• For the past few months, I was preparing for an English Exam called CELPIP. It is an exam to check the Listening, Reading, Writing and Speaking. Though we know English, preparing for an exam is an exhausting one. We took online training from “Galaxy Training Academy“. https://galaxytraining.in The coach “Jay Kumar” gave nice intro about exam pattern. He gave many mock tests and gave good feedback on how to improve, on each test. Last month, Nithya and I cleared the exam. It is a good feel to released from exam fear. Postponed many activities because of the exam preparation. Will roll out them all soon. If you are preparing for any English Exam, I suggest taking training and mock tests with “Galaxy Training Academy”.
  
  ——
  
  
• In Canada, Daylight saving ended yesterday. This happens every year in fall season and referred as “Fallback”. The clocks are moved one hour back. This is to adjust the dark winter season. It seems like all in a sudden, we got one hour extra to sleep in morning.
  
  ——
  
  
• On Oct 31, we had Deepavali, Halloween and our Marriage day. Deepavali day went with great remembering our childhood memories. The evening was filled with fun, as we went to neighbourhood houses, with friends and kids, to play “Trick or Treat”. Saw many weird, spooky decorated houses and people. Kids collected a bag full of chocolates. Last year, it was too cold. This year, the same day had a nice weather, to roam around in the evening.
  
  ——
  
  
• On Nov 1, we celebrated Deepavali with firing crackers. Bought a few crackers, which emit light. Here, we don’t get loud-full crackers like atom bombs, 1000 piece fireworks shots etc. With limited available crackers, kids enjoyed firing them, with all their friends together.
  
  ——
  
  
• On Nov 8, we are planning for a mega Deepavali event with around 250 people here. I am contributing on the planning/photography. Nithya and kids are practicing dance with their friends. Hope it will be a fun-filled evening.
  
  
  ——
  
  
• On Nov 2, gave a talk on tolkappiyam Canada monthly meeting, about our efforts on writing python code for tamil grammar rules in Tolkappiyam book. It was a good meeting. Few of the participants accepted to collaborate. You can read our progress here – https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues/214
  
  
  ——
  
  
• Few weeks ago, gave a talk on open-tamil python library, at Kanchi Linux Users Group ( KanchiLUG) meet. Video is here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtIrbvw2V-w
  
  
  ——
  
  
• Kids started going to tamil school on every Saturday morning. This week, they received books. Viyan is good at Tamil and English. Iyal started to read Tamil and English. Paari is trying to learn writing.
  
  ——
  
  
• We conduct daily meetings in a text based chat system called IRC (Internet Relay Chat). daily, 7-8 pm IST. Good to see many people are joining and discussing many things about open source software and mentoring to contribute to open source software. More details here – https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/10/21/open-source-projects-mentoring-via-irc/
  
  ——
  
  
• Practicing Manual mode in photography for few weeks. Feeling like learning linux and Emacs. It gives the most flexible options and results are stunning. It is better to learn it in early days, so that we can do more magics with lighting.
  
  
  ——
  
  
  The one thing I follow in photography is – shoot a lot, share a little. I keep and share only 10%. All others are deleted. Though it is hard to select the best photos, sharing only 10% is easy for viewers and brings a Wow from them.
  
  
  ——
  
• Completed reading books in last week.
  • வாலிப வார்த்தைகள்: vaaliba vaarthaigal – book about poet Vaali – https://www.amazon.in/gp/product/B08F3KGF1B
  • எழுதுதல் பற்றிய குறிப்புகள்: (Art of Writing) – https://www.amazon.in/-/ta/dp/B09XHZYGZD kombu muLaithavan:
  • கொம்பு முளைத்தவன் – https://www.amazon.in/-/ta/dp/B07YJ4PJQK
    
    ——
    
    
    
• currently reading these books.
  • Crash Course Drupal 10 Site Building – https://www.amazon.in/gp/product/B0CKQ8MK8H
  • Archives, Ethics and the Law in India – https://ethics-law.archives.ncbs.res.in/
  • Understanding Large Language Models – https://www.amazon.ca/Understanding-Large-Language-Models-Technologies/dp/B0CJ2C8TXQ

• For the past few months, I was preparing for an English Exam called CELPIP. It is an exam to check the Listening, Reading, Writing and Speaking. Though we know English, preparing for an exam is an exhausting one. We took online training from “Galaxy Training Academy“. https://galaxytraining.in The coach “Jay Kumar” gave nice intro about exam pattern. He gave many mock tests and gave good feedback on how to improve, on each test. Last month, Nithya and I cleared the exam. It is a good feel to released from exam fear. Postponed many activities because of the exam preparation. Will roll out them all soon. If you are preparing for any English Exam, I suggest taking training and mock tests with “Galaxy Training Academy”.
  
  ——
  
  
• In Canada, Daylight saving ended yesterday. This happens every year in fall season and referred as “Fallback”. The clocks are moved one hour back. This is to adjust the dark winter season. It seems like all in a sudden, we got one hour extra to sleep in morning.
  
  ——
  
  
• On Oct 31, we had Deepavali, Halloween and our Marriage day. Deepavali day went with great remembering our childhood memories. The evening was filled with fun, as we went to neighbourhood houses, with friends and kids, to play “Trick or Treat”. Saw many weird, spooky decorated houses and people. Kids collected a bag full of chocolates. Last year, it was too cold. This year, the same day had a nice weather, to roam around in the evening.
  
