Just another geek
Use of social media by Indian companies have skyrocketed in the recent years due to many reasons, two to be specific –
Now coming back to the support brands on Twitter, an example here:
BSNL is a telecom operator in India, and they have a Twitter account where they answer queries. My query was pretty simple – BSNL announced availability of 4G uSIMs nationally so I asked them if 4G service is available in Pune. Their response as seen above – they want contact details from me. Moreover, the reply says “Sorry for the inconvenience caused”. I didn’t face any inconvenience here. It’s just out of context! Why not just reply to the tweet with a simple yes or no? It doesn’t contain any private information.
Many such countless examples can be seen on the Tweet with replies page of their twitter profiles. Interestingly it’s a common trend, and I don’t know why. If you look at the twitter profiles of some international brands – they don’t reply in similar fashion, except in cases where private information (account number, mobile number, etc.) is involved.
Common general information can be shared publicly, no? If information involves private matters such as – someone has a specific problem for which details are needed – that conversation can happen in private.
Inspired by a blog I follow in my RSS reader that publishes Link Fests, I’m starting this from today.
Unless you’ve been sitting under a rock for the past couple of weeks, you would be well aware of the Cambridge Analytica scandal that happened with Facebook. Around the same time, I came across an article on Twitter – the source for all the content I read, which says It’s Time for an RSS Revival. I wasn’t using Facebook much and this news has pushed me even farther from it. There are specific reasons I am still on Facebook but my activity has reduced significantly.
Ever since Google Reader was killed, I had been using this RSS reader called NewsBlur. But I was already significantly into using social media as a source of new content, so I never really used Newsblur seriously – in spite of me having a premium account all these years.
Continue reading “History repeats itself – RSS and Blogs making a comeback?”
As I stated in my earlier post, I have two WAN connections and of course, there’s a need to monitor them. The monitoring logic is pretty simple, it will send me a message on Telegram every time there’s a state change – UP or DOWN.
Initially this monitoring logic was built as OpenWrt hotplug script which used to trigger on interface UP / DOWN events as described in this article. But then I got a mini PC box and it runs Ubuntu and a pfsense virtual machine. While I could build the same logic by discovering hooks in the pfsense code, but it’s too complex and moreover it doesn’t really make sense to monitor the connection of a device using the same connections!
Continue reading “A WAN monitor running on Google AppEngine written in Go language”
I started cycling again after a gap of 4-5 years. Bought Firefox Maximus D 29er last year and it’s been amazing in terms of fun and saving money as well because I ride to many places where I used to go driving previously.
Few days back I decided to improve on my average speed and the solution was to change my pedaling pattern – what I used to do was shift to highest possible gear on the road and pedal slowly but because of the gear ratios I used to get good average speeds.
The human body cannot deliver high amount of power for a long duration but can do low power for higher duration much, like a IC engine – which is why you have gearbox in it; the engine rotates at higher RPM on lower gears and vice-versa.
Continue reading “Supt Padangushtasana to recover after intense cycling”
For the past 5 years or so, I have been using a single ISP at home and mobile data for backup when it went down. But since last few months, the ISP service became a bit unreliable – this is more related to the rainy season. Mobile data doesn’t give fiber like constant speeds I get on the wire. It’s very annoying to browse at < 10 Mbps on mobile data when you are used to 100 Mbps on the wire.
I decided to get another fiber pipe from a local ISP. One needs to be very unlucky to have both going down at the same time – I hope that never happens. Now the question is how to monitor the two connections: Why do I need monitoring? – so that I can inform the ISP when it goes down, with the fail-over happening automatically thanks to OpenWRT’s mwan3 package, I won’t ever know when I am using which ISP (unless I am checking the public IP address, of course).
Continue reading “Monitoring your internet connections with OpenWRT and a Telegram Bot”
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