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Loneliness & Lockdown

All of us are experiencing something together for the first time in the history of modern humans – a pandemic. A pandemic so pervasive that no nation is untouched by it on the Earth as of today. As of writing now, there are already more than 1.8 million cases worldwide, and this has forced most of the nations to lockdown cities, states, or even districts to a certain degree. Social distancing, also called “physical distancing,” means keeping space between yourself and other people outside of your home is the only effective in breaking the chain of the spread of this deadly virus until vaccines are developed.

Those who are lucky and privileged enough to still have the jobs and food on their tables are suffering from uncertainty, anxiety, and restlessness to various degrees. I’m sure everybody would have lost their minds if suddenly somehow internet goes down for everybody during this pandemic. Our reliance on these media tricks our brains thinking that everything is fine (or going to be fine). Zoom and Netflix can work only this certain extent. Duh! But at the same time, not everything adds up correctly. A lot of people from software and internet companies have reported quite a good boost to their productivity by work-from-home. Still, not everyone is fortunate enough to have a productive quarantine. The emotional balance is disturbed among all the people from all walks of life, and this can have severe implications for the well-being.

People often meme and joke about why this crisis doesn’t affect those who are introverts or loners. It was thought that it quarantine would be a paradise, but it not from the experience of many individuals. Despite the presence of Zoom, which grew from an enterprise service to become the tip of tongue for many who are using it to connect with our loved ones, there is some human connection that is missing. The situation has been particularly stressful for teachers who are teaching remotely. However, a lot of students appreciate the flexibility and convenience provided by it. Communication usually involves the exchange of verbal and non-verbal signals from both parties involved. The asynchronous teaching environment without constant feedback is challenging for effective learning experience. Video-conferencing services have a come a long way in being seamless. But still, our brains are not evolved to understand only these two signals but often require even more, and due to the absence of those clues & gestures, it feels somewhat awkward. The dissonance due to the feeling of conversing with a person who is far away but still feels like being near is what that makes video-conferencing not a perfect solution of human connection.

Being socially disconnected with friends and family members can take a real toll on anyone’s mental health. Loneliness, a word that shudders a lot of people from becoming a reality and is also common in millions of lives is becoming more common during quarantine. It sucks to be alone all or most of the time. There’s a difference between voluntary solitude when you want to spend time with yourself and loneliness. The former is not unhealthy while the latter throws you in a dark pit which makes you further more hesitant from seeking help. It’s a self sustaining cycle and you avoid meeting more people, open up further, avoid eye-contact, avoid all possible social gatherings, and hence further falling deeper in this pit.

Loneliness is a signal from your brain to tell you to interact with other humans. For most of human history, loneliness was a literal death sentence. For the last few hundred years, it was “just” unbearably painful. Over the previous two decades, it’s been able to be numbed to the point that the pain of pursuing meaningful relationships is now greater. Before our health professionals were asking us to socially distance, a rift on emotional level already existed between lot of people. A lot of people feel the pursuit of effective human relationships is not worth the price when you can just mimic those emotions through “Tinder, Facebook, Instagram, FaceTime, Porn, etc. etc.” There’s nothing wrong with it per se, but I do think it’s essential to figure out if you’re spending time alone because it’s easy, or because it’s actually what you want. I worry that a lot of young people are salving loneliness with video games and porn and Netflix instead of facing the discomfort of curing it.

In truth, you’re always isolated in the isolated section of the universe. Your brain which tells and reaffirms you who you’re undergoes a lot of changes throughout the time. It’s said that every cell in your body is regenerated every seven years, and the body is made up of a different collection of physical materials. At that point, nothing that was once you is not you anymore. All the internal changes and external experiences have been varied and molded you differently throughout these years, and yet we still feel the same. The feeling of being who we are. The veil of ego and masquerade can only delude others and ourselves only till certain extent. Some people spend their whole lives thinking not to be who they are, but someone. In the end it all breaks down and you’ve to accept the stark reality of yourself.

Therefore we can conclude that despite these constant fluxes of external and internal states we still are the same, a bit different because of our memories and experiences. But we are still the same, feel the same in the grand scheme of things.

These beautiful lines from a recent video of Pursuit of Wonder have been stuck in my mind, and they explain the struggle for loneliness quite well.