  ——
  
  
• On Nov 1, we celebrated Deepavali with firing crackers. Bought a few crackers, which emit light. Here, we don’t get loud-full crackers like atom bombs, 1000 piece fireworks shots etc. With limited available crackers, kids enjoyed firing them, with all their friends together.
  
  ——
  
  
• On Nov 8, we are planning for a mega Deepavali event with around 250 people here. I am contributing on the planning/photography. Nithya and kids are practicing dance with their friends. Hope it will be a fun-filled evening.
  
  
  ——
  
  
• On Nov 2, gave a talk on tolkappiyam Canada monthly meeting, about our efforts on writing python code for tamil grammar rules in Tolkappiyam book. It was a good meeting. Few of the participants accepted to collaborate. You can read our progress here – https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues/214
  
  
  ——
  
  
• Few weeks ago, gave a talk on open-tamil python library, at Kanchi Linux Users Group ( KanchiLUG) meet. Video is here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtIrbvw2V-w
  
  
  ——
  
  
• Kids started going to tamil school on every Saturday morning. This week, they received books. Viyan is good at Tamil and English. Iyal started to read Tamil and English. Paari is trying to learn writing.
  
  ——
  
  
• We conduct daily meetings in a text based chat system called IRC (Internet Relay Chat). daily, 7-8 pm IST. Good to see many people are joining and discussing many things about open source software and mentoring to contribute to open source software. More details here – https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/10/21/open-source-projects-mentoring-via-irc/
  
  ——
  
  
• Practicing Manual mode in photography for few weeks. Feeling like learning linux and Emacs. It gives the most flexible options and results are stunning. It is better to learn it in early days, so that we can do more magics with lighting.
  
  
  ——
  
  
  The one thing I follow in photography is – shoot a lot, share a little. I keep and share only 10%. All others are deleted. Though it is hard to select the best photos, sharing only 10% is easy for viewers and brings a Wow from them.
  
  
  ——
  
• Completed reading books in last week.
  • வாலிப வார்த்தைகள்: vaaliba vaarthaigal – book about poet Vaali – https://www.amazon.in/gp/product/B08F3KGF1B
  • எழுதுதல் பற்றிய குறிப்புகள்: (Art of Writing) – https://www.amazon.in/-/ta/dp/B09XHZYGZD kombu muLaithavan:
  • கொம்பு முளைத்தவன் – https://www.amazon.in/-/ta/dp/B07YJ4PJQK
    
    ——
    
    
    
• currently reading these books.
  • Crash Course Drupal 10 Site Building – https://www.amazon.in/gp/product/B0CKQ8MK8H
  • Archives, Ethics and the Law in India – https://ethics-law.archives.ncbs.res.in/
  • Understanding Large Language Models – https://www.amazon.ca/Understanding-Large-Language-Models-Technologies/dp/B0CJ2C8TXQ

PhD in Family

My brother Arulalan, completed his PhD IIT Delhi. It was a very long path for him with tons of sacrifices. All the efforts are worth as he is the first PhD in our family. I think he is first in our street, in our generation. May many get inspired from his works and get more PhD researchers.

He works for India Meteorological Department 

Hoping to see him on TV shows and news explaining weather situations soon. Please give more leaves.

TNPSC Group 2A in Family

My another brother Suresh, got selected in TNPSC group 2A. Already he is a group 4 employee. On his efforts to get into good roles, he puts tons of efforts on exams. Hoping to see him even great roles soon and to train many people to get into govt jobs.

PhD in Family

My brother Arulalan, completed his PhD IIT Delhi. It was a very long path for him with tons of sacrifices. All the efforts are worth as he is the first PhD in our family. I think he is first in our street, in our generation. May many get inspired from his works and get more PhD researchers.

He works for India Meteorological Department 

Hoping to see him on TV shows and news explaining weather situations soon. Please give more leaves.

TNPSC Group 2A in Family

My another brother Suresh, got selected in TNPSC group 2A. Already he is a group 4 employee. On his efforts to get into good roles, he puts tons of efforts on exams. Hoping to see him even great roles soon and to train many people to get into govt jobs.

The past 2 months went with weekly 3 python classes in Tamil, from Kaniyam Foundation

We got around 3500 participants in 3 whatsapp groups. Initial days went with some 1000+ students.

As the classes are in Tamil, live streamed, many participants started to learn easily.

We asked to learn, take notes, write blog daily. Many of them started to write. You can see them all here – https://blogs.kaniyam.cloudns.nz/

I hope minimum 20 students learned python very well.

The project demo days at final weeks proved that within 2 months, anyone can learn python programming and do good projects. All we need is dedicated learning and practicing.

I thank Syed Jafer, who trained us in a easy way. Thanks to all participants for great enthusiasm and hard work on learning.

I got opportunity to handle few classes and few QA sessions. Enjoyed every discussions with the team. Happy to see the progress and read all your blog posts daily. Continue the learning and writing. It is a life long process.

Special Thanks to my ilugc friend Asokan. He is a trainer for 20+ years. He taught python around 2005 in our Chennai Linux Users Group meetings. Happy to learn again from him, on his special training sessions.

On our discussions, he explained how to train python for beginners. Learned on he importance of more good examples, how to explain basics etc.

We all wondered on various methods to solve the fizz buzz problem and the beauty of functional programming.

Thanks for Asokan for mentoring us and TalentSprint.com for providing Zoom for the classes.

The feedback session was interesting. Captured the notes here on the things to improve on the next classes.

