Why move

WordPress was fine. It worked. But it was also slow, plugin-heavy, and I was paying for hosting that I never really used for anything. The admin was nice for writing posts inside the browser but, honestly, I dont write that much. So why pay for that all the time?

Vercel hobby tier is free, Next.js is fast, and I can ship a new design without fighting a theme builder. That was enough reason.

The new theme: terminal

I wanted something different. Most personal sites look the same now — big serif heading, three column cards, dark mode toggle, the same Tailwind look. I am tired of it.

So I went with a terminal theme. Phosphor amber on near-black by default. JetBrains Mono everywhere. ASCII drawn boxes. A status bar at the bottom like Vim. A ~/posts/ tree on the left that lists categories. j and k to navigate posts on the home page, / to search. Nerd stuff. I love it :D

If you dont love it, no problem. There are 10 themes built in:

• phosphor (default, amber)
• solarized
• gruvbox
• dracula
• nord
• tokyo‑night
• monokai
• one
• catppuccin
• rose‑pine

Each has a dark and a light mode. Use the theme: dropdown in the top right and switch around till you find one you like. It is saved in your browser so it stays.

What was kept

All the old URLs still work. /life/happy-new-year-2026/, /hacks/…, /info/…, /tag/… — nothing should be broken. If you have bookmarked something, it will still load. Categories, tags, password protected posts — all of them came along.

RSS is still at /rss and /feed for your reader.

What was lost

Comments are not wired up yet. I have an idea to add Giscus (GitHub backed comments) later, but for now the old imported comments are still rendered at the bottom of posts that had them. You just cant add new ones for the moment. If this annoys you, mail me.

The WordPress admin is gone, obviously. From here on the blog is written as markdown files in the repo. Which means a slightly slower workflow to ship a post but, given how often I write, that is not a real concern :P

How fast?

The home page now loads in under a second. PageSpeed gives it 98 on mobile. The whole site is statically generated where possible and served from Vercel's CDN. The old WordPress used to take 3 to 4 seconds for the same page on a fresh load. Even better, my Vercel bill is zero because the free tier covers a site this small easily.

Whats next

I want to write more this year. The yearly New Year post is a habit I dont want to break. But I also want to share more small things in between — the linux fix that took 3 hours, the rides, the small life things. Lets see if the new home helps with that, or if I will still find a way to abandon the blog :P

If you find anything broken, let me know. mail at mithun@mithun.co, or DM me on twitter @mantlecurve.

Njoy :)

Like I have said last year, this is an abandoned blog, lol.

But, hey, We did have a new blog post unlike the previous years, yey progess.

Personal: It was normal and nice. No ups, no downs. just going with the flow

Coding: This is upside down now. Loads of AI coding, creating apps on languages I didn't know before with the help of loads of tools like Cursor, Claude, Gemini, etc. This was fun. Soon apps will get published in appstore and playstore. I am excited.

Professional: Huge ups and downs, like strong ones. But ultimatly it was fine and led to many things that are in progress. Hopefully I will share them in 2027. Things are not yet ready yet.

That's it for now. Hope you have a great 2026.

Happy New Year.

Njoy :)

⬤ Compatible | ✕ Incompatible

Credits: masa | M's Life↗

I really thought I would keep up with the blog in 2024. But, it didn't happen.

Lets start with the usual things.

Personal: It was awesome. Naming my kid Inaiey to watching him grow, taking his first steps, that was something else. Way less travel that I have anticipated. Should try to make up this year. Went to HongKong. I liked it. Nice vibe.

Coding: Oh boy, this is were we have a lot of AI comes into place. We now have editors which takes care of the all the coding. Well, most part. Using it to develop things in languages I have little experience was fun.

Professional: No ups or down (well there is some upside). Going as planned. Planning to do something this year, like starting a company and all (again). Lets see how it pans out.

That's all for now. Have another great year.

Happy New Year :D

Oh boy, there were a lot of things that happened this year.

