Category: General

Setting up my HomeServer – Part 1

Preamble

I had an old Intel NUC lying around that I always wanted to put it to good use. I had set it up as a home media server using Plex a couple years back, but streaming services and the newer content coupled with 100-300Mbps Fiber Internet connections have kind of made it redundant.

So, when finally a couple of weeks back when I wanted to switch from Twitter to Mastodon, I got the idea to just host an instance for myself. But Mastodon was in Ruby and I was at the time reading through the ActivityPub Protocol specifications to see if I can create an account using just a couple of scripts and a bunch of JSON files. I didn’t get far in the experiment, but someone ended up finding out Misskey. I setup a Misskey instance on Digital Ocean and set out to preparing the NUC for a home-server.

Hardware

The NUC I have has a Intel i3 processor with 4 cores each running at 2.1 GHz and has 16 GB of RAM and a 128 GB SSD. That’s the equivalent of an AWS EC2 Compute optimized c7g.2xlarge instance which costs about 0.289 USD/hour which comes to $200/month (approx).

Sidenote: I know its not apple to apple comparison between a hardware device and a cloud instance, but for my intended purposes, it totally works.

OS

I used to have this as an alternate desktop system, so it runs Ubuntu 22.04 Desktop Version with the default Gnome interface. I removed almost all the desktop software and left only the bare minimum necessary to run the OS and the desktop.

I thought about installing Ubuntu Server edition but couldn’t find a pendrive. So a stripped down desktop OS will have to do.

Software Deployment

Now this I am very particular about.

  1. I want to use Infrastructure as Code tools like Terraform as much as possible. This allows storing all the necessary configuration in a repo, so if and when my HDD fails, I can redeploy them again without having to do each and every one of them by hand again.
  2. I want to have some form of Web UI that can show the running services and resource consumption, if possible

First up is YUNOHost – It is an OS dedicated to self-hosting and supports a huge number of software and has a nice UI to manage them. But, the ones I want to host (Misskey) aren’t there and I don’t think storing config as code is an option here.

Next I looked at docker-compose – I am very familiar with it. The config can be stored as files and reused for redeployment. A lot of software are distributed with docker-compose files themselves. But, there is no web UI by default, and I also don’t want to run multiple copies of the same software.[1]

I have some experience with Kubernetes – There are lightweight alternatives like K3S, that might be suitable for a single node system. It fulfills the config-as-code and the Web UI requirements. But, the complexity is a bit daunting and the yaml can get a little unwieldy. And also everything needs to be in a container.

Finally I settled on Nomad – It seemed to have a fine balance.

  • It can handle docker containers, execute shell scripts, run Java programs..etc.,
  • The config is stored in JSON like HCL files, which feels better than the YAML
  • It has a web UI to see running services and resource utilization.

Footnotes

[1] – When software are distributed using docker-compose files, they tend to have all the necessary services defined in them. That usually means, along with the core software they also have other things like a database (Postgres/MariaDB), a web server (Nginx/Apache), a cache (Redis/Memcache)..etc., So, when multiple software are deployed with vendor supplied docker-compose files, it ends up running multiple copies of the same services using up unnecessary CPU and memory.

Huawei – HarmonyOS & LiteOS combo system

I recently bought a smart watch that will let me go for a run without 350 grams of electronics (my phone) jiggling in my pocket at every step. It is a Honor Magic Watch 2. It’s probably the cheap & beast option (costs about 12K) which supports onboard music storage. Now, I can go for a run with just watch and Bluetooth earphones 🙂

The LiteOS

Now the watch doesn’t support 3rd party apps like the pricier WearOS ones like the Samsung Galaxy Watches. How to make this thing smarter? Google lookup revealed that this thing is basically a clone of Huawei Watch 2 and they both run an operating system called LiteOS – which is a low power IoT OS developed by Huawei for its smart devices. The cool thing is, the OS is actually Open Source – https://github.com/LiteOS/LiteOS (BSD-3 Licensed).