Feedback from participants –

• go little slow
• more basics and examples
• first week , explain programming basics for beginners
• teach flow charting methods for basics.
• try teaching scratch
• weekend sessions batch
• make more conversations by participants
• make sub groups
• get cheerleaders within the team to make the classes interactive
• more promotion needed
• give better examples
• more QA sessions are required
• each one should talk
• showing face in video can help to get some personal connections.
• run mini hackathons
• make more interactions and connections between the participants
• ask to write blogs daily
• encourage to give talks in class and other communities

Few more learning’s

• Don’t create whatsapp group for communications. It has 1024 members limit. Having multiple groups is a headache.
• Telegram is fine for now. Try to explore mailing list too.
• Mute the groups, if required, to avoid “hi,hello,good morning” messages.
• Teach how to join for mailing list like chennaipy, kanchilug and how to ask in forums like https://forums.tamillinuxcommunity.org/
• Teach how to create a free blog in dev.to or wordpress.com
• Don’t spend much time on explaining all the things in the language. In 5th or 6th class, they have to write code for a small project. Explain things as solutions for the project ideas or problem statements.
• Insist on using names when calling people, always. By habit, people will call as sir/madam. avoid that on any technical discussions. We all are equal.
• Zoom is costly. Even though we invest time on training and money for zoom, only around 50 people will complete the training. Check for other platforms like jitsi or google meet too.

Will try to implement these in our upcoming classes.

If you are interested in teaching any open source technology in tamil, write to us at KaniyamFoundation@gmail.com It can be some 30 min talk or few months trainings.

Thanks for all people who are spreading the knowledge openly. you are the backbone of the life.

Links –

All the training videos are here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQquVptFreE&list=PLiutOxBS1Mizte0ehfMrRKHSIQcCImwHL

Telegram Group – https://t.me/parottasalna

My slides in introduction to python – https://kaniyam.cloudns.nz/python-tips/python-tips.pdf

350 python tips – https://kaniyam.cloudns.nz/python-tips/python-tips.pdf

Syed’s website – https://parottasalna.com/

All our blog posts – https://blogs.kaniyam.cloudns.nz

The past 2 months went with weekly 3 python classes in Tamil, from Kaniyam Foundation

We got around 3500 participants in 3 whatsapp groups. Initial days went with some 1000+ students.

As the classes are in Tamil, live streamed, many participants started to learn easily.

We asked to learn, take notes, write blog daily. Many of them started to write. You can see them all here – https://blogs.kaniyam.cloudns.nz/

I hope minimum 20 students learned python very well.

The project demo days at final weeks proved that within 2 months, anyone can learn python programming and do good projects. All we need is dedicated learning and practicing.

I thank Syed Jafer, who trained us in a easy way. Thanks to all participants for great enthusiasm and hard work on learning.

I got opportunity to handle few classes and few QA sessions. Enjoyed every discussions with the team. Happy to see the progress and read all your blog posts daily. Continue the learning and writing. It is a life long process.

Special Thanks to my ilugc friend Asokan. He is a trainer for 20+ years. He taught python around 2005 in our Chennai Linux Users Group meetings. Happy to learn again from him, on his special training sessions.

On our discussions, he explained how to train python for beginners. Learned on he importance of more good examples, how to explain basics etc.

We all wondered on various methods to solve the fizz buzz problem and the beauty of functional programming.

Thanks for Asokan for mentoring us and TalentSprint.com for providing Zoom for the classes.

The feedback session was interesting. Captured the notes here on the things to improve on the next classes.

Feedback from participants –

• go little slow
• more basics and examples
• first week , explain programming basics for beginners
• teach flow charting methods for basics.
• try teaching scratch
• weekend sessions batch
• make more conversations by participants
• make sub groups
• get cheerleaders within the team to make the classes interactive
• more promotion needed
• give better examples
• more QA sessions are required
• each one should talk
• showing face in video can help to get some personal connections.
• run mini hackathons
• make more interactions and connections between the participants
• ask to write blogs daily
• encourage to give talks in class and other communities

Few more learning’s

• Don’t create whatsapp group for communications. It has 1024 members limit. Having multiple groups is a headache.
• Telegram is fine for now. Try to explore mailing list too.
• Mute the groups, if required, to avoid “hi,hello,good morning” messages.
• Teach how to join for mailing list like chennaipy, kanchilug and how to ask in forums like https://forums.tamillinuxcommunity.org/
• Teach how to create a free blog in dev.to or wordpress.com
• Don’t spend much time on explaining all the things in the language. In 5th or 6th class, they have to write code for a small project. Explain things as solutions for the project ideas or problem statements.
• Insist on using names when calling people, always. By habit, people will call as sir/madam. avoid that on any technical discussions. We all are equal.
• Zoom is costly. Even though we invest time on training and money for zoom, only around 50 people will complete the training. Check for other platforms like jitsi or google meet too.

Will try to implement these in our upcoming classes.

If you are interested in teaching any open source technology in tamil, write to us at KaniyamFoundation@gmail.com It can be some 30 min talk or few months trainings.

Thanks for all people who are spreading the knowledge openly. you are the backbone of the life.

Links –

All the training videos are here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQquVptFreE&list=PLiutOxBS1Mizte0ehfMrRKHSIQcCImwHL

Telegram Group – https://t.me/parottasalna

My slides in introduction to python – https://kaniyam.cloudns.nz/python-tips/python-tips.pdf

350 python tips – https://kaniyam.cloudns.nz/python-tips/python-tips.pdf

Syed’s website – https://parottasalna.com/

All our blog posts – https://blogs.kaniyam.cloudns.nz

Hello Reader,

Last week went with a grant beginning of online Python Training, Salsa Dance event and a visit to Toronto Zoo.