Like last year, no blogs were posted on this site. I didn't want to share tech here. That's the main reason. I also like these yearly New Year updates. But, unlike last year, where I forgot to write the blog post, I am starting early this year so that I can have a huge blog post :D

Let's start, shall we?

Professional/Coding

Ups and Downs. It was fairly okay. This got a merged update. There isn't much to say here, other than things are happening with AI and stuff, and I am going with the flow with them.

Personal

This is where the fun is this year!!!

It was an immensely beautiful year from start to end. I enjoyed the journey thoroughly. After a dull 2022, this year was a breath of immensely intoxicating fresh air.

Lots of planned and unplanned trips. Visited many cities and a different country and, to top it all off, I became a father :D. A son has been born to me.

Looking forward to another awesome year.

Happy New Year, everyone!!!

Njoy :D

This has become a abandoned blog. I will try to fix things this year. More content will be posted.

Not a single post? Damn it!

Personally - it was a ok year. There are no ups or downs. Just went like a straight line. Which I don't enjoy much.

Professionally - It was better this year. Done many things. Implemented several things.

Coding/Studying - A slightly different category maybe? - Studied a hell lot of things. The Q4 of this year was fun. Had so much fun with openai stuff like dalle, chatgpt etc. Then comes our beloved Stable diffusion. Oh man, this was so much fun. I will continue doing this in this year too.

Knolling case image generated using Stable Diffusion. Outpainted using dalle

Gaming - This was a good year. Enjoyed "Deliver Us The Moon" (I know there is a recency bias. But, it is actually a good enjoyable game).

Family - A new category? :D - Niece was a born. :)

I now wish this year to be filled with content creation, ai art, ai content, gaming and coding.

Hope everyone had an awesome 2022. Lets get on a high seat and have a glimpse of the beautiful journey ahead of us. To 2023 and beyond!

Happy New Year. Have a blast!

Njoy :)

Let me start off by saying, i have more blog posts this year than the previous years. Lol :D

There are a lot of recency bias in these posts. So I would like to get rid of those this year.

Lets talk about the usual things.

Personally it was a good year. Due to C O V I D and things, the year was pretty laid back.

Professionally it was a great year. Our product got acquired and there are lot of stuff coming up.

Regarding coding, it was a good year. No explosive stuff happened. But I am hoping it gets into that this year.

Bike and me reunited after a long time. Took all my things back to home from Trivandrum. Went to Trivandrum two times in Q4 and had a blast.

New knowledge acquired - NFT, Trading, Crypto etc.

Had a blast playing PlayStation and Xbox games. Got both consoles at retail price.

Forza Horizon 5 is currently my favorite game. Other games that I have enjoyed are Uncharted 4.

Finally after a long time since c o v i d, theatres opened and had a blast watching few films. I thought I am pretty much done with marvel movies as I was not interested in continue watching anymore of it. Spiderman: No Way Home changed it. Now I have a backlog of TV series to watch. :-|

Switched to iPhone from android. That is going well.

You probably know my thoughts on new year resolutions from previous posts. So I am not getting into it. But for this year, I would like to focus on wearing elegant dresses for all occasions. Hope it works out.

That is pretty much about it I think. This probably is my most unorganized new year post.

Have a great year ahead. Happy New Year :)

This happened because your windows has run out of space.

If you get this error follow the below steps

Make sure you have 2 to 3GB of free space on your harddisk or ssd

1. Go to start menu and search for "Services". Open it
2. Scroll down to select "Storage Service"
3. Right click "Storage Service" and select "Stop"
4. Then right click again to select "Restart"
5. Now open the xbox app and it should work.

