I am a computational biologist by training, with interests in the outdoors, self-hosting, Ham radio, and FOSS.
This website is an attempt to be part of the tideverse. For my primary website, please visit https://rohitfarmer.com. I aim to keep the design of this website simple by just using HTML and CSS simple.css so that it works on majority if not all the web browsers, even the simple ones that run on terminal e.g. Lynx.
The easiest way to contact me is by an email at rohit@rohitfarmer.com. All my other social links are mentioned on my primary website at https://rohitfarmer.com/connect/.
"Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days,
before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network."
-- Tim Berners-Lee in Technology Review, July 1996
Below is my activity feed in reverse chronological order, mimicking a social media feed/wall. All the long-form blog posts are on my main website.
2025-10-29
- Today I wrote a blog post about RSS. What it is, how to use it, and why it matters. The main reason was to include its link in my blog post's footer, where I ask people to follow my blog through RSS. Many people might not know what RSS is, and the link right underneath may give them a primer. We should keep mentioning and writing about tools, technologies, and our beliefs on our websites, not necessarily as experts, but as witnesses. The more people see us using and talking about it, the more willing they will be to adopt it.
- I also included a meta tag in all the pages of this website for search engines to not to index and follow this website. I do not want this website to be private, but also not openly available. Users of Ctrl-c.club will still be able to see my website pages being updated and general audience can reach this website through it's link mentioned on my main website. I want people to first visit my main website before reaching this one, so if someone Googles my name then they should only get the URL of my main website in the search results.
2025-10-28
- I am halfway through the audiobook "Be Water, My Friend" by Shannon Lee. It's a book about Bruce Lee's teachings, written and narrated by his daughter, Shannon. So far, it has been great. However, as I listen to audiobooks in my car while commuting to work, I may have to get the paperback and re-read it to fully absorb the concepts.
- Today, I spent some time updating the NeoVim setup on this server. The HTML editing parts seems to be working fine, but I am having issues with R and Python execution. After trying for hours and asking, ChatGPT, Gemini and Lumo I gave up on getting Python and R working. At one point ChatGPT couldn't even get me a config file that I can use to write HTML without unnecessary complex tweaks and endless errors and warning popups. So I reverted back to my original setup with a few updates. For now it seems to have enough functionality to keep editing this website. I love using Neovim editor, but sometimes it can be a pain to get it running properly.
2025-10-27
- One of my friends argued, against the vaccine mandates, that we should be allowed to refuse what we do not want to put in our bodies. I agree with that at the food level, but not for vaccines. The argument to support vaccine mandates is the same as the law behind drunk driving. Yes, you are allowed to get drunk, but not drive while intoxicated, because you might cause an accident and kill someone else. So, yes, in theory, you are allowed not to get vaccinated, but then don't go out in public and pass on the infection to someone else who might die of the disease. And this argument primarily supports medical interventions against communicable diseases. If you have cancer, then nobody will require you to go and get chemotherapy, because your cancer can not spread to other people.
- Today I read the blog post "Smartphones are not the enemy" by Kev Quirk, which he wrote in support of Thomas Tigby's original post. I support the arguments these gentlemen make that the new dumbphone revolution is just a fad, and that smartphones themselves are not addictive; it's how and what we use them for. If you are hooked on apps based on the attention economy, you are doomed to doomscrolling. There are easier ways to manage phone addiction than moving to a dumb phone or an overly priced minimal phone. I have switched off all notifications except instant messengers and phone calls, and uninstalled Facebook and many other related apps. My phone usage is for making calls, texting, maps, camera, banking, gym sign-in, day care sign-in, Mastodon, RSS, and audiobooks. And none of these things are addictive to the point of despair.
- Kev posted his blog link on his Mastodon account to which someone replied "kinda like guns, right?". To which I replied "the consequences of gun violence are irreversible and can affect uninvolved parties. Smartphone usage only affects the primary user and can be reversed. Additionally, if you refrain from installing attention-grabbing or addictive apps, basically all of Meta's products, then a smartphone is no more destructive than a dumb phone. Smartphone usage is like food. Salad is always there, but people still choose deep-fried." Link to the comment thread https://fosstodon.org/@swatantra/115446321630383212
2025-10-23
- I wasn't expecting to read about James Bond Stoicism, but here it is, and now I want to read the books. Movies are great, but since I am trying to read the books behind all my favorite films, this should be on my list. James Bond Soicism
- I am having such a hard time concentrating today. My brain seems to be mushed with all the worries and the distractions around me.
