Navigating Ramzan

Saturday, March 1, 2025

When navigating home, it’s a good practice to check which routes are open or simply set your home as the destination and let the phone do the rest. Initially, I thought GPS worked with the phone network—but I was wrong. However, to have fully functional navigation, you need map data. This realization came when I was looking for a GPS device for my bicycle on AliExpress and noticed that they didn’t have SIM slots. Later, I stopped cycling and never bought the device. However, I did buy a Mi Band, and it served me well. Nowadays, every weekend, I plan to start walking and going to the gym again but lack the motivation. At least I have the sense not to buy gear before changing my lifestyle—though some days, I do check Garmin’s website to see what’s on offer. …

Cricket Feburary 2025

Sunday, February 23, 2025

My wife asked to check when the match would start. I googled and found that 2 overs were already up, and there was a “Watch it Live” button! It took me to a Pakistani streaming service. I had already heard its name but didn’t know what else they offered. Unfortunately, other than the match, everything was buffering and losing quality. They probably dedicated all the resources they had to the match, which makes sense, and I am not much of an entertainment consumer anyway. Normally my feed consists of technical YouTube channels. I think the last thing I watched on Netflix was Money Heist, and that too was because my wife was addicted to it. I used to peek between scenes and had to figure out the whole sequence. …

Coding in 2025

Saturday, February 15, 2025

This post is for students who like programming but are uncertain of its future. I am not very good with arguments, but I have been in this business since 2000 and people often ask me about what the future holds, no one can know what that will be but we can speculate with past experiences. So, this is my take on programming in 2025, let me know in the comments what you think. …

Pulse

Saturday, February 8, 2025

In the rhythm of life, sometimes we need to pause and check our pulse - to see how far we’ve come and how much has changed. Today serves as one of those moments of reflection. Earlier today, I helped a colleague set up a blog. While WordPress seemed like the obvious choice, we opted for Hugo - a simpler solution that matched their comfort level. This interaction sparked memories of my own blogging journey, reminding me how our choices evolve with time. …

Staying at Home

Sunday, April 26, 2020

We’ve been under lockdown from 20th March here in Karachi, went to the office on 20th that is, it was Friday, also the last day I went to Masjid. Was in office due to a pending “high priority issue” which was on someone else’s plate, but he had to run back home to interior Sindh amid lockdown risk. From then on till now it is all work from home and our team has adopted it well. …

Coffee

Friday, April 10, 2020

Hello, Your uncanny faith in what we have, what developed along the way, to uncertainties ahead. Is most of my muse these days. I did not bring anything to the table, nothing beyond necessities. Yet you morphed whatever scrap we had, mold its concoction of an existence to a meaningful whole. You could have moved on, you could have ended it all, you can still just fade to a life of your own. Which is fine, I too will wither away, in parts, slowly, one shade at a time. …

Puppeteer

Thursday, April 9, 2020

Puppets! He mutters, not free, in a monolog, while unpacking the stage. Our biase, our presupposition, our belief, he continued. Its a story, add a pinch of salt at will. You can not see my harness, am I at my own will? with a concerned look on his face, while he sets two of his characters on the stage. These were not elaborate, those puppets, yet distinguishable, a male and a female. …

A Letter to Muse

Sunday, April 5, 2020

Dear Muse, Stuck in an endless loop of writing this letter and deleting it. Every time with a slightly different meaning, the goal? I am not clear on that. I simply can not get a grip on this untangled mess. Few of those letters had our differences listed, few emotionally charged, few aggressive, some more apologetic than others. That is not all, they even had profound shit like the utilitarian conclusion and stoic viewpoints. I am fragmenting things here, though this letter is about putting them back together. Life, me, everything is not perfect, nor I am expecting you to be. Hope there is some forgiveness left for me, and for my stupid puppets and their rhymes. In any case, I will be waiting here, behind this screen. …

Chaos

Sunday, April 5, 2020

In the midst of chaos I reside, a distant observer to my own life. I am in a thought-created vessel, drifting this calm, endless sea. My oarsmen row in silence, their voices swallowed by the abyss. I stand expressionless at the bow, staring at the shimmering reflection of this starlit sky. Every time I close my eyes, whole worlds flicker past— deserts, mountains, lush green plains, life at its apex, all unseen in the waking hours. …

Bootstrap

Saturday, April 4, 2020

Bootstrap Links Hugo sites getting started Mike Dane tutorial on Youtube. Steps Created a git repo Check out blog project locally git clone https://github.com/HamdanKhan/blog.git hamdan.blog cd .. hugo new site hamdan.blog --force –force because we already created the blog folder from git clone. Added a theme git submodule add https://github.com/cntrump/hugo-notepadium.git themes/hugo-notepadium Theme is notepadium copy-paste its config.toml to project toml file. Created a disqus account, also setup https://hamdan-blog.disqus.com Config hamdan-blog as disqus shortcode in config.toml file. Folder summary, watch Mike Dane videos for details. …