Misc

EV battery replacement fine print

More and more EVs (Electric Vehicles) are visible on the road as time is passing. On two-wheelers, it’s getting quite common. I don’t have sales stats but I can see as many as 1-2 scooters are electric out of 10 in the area. In cars, it’s still uncommon but one can see a few Tata Nexon EV and Toyota with green number plates when driving around in Delhi, besides many parked electric cars at terminal 3 in Delhi airport parking.

Understanding earthing/grounding

In Aug of this year, I posted about three-phase power. Subsequently, I had a discussion with a friend from Delhi about bonding neutral with earth/ground at the distribution panel. He has a commercial load of 20KW delivered via three phases and his electrician advised him to bond neutral with the ground. We both were curious whether it was technically correct or not. Taking a break from network engineering, here goes a post about it.

Understanding three phase power

Migration to Hugo

I have migrated this 14-year-old blog from a dynamic WordPress (based on WordPress) to a static website (based on Hugo). It was a pretty lengthy process even when I had scripts converting the WordPress XML export into markdown files.

Why a static site?

This gives a few advantages like:

  • Must faster rendering as all the pages are generated well in advance & pushed to the server
  • Better security (as the backend is not at all exposed unlike WordPress where backend admin portal was visible & behind an authenticated URL)
  • Easy to distribute and put behind CDN
  • Easy to type posts as now it’s just markdown

I haven’t finalised the hosting location for this newer site. For now, it’s on Google Cloud firebase but I am still just playing with the options. If I get some free time, I might just tweak my PowerDNS setup to start using GeoIP data for the request and serve the local server in a given country. That way I can host the website in India, Europe and US and let authoritative DNS steer the traffic. More on this later!

How technology loses out in companies...

Just came across this brilliant talk by my friend Bert Hubert. It covers so nicely about the mad rush to just outsource everything and how innovation is lost. While he mentioned names of EU telcos in examples, unfortunately situation isn’t that different in this side of world either. Operator in South Asia also very much suffer with this problem.

Slides of this presentation are here.

Automated SSL certificate management for private containers

Lately, I have been playing with many tools and as one gets into deploying those tools, SSL comes as a pain point. A large number of web-based tools I use are internal and on a private network. VPN (with OSPF running over FRR) takes care of connectivity but still, it’s good to have SSL on these machines. Non-HTTPs websites are getting more & more ugly with browsers and even things like password managers do not fill the passwords anymore on their own for non-HTTPS websites.