• We announced a free python course in Tamil at https://kaniyam.com/python-course-2024/ It went viral somehow. Created a whatsapp group for participants. within a day 1024 members joined and its limit was reached. Went with second and third whatsapp group. Thanks for Writer NChokkan and other who shared the news about the class.

• We explored on what online platform to use to hold 1000+ participants. Meet.jit.is is my favorite as it is Free/OpenSource. But, we need huge infra to self host. There was no time to experiment on that. MS Teams is cheapest. But, Wanted to be away from it. Explored Google Meet. Finally Zoom wins with its Webinar mode, which can hold 1000+ people.

• Mr. Asokan from TalentSprint.com, the one who introduced Python in ilugc meets around 2005, donated the zoom service for the training.

• On the first day, we got 550+ participants. So happy to address to such huge audience.

• Thanks to the trainer Syed Jafer, TalentSprint.com and the participants for making a massive event.

• On the whatsapp groups, people started to post “hi, hello, good morning, I am ABC from XYZ” etc. Muted the group and made them as announcement only groups.

• Asked all the participants to create a blog account at https://dev.to and started to aggregate all their blogs at my FreshRSS running on my desktop in my home. Read ll their writings at https://blogs.kaniyam.cloudns.nz/ Reading their blogs is really interesting. 76 students provided their blogs so far. Will continue asking them to write blogs daily.

• Its a mixed crowd. Electrical/Mechanical/Home making/Baking/PhD Scholars/Designers/Students are attending. Hope ‘A byte of python’ will change their life.

• Asokan explained to me and syed on how to train beginners. Got many insights on the training side.

• Last week, had a discussion with MalaiKannan on Linux, Linux Users Groups, Kaniyam, Tamil Computing, Ebooks, ML/AI etc. Today he published the talk on his youtube channel “Malai Talks” . See it here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLzQTdMK2mw Shhh. It is a 2 hrs talk. Get prepared to hear long stories.

• Sivaprabu, a friend from ilugc, shared a small clip of him seeing the talk on big TV. So happy

• Last Saturday was fun with Salsa Dance Festival 2024 at Toronto. Visited a local library there, as went earlier. Then, danced with Nithya and kids along with 1000s of people. See here for a glimpses of the festival – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTIuHji1qYU&t=1582s ( Got it online )

• Here is a small clip of me and Nithya dancing https://kaniyam.cloudns.nz/clips/video/salsa-dance.mp4.html Thanks to HeartComonos team here for teaching me salsa dance.

• On Sunday, went to Toronto Zoo. Saw Lion, Chimpanzee, Tiger and more animals. Never seen a tiger that closer so far. Kids enjoyed seeing them all. See a small clip of how close we saw the tiger, here – https://kaniyam.cloudns.nz/clips/video/tiger-at-toronto-zoo-with-cubs.mp4.html

See you all in next weekly notes. if you are writing blogs, reply here. Will follow and read them. Blogs and RSS feeds are best alternate to the social media platforms filled with advertisements and random paid contents.

Hello Reader,

Last week went with a grant beginning of online Python Training, Salsa Dance event and a visit to Toronto Zoo.

• We announced a free python course in Tamil at https://kaniyam.com/python-course-2024/ It went viral somehow. Created a whatsapp group for participants. within a day 1024 members joined and its limit was reached. Went with second and third whatsapp group. Thanks for Writer NChokkan and other who shared the news about the class.

• We explored on what online platform to use to hold 1000+ participants. Meet.jit.is is my favorite as it is Free/OpenSource. But, we need huge infra to self host. There was no time to experiment on that. MS Teams is cheapest. But, Wanted to be away from it. Explored Google Meet. Finally Zoom wins with its Webinar mode, which can hold 1000+ people.

• Mr. Asokan from TalentSprint.com, the one who introduced Python in ilugc meets around 2005, donated the zoom service for the training.

• On the first day, we got 550+ participants. So happy to address to such huge audience.

• Thanks to the trainer Syed Jafer, TalentSprint.com and the participants for making a massive event.

• On the whatsapp groups, people started to post “hi, hello, good morning, I am ABC from XYZ” etc. Muted the group and made them as announcement only groups.

• Asked all the participants to create a blog account at https://dev.to and started to aggregate all their blogs at my FreshRSS running on my desktop in my home. Read ll their writings at https://blogs.kaniyam.cloudns.nz/ Reading their blogs is really interesting. 76 students provided their blogs so far. Will continue asking them to write blogs daily.

• Its a mixed crowd. Electrical/Mechanical/Home making/Baking/PhD Scholars/Designers/Students are attending. Hope ‘A byte of python’ will change their life.

• Asokan explained to me and syed on how to train beginners. Got many insights on the training side.

• Last week, had a discussion with MalaiKannan on Linux, Linux Users Groups, Kaniyam, Tamil Computing, Ebooks, ML/AI etc. Today he published the talk on his youtube channel “Malai Talks” . See it here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLzQTdMK2mw Shhh. It is a 2 hrs talk. Get prepared to hear long stories.

• Sivaprabu, a friend from ilugc, shared a small clip of him seeing the talk on big TV. So happy

• Last Saturday was fun with Salsa Dance Festival 2024 at Toronto. Visited a local library there, as went earlier. Then, danced with Nithya and kids along with 1000s of people. See here for a glimpses of the festival – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTIuHji1qYU&t=1582s ( Got it online )

• Here is a small clip of me and Nithya dancing https://kaniyam.cloudns.nz/clips/video/salsa-dance.mp4.html Thanks to HeartComonos team here for teaching me salsa dance.

