Let me start with a little history of when I started writing. I wrote my first article ever on Nov 15th, 2016, i.e., almost 9 and a half years ago. It was during my college years that I learned how to easily SSH to a server from the college network (port 22 was blocked by our network admin, so direct SSH didn’t work). At that time, I heard about Medium and used it. For a while, it worked well, and I used it as my primary platform for writing and reading articles. Then Medium launched paywalled articles, and after that, the quality and product experience deteriorated significantly, so I decided to move away from it and create my own personal website.

Things worked well; like most other people, I used a template, used markdown for the content, and hosted it on a service as a static site (I guess it was GitHub Pages at the time) behind my own domain.
Now, after some time, I felt markdowns were a little cumbersome, and I recently started using Notion and decided to use it as my CMS (Content Management System). At the same time, Next.js came around, so I decided to switch to it as well. I created a new page inside Notion “Personal Website“ and added sub-pages inside it to handle different things, used tags to differentiate and group posts like - blog, project, etc. During build time, I pulled the content from Notion using its API and cached all the dynamic posts in the build directory. This worked quite well for me.

Problem

Now, my notion + Next.js setup was working quite well, but I recently noticed that my writing frequency had become very low; I had almost stopped writing.
The last post I wrote was in October 2025, about a hackathon I won, and it was also because one of my friends wanted to know more about it. The one before it was in 2022!

I don’t know the exact reason, but one correlation I see is the platform. When I was using Medium, I was writing more, but once I shifted to custom blog management, I was more obsessed with styling, tech, and other optimizations. Although that was quite fun as well, it might have impacted my writing habits. There might not be any causation involved here, and it was maybe just a pure correlation, but I decided to shift back to a managed service to find out.

The Solution

I have known about Substack for a while now. I used to read articles on Substack from some people I follow and admire. In fact, when I decided to move to Substack, I noticed I already had an account from long before.

Apart from the writing experience, I found the reading experience on Substack to be quite good as well. So I decided to move my entire personal website to Substack.

Migration

Once the decision was made, I wanted to bring all my posts to Substack.
Substack had an inbuilt option to import posts. So I gave it a try, but that option didn’t work for my personal website, which makes sense since it is a custom site and I can’t expect Substack to parse it directly. But I saw that it explicitly mentioned Medium, and since the majority of my content was already there, it should work. But that also just errored out.

Now I thought the issue must be on the medium side, they might be blocking Substack crawlers. So I decided to try something else. I followed this article from Medium support to export all my articles, and used Claude to write a simple script that exposed all of them from my localhost as an RSS feed. Once that was done, I used ngrok to make it accessible from the internet and pasted the URL on Substack for importing, and it worked like a charm. All of my posts were now imported to Substack with the correct published date. I used the same logic on my personal website to import other articles and pages that were not on Medium, and now have all of my content on Substack.

The other part of the problem was redirection from old URLs. My personal website used a particular URL scheme for posts, but I can’t have the same thing for Substack. I researched a little and found that the most reliable way to do it is on my domain registrar, which was Cloudflare.
To my surprise, it was quite easy to do it there. Cloudflare had something called - Redirect Rules, with which you can easily set up redirections. I tested it out, and it was exactly what I was looking for.

But after I created my test rule, I noticed there is a limit of 10 redirect rules only, which was not enough for me. So, I was back to researching what to do.

After that, I found out about Snippet rules in Cloudflare, which were much more powerful as they were powered by JavaScript.

So, I decided to use it. I created a new snippet rule, tested it out for a single URL, and it worked. It had a similar route matching, but once a route is matched, you can write custom JavaScript to handle what you want to do with it. In my case, I wanted to add a redirection.

In place of adding everything manually, Claude came to my rescue again. I started by telling it to list all the URLs on my website at the moment and validated whether it covered everything or not. After that, I gave the link to pages that list all my posts on Substack and asked it to match the links, and also pasted the demo JS code from Cloudflare snippet and asked Claude to update it. Claude worked amazingly well, and it one-shotted everything perfectly. I just pasted everything on Cloudflare, and it all worked. My old post links are now properly getting redirected to Substack.