While it might be OpenSource, it still doesn’t solve “making it smarter”.

  • The watch’s source code is not open source – just the OS
  • There is no SDK to develop apps, so there is no documented way to know it’s APIs

HarmonyOS

Unsurprisingly Huawei is aware of the problem and they have been developing more modern OS called HarmonyOS, which will allow them to overcome this. HarmonyOS is being positioned as an alternate to Android for cross device integration. It runs on everything from watches, phones, tablets, to TVs.

How did Huawei develop such an OS so fast? Turns out it is just a fork of Android that has been rebranded/code obfuscated… or whatever. Basically a copy.

The Battery

One of the good thing about the LiteOS watches is their battery life. They are rated for 7 – 4 days of usage. Having used it for a week now, I will say it is kind of true. Even with GPS + Bluetooth Music on for 40 mins a day, it can still go for 4 days.

Now if Google’s WearOS can only provide a battery life of 24 – 48 hours, how can HarmonyOS which is a clone be any better?

Enter the combo OS

Huawei has done what we Linux users have been doing for decades – dual booting OS. Well, not exactly, but close. So the newer watches like Huawei Watch 3, come with both LiteOS and HarmonyOS loaded onto them.

For “smarter” requirements, HarmonyOS takes over, and for essentials, the LiteOS subs in. It is kind of a smart solution. With this combo solution, Huawei seems to bringing the best of both worlds to their watches.

Sidenote

The Honor watch also has a Huawei designed custom chip called Kirin which runs the LiteOS. So they could be going Apple’s way in Chip + Kernel + OS level integration.

Goodbye! Brave

Final Update (moved old updates to bottom)

Brave supports Chrome extensions. The problem was with the author’s version of Brave; it was roughly a year old. Very old versions of Brave didn’t include service keys (necessary for interacting with Brave’s privacy-preserving proxy-service), whereas modern versions do (which is why you and I are able to install extensions without any issue)

Sampson from Brave

To explain – the place I have installed Brave hasn’t made available any newer versions of the browser since December 2020. So the keys it shipped with have become outdated. Since no-update was available, I didn’t see the usual orange “Update” button on the taskbar.

⚠️ NOTICE: Closing comments as they have moved from discussing the issue to attacking me for not being crypto friendly.

Original Post

I have been using the Brave Browser for almost 2 years I think. @logic introduced it to me at some point and it has been my primary browser both in Desktop and Mobile, home and office computers since then.

I got my first heads up when I came across a post on HackerNews about Brave misbehaving due to the “Brave backend servers” being unreachable. It struck me as strange when a comment on the Github ticket mentioned that Brave servers need to be up for Brave to function.

This is a big design NO-NO for something as essential as a web browser. But then, the inertia of it being a daily driver, its amazing ad-blocking and tracker protection, Chrome extension compatibility, and the fact I haven’t faced any such issues prevented me from doing any changes.

Today I was looking to install an extension to manage the browser tabs and I ran into this

Can’t install any extension

I thought maybe the extension was buggy and tried a couple more and the same result for everything. And searching for the error led me to this Github Ticket, which again describes that it is a “server-side” issue and it was fixed.

Well, it is not fixed for me. But that’s beside the point. This amount of dependency for a browser to have on “backend servers” is ridiculous. For software, as important as a browser, through which I have come to access almost everything digital for me is unacceptable. So with this post being the last thing I will do on Brave, I will bid goodbye.

Exploring options…

  1. An interesting alternate is Vivaldi – It is trying to do what Opera was doing pre-Chrome. It rolls email, calendar, RSS reader, browser all into one and also provides built-in ad-blocking.
  2. Open source Chrome aka Chromium – This used to be my primary dirver before. So I am thinking of going back to it with the usual extensions like Ghostery, AdBlock+..etc., Not sure how much things have changed there.

Update:

Not sure who posted this in HackerNews. Thanks for all the feedback.