If anything, it is this that solitude and separation provides. The value and reformative nature of confinement is, at least for me, not necessarily to develop into a different person, but to properly face the strange, painful, difficult, and almost inexplicable person you might really be. The person who isn’t even really a person, but the thing that lacks a complete and obvious person, but longs relentlessly for one. The truth of what you might be, that you went to great, massive efforts to otherwise avoid. And instead, you direct your efforts to learn how to live with this, rather than always lashing and flailing away from it.

Spending a lot of time in solitude is a really good way to learn a lot about who you are, without influence from other people and their opinions or perception of you. It’s a path towards self-discovery. Despite being forced by a lot of people to utilize this lockdown for being hyper-productive and do a lot of things and eventually improve your life, one shouldn’t be bogged down by this. Take up the activities you always loved or wanted to give some time not because of rat-racing but as a process of self-discovery. Sometimes slowing down is not bad, and this is a moment for everyone to slow down a bit and rethink the life which had been passing by us.

Arguably, some level of solitude is inevitable in any life. But perhaps, some level of deeper, intentional solitude is necessary for a good one. Even in a crowd of thousands of people, we are all alone. All the interactions and experiences we have had with hundreds of people happened one-by-one, individually, moment-by-moment. The mind is just receiver to all these interactions and noise of the world. The signal is lost for eternity after it has been received.

The struggle of modern life is that this constant noise surrounds us eventual one will struggle to withstand a moment without it when this noise is turned all the way down during the solitude. Is our receiver broken that it requires constant feed of external noises? Perhaps, a moment of slowing down, and turning down the noise will help in listening to the static buzz of the background. It certainly is difficult and would drive anyone crazy, but persisting throughout will aid one to explore his/her inner mind.

I hope all you readers are having a good time with your family and loved ones. Stay safe and happy, and try to slow down and experience the bliss of this life. Slow down a bit. Explore your inner self and detach yourself from the quest of knowing every minute detail of things happening around in the world. It will drive you crazy.

🙂

PS. – The motivation to write this piece was drawn from Pursuit of Wonder channel.

So you want to build a carbon capture company

Casey Handmer's blog

Would you like to win one hundred million bucks from Elon Musk? Carbon capture (CC) is all the rage these days, with dozens of companies springing up to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and help stabilize the climate.

I am not an expert on carbon capture but I do get asked about it from time to time. As a public service, therefore, I am offering the following rubric as a means to organize our thoughts, refine our strategy, and champion quantitative rigor when it comes to developing and evaluating a wide variety of carbon capture systems.

Is our carbon capture scheme any good at all?

Let’s examine our hypothetical CC machine from two angles: physics and finance.

Physics

Is our machine secretly a perpetual motion machine?

In a previous life I spent a few years designing maglev systems and quite often would see concepts from other designers whose performance…

View original post 2,282 more words

10 Time Management Tips That Are Practical

These tips are based on my summary of a recent video that came in my YouTube feed recently. I didn’t want to forget the useful points mentioned there and hence I have summarized them here for myself. I think these might be useful for a lot of other people too.

We own all of our time
- At any given moment you are doing what you most want to be doing.
- We are always in control of our own time. There is always a choice how we spend it.
- You can’t blame life around you for not having time to do X.
Hell yeah or no!
- When young, say yes to most things and opportunities that come along your way.
- Don’t do things when unsure. Pick them when you’re Hell Yeah sure or else have default position of straight Nah! for other cases.
- Learning to say NO to stuff
The Daily highlight
- Choose one thing that you precisely want to do or Highlight of that Day.
- Make sure to do that one thing that is the most urgent, important and satisfying for you.
- Avoids getting the most urgent things being lost in a pile of to-do list.
Use a to Do list
- Physical ones (a paper) are better because of the satisfaction of crossing them off.
- Apps and other methods are fine. It’s helpful because our brain is meant for having ideas and not holding them. So writing them down helps in keeping track of the tasks to do
Time blocking
- Any time you want to do anything, put a block in the calendar.
- Make sure you do that one thing honestly in that block of time
- Best use would be to always make a time block for your Daily Highlight. Helps in ensuring that you do that one task surely
Parkinson’s law
- Work expands to fill the time that we allocate to it
- Making artificial deadlines help in getting tasks done in shorter and more efficient way.
Protected Time
- Make a time period everyday for your own self. Without any obligations or meetings or duties. Just for you, and you alone.
- Use this time for pondering, reading a book, relaxing and reflecting yourself.
Delegation
- Especially helpful for entrepreneurs. Find dollar $ value of your time.
- If the task can be done for cheaper ($/hr) by paying others, then outsource it to others.
- This frees your time for doing higher value work
Automated Scheduling
- Instead of wasting time in scheduling a meeting and events, automate this.
- Calendly, an app, can be used for automating schedule with friends/family, or clients.
The choice to be satisfied
- It’s easy to fall in trap of being chronically dissatisfied at the end of the day because of not accomplishing everything.
- We can choose to be satisfied. Feeling sad won’t solve problems or finish work but rather would make us more sad and unhappy.
- So, we always have a choice to be happy at the end of the day.