With the setup now complete, the only thing left was to properly sunset my old website and read more, write more, and share more here on Substack.

I first heard about TRMNL from a tweet by one of my old co‑workers on Jan 31, 2025, and absolutely loved it. Although my first thought was that it was a little expensive, I liked the product a lot, and my wife convinced me to buy it for myself. I finally received the device around June, but was slapped with heavy customs fees—part of which the TRMNL team gladly reimbursed.

Let me start with what TRMNL is. It is a battery‑powered, developer‑friendly, e‑ink display, simply put, a Kindle‑like device on which you can choose what to display from a library of plugins that connect to third‑party services and show up‑to‑date results with a custom refresh interval. My favourite part was how easy it was to build your own plugins as well.

The first time I saw the device, I instantly thought there should be a Grafana plugin for TRMNL. My plan was to start developing it as soon as I received my device. But after it was delivered, I procrastinated. To start using the device, I installed the Weather Churn plugin with a 30‑minute refresh interval, which was helpful since I live in London and the weather here is quite unpredictable. Being able to see it at a glance in the living room helped whenever we were heading out.

I work at Grafana Labs, and we have quarterly hackathons that last a week. We get to step away from our daily work and focus on a hackathon project for the whole week. This was the perfect time to break my procrastination and start working on the plugin I’d had in mind for quite some time.

For the Grafana hackathon, my idea was to present it as a stepping stone toward Grafana‑branded physical devices, where, after getting a device, you can link it to your Grafana Cloud account and easily select a dashboard or panel to display on the device. By the end of the hackathon, I had built a TRMNL plugin that lets you select a Grafana panel to display on the device.

Below is a short clip of how different Grafana panels looked on the TRMNL device using the plugin I created.

Although I didn’t win the internal hackathon, I was very happy with the plugin’s results. It was still a private plugin, meaning only I could use it. The next step was to publish it as a recipe on TRMNL so that others could also use it, but my procrastination kicked in again, and I delayed publishing it as a recipe.

This time, it was a blessing in disguise. A few days ago, I got an email from the TRMNL team announcing a hackathon focused on building plugins for DevOps. I instantly remembered my Grafana plugin. I quickly went through the rules to check if I could submit a previously created plugin, and the rules said that if a plugin hadn’t been published as a recipe, it could be submitted. So my procrastination made me eligible to submit my Grafana plugin for this hackathon, the theme of which exactly matched my project. I made a few tweaks and submitted it. I also updated the video I created for the internal hackathon and attached it.

Lo and behold, my submission was one of the winners, and I couldn’t have been happier. I didn’t see TRMNL’s official announcement first; my friend and college senior, Kshitij, congratulated me, and after reading his email I checked the blog and saw my plugin among the winners. In fact, the main reason I wrote this post was that he asked me to share my experience.

If you’d like to try the plugin, you can check it out here: https://usetrmnl.com/recipes/105532

Hi folks! In this blog post, I’m going to introduce you to an easy way to convert Postman collections to OpenAPI schema in just one click. To see it in action, go to p2o.defcon007.com

What is OpenAPI schema?

According to Wikipedia, OpenAPI Specification, previously known as the Swagger Specification, is a specification for machine-readable interface files for describing, producing, consuming, and visualizing RESTful web services.

It provides a standard way to share your API designs with others, and even auto-generate documentations using various tools.

If you try to write an OpenAPI schema file for your service, one of the major challenges you will face is remembering the structure and ways in which different entities are described in the specification. Tools like Postman, makes it very easy to test your endpoints by writing requests and grouping them together inside collections. The ease of use and intuitiveness of the tool makes it very easy to define all the endpoints inside Postman collections, but creating an OpenAPI schema manually for all the endpoints is very cumbersome.

I always find it very easy to create a collection for my service and use it during the development itself for testing purpose. There are solutions already present to convert the collection to OpenAPI schema, but most of them are CLI tools. I wanted a quick way to convert the collection to OpenAPI schema. I was also reading about Next.js at the time and wanted to try it out.

