Category: Simple Feelings

about:sleep (or lack thereof)

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I’m kind of embarrassed to admit this but this is the best time I’ve manage to track so far.

One of the most useful things for me with the Xiaomi Mi Band is the sleep tracker. I check my sleep data pretty much every morning and it helps me decide if I’ve had enough sleep the previous night and what to do if when I haven’t.

Something I always knew for a long time is that I’m usually not having enough sleep at night, and I’m not entirely proud of it either. I find it much easier to concentrate at night because it feels much more peaceful and calm. While some of you “early to bed early to rise” types would struggle to understand this, I’m sure the night owls would totally get this.

But whatever your sleep preferences are, there’s one thing that we should all agree on; there are some serious health concerns when you are not having enough sleep. Seriously, Google it right now! You’d find a ton of research that explains how damaging lack of sleep can be… I was actually going to include links to some of the articles I read regarding this in the past, and googling to find those flooded me with a bunch more. I read a couple of those and it was so scary, that instead of finishing this post last night around 12am, I went straight to bed!

Anyway, I’ve been tracking my sleep for a few weeks now and I now know that I need to improve. Don’t get me wrong, I always knew that I’m not having enough sleep, I just didn’t have the numbers… or I was just lazy to actively measure my sleep durations. This is why the Mi Band is so much helpful. It does everything for me and now I know that I usually sleep between 3 to 5 hours at night. Around 3 if I stay up too late… and just over 5 if I come to bed a little “early”.

Now that I have some clear idea about how much sleep I get and what to do to improve it,  I have one less thing to worry about in life. And honestly, if you see my numbers you’d see that I don’t really have too much to do to fix my sleep habits. Since I work from home pretty much all the time, I have the freedom to sleep anytime I want and get up anytime I want to. Some of you who has to get up at a certain time because you have to commute to work would think that It’s harder for you to improve your sleep, trust me, it isn’t! I can argue that it’s actually harder for me because I lack that push to have a fixed sleep schedule. And I tend to stay up too late and for some strange reason, get up earlier than I should.

My point is that whether you have the freedom to choose when you wake up, or you don’t, you’d almost always have some way to allow yourself to have enough time to sleep (If you don’t, You should change whatever you are doing. Because you are probably better off alive) This is something I’ve personally been neglecting for a long time and something that I am planning to change.

So how do we do this? Simple, just have a way to measure your daily sleep habits and act accordingly, that is to get your daily schedules sorted out until you have a minimum of 6 hours (Maybe 7 depending on how you feel about it) for sleep. I highly recommend you getting some sort of a sleep tracker because it has helped me so much. I’ve tried a few android apps sometime back and it wasn’t very helpful for me. Part of it because I don’t feel too comfortable keeping the phone so close to me on the bed, and I’m also not so certain about their accuracy. So get yourself a proper sleep tracker (after all, $20+ for a chance at good health is a killer deal =) )

Once you know how much sleep you get (or how little, in case you are like me) Decide how much more you need to get in order to have a healthy amount of sleep and prepare a schedule.

And most importantly, try to stick to your sleep schedule as if your life depends on it because it most probably does!

~SeeJay

Make blogging great again!

So yeah, I’m tired of not having a proper place to post my rants. And I certainly don’t believe I’m accomplishing anything by posting stuff on Facebook (twitter, I’m still in love with, but there’s only so much you could do with 140 characters).

So a few months back I decided to blame on Blogger for my laziness and decided to change my blog platform to something better. I went with Pelican because it was written in Python and also it was really good. But after a few weeks, I realized that having all those moving parts (Static site generators, how ironic!) really gets in the way and you end up managing the site rather than posting anything. And I decided that I needed to get back to the one true blog platform!

And today I’m rocking the super cool WordPress installation on my blog. I imported all the content from the old blogger site and fixed the URL structure. I’ll be hunting for a good theme in the next few days and hopefully keep this blog up to date again, just like the old days.

~SeeJay

Don’t mess with my Internet!

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The greatest thing about the internet is the fact that it belongs to all of us! No matter who you are, where you are from, We all have the freedom to choose where we’re headed! But now, the U.S. Congress is considering legislation that could seriously damage the fundamental structure of the Internet.
Tech giants like Wikipedia, Mozilla, Reddit, Google, and many more who actually care to protect the internet are against this. But obviously, there’s a bunch of money hungry politicians who are working towards this legislation in favour of a few organisations who think they’d rather break of the Internet than fixing their business models. This is downright evil! and should be fought against with all our strength!
This is why all of us who care to protect the internet should spread the word around and educate people to fight against the legislation of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) Because if any of these get passed that would mean the end of the Internet as we know it.
Don’t let anyone mess with your Internet! Join the battle against SOPA/PIPA
(Picture courtesy of reddit)

Playing with pligg

So I had this idea for a small (i guess) project which uses a digg like voting system. So I installed the pligg cms and tried playing with it for some time and after two days I decided to go with its well known drupal based competitor drigg. Of course pligg is a good cms and I don’t necessarily mean to suggest that anyone shouldn’t use it. But it was a little too messed up. Atleast for me. 😐

The things I didn’t like in pligg includes the not so clean code, which requres to change dozen places when you need to do something as simple as switching a theme, The not so active development of the cms, unlike drupal which has a very powerful developer base. The not so open karma calculation, which obviously gonna be a PITA later on. And the not so friendly user support which is “known” not to listen to its users 😛 (which I did NOT experience btw)
So I switched to drigg and I’m glad I did 🙂 it’s drupal based and you can feel the cleanliness of the code 🙂 of course if you choose to do the manual installation it takes some time to configure the the modules needed to get drigg up and running, And you’re gonna need to know the basics of drupal, but it’s all fun and I don’t think it would be that hard to learn, even if you are completely new to drupal.