Njoy :)

Open the registry editor and navigate to

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced\Start_ShowClassicMode

If Start_ShowClassicMode doesn't exist, create a new DWORD

Change DWORD=1 to enable classic Start

Logout and log back in to see the old start menu

Njoy :)

My assumptions:

• You already have a screen or tty to perform the steps
• You installed arch with nvidia proprietary drivers
• You are going to use Gnome

This also works with manjaro

Lets get started

First you need to install gdm-prime which is a patched version of gdm.

yay -S gdm-prime

Next open the gdm configuration file

sudo nano /etc/gdm/custom.conf

and uncomment the line

WaylandEnable=false

Note: install yay using sudo pacman -S yay

Next install optimus-manager

yay -s optimus-manager

Remove everything except the file called

10-optimus-manager.conf from /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d

(keep the keyboard files, they don't interfere)

If you don't have this file. Here is the one I am using to HP Omen Ryzen AMD. Download

Now lets copy the configuration file

sudo cp /usr/share/optimus-manager.conf /etc/optimus-manager/optimus-manager.conf

Next open the configuration file

sudo nano /etc/optimus-manager/optimus-manager.conf

Search and find startup_mode and check whether it is startup_mode=nvidia (if not, make it so)

Now lets enable and start the optimus-manager

sudo systemctl enable optimus-manager.service
sudo systemctl start optimus-manager.service

Now you may reboot the system and see whether both the Monitor and Laptop screen works. If not, comment. It is working for me so we both can figure out how to make it work.

Njoy :)

Well, 2020 was mixed.

The year started with the so many hopes and dreams. I had thought to travel more. But due to the situation that happened to the world, all things came to a halt.

2020 brought us Covid19. This wasn't a pleasant experience. By March, the lockdown started. I had come home for my sister's engagement and never went back to Trivandrum. I miss riding my bike.

During the months followed, April, may didn't get out of the house much due the scare tactics by the media and the strong lockdown. Then house repairs started for the sister's marriage, and it went successfully.

The very next day, I got engaged and got married on Oct 19 :)

Everyone started living with the virus and the things are going back to normal even though there are more cases now than we had during the lockdown.

During my school days, I used to think a situation where we don't have to go to school, this year showed me how that would have been. People adopted technologies to reach out, study and work.

Regarding the movies, there wasn't many movies this year, watched all the famous ones. Missed the theatre experience very much.

Had played lot of games this year. Xbox gamepass, steam etc. Tried to get XBOX series X, the next gen console, but wasn't available. Shortages on processors and new gen console.

Professionally, the year was uneventful. Personally, the year was great. Coding, the year was ok.

This year was lazy. But started working out regularly. so, progress?! I didn't do many things that I wanted to do in 2020, I hope to change this year. I need to bring discipline to the work and hobbies to derive some benefits from them. I hope to achieve these things this year.

Be grateful for your health and let the new year brings so much hope.

Happy New Year :)

TLDR; It doesn't work so nicely

I recently purchased a 4k display to go along with my Thinkpad T480 with GPU. For the first few days I used in 1440p as I didn't have the USB C to HDMI cable for a 60hz (Thinkpad's HDMI was not 2.0) . Then I bought one.

Ubuntu didn't support fractional scaling on LTS release before 20.04. Since I am on Ubuntu 20.04 I thought this would work fine. I connected the cable and switched to 4k 60hz. That display was too small for my liking. I immediately switched to 125% scaling which is supported out of box on Ubuntu 20.04. I immediately noticed a serious lag. I checked what fps i am getting and got to know that it is around 24-32. So i switched back to 100% scaling and checked again. I am getting 59 fps. Then i checked all fractional scaling and saw there is a performance dip. Only scaling I didn't get dip in performance was at 100% and 200%. I searched and saw that there is a performance hit for fractional scaling on Ubuntu. Some people have commented to use wayland session. But due to the nvidia drivers I cannot switch to wayland session.

I got annoyed and started testing other DE's like cinnnamon, kde, deepin. I was more annoyed by other DE's with things unrelated to fractional scaling. Uninstalled everything and came back to gnome.

Now I had some options. To use it too small at 100%. Or increase font scaling at 1.25 or use 1440p or use at 200% scaling. I tried font scaling 1.25, it doesn't look proportional and i really didn't want to use 1440p. 200% is too large. So ultimately I started using 4k display at 60hz with 100% scaling by turning on font scaling for 1.25.

I might ditch Ubuntu and go to windows with proper fractional scaling and use WSL2

First you need to install libffi-dev

sudo apt-get install libffi-dev

Crete a new virtual environment and pip install

Most probably this will fix it.