Hence, Postman to OpenAPI online was born. It is a small online utility powered by Next.js to convert Postman collections to OpenAPI schema file. For data privacy reasons, all the conversion happens inside your browser keeping all of your data safe.

You can either load the collection from an exported JSON or directly use the collection URL.

Note: If your collection is not public, create an access token in Postman and add ?apikey=<POSTMAN_API_KEY> at end of the URL to access it.

Now, to generate the OpenAPI schema

Demo

Convert collection JSON file to OpenAPI schema

Convert collection via URL to OpenAPI schema

Thank you for reading! Head over to https://github.com/DefCon-007/postman-to-openapi-online to contribute to the source code.

Acknowledgements

• Thanks to @joolfe for the awesome postman-to-openapi NPM package which made conversion easy.

• Website design taken from codebushi and theme name is Next.js Dimension

Sleep — By Kaha Mind

Disclaimer: Following views are my own and I am not affiliated with Kaha Mind

Recently, Kaha mind organized a very awesome session on sleep hygiene. It was very informative, and I jotted down the key learnings I had from the session to easily comback and look again.

The session started with quick little trivia busting common myths people have on sleep. Following are some of them:

1. A 20 minute power nap during the day will energize you.

2. If you have trouble falling asleep at night, it's helpful to get out of bed and do some “boring” task then just lying in the bed.

3. For a better sleep, it's better to have a cool dark room.

Culprits for Improper Sleep

• Not taking enough breaks during the day

• Having stress & anxiety

• Using screens like laptop or phone late into the night

Sleep Hormones and some biology

1. Melatonin: Its production and release is increased in the dark and it is the main sleep hormone. It is what helps you sleep.

2. Melanopsin: It is a photopigment found in cells which increases awareness and keeps us awake. It is triggered with blue light.

So, Melatonin helps you sleep and Melanopsin keeps you awake. Also, in these two, Melanopsin over powers Melatonin. i.e. if you do any activity which increases Melanopsin, you are unlikely to get good sleep.

Binaural Beats

A binaural beat is an illusion created by the brain when you listen to two tones with slightly different frequencies at the same time.
Most of the sleep music/lucid dreaming music audios are actually binaural beats.

Harry potter and the philosopher’s stone — An insight

So I have watched the harry potter series a lot of times. I binge-watched the complete series recently in the summers just before reading the Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. But then some of friends told me that the story in the original novels is quite different and a LOT of details are missed in the movie. So, I took kindle unlimited subscription and started with the very first book Harry Potter and Philosopher’s Stone.

So the first thing I noticed different was the name. I remembered seeing the name Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone but well the book was Harry Potter and Philosopher’s stone. After a quick google search, I found that it also recommends the movie as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Even on amazon prime video the movie is listed as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

So now I started reading the book and trust me it was VERY different from the movie. Now I will list all the changes I found out in the book one by one. I will also add snapshots of the book for you to read !

1. In the first scene when Albus Dumbledore, Professor McGonagall and Hagrid are at Privet Drive to leave young Harry at doorsteps of the Dursley’s — The worst muggles imaginable, in the movie it was a simple scene Hagrid bringing Harry and they all leaving him there with a letter to the Dursley’s but in the book there was a dialogue between McGonagall and Dumbledore which caught my attention. You can read it from the below snapshot of the book.

2. In the movie when we have the first glimpse of our most loved and fierce wizard it was quite simple scene, Harry’s Aunt Petunia waking him up and then big fat Dudley going up and down over the stairs which was spilling dust over Potter and then he coming out of the cupboard and cooking breakfast for all and being scolded for non sense things. But in the book this was quite different. The scene starts with Aunt Petunia waking up Harry and it also tells about Harry dreaming of a flying motorbike. And then he was instructed to cook bacon by his Aunt with a warning not burn them but in the movie what to cook for breakfast was not specified. This whole conversation was going on when Harry was still in the cupboard while in movie it was happening when he was inside the kitchen. Also afterwards in the book he looks for his sock and finds spider on them which he pulls off and it was also mentioned that he was used to spiders in cupboard but nothing of this sort was mentioned in the movie.

