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Digital Minimalism is a philosophy of technology in which you focus your online time on a few carefully selected activities that support the things you value. Addiction is a condition in which a person engages in the use of a substance or in s behavior for which the rewarding effects provide a compelling incentive to …

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About 50% of Indians use Hindi as their primary language. Hindi/Devanagari is fairly phonetic except when it starts to import foreign words. And that’s why many Indians, with Hindi as their primary language, end up with incorrect pronunciations of foreign, mainly English, words. Let’s look at a few specific categories of mistakes. Approximating English sounds …

The post Indian accent first appeared on ashishb.net.

Aruba, a small Caribbean island 29 km north of Venezuela, is a part of the ABC islands – Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao, which form the Dutch Caribbean and is a part of the Netherlands. It is famous for its white-sand beaches. Where to stay Aruba Downtown is very far from the impressive beaches in the …

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Google Play Music was great. Apart from one missing feature about the inability to upload music from the phone to the Google Play Music library, I had no other complaints. Then it was forcefully shut down. Google provided YouTube Music as an alternative. Unless you pay for the premium version, you can’t listen to the …

The post Why I built an alternative to Google Play Music first appeared on ashishb.net.

There are tons of hyped-up claims surrounding React Native that are worth addressing. The reasons why companies run for React Native are usually, We already use Javascript for the website and now, we can build apps in that as well. We can use one codebase for Android, iOS, and web apps. Or at least, Android …

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On Android catching Java exceptions is easy via UncaughtExceptionHandler. Catching NDK crashes is a bit more convoluted. Since the native stack is probably corrupted, you want the crash handler to run on a separate process. Also, since the system might be in an unstable shape, don’t send the crash report to your web server or …

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Indic-origin names should not use “v”, the sound is entirely non-existent in Indic origin languages. Consider a word like a wave, a Hindi speaker might pronounce it as वेव but that’s incorrect. The first consonant “w” is pronounced just like व in Hindi with the two lips touching each other. The second consonant though involves …

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Egypt, locally known as Misr (मिस्र) is world-famous for its pyramids and ancient polytheist temples. I made a trip to Egypt in Nov 2020, during the COVID-19 era. Given the general lack of tourism, it was a great time to travel since I didn’t face any queues and in many temples, I was the sole …

The post Egypt in 8 days first appeared on ashishb.net.

After I wrote my previous post, some suggested that I can cut down the image size further by using a “scratch” image. And that’s true, “scratch i”s a reserved 0-sized image with nothing in it. And utilizing a scratch binary image did cut down the size of the final Docker image from 13MB to 7.5MB. …

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Glacier National Park, Montana is considered to be one of the most gorgeous national parks in the US. We went there in September 2020. It wasn’t snowing but the weather was still pretty erratic with random cold showers during the day. So, I would recommend going no later than August. Also, the east side, which …

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