The video by Ali Abdaal is really great with lots of context added to the points mentioned above. Here it is embedded for your watch.

Teee heee !!!!

—

2120, The Technological U(Dys)topia

It has now been more than 150 years since these words were uttered, “That’s one small step for man. One giant leap for mankind.” We proved our technical prowess and achieved so much just in a few hundred years of the scientific revolution. The United States’ competition with Soviet Russia post-second world war accelerated the scientific revolution. Lots of accomplishments made their way into our lives. We were now living more royally than what most Greeks or Egyptians would have imagined.

The combination of a capitalistic society and scientific progress meant an ever-increasing standard of living for all of us. But we are not perfect, are we? With the fair share of follies which even the greatest of the minds and the leaders of nations of the 21st century had we survived through a few financial crises. Well, not everybody. Few nations economies tanked and they never recovered which in effect fueled large scale conflicts, civil-wars, and other crises there. Those who did survive still felt largely unaffected. Maybe it’s my poor memory which is failing to recall all the events but everyone acted as if this is the new normal. I remember I was 21 years old when a bit of paranoia, helplessness, fear, conspiracy, and masks was normalized. The world was hit with a global pandemic that infected tens of millions of people and the course of humanity was altered a bit. Few years down the line it was uncovered by the US and EU Intelligence that pandemic was caused by a large state-sponsored bioweapon program of China. This didn’t change much in the global order because everyone relied on China so much for most of the manufacturing supplies that no-one dared to take a risk on their countries’ economy and the whole fiasco was covered up later.

Because of the few dozens of natural and man-made catastrophes, the reality has been blurred further now between a normal world and the brave new world. As I look out of my window of my apartment and see this beautiful city that stretches a couple of hundred kilometers in all directions I feel a deep sense of connectedness with all the Billions of humans who had lived on the neighboring planet. The red planet is amazing to live most of the times but I do miss the freedom to roam farther than these two hundred kilometer city boundaries here. Only scientists, robots and ‘Iridas’ are permitted to go outside of this vast canopy which protects us from harsh Martian climate. It has now been 40 years since we made a sustainable long term base on Mars and Iridas have been essential to our development here.

Philip K. Dick’s dystopian future has become a reality now. Iridas are genetically modified humans who are now serving as slaves to our new Martian society. This may be scary or confusing for a lot of readers from the previous generation who had the conception that slavery was abolished. Only racial slavery was abolished by the law not every other kind of slavery. You see, this human civilization wasn’t built on the utopian concepts of equality and freedom of all humans. The very fabric of society lied in the creation of hierarchy based on power. The one who controlled the power controlled the other humans and could decide the fate of his/her people. The mighty achievements of Greeks, Egyptians, Romans European powers, and Americans were not built by very noble concepts that took care of everyone’s opinion and liberty. Anyone who seemed foreign to the land of power, the land of the oppressors were considered subdued and irrelevant. The foreigners in ancient kingdoms, women for most of the history, the blacks, the aboriginals, etc. are the few notable categories that come at the top of my mind. Most of these hierarchical structures vanished in the late 20th century but the global world was created on the backs of other new kinds of slaves. The slaves who were captured in their daily struggle of putting bread on the table, the ones against whom the game was rigged forever to prevent socio-economic mobility, the ones whose homes, schools, and hospitals were bombarded because some foreign power thought of intervening and bombing their countries, the ones who faced the most adverse effect of the lavishness and carbon output of richer nations which resulted in natural catastrophes. Now Iridas are one of the most important part of our martian society. They have super strong human capabilities and are strictly governed by the new orders of our society. Their memories are hazed out and implanted with artificial ones. Their only existence is service to our humanity and help us to expand beyond the limits of our solar system.