3. After Hagrid delivered the Hogwarts Letter to Harry in the secluded light house they can be seen directly walking in the street next to the Leaking Cauldron and then on their way to Diagon Alley but according to the book when Hagrid arrives at the night after having some “fun” with the Dursleys he sleeps on the sofa and next morning harry wakes up seeing an owl dropping newspaper for Hagrid and then starting to tap its beak on Hagrid’s coat until Hagrid told Harry to pay him five Knuts (the small bronze ones) and then they pack their things and went out and Hagrid told Harry that he came flying but since he now got Harry he cannot use the magic so they uses the boat to cross the sea and then they walked to the station and boarded a train to London. Hagrid sat on the train taking up two seats and knitting something which looked like Canary-yellow circus tent. The Passers-by were staring at Hagrid a lot. And then Hagrid asks to take out the things he needed. Now in the movie Harry tells about only One standard size 2 Pewter Cauldron, and either an Owl, Cat or a Toad but in the book the whole list of essentials for a first year wizard was present which can be seen in the screenshot below.

You will be amazed to find that one of the text book was Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them by Newt Scamander.

4. In the scene when Harry has boarded the Hogwarts Express from the platform 9¾ of the King’s Cross Station and is sitting with Ron having bought a lot of the things from the smiling dimpled woman and eating Chocolate Frogs which contains card of a famous witch or wizard. Harry finds the card of Dumbledore. In the movie the scene is now completed but in the book there is more to the card. Harry turns over the card and starts reading :

Albus Dumbledore, currently Headmaster of Hogwarts. Considered by many the greatest wizard of modern time, Professor Dumbledore is particularly famous for his defeat of the dark wizard Grindelwald in 1945, for the discovery of the twelve uses of dragon’s blood and his work on alchemy with his partner, Nicolas Flamel. Professor Dumbledore enjoys chamber music and tenpin bowling.

Now many of you guys who have followed the Harry Potter realm properly must know who Grindelwald is. I was astonished to see his reference this early in the series.

5. In the movie when Harry and Ron were still on Hogwarts Express and Ron was going to change the Scrabber’s colour and Hermoine walks in looking for Neville’s toad. She just slams Ron for his trick not working and then fixes Harry’s spectacles. She then advices them to change as they all will be reaching soon and then just leaves. But in the book after Hermoine got to know about Harry she tells that she had read everything about him and also that he is mentioned in Modern Magical History and The Rise and the Fall of the Dark Arts and The Great Wizarding Events of the Twentieth Century. She also talks a bit about they both knowing which house they will be in and then talking about how she would like to be in Gryffindor but Ravenclaw will also work. And then she leaves advising them to change. After this Harry and Ron talks and Ron tells Harry how everyone from his family was in Gryffindor and Harry enquired about the two of his brothers who completed their school. Now Ron tells Harry that :

Chalie’s in Romania studying dragons and Bills in Africa doing something to do with Gringotts.

We all know that the Charlie’s reference will have a comeback in the Goblet of Fire 😜

6. There were some differences in the sorting ceremony too. The grand hall was more elaborated in the book. Also in the movie Dumbledore gives the start-of-the-term notices before the sorting ceremony begins but in the book it was done after the ceremony. Also, in the book before the sorting began the sorting hat sing a song, which is as follows :

Py-WhatsApp is the un-official python module for chat-api.com and provides a pure pythonic way to communicate with WhatsApp programmatically without the official business API.

Github - https://github.com/DefCon-007/py-whatsapp

PyPi - https://pypi.org/project/whatsapp-api/

What is chat-api.com

It is a multifunctional rest api for WhatsApp accounts working on top of WhatsApp web. They offer a 3-day free trial to allow you to use the service before buying and this python package allows you to interface with most of its services directly.