So now I’m tweaking the site and I might write a post on getting drupal+drigg up if I have enough time. And yes! of course I’ll reveal the project i’m working 😛 and if you people have any interest in Free Software you might even like it heehee. but that’s yet to see… 😉

Why I unlocked my HSDPA modem (and why you should too)

As usual it’s old news to my twitter followers that I’ve unlocked my Huawei e220 HSDPA modem I bought with the Mobile Broadband connection from Dialog Telecom. It was operator locked and could only be used with Dialog. Well I must say that I loved mobile broadband. I absolutely loved the fact that I had internet access wherever I go. But unfortunately Dialog has been doing everything possible to ruin that amazing experience. When I got this connection they promised 3.6mbps but I’ve never ever experienced anything more than 1mbps with this. And sometimes the DNS servers get messed making the connection totally unusable.

“Well, they’ll improve the quality of the service eventually and we’ll have a good speed one day” that’s what I thought, but boy was I wrong.

Few weeks back I found that Dialog has officially “changed” the speed of the mobile broadband to 1mbps, It was changed on their web site too. But wait! Then what about the connection I purchased? what about the so called “very very fast” (hilarious! I know! but that’s how they advertised it :p) Internet connection which was supposed to be 3.6mbps???
What came to my mind for the first time was “WTF! who do they think we are? how do they expect to get away with this???” well answer is simple. They perfectly knew that there’s no way they can provide 3.6mbps speed but they LIED! why? why not? They are the *all mighty* Dialog Telecom, and we are just helpless customer fuckNuts.

“They’ve paid us already, So why bother, they can’t switch to any other provider since it’s operator locked” that’s probably what the people at dialog must be thinking.
Well Dialog, I’ve got news for you, Anything which can be locked can be unlocked, at least it’s true with the HSDPA modem you sold us 😛 And thats exactly what I did 😛 and now I own a fully functional Huawei e220 HSDPA modem 😀

The Unlock process was pretty easy and, NO I didn’t pay any money to any company to unlock it 😛 I did it my self after a fair bit of Googling (Thanks to opendns we can still brows the web which is almost impossible if you are using Dialog’s crappy DNS servers 😛 if you are still using them you should seriously try http://opendns.com you’re gonna luv me for suggesting it :P)

Anyway, the first question I got via twitter was “are you gonna switch to Airtel now?” My answer was “No!”

No, I won’t be switching away from Dialog right now. Why? Simply because I’ve agreed to use this connection for 6 months and I will act according to that. Then why did I unlock this? Simple, After 6 months I’m free to do anything, but they know that I can’t switch to any other network and use this modem so they DON’T CARE. But now, since I can switch between networks and still use the same modem, they know I will! and that’s what keep these money hungry companies like Dialog from screwing the customers. And thats exactly why we all should do it! That will teach them a lesson to treat their customers with some respect.

There are lot of places to find ways to unlock the HSDPA modems. And my next post which I’ll be writing tomorrow morning, will also be a how-to on unlocking Huawei e220 which is the most common HSDPA modem in Sri Lanka. Almost all my friends have this model so there’s a good chance you have the same. Let me know If you have any other model. I’ll always be happy to help.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not paid by Airtel or any other company or individual to take down Dialog telecom(LOL!) And this is not just about Dialog. This is true with Mobitel or even with Airtel. My point is that the customer should always have the freedom to switch to a network which offers good quality service. And If they don’t offer that. We should fight for it! I just took the first step.

Wanna learn GIMP??? (!!!)

Me too!!! 😀 We gotta develop this web site for our Internet Techs&Apps module for this semester and I’m suppose to design a nice header and a logo for the site. Well, the whole site actually. I’ll have to do all the coding but my other group members are doing a great job collecting required data drawing the layouts and stuff. That kinda stuff are the most difficult for me so I’m really REALLY thankful for them for not putting me in that hell.
But guess what! I suck at graphic designing 😛 well, not exactly. I just didn’t have time (oh no! not the same old excuse again!) to spend for graphic designing. I’d say graphic designing is not my thing exactly. I haven’t done much of Photoshop on my windo$ days either… But now that I have to do something for our project I thought it’d be nice to give GIMP a try. Hope it’s gonna be easy coz I’m not addicted to evil propritery graphic designing tools such as… u know… photoshop (yep! i just said that! 😀 )
So I’m now hunting GIMP tutorials on the net and found these cool sites so far, which i’ll add to my scrap book to use anytime i want (err… scrapbook??? well, thats another post hee hee…)

gimp-tutorials.net
gimp.org tutorials
youtub GIMP tutorials
gimpguru.org
gimp-tutorials.com

ok! thats all folks! feel free to let me know if you know any cool sites with nice tutorials for GIMP, i’ll keep the Links section updated as i find more stuff.
~seejay~