(To be Continued)

PyTorch functions

This blog post is a part of my learning process from the freeCodeCamp course conducted by Jovian.ml: Deep Learning with PyTorch: Zero to GANs. The first task involved exploring various functions of PyTorch Library.

WHAT IS PYTORCH?

It’s a Python-based scientific computing package targeted at two sets of audiences:

A replacement for NumPy to use the power of GPUs
a deep learning research platform that provides maximum flexibility and speed

The 5 functions which I chose as a part of my exploration were –

torch.exp()
torch.floor_divide()
torch.erf()
torch.logical_and()
torch.mul()

torch.exp()

torch.exp(input, out=None) → Tensor

Returns a new tensor with the exponential of the elements of the input tensor input.

torch.exp doesn’t take inputs as integer types. They needs floating point values. Even one input being float does the job.

This function is great to use in various activation function if you want to manually write them in terms of exponential function. Activation functions like sigmoid and tanh have exponential parts.

torch.floor_divide()

torch.floor_divide(input, other, out=None) → Tensor

Return the division of the inputs rounded down to the nearest integer smaller than equal to the division. Basically it truncates the fractional part of the answer

It’s an elementwise floor division of each entry of a with b. 4.0/2.0 = floor(2.0) = 2.0 and 11.0/7.0 =~ floor(1.57) = 1.0

Having different sized tensors outputs an error.

This function can be used in mathematical operations where we don’t wish to have fractional part in the outputs. For example in image processing you don’t wish to have half pixel or quarter pixel. The result must be a whole number.

torch.erf()

torch.erf(input, out=None) → Tensor

Computes the error function of each element. The error function is defined as follows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_function

One wonderful insight that we got is that erf(0) = 0 and erf(-x) = -erf(x). Therefore error function is an odd function.

PyTorch can’t handle complex numbers for erf() though error function is valid for complex numbers mathematically.

When the results of a series of measurements are described by a normal distribution with standard deviation $\sigma$ and expected value 0, then $\textstyle \operatorname {erf} \left({\frac {a}{\sigma {\sqrt {2}}}}\right)$ is the probability that the error of a single measurement lies between −a and +a, for positive a. This is useful, for example, in determining the bit error rate of a digital communication system.

torch.logical_and()

torch.logical_and(input, other, out=None) → Tensor

Computes the element-wise logical AND of the given input tensors. Zeros are treated as False and nonzeros are treated as True.

Since non-zero values are interpreted true. So if one of the two values that are being compared is zero, the result is given as false.

The size of both the tensors that are being compared should be same.

Logical_and is one of the basic functions when doing logical operations. A lot of times we need to assess the validity of multiple tensors and their validity.

torch.mul()

torch.mul(input, other, out=None)

Does matix multiplication of each entry of one tensor with other entries of other tensor. The multiplication happens element wise and the shapes of input and other must be broadcastable.

Matrix b is broadcasted as 2×3 matrix to match the size of a and then each entry is muultiplied with the corresponding entries of matrix a.

When the input and output sizes are not broadcastable then the the multiplication can’t happen.

Element wise matrix multiplication is a common operation during data pre-processing or while computations. A lot of other function use this multiplication by calling this function.

Conclusion

This notebook aimed at learning various PyTorch functions by navigating through PyTorch docs. We saw 5 functions which involved logical_and, exp, mul, erf, exp. These functions are often used in one way or other while training neural networks. PyTorch docs made it quite easy to navigate and searching the information was no brainer. There were illustrations and examples with each function. We also saw when do these functions break and outputs error. Some errors are because of design choices of PyTorch, like torch.erf() which only takes real values as inputs while others are because of simple mathematics rules.

References

Official documentation for torch.Tensor – https://pytorch.org/docs/stable/tensors.html. Just hit Ctrl+F and search for all the functions you may need.
My Jupyter Notebook hosted on Jovian.ml – https://jovian.ml/chitranshuvashishth9/01-tensor-operations

Ps- [Not sponsored] I really loved Jovian.ml platform for doing DataScience related work which involves jupyter notebooks and collaborating with other team members. It’s so easier to push commit and make changes on the fly. The UI/UX is great and Aakash has done a really good job with the jovian and the course he’s offering on freecodecamp for all of us. Thanks. 🙂

I wish I could embed the notebook cells in WordPress but for some reasons the embed element doesn’t transform the URL into the embeded content.

