We made a stair into a Piano ! It was our college tech fest and we needed something cool to showcase, something audience can interact with and have fun ! Piano Stairs sounded like a cool idea, but implementing it was a challenge. I'm a 3rd year B.Tech CS engineering student now and this is my first time hacking with hardware. So I didn't know much. I was joined by my juniors, Muhammed Hashim and Athul Raj, both in their 2nd year of CS engineering.... [READ MORE]

I attended my first KDE India conf ! conf.kde.in 2020 happened in Maharaja Agrasen Institute of Technology, Delhi during January 17-19, 2020. I started contributing to KDE since 2019 in localization as part of Swathanthra Malayalam Computing. The KDE localization process is still on SVN and it's difficult for a newbie to localize. I simplified it for the Malayalam localization by setting up an easy to use web interface with Weblate.... [READ MORE]

About Lately, I've been volunteering for Swathanthra Malayalam Project (SMC). I took up the initiative in revamping KDE localization which was dorminant for many years. More about how, why I started this is in this Twitter thread. We were successful in pushing new Malayalam localization to the wide range of KDE products. November 1 is the birthday of Kerala state of India. Kerala was formed on the basis of the language spoken, Malayalam.... [READ MORE]

Today, I'm introducing Varnam Editor, an easy software for you to write Malayalam and other Indian languages. It is easily installable for GNU/Linux distros like Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Debian, Archlinux etc. Technically, it's an editor for transliterating Indian languages. Varnam Editor uses an existing library called Varnam and makes it easy to install & use. Transliteration From Wikipedia : Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one script to another that involves swapping letters (thus trans- + liter-) in predictable ways (such as α → a, д → d, χ → ch, ն → n or æ → ae).... [READ MORE]

I'm happy to announce a new Android app called "Manglish", it's an app to convert Malayalam text to Manglish. It's a GNU GPL v3 licensed completely free software app with no ads thanks to the donors. Kept it as light as possible. You can download & install it in many ways : Play Store F-Droid APK (3MB) UPDATE; 2019 November : App has reached 1000+ active installs and more than 3000 downloads !... [READ MORE]

I have an interesting story of how I learnt & used a curse word. Myru In Malayalam, a main curse word is "myru" which translates to "pubic hair". In Tamil, it simply means "hair". You can just go to a barber shop and say "annaa, cut my myru", but in Malayalam this sentence is hilarious 🤣. When you refer the word to someone, it becomes "myre". It's like calling someone bro, but in the worst way possible :... [READ MORE]

Instagram allows you to livestream from the phone only. And that too from the camera which means you can't add extra effects, overlays or cool stuff like that. If you could livestream from the computer, you can customize the livestream video as you like. Similar to livestreams on YouTube or Twitch. I was bored and was thinking of cool projects to do. I just got into Instagram and was checking it out.... [READ MORE]

Writing this at CUSAT MakeATon Hackathon. Part of the revolving around series : 18 years of revolving around the sun 17 years of revolving around the sun age = 18 age = age + 1 I have officially revolved around the sun 19 times. 19 years of existence. This is the beginning of my last teenage year. I feel old. A tagline that I've been using these days is "A 21st century teen".... [READ MORE]

Year Review 👏👏👏 And there goes another year. Been very inactive in this blog. Should have blogged of some of the major events, but couldn't. I'm all now posting stories on Instagram and on my channel in Telegram. Here's a summing up of my year 2018. Coding I kinda tried doing a #100DaysOfCode challenge, but stopped at 73. This is my longest streak ever on GitHub ! When I look back at my contribution wall, I can see what I've been doing my whole year.... [READ MORE]

I mentioned about me working with the FOSS club of my college in a recent post. Well, we're getting more active ! On Software Freedom Day 2018, we did an OpenStreetMap mapathon. OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world. Unlike Google Maps, OSM is completely open source. Its data can be accessed and used by anyone. Because of this, many softwares and organizations use OSM.... [READ MORE]