• On Sunday, went to Toronto Zoo. Saw Lion, Chimpanzee, Tiger and more animals. Never seen a tiger that closer so far. Kids enjoyed seeing them all. See a small clip of how close we saw the tiger, here – https://kaniyam.cloudns.nz/clips/video/tiger-at-toronto-zoo-with-cubs.mp4.html

See you all in next weekly notes. if you are writing blogs, reply here. Will follow and read them. Blogs and RSS feeds are best alternate to the social media platforms filled with advertisements and random paid contents.

Last week was an event full week.

• Last Thursday, at Heartcomonos,we had a potluck and drumming Jam. Went with friends, Nithya and kids. Good to see around 40 people. Few people came from Ukraine and other countries. Happy to see that heartcomonos is connecting local people, provides a friendly environment for all who miss the back home friends and relatives. The Drumming Jam was mesmerizing. Imagine 40 people are hitting hand drum with same rhythm. It induced the interesting learning drum. But, I remembered all the pending planned activities and a sleeping keyboard. In few months, I have to complete all the planned works and then only can explore the musical keyboard at home.

• Took few photos and videos of the event. With Darktable, I can mass edit, apply filters to all the photos. But video editing was always a nightmare for me. After exploring OpenShot, ShotCut, found that KDEnlive is an excellent tool for video editing. Though it asks efforts to learn it, the time and efforts are worth. we can all the video magics with it. Edited few event videos with kdenlive.

• Found good tamil video tutorials – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsQ_RnSTkSg&list=PLhPOYM1ZXzOFPb-tvIGxpykG4jicBnitI

  Thanks to Prasanna for making wonderful tutorial. Thanks for your beautiful cover images for FreeTamilEbooks.com too.

  With good tools and methods, we can really do things quickly. Started to like Kdenlive after Emacs. Feeling like Emacs is for text and Kdenlive is for Videos.

• Visited BAPS Swami narayana temple in Etobicoke. It has stunning architecture. Kids are seeing many gods for the first time. We discussed about various religions, faiths and rituals. They more they ask questions, the more I say as they are just stories.

• Our favorite Stand up Comedian, Alexander Babu was in Toronto, last week for a show “Alexperience”. Nithya attended it. She wrote a thanks note for the event in Facebook. Alex replied with thanks. Read it in Tamil here, https://www.facebook.com/nithya.duraisamy.7/posts/pfbid02wjuDsZpqSX8xcD9YXVRPSBYgw14vYCPgifoNxvFtF9vv1QzdANhX55oFJntVrmACl

• When Nithya went to the show, Myself and kids watched his show “Alex in Wonderland” in Amazon Prime. Don’t miss the show if you like Tamil movies and songs. Many songs and singers were spoken in the show. Watched those songs along with the kids. Kids wondered on Karnan Sivaji, Muthu Rajini etc. Demonstrated how ARR started new wave in tamil music, with different songs. We placed a water bottle on top of the woofer. As the songs go, the bottle started to move and fell down. Discussed few basic science behind it.

• Last Monday, celebrated Canada day with a day out and fireworks at night.

• Announced a free python course in tamil at Kaniyam.com Get more info at https://kaniyam.com/python-course-2024/

  Python is a crowd puller. Within a day, we got 540+ members in the whatsapp group. Looking for good online training platform to run the classes smoothly, with 100+ participants.

  Thanks Syed Jafar for providing the free training and Shyamala for initiating the training discussions. All started with a request in our forum – https://forums.tamillinuxcommunity.org/t/need-python-tutor/1999

• Yesterday, Spoke at a podcast about kaniyam, LUGs, Saama and other activities. It will be released after editing soon.

• Wrote code to find the unused kubernetes deployments by the loadbalancer’s request count and mapping with the Route53 entries. Programming is the best drug to be immersed, next to reading books.
• Playing with airflow on kubernetes for its performance fine tuning.

Interesting weeks are ahead. Will share more news as they happen. Do you write blogs? Reply here with your blog URL. I will follow them.

I feel like reading blogs are more peaceful than any other social media.

Last week was an event full week.

• Last Thursday, at Heartcomonos,we had a potluck and drumming Jam. Went with friends, Nithya and kids. Good to see around 40 people. Few people came from Ukraine and other countries. Happy to see that heartcomonos is connecting local people, provides a friendly environment for all who miss the back home friends and relatives. The Drumming Jam was mesmerizing. Imagine 40 people are hitting hand drum with same rhythm. It induced the interesting learning drum. But, I remembered all the pending planned activities and a sleeping keyboard. In few months, I have to complete all the planned works and then only can explore the musical keyboard at home.

• Took few photos and videos of the event. With Darktable, I can mass edit, apply filters to all the photos. But video editing was always a nightmare for me. After exploring OpenShot, ShotCut, found that KDEnlive is an excellent tool for video editing. Though it asks efforts to learn it, the time and efforts are worth. we can all the video magics with it. Edited few event videos with kdenlive.

• Found good tamil video tutorials – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsQ_RnSTkSg&list=PLhPOYM1ZXzOFPb-tvIGxpykG4jicBnitI

  Thanks to Prasanna for making wonderful tutorial. Thanks for your beautiful cover images for FreeTamilEbooks.com too.

  With good tools and methods, we can really do things quickly. Started to like Kdenlive after Emacs. Feeling like Emacs is for text and Kdenlive is for Videos.

