Jai Shri Ram!

The online journal of Nikhil Bhardwaj. Collection of thoughts, articles, essays.

Dec 11, 2020

Backup Strategy

Backups are critically important, but often ignored. Their true value only becomes obvious when you need one but don’t have one. I’ve myself been negligent on a few occasions and...

Feb 25, 2020

Minio Bucket Policy Notes

Minio is a really cool opensource project which democratizes cloud storage. The feature that I love most about it is S3 compatibility which means that you can use it with...

Feb 24, 2020

Norbert's Gambit

After moving from America to Canada, one of the things that I needed to do was to move over some of my savings across the border. I’m not moving over...

Jul 16, 2019

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. AWS

For many years, I’ve hosted my blog with Wordpress on a hosting provider called VlexoFree. Earlier in the year Eli, the proprietor of VlexoFree announced that they were shutting down....

Jul 9, 2019

Cost of Self-Hosting a VPN server in AWS

I wanted to briefly share some of the details of my self-hosted VPN setup, and to specifically talk about the associated costs with running one in AWS. The VPN is...

Jul 26, 2017

Magic Candles - fun with Alexa and IoT

A while back my wife had picked up a packet of flameless candles from costco. These come with an infrared remote which you can change colors, switch modes between glow and...

Jul 2, 2017

Smart DNS to sidestep geolocation checks

One of the HDMI ports of my TV is powered by Raspberry Pi, I use this to stream content that isn’t available in my current geography. The most obvious way...

Sep 23, 2016

Path Tracker an Alexa Skill for local train timings

I’ve had the Amazon Echo for a while, recently I had some time on my hands and decided to build a skill that at least I would find useful. Typically my...

Jan 16, 2015

Je Suis Charlie

It’s been a week and the dust has started to settle after the horrific acts of terror by the islamists again, this time against France. Acts of terror are no longer...

Jan 16, 2015

New Year Ramblings 2015

I had neglected by blog for sometime now, lots has happened since my last post about setting up raspberry pi. I had a great vacation in Laddakh. After which I...

Apr 14, 2014

Setting up raspberry pi

Here’s a list of things I do to set up my raspberry pi and a small note, the purpose of this list is to help me remember what all I...

Apr 14, 2014

Raspberry Pi tip : Map your Subdomain to Pi

After I had my Raspberry Pi setup, I wanted to create a subdomain which would point to it. This is trivial to set up if you have a static IP...

Jul 30, 2013

Another partition looms

By the indications that we are getting from the media the state of Andhra Pradesh will be bifurcated, partitioned into two and this saddens me immensely. The parallel with India’s...

Jul 30, 2013

Meteor.js

It’s been a while since I last blogged, sort of lost the interest didn’t know what to write about but you don’t really care about that do you! Lets get...

Dec 25, 2012

Downgrade grub2 to grub

There was this weird issue that I’ve been facing for some time with both ubuntu 12.10 and 12.04, what happens is that my Acer Aspire One 722 netbook doesn’t boot...

Dec 14, 2012

Keep Windows and Linux time in sync

Every time I log into windows after having used linux on my netbook there is a problem with the system time. It is because linux treats the time set in...

Dec 3, 2012

Reliance Netconnect+ Settings for Ubuntu

I had written a post on how we can easily get MTS Mblaze to work under linux and as it turns out, the Reliance Netconnect+ is equally easy to set...

Dec 1, 2012

Using the Windows 7/8 bootloader to dual boot linux

In the past whenever I had to install linux along with windows I would install grub and it works flawlessly most of the time. Sometimes however when you’re experimenting with...

Oct 2, 2012

gprs and wvdial over bluetooth

I must say that the network manager handles ppp connections rather poorly, sometimes they work but most of the times they don’t. The situation is worse still with mobile phones,...

Sep 19, 2012

Sinatra Class

The A.C.M students chapter at NIT Trichy were kind enough to invite me to take an introductory class on web development for the first year M.C.A. students , php was...

Sep 10, 2012

Kde4 map windows key to kickoff launcher

KDE’s equivalent to the windows start menu is the kickoff launcher, being a windows user for a long time before I moved to linux some habits just don’t go away....

