Weekly Notes 2023-W09

04 Mar 2023

I follow Thej’s weekly notes and wanted to write my own. I am not sure what would go here - but here is the first edition.

Last year

Last year I got diagnosed with ADHD. I had a hunch for sometime, but getting it officially diagnosed was helpful. Knowing about ADHD has helped me in understanding myself, mainly the fact that my behaviour and patterns are not a moral failure. I am trying to learn about existing with it.
Orange, a stray pregnant cat chose our office to lay her kittens. Since then she has been with us.

I bought my first domain and a Virtual Machine Droplet on DigitalOcean. I wanted a place to host my RSS reader and my Private Journal which I can access from any device.

Earlier last month we at Beneathatree Learning Partnered with Quest alliance as technical partners for their Hack to the Future Program and helped to conduct a 5-day hackathon for 80+ kids from 13 states across India. This was really satisfying to see kids with no much prior experience with technology pick up so much in short duration and think about their local problems and build stuff to address it. Watch what kids built here.
Last weekend in February BIC hosted their BIC Hubba, and Beneathatree Learning was one of the collaborators. My colleagues conducted few interesting sessions. I also manned our living archive exhibit for few hours.
I ordered a lot of useful and interesting tools, sensors, microcontroller boards and other interesting things for our Makerspace at Beneathatree Learning. Most of which have arrived and I am excited to inventorize them. I am also very happy that we have the right tools (mostly) for the right job, instead of having to improvise and jugaad.
We have a brand new mini CNC machine that we are yet to complete the assembly. I am looking forward to this.

Last few weeks were very difficult work and productivity wise because of my ADHD. All my routine had gone for a toss, and it was very difficult to get through each day. I have restarted working on my routine and other things for help. Because of my ADHD it is really difficult for me to stick to a routine.
I had my ADHD medication changed this week.
Later half of the week was productive-ish. I am working on a new feature for our clients at Beneathatree Consultancy. I am excited by this feature technically, as well as by its usefulness.
I have started reading “The Great Arc: The Dramatic Tale of How India was Mapped and Everest was Named”

Orange and the Great Arc
I ordered a new multimeter. This would be the first multimeter I am using that is not a cheap Chinese unnamed model. I asked an Embedded Developer friend for a recommendation - and he recommended this DM 98. This looks like a good bang for the buck. May not be the best in the market, but I also didn’t want to splurge too much just yet.
I tried opening up a cheap Laminator to be used for my DIY PCB-making experiment. I have issues with this as one of the heating quartz rods inside the roller shattered, but it was fun trying to figure out how this laminator worked. Will try to document it if I can.