Comment if it didn't

Enjoy :)

If you have recently installed a fresh copy of Ubuntu 20.04 and find out that the steam is crashing, there is one solution that can be of help here. (the only one i encountered)

Crashing usually happens when you have an NVIDIA card and proprietary NVIDIA drivers installed and you happen to have only 64 bit of the drivers installed.

Get the driver version by running
nvidia-smi | grep "Driver Version"
You will see something like below as the output
| NVIDIA-SMI 440.64 Driver Version: 440.64 CUDA Version: 10.2 |
It means you have the driver version 440 installed

Now lets fix the issue. Run the following to install the 32bit version of the above driver
$ sudo apt install libnvidia-gl-440:i386
Note the version number (440). It should be what you have got before by running the nvidia-smi command

That's all it. It should work now. If not comment below. Let me see what I can do.

Enjoy :)

Last year I forgot to write the blog post about new year. I don't remember any other year which I forgot about this after I started writing about new year. If you have read my previous (its very easy to find as I don't blog much these days :P ) it usually involves in a standard theme around which i mention my ups and downs in professional, personal, coding life and I usually write this around 31st December without giving much thoughts to it. This year it is gonna be slightly different. This year we are going to cover a lot of things. I started preparing for this post by the end of November. I made one mistake though, I forgot to write down the points I want to share. All these things are the things that are stuck in my head since 2019 January. Lets dig in.

For the TL;DR people: I liked 2019. Happy New Year :)

I was excited for 2019, actually the first part. By the end of 2018 i thought that the first half would be awesome and the second half would be boring. The reason to this was the end of Avengers and completion of Game of Thrones series (damn, my life currently revolves around movies and TV series. No regrets :P)

Lets talk about movies and series. I watched around 28 movies in theaters. Probably have beaten my previous records. I was obsessed with watching movies in big screen and I have a bike to get around. When i think about Avengers being this year, i feel this year was too long. In reality, for me, it was a mix. I felt it was adequate. So many good series ended. Game of Thrones, the ending was meh. Elementary has a good ending. The Big Bang Theory had a nice ending. About avengers, The booking of avengers opened while I was in travelling in train. I couldn't get the tickets to my preferred cinemas where I know fans would be there to cheer throughout the movie. I booked with another cinemas and hoped it would have fans like my goto cinemas. My expectations were exceeded. That was one of the most amazing bunch of fans i have ever had the pleasure of watching a marvel(or any other) movie with. It was awesome. About new series, Witcher; I waited for this for many months. It was nice but something was missing. Later I found out that, they didn't have Game of thrones like budget. If they had, that would have been amazing. If I missed some series, i will edit and put it here.

One of the interesting campaigns I saw was by teamtrees. It is about collecting 20million USD to plant 20 million trees. 1 USD = 1 Tree. They reached their goal few days back.

There has been some changes in how I approach things. This started around November(yup, revelations comes in may forms. I am a diamondNTR (for those who can understand it :D). I started developing applications as soon as it came to my head. So developed and deployed some. Some are still in development, will deploy very soon. Also I need to improve my writing, increase my content and update my vocabulary.

Attended PyCon Chennai. It was a nice experience. One thing that struck me was. Do(develop) with what you know the best. This was cemented by how Will Kuwan approaches things.

This year is the year I got rid of many of my domains. What is the point of keeping them if you are not using or selling it.

Usually I don't take resolutions. What is the point of starting something on 1st Jan where I should have started that thing when it came to mind. Jan 1 isn't going to change any of that laziness. So no new things. Instead I am improving things. There are somethings that I need to tackle. I would like to improve the discipline (one thing i found out about disciple is that, once we start improving discipline, all other things falls in line. Discipline is Alpha). I also want to get rid of (or at least try to) recency bias. Getting rid of that would mean keeping a Journal, which I don't have the disciple to keep up with. See, all road ultimately leads of Discipline.