10 Tools to Make Life Easier

I know, I know… this article may seem like one of those Youtube countdown videos ( *cough* Watchmojo) but I’ll try my best to give the best product suggestions which have become an indispensable part of my life. A lot of my friends when they see my devices are like -“why can’t you be normal like others and use the same handful of softwares/apps”. But I like going out for search of the best tools for my experience.

I discovered these products mostly through Reddit or searching by myself for a potential solution of lack of features in current tool which I were using.

1. ShutUp10 – [Windows 10]

I think it should be obvious knowledge to most of the people by now that Microsoft Desktop OS is no longer their bread and butter, so there is no wonder why there are no future releases of Windows. Microsoft is almost giving it for free at this point and you know what? If you are not paying for it, you become the product.

Windows currently has lot of Telemetry and privacy invasing tracking baked into the OS. O&O ShutUp10 is a tool which comes to your help. Using a very simple interface, you decide how Windows 10 should respect your privacy by deciding which unwanted functions should be deactivated. It’s entirely free and does not have to be installed – it can be simply run directly and immediately on your PC. And it will not install or download retrospectively unwanted or unnecessary software, like so many other programs do these days!

2. uBlock Origin – [Chromium based browsers and Firefox]

There was a time when antivirus softwares were the most necessary softwares for the PC and even after having them there wasn’t a sure guarantee that you’ll be safe while being online or sharing files with others. But what I have seen is that most of the malware/virus infections happen because of users being tricked by shady pop-ups, ads and malwarer sites while trying to pirate or stream free animes/movie/games/softwares. Google has worked a lot recently to prevent this in Chrome but there is not a concrete solution as of now. Brave, Firefox and new Chromium based Edge are trying to solve this but even they haven’t perfected the art

So what is uBlocok Origin – An efficient blocker add-on for various browsers. Fast, potent, and lean.

uBlock Origin is NOT an “ad blocker”: it is a wide-spectrum blocker — which happens to be able to function as a mere “ad blocker”. The default behavior of uBlock Origin when newly installed is to block ads, trackers and malware sites — through EasyList, EasyPrivacy, Peter Lowe’s ad/tracking/malware servers, various lists of malware sites, and uBlock Origin’s own filter lists.

3. Keepass – [Windows, Linux, Android, MacOS]

If you’ve spent a considerable amount of time on Youtube then you must have heard these words – “This video was sponsored by Lastpass” . “We are thankful to Dashlane for sponsoring this week’s video”. Password managers have become a conversational topic after more and more security breaches have been reported in recent times. And one of the worst ways you can screw this up is by having same, weak, guessable passwords for all the sites – from your banks to gmail to your Steam account .

Lastpass and Dashlane are amazing products which work great with browser integration and are easy to use. But I trust no-one with my passwords (idk if i’m too cynical) and it’s a common saying that one must always remember “There is no cloud. It’s just someone else’s computer”

KeePass is a free open source password manager, which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way. You can store all your passwords in one database, which is locked with a master key. So you only have to remember one single master key to unlock the whole database. Database files are encrypted using the best and most secure encryption algorithms currently known (AES-256, ChaCha20 and Twofish).

Now the problem will be how will you sync your passwords between different devices? Worry not, there are various keepass plugins for connecting your cloud storage and access the database file located on Google Drive/Dropbox from multiple devices. Another good advice will be to keep a few backups of this password file at other locations and you’ll be alright as long as your remember master password.

4. Syncthing – [Windows, Linux, MacOS, Android]

Syncthing is a continuous file synchronization program. It synchronizes files between two or more computers in real time, safely protected from prying eyes. Your data is your data alone and you deserve to choose where it is stored, whether it is shared with some third party, and how it’s transmitted over the internet.

Earlier, the most common method for sharing files with my other devices used to be sending them on Whatsapp chat through Whatsapp Web or uploading on Google Cloud. But this thing has been a savior for me. It needs a bit configuration at first, but after that it’s a magic. Why bother about cloud storage when you can cut the middle man out and use open source utilities.

5. ShareX – [Windows]

I don’t know about you guys but I take a lot of screenshots for sharing the stuff with my friends. Mostly it’s just memes, but you get it, they are fun and necessary. ShareX is a tool which is so good that I wish that I had discovered it earlier. I configured its keybindings with Alt+Space to take screenshots at breeze.