Pitfalls of official WhatsApp API

• You first need to get approved from WhatsApp to start using the business API.

• You are tied in with a third party provider to avail the services and has to pay their set prices which are generally low but depends on per incoming/outgoing message.

• When someone contacts your number, you have to reply with in 24 hours. Post that, you can only send a template message to the contact.

• You cannot send any message to a person who has not initiated a conversation with you, you can only send them a template message.What is template message? This is a message which has to be first approved by WhatsApp and then you can use it to contact potential customers or reply to conversations which are older than 24 hours.

For more information head over to https://www.whatsapp.com/business/api/.

How to use

• Go to chat-api.com and create a new account.

• After successful account creation you will have a single instance active, copy the instanceId and token and keep them safe.

• Install the module using pip install whatsapp-api.

• Now use the following code snippet to send the message. Click here to read more in-depth details on using the library.

from whatsapp import WhatsApp

token = "xxxxxxx"
instance_id = "instancexxx"

object = WhatsApp(token, instance_id)

phone_number = "911234512345"
message = "This is a sample text message. *This will be bold*"

response = object.send_message(phone_number, message)

• Keep in mind the phone number has to be in the international format, here the sample number is from India(country code +91).

Disclaimer

I am in no way associated to WhatsApp or Chat-API. This post and the corresponding module is only for educational purpose.

GitHub actually allows you to host websites for your projects directly from the repository itself. It will have URL something like https://<username>.github.io , you can add your custom domain to it too. If you haven’t done it, GitHub has pretty good documentation about it. You can read it here.

Now, let's suppose you have already set up a custom domain and your default site is accessible through https://example.com . Now, if you create a new repository named project , and enable GitHub pages, it will be accessible through https://example.com/project but sometimes it makes more sense to have a custom sub-domain, like https://project.example.com . To do this, there are some additional configurations required. Just follow the steps below.

To make the steps more clear, I will use my own, recent project example for which I set up the custom subdomain. My GitHub username is DefCon-007 and my personal website which was available through GitHub pages at https://DefCon-007.github.io is served from my custom domain with https://defcon007.com and https://www.defcon007.com . I now had a new repository named utilobot-website which contained some HTML and was served at https://defcon007.com/utilobot-website and I wanted it to be served at https://utilobot.defcon007.com

Step 1: Configure DNS settings

Go to your domain provider’s website and add a new CNAME record with a name as your subdomain and value as your GitHub root URL with a trailing dot(No it is not a typo). In my case the name was utilobot and the value was defcon-007.github.io.

Step 2: Add CNAME file

Now, add a new file named CNAME to your repository with just a single line in it, that is your complete URL.

You can also go to the repository settings and enter your custom domain in the GitHub Pages section, it will automatically add the CNAME file.

That’s it, you have a custom domain for your GitHub project now. Try opening it with http first, and it is working fine, you can select Enforce HTTPS option in the repository settings page.

Troubleshooting

1. If the custom sub-domain does not work, try after some time, so that the DNS records are propagated, also try removing the trailing period from the URL in step one, it works sometimes.

2. If you find that the Enforce HTTPS checkbox is disabled, and your custom domain is working fine with http , try deleting the CNAME file, push the changes, create the same CNAME file with the same content and push again. It should be enabled now.

Thanks for reading.

This article was originally published at http://www.defcon007.com/GitHub-Custom-Domain/

Histrock was made as a submission for Societe Generale Brainwaves 2019 hackathon. It is a django application for historic stock data analysis along with real-time stock charts and economic calender.

The project made it to the all India finals from the 10,200+ applicants.

Github - https://github.com/DefCon-007/histrock.

Features

• Check historical stock trend analysis on responsive charts which can be exported as png.

• Realtime economic calender displaying latest events.

• Automatically selects oldest or most records if start or end date not given.

• Realtime stock chart.

• Easy-to-implement REST API.

Demonstration

Below is a short video demonstration of the project.

Screenshots

Trainman helps you to find alternate train bookings on the same route and train for Indian railways.

