Hi There 👋

What’s more difficult? Knowing beforehand the exact moment you would talk to a person for the last time, or staying oblivious to the odds of future.In both the scenarios, though the event is common, the before & after is very different. In the 1st scenario, you know the exact moment a person will stop talking to you or the exact moment you’ll stop talking to the person. They won’t be part of your life anymore. In the 2nd scenario, you are not aware that one day the person will be gone. You both live your life as if it will last forever. ...

I never liked having my photos taken. To me, it always felt awkward to pose or smile in front of a camera, for no reason whatsoever. For so long, I didn’t even know how to smile for the camera.But lately, I have started to be part of some pictures. Started smiling (grinning, actually) for the camera. But at times I still find questioning myself “what’s the point?” People I care about, and with whom I would want to share the moments are either with me, or they receive the few images I do click. So why I click more pics, why say cheese every time we find something new, something interesting. ...

Have you heard the above quote? It’s a famous quote by German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. Do you know what’s the real meaning behind it?

My thoughts on why I work on personal projects, which are silly sometimes

Even though life might not give us a happy ending.We can still read stories, watch movies, listen to songs & poems which have happy ending. Even if life doesn’t give us happy ending, stories can.In those stories we imagine ourselves, having a happy end. Getting what we feel we deserve, what we want. And that’s why stories with happy ending sell. And why not, there’s nothing wrong in choosing a happy ending. Just because life isn’t fair, does not mean our stories need to be unfair as well. ...

Till last year I was a happy user of uBlock Origin. A browser extension which blocks all the ads, trackers and malware sites. But then I found out about Pi-hole. At that time, I didn’t have the right hardware to install it, so I kept bugging my sister to gift me a Raspberry Pi. After few weeks of crying & begging I finally got it and immediately put it to use by installing the Pi-hole. To quote their website, Pi-hole is ...

Hosting a new web-service requires 2 steps: Create a new virtual host on nginx Create a systemd service, so that the web-service can start automatically on server restart. Setup virtual host on nginx > cd /var/www/frp > nano frp.smurfpandey.me.conf server { listen 80; listen [::]:80; server_name comments.smurfpandey.me; root /var/www/html; location / { proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme; proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; proxy_set_header Host $http_host; proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:7500; } location ~ /.well-known { allow all; } client_max_body_size 50m; } ...

Many moons ago I saw the above status, and it got me thinking. Why should I work? Why does anybody work? A very high level view is, people work to satisfy their hunger. For some it’s for satisfying the basic need of body, hunger of food. For some it’s hunger of brain, they can’t sit idle, they need to do something. But it’s not that simple, it’s not a choice between these two. Everyone prioritizes these hungers depending of different parameters of their life. For some getting a day’s meal is priority, so they will do any type of work they can get as long as their basic need is satisfied. For some, they already earn enough to satisfy their basic needs, so they look for a kind of work which will give them mental satisfaction. ...

Since a couple of weeks I have been more active in sharing my personal thoughts on this blog, and few readers said that there’s no option for them to comment, and share their thoughts. When I was hosting my blog on Heroku, I enabled comments using a 3rd party commercial tool. But, after moving to Google Cloud, that feature was lost and I was only running a plain blog. I didn’t enable comments earlier because this time I wanted to do it differently. With all the privacy related issues going on, I didn’t want to share data about my readers with a 3rd party. So I decided to look for a self-hosted open-source tool which fits my bill. And after a quick google-fu I found remark42. ...

This site uses Facebook Login to allow users to comment on the posts. This data is collected by an open-source, self-hosted comment engine remark42. All potentially sensitive data stored is hashed and encrypted, more details here. This site also uses Google Analytics to get reports of traffic on the site. You can visit here to know how Google uses this data.