What’s so cool about it? Free, Open-Source, No Ads, Light-weight, Easy screen capture sharing

You can capture screenshot and it’s instantly copied to your clipboard for sharing or you can uplaod it to image uploaders site like Imgur and PhotoBucket and share the URL on other sites. All with just one key combo. Screen recording is so easy and it’s no brainer when compared to advnaced softwares like OBS. You can record screen with your mic audio or system audio and all with just another key combo.

6. Typora – [ Windows, Linux, MacOS]

I’m sure a lot of you people must have hated MS Word for some reasons including that formatting is so difficult in it. You try to insert one image and boom your paragraphs are shattered. Maintaining consistency is sometimes difficulty and there are way too many features than one needs.

Comes, Markdown. Markdown is a plain text formatting syntax aimed at making writing for the internet easier. The philosophy behind Markdown is that plain text documents should be readable without tags mussing everything up, but there should still be ways to add text modifiers like lists, bold, italics, etc

Typora is a great alternative for quickly writing notes, making to do list, readme docuements and infact reports too. If you’re someone like me who hates using mouse or trackpad and prefers key bindings then think no more. It’s filled with plethora of keyboard shortcuts which can help someone write quicker and focus more on the content. Well, infact the whole draft of this blog was first written in Typora.

You can write mathematics equations using LaTeX, write chemistry equations, insert code fences, make tables, export to 12 different document formats including PDF and HTML. It’s like a perfect package which is free (currently, might become paid after launching out of Beta).

7. Youtube-dl – [Windows, Linux, MacOS]

Youtube these days is analogous to video content and entertainment other than Netflix (who watches tv, Duh!). Indians with dirt cheap mobile data don’t care about saving videos offline much now but there used to be a time when shady sites and tracker ridden extensions were used for downloading youtube videos. I got fed up with lack of options on ‘Save from Net’ which I used to use for saving video. There was no 1080p option without signing up on other stupid site and downlading their malware. I discovered Youtube-dl later and this is one which is a solution to all problems.

So what is Youtube-dl?

Command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com and other video sites http://ytdl-org.github.io/youtube-dl/. If you’re on Windows then there are some GUI versions also to help you out if you get freaked out by terminal/cmd. But I find it using from terminal much easier. Just one line and boom, it’s done.

$ youtube-dl -F <video URL>

This gives list of all the file format. Or else you can see audio and video code from stats for nerds of Youtube.

$ youtube-dl -f <video code> + <audio code> <video URL>

Just this command downloads the video in required format. One can also download an entire playlist this way.

8.Ditto – [Windows]

Ditto is a simple clipboard manager. Clipboard manager is something which you don’t even feel you need until you actually use it and once you’ve become used to it, it’s already too late and you can’t live without it. It’s exactly like crack cocaine. Jokes aside, Ditto is an extension to the standard windows clipboard. It saves each item placed on the clipboard allowing you access to any of those items at a later time. Ditto allows you to specify what gets saved, text, images or html.

It becomes really handy during copy-pasting large amount of datas and make the task not look like chore, though it still is technically! Copy multiple entries using Ctrl + C . Click Ctrl + ` . Now it launches a list of all the things it copied. You can cycle through them and paste one by one. It doen’t lose the source formatting of the text, so when you copy, it copies as it is. There is an option for copying as plain text though.

9. f.lux – [Windows, MacOS]

Before the concept of Night Light was even popular and it existed on Windows 10, f.lux was the de-facto standard for night light software. It still is very popular because of the functionality it provides. During the day, computer screens look good—they’re designed to look like the sun. But, at 9PM, 10PM, or 3AM, you probably shouldn’t be looking at the sun.

f.lux fixes this: it makes the color of your computer’s display adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day.

It’s even possible that you’re staying up too late because of your computer. You could use f.lux because it makes you sleep better, or you could just use it just because it makes your computer look better.

10. Imagus, OneTab, Video Speed [Chromium based Browsers]

Imagus

Enlarge thumbnails, and show images/videos from links with a mouse hover. I think this one liner is enough decription for this. I discovered it while using Reddit. Reddit has lots of links and usually they are linked to other video or image sites so just hovering mouse helps greatly to quickly save time and prevents you from doing boring ‘Right Click + Open image in New Tab’ thing.