You can check it out at https://trainman.defcon007.com/

Github - https://github.com/DefCon-007/trainman

How it works

Let’s say your train starts at source station A and ends at destination station F and follows the following path:

A -> B -> C -> D -> E -> F

Now you want to travel from B to D, but there is no ticket available. Indian trains have ticket quotas on the basis of stations. So, even if tickets from B to D are fully booked, you may get a reservation from any of the following routes in the same train :

A->D A->E A->F . . .

TrainMan lists availability on these kind of alternate routes to make your journey hassel free.

Screenshots

Using a GPS module(neo-7m) with Raspberry Pi 3

Recently, I got an opportunity to work on an awesome project which included hardware and software development. The project was about Tractor Telematics. For starters, we needed to track the location of a tractor in real time. So, we the one and only way for it was to use Raspberry Pi and a GPS module. While trying to make things work, I faced a lot of problems in the configuration and there was no one-stop guide for it. Hence, I decided that I will write a blog about how I did it and what problems I faced along with their solutions.

NOTE: All of these steps were done on a Raspberry Pi 3 model B and ublox neo-7m GPS module but it should work on other models too.

Configuring UART

sudo raspi-config

Select -> Interfacing Options

After selecting Interfacing option, select Serial option to enable UART

Then it will ask for login shell to be accessible over Serial, select No shown as follows.

At the end, it will ask for enabling Hardware Serial port, select Yes,

Finally, our UART is enabled for Serial Communication on RX and TX pin of Raspberry Pi 3.

Then, reboot the Raspberry Pi.

Hardware connections

In the GPS module I have there were total 4 connections to be made as follows:

1. VCC — 5v(pin 2)

2. GND — Pi’s ground(pin 6)

3. RX — Pi’s TX

4. TX — Pi’s RX

Note that Pin 1 is the one facing the memory card slot and Pin2 is just adjacent to it. Refer to following images for better understanding.

Installing GPS Applications

sudo apt-get install gpsd gpsd-clients

Now, run the GPSD client

sudo gpsd /dev/ttyS0 -F /var/run/gpsd.sock

Here, ttyS0 is my serial port where GPS data is received, for other Raspberry Pi models this might be different. So, just replace ‘XXX’ in ttyXXX with appropriate name.

Now, type the following code to check the connections.

cat /dev/ttyS0

You should see a continuous stream of data. It is raw GPS data in NMEA format. If you see something like $GPTXT,01,01,01,NMEA unknown msg*58 a lot then check your serial port configuration. If the ‘echo’ option is enabled that will cause this problem. Just do stty -F /dev/ttyS0 -echo to disable echo then cat the gps serial device and those messages should stop.

Now, after this type cgps and you should see something like below.

After some time the data will be shown here.

If the cat command shows data but you get nothing in cgps at all do the following :

1. Check if port 2947 is open in firewall.

2. Open the file /etc/default/gps in sudo with any text editor and change DEVICES=”” to DEVICES=”/dev/ttyS0" and then type sudo systemctl restart gpsd

Note : It may take sometime for GPS module to receive data. So it time or anything else is shown in cgps that means configurations are all ok but module is not receiving GPS signals. So, just wait for sometime.

Some troubleshooting steps if cgps does not get a fix

1. Check GPS data stream

cat /dev/ttyS0

You should see the NMEA stream

2. Check GPS data with gpsmon

gpsmon /dev/ttyS0

It should run properly with the data stream

Note : It first two steps didn’t work, check you connections and configurations properly.

3. Run gpsd in debug mode

sudo gpsd /dev/ttyS0 -N -D3 -F /var/run/gpsd.sock

It should say that it is already running

4. Now type the following lines.

sudo systemctl stop gpsd.socket
sudo systemctl disable gpsd.socket

5. Now, launch gpsd again

sudo gpsd /dev/ttyS0 -F /var/run/gpsd.sock

Now, cgps should get a fix and no timeout.