Aug 15, 2012

Microsoft Interview Experience

A few days back Microsoft visited our campus, this had generated quite the buzz for it is not everyday that you have a giant like MS visiting the campus. They...

Aug 15, 2012

Fixing the keyboard on a hackintosh

I installed iAtkos L2 on my Acer 5742G laptop and it works really well, there was one thing that has been bugging me. I couldn’t press ~ on the keyboard...

Jul 10, 2012

Recursion Quote

To understand recursion, you first need to understand recursion.

Jul 7, 2012

Changing your DNS for MTS Mblaze

For the last few days, the news of Monday being the internet doomsday have been doing the rounds. But there are trivial fixes that can help you avoid meeting with...

Jun 30, 2012

Introducing Chagol!

Having learnt how easy it was to develop ruby gems, I thought of putting my newly learned skills to the test and the result is chagol. Any work of software...

Jun 27, 2012

Churning out ruby gems

If you didn’t already know then let me tell you that I’m a huge fan of the ruby programming language. I have dabbed with a few imperative languages and none...

Jun 26, 2012

Installing ubuntu to a usb drive using vmware

In this post I’m going to walk you through installing ubuntu on a usb drive using vmware, that can boot any system not only virtual machines also we’ll create an...

Jun 10, 2012

Creating a usb recovery image for a netbook using dd

Yesterday I got my new shiny Acer aspire one 722 netbook, it comes with windows 7 starter and I’m not going to stick with it for long but before I...

May 30, 2012

Oh My ZSH!

I spend a lot of time in front of the terminal and have been using bash ever since I can remember, it’s a fine shell indeed but as I discovered...

May 6, 2012

Cinnamon!!

After installing the 12.04 LTS version of ubuntu I was quite happy with the performance of the system, there was however one thing that bugs me. It’s unity of course,...

May 6, 2012

MTS Settings for Ubuntu 12.04

I switched to ubuntu after the new LTS release and was having some problems with my MTS Mblaze connection. Sometime’s it’d work and sometimes it wouldn’t. There seems to be...

Apr 30, 2012

Download videos from pluralsight using Replay Media Catcher

Just a quick tip on how you can download videos from pluralsight using RMC. I found this on the applian forums. You need to add a new HTTP tweak in...

Mar 24, 2012

Accessing github in NITT

In my opinion github is the best way to share code on the internet but it was not possible to use it in NITT because of the geniuses that are...

Dec 26, 2011

The Lost Dan Brown

I had been a huge fan of Dan Brown, his initial few novels sold like wildfire and I was hooked to them. All of them were pageturners The da vinci...

Dec 10, 2011

Getting MySQL to work on arch linux

I was setting up the LAMP stack on my arch linux installation, I followed the wonderful arch wiki and had no trouble getting apache and php working but there seems...

Oct 4, 2011

Murder of Intellect

What good is a class room if you replace teachers with jokers? At first it would sound amusing but it is anything but that. It becomes a cruel joke, a...

Aug 2, 2011

Getting graphics.h to work on Windows and Linux

We have an introductory Computer Graphics course at our university this semester, we will be working with BGI(Borland Graphics Interface) which has its origins in Borland Turbo C. It goes...

Jul 19, 2011

Back to NITT

As I stare blankly into the computer screen, I know that my time at home is coming to an end, now that the holidays are finally over its time to...

Jul 10, 2011

Setting Up Android SDK on Sabayon

Mobile application development seems to be in vogue these days, with the iPhone and Android platforms being the top contenders. iPhone had all of the market to itself sometime back  but now...

Jul 1, 2011

Meeting Mr. Tux

One of my friends asked me as to how one should get started with linux. That made me think, “How did it all start for me?”. I didn’t know too...

Jun 26, 2011

Automatically Mount Partitions at Boot Up

I dual boot windows and linux and what happens is that most of my data resides on an ntfs volume which can be accessed by both the operating systems. It’s...

Jun 24, 2011

Choosing a Linux Distribution

A lot of people are curious to know about linux, but its hard for a beginner to start. Linux is really easy to use but there are a lot of...

This project is maintained by nikhilbhardwaj