One Tab

Browsers are becoming increasingly complex these days to render bigger and more complex webpages. As a result they are often found hogging RAM. Chrome eating RAM meme actually has a lot of substance to it. Whenever you find yourself with too many tabs, click the OneTab icon to convert all of your tabs into a list. When you need to access the tabs again, you can either restore them individually or all at once.

Video Speed

Change the play speed of YouTube/Facebook/Vimeo or ANY website using only your keyboard. An easy way to control any HTML5 video playback speed. Just pressing ] decreases speed by 0.02x and [ increases speed by 0.02x . This is really helpful when you want to watch youtube lectures which are really slow. I’ve become so much used to using this extension that I’ve been watching almost all videos at 1.4x or higher. Now whenever I watch videos at normal speed it feels weird.

I hope that despite this long article of a college kid trying to impose his personal software preferences on genral public it was still somewhat useful for you and you might try to use any of these and improve productivity.

Ps – This is not a promotion. I just like these products and use them everyday, and hence thought of helping others with these suggestions.

The Flow State and Chaos

If someone asks me what’s my weakness, the first thing that comes on my mind is –

Being set up in the flow.

You know, when water flows calmly through channels and everything is perfect. Imagine those scenes which you’ve seen in anime and some movies where a flute is the only thing which is breaking the serenity and everything else is so calm and silent. I feel my brain is also like that. Once it’s set in the “flow” state there’s no distraction and maximum efficiency can be established for doing anything, newer ideas start flowing, tough problems are tackled down easily. It’s quite a meditative state. My weakness is that I usually can’t set myself into flow quite easily after being interrupted or more honestly actually setting myself in it in the first place. The reasons of interruptions can be external as well as internal. Usually it takes time for me to go back to this state and many a time in those moments I feel myself weakest and digress further to not being able to focus on my work and procrastination, boredom, being unmotivated like words becomes common from my mouth for the reason of slacking off.

One of the best results I’ve ever gotten in my life in any area has been because of me being able to set up a flow state during that task. You know, what’s the great thing about the flow state is that the time seems to slow down in those moments and the brain is pouring out 100% of its energy in one task. Apparently this “flow” isn’t like any other flow where you can use a distributed system to maximize the output, execute more tasks and be efficient. No, it’s reverse of it; the more multi-tasking happens, the worse the result becomes. So, that’s the number 1 thing about being in a flow sate – Focus all your energies on one task. One of the things from my personal experiences has been that happiness or more accurately long term joy is amplified in this state. Strictly speaking, doing any serious work is not really blissful or exciting. It’s composed of excruciating long hours of pain and failed attempts and often dissatisfaction. What we all call happiness or bliss or excitement as emotions on our faces and in the body language are usually the end product of our work and effort. An artist is most happy when he/she finishes his/her final stroke of the brush on the canvas. A musician after finishing his recordings and mixing all the tracks and finally encoding the music, a filmmaker after finishing the shooting process, editing audio&video and uploading it on YouTube finally to see his/her work praised by others, a writer seeing his/her books sold quickly in the stores and internet after his last 2 years of efforts, a programmer after spending hours debugging his/her code and finally solving it and pushing it to repository and production, etc, etc… there are thousands of people every day being engrossed in such flow states. But the reason why all these creative people love their work and never call their work as a chore is that they enter the flow state during their creative processes. The joy of being in that flow state is far more rewarding to them than the fame, money, perks, yadda yadda yadda which come as the by-product. I ain’t saying those things are not worth anything. We all want to see ourselves surrounded by people, respecting and praising our work, having a great bank balance and living that perfect life which we all wanted. Don’t we?

What I’ve been working on?
Firstly, I always try to pick up tasks and projects for which I’m self-motivated. Nobody has to interrogate me to know why I’m not working. I just need someone’s birds-eye view to tell me what I’m not doing correctly and how can I improve it. That’s enough for me to remain motivated. But you know life is not so simple and there are monotonous tasks, repetitive and boring chores one has to do. Making oneself indifferent to all these scenarios and as cliche as this may sound, “Just do it” philosophy seems to be working great in my experience. I’ve lapsed multiple times by being succumbed to the distractions and other things that shouldn’t be on the priority of life.

