Weekly Notes 15 2025

15 April 2025 at 21:30

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.

Weekly Notes 15 2025

Shrini

tshrinivasan

15 April 2025 at 21:30

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.

Welcoming Winter with Python – PyKids and PyLadies

Shrini

tshrinivasan

31 January 2025 at 21:30

Winter Break for kids

In Canada, we have around 15 days of winter break for all school kids, covering Christmas and New year.

These celebrations are helping much to come out of the winter worries.

Winter is scary word, but people have to go through it, as life has to go on. As we can not travel much and there are no outdoor events/games, we have to be at home, all the days, weeks and months. Organizing indoor events are costly.

To spend the winter actively, many celebrations days are occurring. Halloween, Christmas, Boxing day, New year, Valentine day and more are there, to make the winter active.

Keeping the kids at home for 17 days winter break is tough. We have to engage them whole day. In our apartment, we are conducting many kids events like weekly chess hour, dance hours, board games day, movie time, sleep over nights etc.

Computer Literacy is good here. Kids are learning to use computer at school, from Grade 3 itself. They play many educational games at school. Homework are done with google slides and google docs, from grade 5. Scratch programming also trained here at grade 5. So, they know very well to use computer, read text online, search the internet and gather some info etc.

PyKids

This time, thought of having some tech events for kids. Called for 10 days training as “PyKids”, for grade 5 and above. The announcement was welcomed well by many parents. We had around 17 kids participated.

As our house is empty mostly, ( thanks to Nithya, for the minimalistic life style ), our hall helped for gathering and teaching.

By keeping the hall empty, we are using the place as Daily Zumba dance hall, mini party hall, DJ hall, kids play area and now as a learning place.

Teaching Python for kids is not easy. The kids are not ready to listen to any long talks. They can not even listen to my regular “python introduction” slides. So, jumped into hands-on on the day one itself.

My mentor, Asokan Pichai explained how we have to goto hands-on on any python training, few months ago. Experienced the benefits of it this time.

Even-though, I am using Python for 10+ years, teaching it to kids was really tough. I had to read few books and read on more basics, so that I can explain the building blocks of python with more relevant examples for kids.

The kids are good at asking questions. They share feedback with their eyes itself. It is a huge different on teaching to adults. Most of the adults don’t ask questions. They hesitate to say they don’t understand something. But, kids are brave enough to ask questions and express the feedback immediately.

With a training on 4-6 pm everyday, for around 10 days, we can cover so little of python only.

We practiced the code here – https://github.com/tshrinivasan/python-for-kids We used https://www.online-python.com/ as IDE, as the kids have laptops and tablets with different OS. Will install Python on their laptops on next events so that they can explore more python libraries.

On the final day, my friend Jay Varadharajan, gave a Pizza party for all kids, along with a participation certificate.

Thanks for all the questions kids. Along with you, I learnt a lot. Thanks for all the parents for the great support.

PyLadies

Nithya wanted to try out full day training for her friends. Getting a time of 9-5 to learn something is so luxury for many people. Still, around 10 friends participated.

Nithya took the day with all hands-on. She covered the variables, getting input, if/else, for/while loop, string/list operations. The participants were happy to dive into programming so quickly.

“A byte of Python” is a super easy book to learn python. Read it here for free. https://python.swaroopch.com/

Gave this link as asked to read/practice regularly. Hope they are following the book.

Home as Learning Space

Thus, we are converting our home as a learning space for kids and friends. Thinking of conducting some technical meetups too. ( I am missing all the Linux Users groups meetings and hackathons). Hope we can get more tech events in the winter and make it so interesting and productive.