2025-10-22
- We had a small Diwali party in our office today and around 12 people turned up. We had a great time eating and chatting. Everybody likes Indian food here.
- I am trying to find a straight forward image hosting solution that I can use to display images on this website. I may end up uploading images directly to the server and then minimizing the size using Image Magick.
2025-10-21
Today, I updated this website to complement my primary website. On my main website, I post long-form, polished blog posts, and it includes my CV and work-related documentation. This website is more like my online junk journal, where I can post whatever I find interesting without worrying too much about the format or the intended audience. It is also an attempt to utilize Ctrl-C more regularly. I like the idea of pubnixes, and more people should use Tildeverse to make the internet less siloed by big tech and more interesting.
2025-09-16
I was reading on NPR today that 9/16/25 is a pretty special date. Not only does it line up perfectly with the Pythagorean theorem (3² + 4² = 5²), but it's also made up of the squares of three consecutive numbers—3, 4, and 5. So 9 is 3², 16 is 4², and 25 is 5². I am not a math nerd, but it's cool to bump into something like this.
2025-04-03
After a long hiatus, I have resumed listening to audiobooks in my car since I started commuting to work daily. The best part is that I borrow audiobooks from my local Montgomery County, Maryland library. In the past three weeks, I finished listening to Analog Church/Christian by Jay Y. Kim and am now listening to The Revenge of Analog by David Sax. Public libraries in the USA are a blessing and a massive resource that few people tap into.
2024-12-20
Mastodon offers a feature to set up filters for excluding posts containing specific keywords. This week, I decided to use it on my Fosstodon.org account to filter out posts related to U.S. politics, Elon Musk, and LGBTQ topics. It's not that I'm uninterested or unconcerned about these issues, but I joined Fosstodon for its focus on tech and nerdy hobbies. I follow people who primarily post about these topics.
However, as my follow list grows and the instance expands, I’ve noticed an increasing number of posts on these topics. Unfortunately, the tone of such posts is often angry, condescending, or outright abusive—something I’d rather not mix with my hobbies and interests. For me, Twitter, Bluesky, and news channels are already sufficient sources for staying informed about these issues.
Since setting up the filters a few days ago, I’ve felt much less triggered and more at ease. The takeaway? Keep your hobbies separate from politics and other social issues unless discussing them is your hobby. Mixing the two can drain the joy from what should be a pleasurable escape.
2024-12-16
For the past two Sundays, I have been recording the church sermons with the Otter.ai app, hoping to archive the audio and the transcribed text for future use. However, Otter only allows 30 minutes of transcription in its free plan, which is usually 15 minutes short on a typical Sunday. So, today, I asked Fediverse if there is a free or low-budget solution to my problem, and the suggestions were to use a locally installed Whisper model from OpenAI and use it to transcribe the audio recording either via script or through some off-the-shelf GUI. I tried both and settled with a cross-platform app called Vibe that uses the Whisper model to transcribe audio files locally and also has features for summary and context generation through APIs to other popular models. I used it on two recordings and am pleased with the results. It took some time to transcribe a 30 to 45-minute recording, mainly because I have a very old, slow computer without GPU support. However, Vibe provided the transcribed text in several formats, including .srt, .txt, .html, and .pdf. I check if the .srt and audio files are in sync using the VLC and Celluloid media players on Linux Mint. I used the transcribed text to generate a summary using ChatGPT. For now, this workflow serves the purpose.
2024-12-09
Today, I read this beautifully written article, "Planning for an Uncertain Future" (link below), by Nicholas Johnson, on his Gemini website. I may not agree with all the details that he mentioned, which sounded very confident and methodological, but I do agree with the overall message that too much future planning at the expense of current joy and life fulfillment is futile. So, do today what you can do today to live a better life than worrying or overplanning for your future.
Note: you will need a Gemini browser to open the link: gemini://nicholasjohnson.ch/2024/12/09/planning-for-an-uncertain-future/
2024-12-05
I am working with a data frame with 53 million rows and 28 columns, which I stored as a .feather binary file. On the disk, it's around 5 GB. Fortunately, I am working on an HPC and have ample RAM to load the entire data frame on the memory. However, working with such a huge file is slow and cumbersome.
2024-11-29
Happy Thanksgiving, USA, and every other country that celebrates it. We had an Indian-American mixed family lunch today, and we enjoyed the variety of food and spending time with the family after a long time. One of my colleagues coined a new term for our kind of lunch today: "Curkey." That's a mix of curry and turkey. We all loved it.