Flow state can’t be achieved for any kind of work or environment. For example, say, it’s easier to compare it with a flower. A flower needs a tender and caring environment to blossom. Newer ideas, inventions, and creative thoughts, all of these need a similar kind of environment to blossom in the mind palace. One just simply can’t write their best poetries when there is a construction work going near their home or one of the family member is seriously ill or their friends are texting them continuously after every few minutes. There are lots of factors why it’s difficult to attain such a proper state of mind. A few of them are under our control, a few not and there are a lot of others which can be made into our favor if we truly want.

The way our present society is being structured and the culture also makes it inherently difficult to develop the habit of attaining flow state. The 21st century started with modern computers becoming common in households, the internet which was previously just limited to government offices and university labs started making its way towards most of the houses. The birth of social media giants like Facebook and Twitter allowed us being able to connect with our friends and family members spread across different cities, or well, in fact, nations, and broadcast our thoughts to thousands of people around the globe. The internet which was made for each of us to connect with others for communication and use the giant corpus of collective knowledge for our own benefit started devolving something very different. Something ugly. Human nature like greed, the lust of power and everything else started bending market forces and ultimately now the power has become consolidated in the hands of few mega-corporations. The overlords of these corporations now have tools and human resources which allow them to have control over such a big portion of human civilization instances of which were completely unheard of before this century. Until recent years the governments and dictators in most parts of the world were the only people who could control such large swathe of the population. Governments still do have powers, but at most of the places, they have become puppets of others and the dilemmas they have to face completely tie their hands. The newer global order isn’t just restricted to geographical borders and there are half a dozen of the ways one can be influenced. Governments at some places still do have that level of control and power and if you think otherwise then China and Russia would like to have word with you.

While entering into the 3rd decade of this century, it has ever become more than ever riskier to not being able to attain mindfulness. Thanks to capitalism it is not shocking to see that the global self-help industry is worth more than $10 Billion, the meditation industry is worth more than $1.2 Billion. The possibilities of problems are endless: from mind-numbing 24/7 television shows to the dopamine firing shotguns which control each and every one of our swipes on these black mirrors which almost all of us are holding now or have one in the pockets, and by staring them for the last few hours for far too long have already strained our eyes. The infinite amount of content which is available on the streaming services is so infinite that all the market players are not fighting against each other but they are fighting with our sleep, the basic human function to keep us alive and healthy, so that we can finish that one more season of our favorite show. The advertisements in the prints, flashy billboards on literally every other street and the fucking unskippable YouTube ads before almost every video (seriously, I ❤ YT, but fuck ’em) have already made the notion of free-will ineffective. Our choices are mostly manipulated and every business is after our eye-balls, our attention, and obviously there is no moral or ethical question being asked if it’s wrong or not. Well, what is wrong when you want to sell razors just by being bit political and it seems to just work by increasing the buzz of your product by aggravating more people. Today more than ever, more and more people feel that they are disconnected from reality. They can’t find long-lasting joy in the limited moments of this precious life. Long-lasting relationships and trust are difficult to be forged. While working at a lot of big companies with lots of perks, a good number of people in their 20s feel that they are worthless. A small swipe through a feed of “perfect” pictures and videos easily makes them feel insignificant about their existence. They don’t find the passion or the joy they were looking for. Everyone wants to make an impact in this world and when what they had fantasized of doesn’t align with the reality, despair sets in. The lack of hope in the general populace can easily be correlated with the number of people who are being diagnosed with depression and anxiety and other mental health problems in the past few years. The number of suicides / attempted suicides among younger people is alarming and this should have raised red flags among policymakers and health institutions. The endless distractions have made us the slaves of our own inventions now and are becoming one of the reasons why our social fabric is not normal today and possibly not in the coming times.

Flow state is something that everyone should try to form a habit of. I am a victim of my own vices and continuous effort to overcome personal hurdles is one of my personal goals. One can’t live with their failures for far too long. I hope I become more resilient in the coming years. One of the behavioral changes I wish to adopt is being conscious of my decisions. Looking back I feel that a lot of my decisions have been taken in auto-pilot mode. If everything just works, then why even bother to self reflect. Right?

Personally, for me, I’ve not written anything in long-form since last year. I’ve always wanted to write something long and express my ideas but motivation and that flow state never kicked in. It just happened today because I was alone and I opened Google Keep for writing something which stuck my mind and was afraid that I would forget it afterward and fast-forward one hour and boom I’ve written almost 1800 word article. Holy shit!!!!

Cool!
Bye…
I gotta sleep.