Then there were births, marriages, deaths that I don't want to talk about it here. One other thing I realized that (may be it was always there or I ignored or never noticed it). I really like spending time with people whom I miss when they or I leave. I just want to freeze such moments.

One of the interesting song that stuck with me this year was Blowing in the wind. It was written in 1967 and is very much relevant today.

Regarding tech, In 2019, i wanted USB-C on all devices I buy. But that didn't work out well. This year, i won't buy things that aren't USB-C (except supporting things for the current gadgets I have). Finally bought an interchangeable mirrorless camera (a6400). I wanted one for so long. The lens are expensive :(

New things I have acquired knowledge(or improved) about are illustrator, premier pro and after effects. I thought of doing an animation for 2020 poster, but this thing keeps crashing. Featured image is a post I did myself, in my vision taking the elements from flaticons. I will try to improve upon this too. I started a design centric Instagram profile, but that is not doing well.

I think I have covered all things that I wanted to share.

Here is how I look in 2019 Dec 28th. Taken with a6400

I hope you had a great 2019 like I did.

Have an amazing 2020.

Happy New Year.

Enjoy :)

Lets party!!! :D

Its been so long I have written a blog post here. I have been trying out things with my new domain instead of writing here. This blog although unmaintained has a steady traffic for a few years now due to its old content.

Gutenberg: The new editor
I am writing this in Gutenberg editor. for those of who don't know about it, its a controversial new default editor for WordPress. I didn't like its first version and i switched to classic editor. But this time, with the improvements it has it looks nice. I have to do more testing to see whether I like it or not. Maybe I will start sharing here more often

Disney+: A streaming service from Disney
Disney+ released today, which is what made me write this blog post in the first place. It has released with plethora of old and awesome titles. To get the list of titles you can visit my random blog here: https://random.mantlecurve.com/post/189029788721/disney-launch-titles

mantlecurve.com : new blogs and projects
I've been writing random things in random.mantlecurve.com Some of the projects there are
https://news-thingy.mantlecurve.com
https://blog.mantlecurve.com
https://domain-checker.mantlecurve.com

Twenty twenty: A new theme from wordpress
For most part of this blog, i have used only the themes from WordPress. Its been in twenty fifteen for so long now, I got used to that so much and like it very much. I think its time for a change. From this post on I am switching to twenty twenty and see how it goes. If you are reading this and its showing the old theme, just assume that I didn't like twenty twenty.

Edit 1
In this new editor, publish is on top and move to trash is on side. With the previous memory, i was about to trash this blog post

That's all folks, Thank you and Enjoy :)

It's another new year and here is my blog post :D

This is my first post using gutenberg editor for wordpress.

Now let's talk about last year in the usual way.

Professionally: This was an awesome year with product launches and all :D

Coding: Little leisure coding and more professional coding :)

Personal: This had lots of ups and down and is currently running in neutral :-| Also, i bought a new motorcycle. Regardless of the ups and downs, i like 2018 for some odd reasons. Although I think it went too fast , I have enjoyed it profusely.

<3 HAPPY NEW YEAR <3

Enjoy :)

If you try to start mongodb on WSL using systemd you will be getting this error.

System has not been booted with systemd as init system (PID 1). Can't operate.

There seems to be no init script for mongodb 4 on ubuntu 18.04(may be other versions too). This makes it complicated for starting mongodb in WSL as systemctl is not supported on WSL. Inorder to have a init script so that you can start using service mongodb start we need to have the init file.

Thankfully init file is already provivided by mongodb here

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mongodb/mongo/master/debian/init.d

Follow the below steps to get the mongodb running on WSL

• sudo curl -o /etc/init.d/mongodb https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mongodb/mongo/master/debian/init.d
• sudo chmod +x mongodb
• sudo service mongodb start

This should successfully start mongodb.

