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.... [READ MORE]

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.... [READ MORE]

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.... [READ MORE]

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 :... [READ MORE]

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.... [READ MORE]

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 ;) 😉... [READ MORE]

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]