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.