel free to share this to your friends

Mailing list: kanchilug@freelists.org
Repository : https://gitlab.com/kanchilug
Twitter handle: @kanchilug
Kanchilug Blog : http://kanchilug.wordpress.com

To subscribe/unsubscribe kanchilug mailing list :
http://kanchilug.wordpress.com/join-mailing-list/

Hi everyone,
KanchiLUG’s Monthly meet is scheduled as online meeting this week on Sunday, Dec 08, 2024 17:00 – 18:00 IST

Meeting link : https://meet.jit.si/KanchiLugMonthlyMeet

Can join with any browser or JitSi android app.
All the Discussions are in Tamil.

Talk Details

Talk 0:
Topic : my Elisp ‘load random theme’ function
Description : I wanted to randomly load a theme in Emacs during startup. After i search in online, I achieved this
functionality using Emacs Lisp. this my talk Duration : 10 minutes
Name : Krishna Subramaniyan
About :GNU/Linux and Emacs user

Talk 1:
Topic : PDF generation using python
Description : To demo a python program which will generate a PDF output. Duration : 20 minutes
Name : Sethu
About : Member of KanchiLUG & Kaniyam IRC Channel

Talk 2:
Topic : distrobox – a wrapper on podman/docker
Description : Intro about the tool, why I had to use that and a demo Duration : 15 minutes
Name : Annamalai N
About : a GNU/Linux user

Talk 3:
Topic : Real Time Update Mechanisms (Polling, Long Polling, Server Sent Events)
Description : To demo Real Time Update Mechanisms with JS and Python Duration : 30 minutes
Name :Syed Jafer (parottasalna)
About : Developer. Currently teaching postgres at
https://t.me/parottasalna

After Talks : Q&A, General discussion

About KanchiLUG : Kanchi Linux Users Group [ KanchiLUG ] has been spreading awareness on Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) in
Kanchipuram since November 2006.

Anyone can join! (Entry is free)
Everyone is welcome
Feel free to share this to your friends

Mailing list: kanchilug@freelists.org
Repository : https://gitlab.com/kanchilug
Twitter handle: @kanchilug
Kanchilug Blog : http://kanchilug.wordpress.com

To subscribe/unsubscribe kanchilug mailing list :
http://kanchilug.wordpress.com/join-mailing-list/

At FreeTamilEbooks.com we have published 850 ebooks. All in sharable creative commons license. There are many people asking for the text only content of all these books many times. As it is a big task, took long time for it. Thanks to Lenin, Anwar of Kaniyam Foundation, all the contributors, all the writers and readers for making this project alive and a great success.

We are publishing the books as epub format, along with PDF format. Epub is just a zip file of HTML files. So, we can copy all the content from it as unicode text. Pandoc is a wonderful open source software, which can convert an epub to plaintext file.

There are the list of actions we have to do.

1. Get URLs of all the 850+ epub files
2. Download them all.
3. using pandoc, convert to text file.

So far, we dont have a metadata file for all the books published. Getting the links of all epub files need some programming. As Python is a swiss knife to automate anything, started to explore the wordpress REST api with python to get all the books pages content.

https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/create_ebooks/blob/master/get_metadata/get_Data.py

Wrote the code here to get all the books info.

This gave a JSON file with book name, author, genre, epub, mobi, a4 pdf,6 inch pdf links.

Converted this to a CSV file with the below code. https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/create_ebooks/blob/master/get_metadata/parse.py

I had to fix few things manually on the CSV file.

This is the final CSV file. https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/create_ebooks/blob/master/get_metadata/fte_metadata.csv

The below code is to download all the epub files from their links in the fte_metadata.csv file. Used pandoc to convert to text.

https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/create_ebooks/blob/master/get_metadata/get_fte_books.py

Got 845 txt files. Total size is 374 MB

Compressed with 7z to get 47MB compressed file.

Published the data here. https://kaniyam.cloudns.nz/tamil_datasets/

Download, share the text data for free. Dont sell them as most of the books are released as CC-BY-NC ( No Commercial ) license.

Use these data to build awesome open source applications and researches like Spellchekers, grammar checkers, LLm, RAG, what not?

Data is always the oil. Let us grow the open data oil.

Please share all your text, audio, video content in sharable license like creative commons. They will use to build a better future.

We are collecting open licensed dataset in tamil language, to build LLM, and other interesting applications in the coming days.

The ML models we build may have very short lifespan, but the open data will be there forever or at least for longer time than our life time.

Check the efforts part 1 and part 2 here.

part 1 – https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/06/11/collecting-content-for-llm-dataset-part-1-tamil-wikipedia-content/

part 2 – https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/06/16/collecting-content-for-llm-dataset-part-2-freetamilebooks/

here goes part 3.

Thamizh_mann publishers are publishing the public domain and nationalized tamil books for many years. Few years ago, with a collaboration with the Library at University of Toronto, Scarborough, Canada, and Thamizh_mann publishers, the kaniyam foundation team helped to release all the 1000+ tamil books as PDF and Docx formats for free online.