After all the proper configurations, you need to run sudo gpsd /dev/ttyS0 -F /var/run/gpsd.sock every time the pi is rebooted. If you are using it as an IOT project you might want to automate everything.

Automating

Create a file at /etc/rc.local

sudo nano /etc/rc.local

Add following contents to the file

#!/bin/sh -e
sudo gpsd /dev/ttyS0 -F /var/run/gpsd.sock
exit 0

This will run our sudo command on every boot.

Using python to get Latitude and Longitude

I used a simple python script to get latitude and longitude from the gps module.

Here, I print the Latitude and Longitude but you can actually do whatever you like with them and later on make this script to run every time on boot using cron job.

To make a cron job first type crontab -e and in the window that appears write the following command.

@reboot cd /home/pi/ && python sendCoordinate.py

Change the path and file name accordingly.

Small Issue

Now, after everything was setup the system was working pretty nice. But after 2–3 trial runs I found that something was crashing and I was not able to get the coordinates on my web server.

Now, there could be only two problems, either the GPS module is not configuring properly on every startup or my internet connection had some issues on boot. After hours of hit-and-try, and trying several permutations and combinations of different things on the internet I did the following to make it work.

I made a shell script startup.sh and added the following lines of code to it.

sudo gpsd /dev/ttyS0 -F /var/run/gpsd.sock
stty -F /dev/ttyS0 -echo
sudo systemctl stop gpsd.socket
sudo systemctl disable gpsd.socket
sudo killall gpsd
sudo systemctl stop gpsd.socket
sudo systemctl disable gpsd.socket
sudo gpsd /dev/ttyS0 -F /var/run/gpsd.sock
sleep 10s
nohup python /home/pi/sendCoordinate.py > pylog.test &

Then I made it an executable.

sudo chmod 755 ./startup.sh

After added it as cronjob to be executed on every startup and everything ran without any problems. My crontab file looked like this.

@reboot cd /home/pi/ && sh startup.sh

Note : I know some of the lines in startup.sh are redundant and may not be necessary but due to time crunch I was not able to further test it and make it more simpler. If you are reading this and have a more optimal foolproof solution kindly let me know in the comments or at ayushgoyal.iitkgp@gmail.com .

Importance of Things!

Today, I was thinking about how quickly and how vastly our priorities, importance of things and people, change over time. Personally, I have seen that one thing which was once very important in my life now is just speck of sand in a desert.

The reason today I started writing about it was very trivial; my end semester examinations commence from tomorrow.
 I still remember the exam time from my first semester, I was terrified (of course a lot less from the time I was in my high school) mugging up the formulas, solving the tutorial sheets, looking over the solved examples again and again, etc. But today just one day for the examinations, knowing that I have not attended a single class attentively, not even aware of the syllabus, I am Ok! In fact more better than that.
 
I actually feel that over time our way to perceive “important” things in life changes a lot. One thing which is currently so important to you that you will push yourself more than your limits may be rendered entirely useless in some time. 
For example, I worked my ass off during the examinations in school, but now when I look back to those grades which I secured in school, they are unquestionably useless, they have zero significance in my life right now. So, the point is should I be worried about anything which is going in my life right now knowing that after some time I will look back and say that it was just waste of time and I could have done something else more productive or enjoyed that time of my life more peacefully?

Now, the significant thing to closely see is that it’s not like those events never actually had any importance, it’s just over the time I am forgetting or don’t want to acknowledge what their significance was. Retaking the example of exams, during those school times, the marks in those exams were essential. Because, if I didn’t study hard, I would not be able to get a good college and which will lead to a low paying job, and thus I will be making compromises at every facet of my life, and the list goes on and on. But now when I am in a good college, I feel those marks are useless.

So, it’s not that nothing is worth the efforts, but after achieving the importance of them, we tend to think of those events as useless. For example, most of the people are worried about exams in college because they know if they fuck these up they are not going to beg a proper placement. But since I know these grades are not going to help me in my placements, so I give zero fucks to the exams. Contrary to my first semester where I had no such backup, so I prepared hard for the exams and was worried too.