• Visited BAPS Swami narayana temple in Etobicoke. It has stunning architecture. Kids are seeing many gods for the first time. We discussed about various religions, faiths and rituals. They more they ask questions, the more I say as they are just stories.

• Our favorite Stand up Comedian, Alexander Babu was in Toronto, last week for a show “Alexperience”. Nithya attended it. She wrote a thanks note for the event in Facebook. Alex replied with thanks. Read it in Tamil here, https://www.facebook.com/nithya.duraisamy.7/posts/pfbid02wjuDsZpqSX8xcD9YXVRPSBYgw14vYCPgifoNxvFtF9vv1QzdANhX55oFJntVrmACl

• When Nithya went to the show, Myself and kids watched his show “Alex in Wonderland” in Amazon Prime. Don’t miss the show if you like Tamil movies and songs. Many songs and singers were spoken in the show. Watched those songs along with the kids. Kids wondered on Karnan Sivaji, Muthu Rajini etc. Demonstrated how ARR started new wave in tamil music, with different songs. We placed a water bottle on top of the woofer. As the songs go, the bottle started to move and fell down. Discussed few basic science behind it.

• Last Monday, celebrated Canada day with a day out and fireworks at night.

• Announced a free python course in tamil at Kaniyam.com Get more info at https://kaniyam.com/python-course-2024/

  Python is a crowd puller. Within a day, we got 540+ members in the whatsapp group. Looking for good online training platform to run the classes smoothly, with 100+ participants.

  Thanks Syed Jafar for providing the free training and Shyamala for initiating the training discussions. All started with a request in our forum – https://forums.tamillinuxcommunity.org/t/need-python-tutor/1999

• Yesterday, Spoke at a podcast about kaniyam, LUGs, Saama and other activities. It will be released after editing soon.

• Wrote code to find the unused kubernetes deployments by the loadbalancer’s request count and mapping with the Route53 entries. Programming is the best drug to be immersed, next to reading books.
• Playing with airflow on kubernetes for its performance fine tuning.

Interesting weeks are ahead. Will share more news as they happen. Do you write blogs? Reply here with your blog URL. I will follow them.

I feel like reading blogs are more peaceful than any other social media.

Dear Reader,

Thanks for reading this blog and encouraging me to write more. It has been a while since my last weekly notes. Sometimes, life so eventful that I miss to document them.

For past few months, I am super busy with work, reading, summer and more.

Here are few notes from my daily journal.

• Gave an online talk on “Daily life at a IT company” in Tamil. Spoke about various departments, their activities, the problems they all solve. Check the slides here – https://archive.org/details/look-inside-it-company

  See the video in Tamil here – https://youtu.be/gyT11vOKEEg

• Nithya gave a talk at an online seminar arranged by the college she studied “Sri Sankara arts & science collge, kanchipuram” along with her friend Brinda, on “Reent trends on IT”.
• Completed reading the Tamil Translation of the book “The Origin” by Don Brown. It was a 800+ pages book. Translation was very good. Never felt like reading a translation book. Don’s writings show a magical world in front of our eyes, all with plain text. In this novel, he questions on religions, god, power, greed and shows the possibilities of AI bots ruling the future of human. Dont miss to read this, if you like to spend few days to weeks on a new world.
• I use WordPress to host few websites for friends. When the hosting company moved their servers to another vendors, lost those sites. Learnt the necessary of backups of the websites in a hard way. The cloud team of annaitech.in helped to restore few sites from their backup. They recreated few websites as fresh. started to use https://managewp.com/ to have backups for all wordpress sites.
• Visited High park, toronto with family. Kids enjoyed a lot. Saw the animal Llama for the first time.
• Summer is here finally. Spending good times with children on weekends. Dining at park benches are awesome.
• Viyan is grown. I am playing shuttle with him. Talking with him on various subjects like women rights, religion , science, history, castes, reservations, why Tamilnadu is against hindi imposition etc. His questions are good. We both do research, read books, watch videos and learn together. If we answer the questions of kids on god honestly, we will become athests naturally.
• Tamil school for kids had a good annual day with cultural dances and songs. The efforts of people here to make the language alive are awesome.
• with KanchiLUG friends, we are writing python code for Tolkappym rules. We meet every saturday and discuss. Minutes are here – https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues/214
• Mississauga city had an election for Mayor. Attended a meeting with a debate of 3 candidates with HeartComonos Team. Good to listen the politicians and local issues here.

• Started to collect sharable Tamil plain text data for LLM researches. Documenting the progress here – https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues/198

  https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/06/11/collecting-content-for-llm-dataset-part-1-tamil-wikipedia-content/ https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/06/16/collecting-content-for-llm-dataset-part-2-freetamilebooks/

• Announced an online course on machine learning in Tamil – https://kaniyam.com/ml-training-2024/ We are not getting enough participants. will wait for two more weeks and then will decide to go for it or cancel it.
• Happy to read weekly notes from Parathan, Stilanka – Read them here – https://weekly-notes.parathan.com/ His blog and a talk with Dinesh Parasakthi inspired me to resume the weekly notes here. Thanks for all who are motivating me in all the ways.
• Taking many photographs of people, nature and streets. But no time to process them all. Have to process them and upload to wikipedia commons.
• Watched few movies. When Viyan discussed about DNA, Cloning etc, watched the movie “Jurrassic Park”. Then, “Termininator 2”. Hope we will watch “The Matrix” soon. Enjoyed watching “Aavesham”, “Laapataa Ladies” , Jawaan, HotSpot, Manjummel Boys, Vasool Raja MBBS.
• Last weekend with with kids to a indoor Arcade game center. They enjoyed playing games with Arcade centers.
• From next week, kids get two month summer holidays. We will be living and working at library mostly.