You can download them all here https://tamil.digital.utsc.utoronto.ca/61220/utsc35335

Thanks to UTSC, Thamizh_mann team for the great gift for the tamil Diaspora.

Now, we have 1000+ books in Unicode Docx format. Next is to convert them all as PlainText and use them. Natkeeran and Parathan helped on this.

Along with this, they helped to scrap project madurai books and tamil WikiSource books. They published all in a git repo here – https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/open_tamil_texts along with the scripts and metadata.

I am adding those text in our open licensed tamil data collection.

Download them all here https://kaniyam.cloudns.nz/tamil_datasets/

here is the current size in text format and compressed format.

shrini@dell-optiplex-9100 v/w/h/tamil_datasets> du -h compressed
258M compressed/

shrini@dell-optiplex-9100 v/w/h/tamil_datasets> du -h text-files
355M text-files/project_madurai/data/text
355M text-files/project_madurai/data
355M text-files/project_madurai
110M text-files/tamil_wikisource/data
110M text-files/tamil_wikisource
374M text-files/FreeTamilEbooks-txt
714M text-files/thamizh_mann/data
716M text-files/thamizh_mann
1.6G text-files/

We have 1.6 G of text data to work on LLM or other works.

Go ahead, use it and build more models and tools using this data.

Hope this may not enough to get any good output. But, if we can bring something out of this, even though they are not good, then we can ask people to release their recent contents, blogs, social media posts in creative commons license.

There are few bloggers, magazines are already released their content in CC license. Now, we need your help to scarp them. If you know any programming language and can help for this project, please do webscrapping for the websites mentioned here. share the data and code.

https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues/198

Thanks for all the content providers and the contributors.

We are collecting open licensed dataset in tamil language, to build LLM, and other interesting applications in the coming days.

The ML models we build may have very short lifespan, but the open data will be there forever or at least for longer time than our life time.

Check the efforts part 1 and part 2 here.

part 1 – https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/06/11/collecting-content-for-llm-dataset-part-1-tamil-wikipedia-content/

part 2 – https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/06/16/collecting-content-for-llm-dataset-part-2-freetamilebooks/

here goes part 3.

Thamizh_mann publishers are publishing the public domain and nationalized tamil books for many years. Few years ago, with a collaboration with the Library at University of Toronto, Scarborough, Canada, and Thamizh_mann publishers, the kaniyam foundation team helped to release all the 1000+ tamil books as PDF and Docx formats for free online.

You can download them all here https://tamil.digital.utsc.utoronto.ca/61220/utsc35335

Thanks to UTSC, Thamizh_mann team for the great gift for the tamil Diaspora.

Now, we have 1000+ books in Unicode Docx format. Next is to convert them all as PlainText and use them. Natkeeran and Parathan helped on this.

Along with this, they helped to scrap project madurai books and tamil WikiSource books. They published all in a git repo here – https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/open_tamil_texts along with the scripts and metadata.

I am adding those text in our open licensed tamil data collection.

Download them all here https://kaniyam.cloudns.nz/tamil_datasets/

here is the current size in text format and compressed format.

shrini@dell-optiplex-9100 v/w/h/tamil_datasets> du -h compressed
258M compressed/

shrini@dell-optiplex-9100 v/w/h/tamil_datasets> du -h text-files
355M text-files/project_madurai/data/text
355M text-files/project_madurai/data
355M text-files/project_madurai
110M text-files/tamil_wikisource/data
110M text-files/tamil_wikisource
374M text-files/FreeTamilEbooks-txt
714M text-files/thamizh_mann/data
716M text-files/thamizh_mann
1.6G text-files/

We have 1.6 G of text data to work on LLM or other works.

Go ahead, use it and build more models and tools using this data.

Hope this may not enough to get any good output. But, if we can bring something out of this, even though they are not good, then we can ask people to release their recent contents, blogs, social media posts in creative commons license.

There are few bloggers, magazines are already released their content in CC license. Now, we need your help to scarp them. If you know any programming language and can help for this project, please do webscrapping for the websites mentioned here. share the data and code.

https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues/198

Thanks for all the content providers and the contributors.

Introduction to PostgreSQL database – free online course in Tamil

Monday, wednesday, Friday IST evening.

First class – 18-Nov-2024 7-8 PM IST

Syllabus: https://parottasalna.com/postgres-database-syllabus/

Trainer – Syed Jafer – contact.syedjafer@gmail.com

Get the meeting link here

Telegram Group – https://t.me/parottasalna
Whatsapp channel- https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029Vavu8mF2v1IpaPd9np0s Kaniyam Tech events Calendar – https://kaniyam.com/events/

Introduction to PostgreSQL database – free online course in Tamil

Monday, wednesday, Friday IST evening.

First class – 18-Nov-2024 7-8 PM IST

Syllabus: https://parottasalna.com/postgres-database-syllabus/

Trainer – Syed Jafer – contact.syedjafer@gmail.com

Get the meeting link here

Telegram Group – https://t.me/parottasalna
Whatsapp channel- https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029Vavu8mF2v1IpaPd9np0s Kaniyam Tech events Calendar – https://kaniyam.com/events/