I attended KDE India Conf (conf.kde.in, CKI) 2025 in Gandhinagar, Gujarat. My last and first CKI was in 2020 in Delhi. Had written a blog then.

There was a CKI last year in Pune but I was unable to attend it. So it’s been 5 years. The constant from then and now is Bhushan :)

My talk

Title of the talk was “Learnings from creating an input method for KDE”. My primary desktop environment since 2018 is KDE Plasma. Varnam input method was created to use in KDE. The talk was about the learnings of creating the input method.

Recently been using ActiveRecord + SQLite a LOT, so making this post for the basic template.

Gemfile

source "https://rubygems.org"

gem "activerecord", "~> 8.0"
gem "pry"

gem "sqlite3", "~> 2.4"

playground.rb

require 'active_record'
require 'pry'
require 'sqlite3'

ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(
  adapter: 'sqlite3',
  database: 'db.sqlite3'
)

class Place < ActiveRecord::Base
end

@first_run = !Place.table_exists?

# Create the table (migration-like setup)
if @first_run
  ActiveRecord::Schema.define do
    create_table :places do |t|
      t.string :name
      t.string :lat
      t.string :lon
      t.timestamps
    end
    add_index :places, :name, unique: true
  end
end

binding.pry

Update

After this post was published, some people asked for some other suffixes to be analyzed. I’ve now made an interactive webpage to analyse place names in any way with SQL:

Intro

I noticed something unique when I walked around in Kakkanad, some of the local place names ended with the word “മുഗൾ”.

I haven’t heard of any other place having this suffix in Kerala before, so it was quite interesting to me. The curiosity instantly brewed in my mind, is this really specific to Kakkanad? Why so?

This is the story of solving a problem, making a dictionary book online.

The dictionary

Njattyela Sreedharan (ഞാറ്റ്യേല ശ്രീധരൻ) is an 85 year old person from Kannur, Kerala. Out of his interest for Dravidian languages, he spent 25 years in compiling a dictionary of four Dravidian languages - Malayalam, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu.

The dictionary was originaly handwritten in a book of four columns. This was later published as a book by Senior Citizens Forum. This news article tells a better story than me here :)

I have a VueJS app, I want to make the <title> and <meta> tags to be populated in page source itself for better SEO.

I could use Server Side Rendering but it was difficult, express.js keeps crashing and there’s JavaScript inconsistencies (ES Module imports didn’t work in node). More explanation at the very bottom.

To solve this problem, I did something wild.

I made a Go server, served the JS app. On each request, the HTML file is processed by Go and title, meta tags are dynamically populated, rest of the page is just another VueJS app.

Some days ago, I came across Malayalam numerals and found it very interesting. Unlike Hindi or Kannada numerals, the numerical grammar of Malayalam was unique. It’s a direct fork of the Tamil numeric system. So, Tamil & Malayalam has this unique numeral system. It is no longer commonly used though. Like the rest of the world, we use Hindu-Arabic numeral system now.

I had to include my phone number in a webpage recently for an event hosting and was concerned whether spammers would take hold of it with their fancy phone-number mining scripts. An idea to prevent this and still give the phone number was to write it in Malayalam numerals. The event was related to Malayalam, so some people would recognize it. Besides, if there were people who really really wanted to reach via phone, they’d go through the trouble to read the numerals eh ? 😉 :D (psst, see my contact page)

If you’re using i3 window manager and you want the Picture in Picture (PiP) window of Firefox and Chromium to be seen in all workspaces, just add this to your i3 config file :

for_window [title="Picture-in-Picture"] sticky enable

This will work for both Firefox and Chromium/Chrome PiP.

If it doesn’t work, open a video in Picture in Picture mode and run the command wmctrl -l in terminal which will produce a similar output :

This is certainly not an April Fool and doesn’t involve a rickroll. :P 😝

Introducing Indic-En, a browser extension to convert websites in Indian languages (Malayalam, Hindi, Kannada) to Manglish, Hinglish & Kanglish. This is the first WebExtension that I’ve made.

This extension will be useful for people who can understand the language, but can’t read it (read the script). I’ve also made a similar Android app “Manglish” which does this, but only for the Malayalam language. Special shoutout to r/Kerala folks who support and help spread the word around of Manglish app. Thanks to all the folks who have donated and spread the word about Manglish app. I’m happy that it’s helping people ❤️. As a Free software indie developer, marketing is a difficult thing to do. Please spread the word around :)

A global pandemic is going on and we’re all staying in our homes. College’s been closed for a week now. Yes, it gets boring staying in home all day. But, we must !

Out of boredom and a wish to cheer up people in my circle, I made a website which ends up rickrolling the visitor. It took me an hour to make it.

If you’re reading this, you probably got rickrolled by me ;) 😉

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. They have played with hardware before and has more experience than me. Having them with me was a great help for a noobie me.