Dear Reader,

Thanks for reading this blog and encouraging me to write more. It has been a while since my last weekly notes. Sometimes, life so eventful that I miss to document them.

For past few months, I am super busy with work, reading, summer and more.

Here are few notes from my daily journal.

• Gave an online talk on “Daily life at a IT company” in Tamil. Spoke about various departments, their activities, the problems they all solve. Check the slides here – https://archive.org/details/look-inside-it-company

  See the video in Tamil here – https://youtu.be/gyT11vOKEEg

• Nithya gave a talk at an online seminar arranged by the college she studied “Sri Sankara arts & science collge, kanchipuram” along with her friend Brinda, on “Reent trends on IT”.
• Completed reading the Tamil Translation of the book “The Origin” by Don Brown. It was a 800+ pages book. Translation was very good. Never felt like reading a translation book. Don’s writings show a magical world in front of our eyes, all with plain text. In this novel, he questions on religions, god, power, greed and shows the possibilities of AI bots ruling the future of human. Dont miss to read this, if you like to spend few days to weeks on a new world.
• I use WordPress to host few websites for friends. When the hosting company moved their servers to another vendors, lost those sites. Learnt the necessary of backups of the websites in a hard way. The cloud team of annaitech.in helped to restore few sites from their backup. They recreated few websites as fresh. started to use https://managewp.com/ to have backups for all wordpress sites.
• Visited High park, toronto with family. Kids enjoyed a lot. Saw the animal Llama for the first time.
• Summer is here finally. Spending good times with children on weekends. Dining at park benches are awesome.
• Viyan is grown. I am playing shuttle with him. Talking with him on various subjects like women rights, religion , science, history, castes, reservations, why Tamilnadu is against hindi imposition etc. His questions are good. We both do research, read books, watch videos and learn together. If we answer the questions of kids on god honestly, we will become athests naturally.
• Tamil school for kids had a good annual day with cultural dances and songs. The efforts of people here to make the language alive are awesome.
• with KanchiLUG friends, we are writing python code for Tolkappym rules. We meet every saturday and discuss. Minutes are here – https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues/214
• Mississauga city had an election for Mayor. Attended a meeting with a debate of 3 candidates with HeartComonos Team. Good to listen the politicians and local issues here.

• Started to collect sharable Tamil plain text data for LLM researches. Documenting the progress here – https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues/198

  https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/06/11/collecting-content-for-llm-dataset-part-1-tamil-wikipedia-content/ https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/06/16/collecting-content-for-llm-dataset-part-2-freetamilebooks/

• Announced an online course on machine learning in Tamil – https://kaniyam.com/ml-training-2024/ We are not getting enough participants. will wait for two more weeks and then will decide to go for it or cancel it.
• Happy to read weekly notes from Parathan, Stilanka – Read them here – https://weekly-notes.parathan.com/ His blog and a talk with Dinesh Parasakthi inspired me to resume the weekly notes here. Thanks for all who are motivating me in all the ways.
• Taking many photographs of people, nature and streets. But no time to process them all. Have to process them and upload to wikipedia commons.
• Watched few movies. When Viyan discussed about DNA, Cloning etc, watched the movie “Jurrassic Park”. Then, “Termininator 2”. Hope we will watch “The Matrix” soon. Enjoyed watching “Aavesham”, “Laapataa Ladies” , Jawaan, HotSpot, Manjummel Boys, Vasool Raja MBBS.
• Last weekend with with kids to a indoor Arcade game center. They enjoyed playing games with Arcade centers.
• From next week, kids get two month summer holidays. We will be living and working at library mostly.

Dear Reader,

Thanks for reading this blog and encouraging me to write more. It has been a while since my last weekly notes. Sometimes, life so eventful that I miss documenting them.

For past few months, I am super busy with work, reading, summer and more.

Here are a few notes from my daily journal.

• Gave an online talk on “Daily life at an IT company” in Tamil. Spoke about various departments, their activities, the problems they all solve. Check the slides here – https://archive.org/details/look-inside-it-company

  See the video in Tamil here –

  https://youtu.be/gyT11vOKEEg

• Nithya gave a talk at an online seminar arranged by the college she studied “Sri Sankara arts & science college, kanchipuram” along with her friend Brinda, on “Recent trends on IT”.
• Completed reading the Tamil Translation of the book “The Origin” by Don Brown. It was a 800+ pages book. Translation was very good. Never felt like reading a translation book. Don’s writings show a magical world in front of our eyes, all with plain text. In this novel, he questions on religions, god, power, greed and shows the possibilities of AI bots ruling the future of human. Dont miss to read this, if you like to spend few days to weeks on a new world.
• I use WordPress to host few websites for friends. When the hosting company moved their servers to another vendors, lost those sites. Learnt the necessary of backups of the websites in a hard way. The cloud team of annaitech.in helped to restore few sites from their backup. They recreated few websites as fresh. Started to use https://managewp.com/ to have backups for all wordpress sites.
• Visited High park, Toronto with family. Kids enjoyed a lot. Saw the animal Llama for the first time.
• Summer is finally here. Spending good times with children on weekends. Dining at park benches are awesome.
• Viyan is grown. I am playing shuttle with him. Talking with him on various subjects like women rights, religion , science, history, castes, reservations, why Tamilnadu is against hindi imposition etc. His questions are good. We both do research, read books, watch videos and learn together. If we answer the questions of kids on god honestly, we will become atheists naturally.
• Tamil school for kids had a good annual day with cultural dances and songs. The efforts of people here to make the language alive are awesome.
• with KanchiLUG friends, we are writing python code for Tolkappym rules. We meet every saturday and discuss. Minutes are here – https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues/214
• Mississauga city had an election for Mayor. Attended a meeting with a debate of 3 candidates with HeartComonos Team. Good to listen to the politicians and local issues here.
• Started to collect sharable Tamil plain text data for LLM researches. Documenting the progress here – https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues/198

