• Friends Roster - Basic Design

    This is the continuation of how I built the Friend Roster app. If you have missed the previous parts in this series, do check them out -- part 1, part 2 and part 3. I wanted to build a flutter app that would let me do these basic things

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  • Two Hundred Posts And Counting

    I did not realize but I just completed 200 posts on this blog. That is unbelievable given that I did not have any plans to write for this long. Previously when I blogged (I have two other blogs), I never kept up for these many posts. Those blogs are now abandoned and probably will never see the light of another post. However, for this blog I still have a list of 30 articles that I want to cover in the future. So there is really no dearth of topics. I just need to get myself to work on them. Anyway, this is just a pat on my back sort of post and has nothing informative for you as a reader.

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  • Cleaning Refrigerator Condenser Coils

    Recently our refrigerator started to have some interesting problem. The cooling performance was becoming progressively worse by the day. Up until a month ago the weather is quite cool here in Bangalore. So food did not spoil much and we did not notice. But as the weather was warming up we observed the cooling to be not adequate. Eventually milk started to spoil. The place I live is notorious for frequent power-cuts. I wondered if that was to blame. But this never happened before even with a lot of power-cuts. I started debugging the problem and eventually found the cause. It was the condenser coils.

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  • Where I Struggled With Flutter

    In one of my previous posts I mentioned that it was fun and easy to code in Flutter. But that does not mean there were no difficulties. In this post I will cover a couple of areas where I struggled. The post will go into some technical details regarding Flutter and android development. So if you are not interested in them you might not care much. Feel free to skip.

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  • Short-term And Long-term Gains Harvesting

    Everybody agrees that long-term gains are almost always preferable to short-term gains. I tend to agree in general. But there are exceptions too for example if you are a retired person like me :). Long term capital gains taxes are lower than the short-term counterparts. For example, short-term capital gains tax on equity is 15% vs 10% on long-term gains. Likewise, debt short-term capital gains are taxed at your applicable tax rate as opposed to 20% on indexed long-term capital gains.

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  • Experience With Flutter

    In one of my previous posts I mentioned about a project that I wrote entirely using Flutter. This is the continuation of that post. I will go into the details of how Flutter became the platform of choice and my experience with it. Let me preface by saying that this may be interesting only to a limited set of software engineers. So if you are not one of them, it'll serve you best to skip this post.

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  • Franklin Debt Funds Payment Is Here

    Finally after almost one year since the Franklin debacle, there is some good news. I received 50% of my investment in Franklin Ultra Short Term fund. That is a sizable chunk of money. I am sure I have never seen as much in my bank account -- ever. While it is a sigh of relief, I never so much as doubted that there will be problem in repayment. My only worry was how long it would take for Franklin to repay given the court cases. For once this case moved faster than typical court case duration in India. Anyway I hope by the time you read this, you would have received your payment too.

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  • More Ideas On Minimalism

    I have already written a few articles on minimalism. Yet, from time to time people still ask me to teach them how to get started on minimalism. Unfortunately I don't know how to help them. There are perhaps some books and youtube videos on the topic. May be that will help. But here is one way to go about it.

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  • The Friends Roster Project

    While 2020 has tied many people to their homes, it also encouraged many to seek out old friends. The same happened with me and a bunch of my friends. I have lost touch with a lot of my school, college and work friends as the years passed. You find new friends. You get busy with work and family and eventually don't find time to call or meet friends as much as you might have when you were young.

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  • Franklin To Disburse Our Investment?

    You probably remember the Franklin fiasco that happened some 9 months ago. All those who invested in the six wound up funds have their investments stuck for the past 9 months. While the funds were wound up they were still receiving interest income from the papers that it holds. Some papers matured while some others pre-paid the bonds. So overall Franklin has Rs. 14,391 Cr in income so far according to it's latest report on Jan 29, 2021. Of this amount 4,621 Cr was used up to pay back its borrowings. The left over Rs. 9,770 Cr is available for disbursement. However it was unable to return the monies because of a court case in Supreme Court.

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