Njoy :)

sudo apt install flameshot

https://launchpad.net/~harish2704/+archive/ubuntu/ppa1

sudo apt install git

git clone https://github.com/lupoDharkael/flameshot.git

cd flameshot

sudo apt install -y git g++ build-essential qt5-qmake qt5-default qttools5-dev-tools

qmake

make install #desktop entry fails with warning

flameshot gui #via terminal

Switch on color inversion from Magnifier and run ClearType

Only alphabets A-Z a-z number 0-9 and special characters , . - _ ( ) / @ : & \ % are allowed in Text for RTI Request application

╰─○ git clone git://github.com/patjak/mba6x_bl 
╰─○ cd mba6x_bl 
╰─○ make
╰─○ checkinstall
╰─○ sudo dpkg -i mba6x-bl_xxxxxx_amd64.deb (check your folder for the exact name of deb file generated from check install)
╰─○ sudo depmod -a 
╰─○ sudo modprobe mba6x_bl 
╰─○ sudo reboot

pip install flask 

pip install uwsgi

from flask import Flask
app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route("/")
def hello():
    return "Hello World!"

if __name__ == "__main__":
    app.run()

from app import app as application
if __name__ == "__main__":
    application.run()

[uwsgi]
http = 127.0.0.1:3031
chdir = /home/name/flaskuwsgi
wsgi-file = run.py
processes = 4
threads = 2
stats = 127.0.0.1:9191

socket = 127.0.0.1:3031

sudo rm /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.torrents-time.helper.plist

sudo rm /Library/PrivilegedHelperTools/com.torrents-time.helper

sudo rm -rf /Library/Preferences/com.torrents-time.plist /Library/Application Support/com.torrents-time

pip install facebook-sdk

graph = facebook.GraphAPI(access_token='your pretty long string which you have copied now')

post = graph.get_object(id = 'post id')

You can get the post id, by opening an url of a post in facebook

If url to a post is https://www.facebook.com/TimesofIndia/posts/10153947250687139 then, "10153947250687139" is the post id

print post

This will print bunch of details about the post including first 10 likes and first 10 comments

If you just need to see the comments

print post['comments']

This will show just the comments.

Solution

defaults write com.apple.finder QuitMenuItem -bool yes

killall Finder

I always wanted things that are impossible to get

1. Open Automator
2. Select New and select 'Application'
3. Search for 'Run Applescript' and open it.
4. Paste the below code

 on run {input, parameters}
     tell application "Terminal"
         reopen
         activate
         do script " echo \"launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.nsurlstoraged.plist\"" in window 1
         do script " echo \"llaunchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.nsurlsessiond.plist\"" in window 1
         do script " echo \"sudo launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.nsurlsessiond.plist\"" in window 1
         do script " echo \"sudo launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.nsurlstoraged.plist\"" in window 1
     end tell
end run

1.  Save it as 'application'. give a cool name and enjoy

Professionally? ok

Personal life? bloody awesome :D

HAPPY NEW YEAR

:)

brew install openssl

cd /usr/local/Cellar/openssl/1.0.1f/lib

sudo cp libssl.1.0.0.dylib libcrypto.1.0.0.dylib /usr/lib/

sudo rm libssl.dylib libcrypto.dylib

sudo ln -s libssl.1.0.0.dylib libssl.dylib

sudo ln -s libcrypto.1.0.0.dylib libcrypto.dylib

I was travelling with 22 international bloggers for the past one week as part of KeralaBlogExpress by Kerala Tourism

One question by one of the travel bloggers is “Why people in kerala ruin the coffee/tea by adding sugar and milk”.

The explanation given by our guide Manoj is as follows

Tea plantations in Kerala was started by the British. Since most of the good quality tea or coffee that is produced in Kerala was exported and what left of it, the dust is what will reach the local market. This continued many years. So in order to make this dust suitable for drinking people of kerala added milk and sugar to it. Altough we get good quality tea now, the tradition of adding milk and sugar to it continued till now.

So, in my case i might not like the most expensive tea without sugar and milk :-/

1. Open the file com.BlueStacks.AppPlayer.plist from ~/Library/Preferences/ using any text editor
2. Find the text Framebuffer
3. Below Framebuffer you can see height and width
4. Specify the height and width you wish to use
5. Now change the following line