This week in Kerala: intense heat, movie recommendation “June,” and switch to eco-friendly shaving with Leaf Razor.

For folks not in the know, this is a weekly stream of consciousness zero-agenda “here’s what’s happening” or “here’s what’s interesting” post.

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What’s been happening

• The heat has been quite unbearable lately. It’s only about 35?, but it feels like so much more. It’s a visible sign that climate change is having a real effect, without an AC it’s hard to live in Kerala anymore.

• Saw and liked the Malayalam movie June. Like the very similarly named Juno (which I loved), it’s a coming of age story of a girl, and it’s quite wonderfully done. Ammu liked it quite a bit and laughed out loud at a few places, paused a bunch to tell me this—exactly this—has happened to her.

• I bought a Leaf Razor and have been using it to shave for the last couple of weeks or so. It was pretty costly to get it in India, but I shave my head around every 3-4 days now and the costs of disposable razor blades was adding up. It’s actually not as close a shave as the Gillette Fusion blades I was using before, but the difference isn’t that much. I was always thinking of shaving with a straight razor, but the Leaf Razor seems to be the best of both worlds: you can fit a regular stainless steel blade in, but it curves to your head just like the Gillette ones.

• We started to track expenses in a more structured fashion (in a bid to reduce splurges and start to save for a house), and I made a Google spreadsheet. You can use a QUERY function like this to generate a pivot table based on categories quite easily:

=QUERY(A:F,"SELECT C, SUM(B), F WHERE C != '' GROUP BY C, F ORDER BY SUM(B) DESC LABEL SUM(B) 'Total', F 'NWS'", -1)

• Buying the Jeep was one of the best decisions in the last couple of years. It’s really nice to drive and handles like a small car. Here’s mine parked next to another when we recently went out:

• Bit of a meta find, but the fact that Jetpack (& WordPress.com where this blog is hosted) can now generate excerpts is a perfect fit for generative AI:

Links of the Week

• I keep coming back to the parable of the wishing tree to explain a bunch of things that happen to me and folks around me. I also feel this is why it’s better to be agnostic rather than an atheist because there’s always grains of wisdom in the bushels of chaff that is religion.
• I had a Beyond Meat burger last time I was in the US, and now folks seem to be making egg protein replacements. I think it’s only a matter of time before these become more mainstream.
• Found this nice directory of self hosted apps.

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