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

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

• Announced an online course on machine learning in Tamil – https://kaniyam.com/ml-training-2024/ We are not getting enough participants. Will wait for two more weeks and then will decide to go for it or cancel it.
• Happy to read weekly notes from Parathan, Stilanka – Read them here – https://weekly-notes.parathan.com/ His blog and a talk with Dinesh Parasakthi inspired me to resume the weekly notes here. Thanks for all who are motivating me in all the ways.
• Taking many photographs of people, nature and streets. But no time to process them all. Have to process them and upload to Wikipedia commons.
• Watched few movies. When Viyan discussed about DNA, Cloning etc, watched the movie “Jurassic Park”. Then, “Termininator 2”. Hope we will watch “The Matrix” soon. Enjoyed watching “Aavesham”, “Laapataa Ladies” , Jawaan, HotSpot, Manjummel Boys, Vasool Raja MBBS.
• Last weekend with with kids to an indoor Arcade game center. They enjoyed playing games with Arcade centers.
• From next week, kids get two month summer holidays. We will be living and working at the library mostly.

Last week went on with reading, listening to podcasts, and programming.

Was listening to a few podcasts of Carl Newport and Jey Shetty on deep work and time management. Most of the contents I already knew from “Eat that Frog” and “Deep Work”. Many times, I need more inspiration and motivation to follow the things we already knew.

Still reading the books Origin and Emacs Field Guide.

Writing code to get many reports from AWS, with python and boto3 library.
Programming is exercise for the brain. The satisfaction of seeing the code working is always awesome.

Kids got a long weekend for Good Friday and Easter.

My brother suresh gave a few Tamil story Books and School Books for kids, from chennai through a friend. So happy to see the Tamil books. Kids started to read them.

Heart Comonos Team conducted two events for Easter. An event for kids and a Health Fair with Zumba. Danced with the team for a long time.

Viyan wanted a few interesting games to play. I asked him to try “Prince of Persia and Mario”. They are 20+ years old DOS games. He found them online and enjoyed playing for some time.

Watched the movies below.
– Terminator 2 Judgement Day
– Lover
– Parking

Lover and Parking are “not to miss” movies. Happy to see Tamil Film Industry is making movies with real life like moments and storylines.

Payilagam Team conducts summer classes for women and online react classes.
KanchiLUG team discussed Ledger CLI and Ledger Mode on Emacs.

Released one ebook about Madras/Chennai in Tamil. Download it here https://freetamilebooks.com/ebooks/madharasapattinam/

There are many books waiting to be released at FreeTamilEbooks.com
Check them at https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/Ebooks/issues
Reply here or mail to me ( tshrinivasan@gmail.com ) if you can contribute on ebook making.

Planning to download the old tamil books from “Endangered Archives Programme” https://eap.bl.uk/ and Google books. Working on automating the process.

https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues/199

https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues/200

Check these issues and contribute.

The last two weeks went crazy.

Kids got a week of holidays to welcome spring.
We went to nearby small library and a very big central library.

Libraries had many events for kids and adults.
We missed few events as we were late few min for on spot registration.
We had good learnings too.

Payilagam team announced a free react class in Tamil.
Around 400 people registered.
We dont have purchased any online meeting platform yet.
Went with free google meet and youtube live.

Started to read the book “Harley Hahn’s Emacs Field Guide“
It introduces the history of Unix, terminals and then emacs.
I never thought a technical book will be full of history and fun.
If you get a chance to read it, dont miss it.

Upgraded my desktop with 2TB SSD hard disk and Ubuntu 23.10
Now my desktop is super fast. SSD makes the desktop experience awesome.

Sad to see many websites are disappearing from internet.
Maattru.com and TNCPIM.org were with good contents in creative commons license for many years.
But they disappeared due to various reasons.
Khaleel is working on restoring the site content from way back machine.
Thanks to archive.org for storing the internet’s content.

We celebrated Viyan’s birthday.
He is turning 10 this year.
Kids grow faster than we thought.
Invited all his friends and had a great kids gathering event last saturday.

Sunday, went to scarborough for a tamil literature meeting.
Tamil Writer Yuvan Chandrasekar is in Mississauga.
He gave a talk.
Kaalam Selvam released his 60th edition of the tamil magazine “Kaalam“
Happy to meet many Tamil literary people here.

Started reading the book “Origin” by Dan Brown in Tamil. Reading a non fiction after long time.
It is a 800 page novel. but the pages and hours are flying with the book. After this, will check for other novels by Dan Brown. Thanks for the translator senthil and publisher “Ethir Veliyedu” for bringing the nice work in Tamil.

My brother Arulalan received the “Best Employee Award” of India Meteorological Department (IMD) from the Honorable Union Minister of Earth Sciences Sh. Krien Rijiju in the presence of the Secretary of MoES Dr.M.Ravichandran and the DGM of IMD Dr.M.Mohapatra during the World Meteorological Day Celebration on 22.03.2024

Tons of wishes for him. I am proud of the passionate hard work and dedication.