  1. I will be trying Firefox. So many people have recommended it. It’s something I have forgotten over the last couple of years and before that it frequently caused issues and was only my secondary browser for testing.
  2. There is nothing sinister about the decision or PR at work. I tried installing extensions, it didn’t work, I uninstalled and made a note of why I am doing it. Interpretations are all yours.

Update 2:

This is for people suggesting I jumped the gun and probably didn’t take the time to understand the real problem. I am an Chrome extension author myself, I had just published a new version of it only 8 hours before and tested installation on Brave and Chrome. So, I understand the issue. And I have linked to GitHub issues where this has been discussed.

Basics of Investing – A conversation in Tamil

A couple of weeks back, I hosted a space on Investments where Mohanakrishnan covered the first steps on an investment journey. This covered things like:

  • Emergency Fund
  • Health Insurance
  • Asset allocation and..
  • diversification

The snippets from the conversation are listed here.

Stepping into 2021

This is probably the most remarkable New Year in my life. I am finally giving up 5 years of successful (personally) freelancing and consulting work and will be a full time employee of a company.

I am joining Times Internet group for a data driven journalism team they are setting up and Ritvvij thinks I can contribute a lot and I am excited about it as much as I can be given the circumstances. **turns and glares at 2020**

Some background

You see, I saw this TED talk of Sir Tim Berners Lee way back in 2010 and got excited about OpenStreetMap and have been making maps since then. If you follow me on Twitter, then you perhaps would agree that I have had some success with it.

During 2010 – 13, my dream job was to become a data visualisation developer for a newspaper. TED Talks on that subject were watched and rewatched so many times – I miss you Hans Rosling. Unfortunately I never actually become a data visualisation expert. It remained a hobby – notice the “Visualization” on the top menu.

… and now

I think what brought attention was me trying to make NER based data extraction a commercial tool. Ritvvij DMed me to provide feedback on it and a few weeks later DMed again to hire me for Times Internet.*

Suddenly, in the last week of the crappy year that 2020 has been, I found myself holding a role that I had dreamt of almost 10 years ago.

Tell me this is not a remarkable new year.

* Well, not exactly. I did go through a two day paid test where I did some work to prove that I am suitable and impressed at least one other person with my data visualisation attempts.

some thoughts

I am happy I get to build software for things that I do as a hobby and get paid for it. I think I can call myself lucky in that sense, even though I might have to find a new hobby, the old hobby becoming work and all.

I have spent hours agonising over the frameworks I am not confident about (hello Django, hey NodeJS), the new cool features I am missing out on (what version are you now on React? 16, 17, 99?), the amazing new paradigms that are opening up (nocode.tech), questioned the future as a Python developer and how what I know doesn’t fit into 100s of job descriptions that I skip across. It is remarkable that a job found me without asking any of that.

This is similar to the instance when 40 lines of JavaScript made it to The Next Web and Lifehacker .

This has brought in the realisation that, while I might not be a 10x engineer who can reverse a binary tree for breakfast, I certainly can create solutions that people find valuable / useful / interesting at some level.

And for that I am happy.

Happy New Year 2021 – Cheers to New Beginnings.

Rediscovering Web Development

Despite the rapid advancement of tools and specifications, web development has pretty much involved the same set of actions for a developer.

It all starts with an index.html file. An entire decade has been spent on just creating different ways to generate this file. From writing each line of HTML by hand to creating it on the fly using a shadow DOM we have come a long way.

Then comes the data that sits on these HTML files and followed by the interaction. The data flows from a data-source. Usually a database. The developer’s first task is to figure out a way to get this data from the database on the HTML. This is where a lot of action goes in. So much so that the quintessential phrase “Web Developer” has been replaced by “Frontend” and “Backend” developer.

But that’s all an old story, a thing of the past, a bygone era, remnants of an old civilization…. (looks dreamily into the void). Alight, I might be exaggerating a tiny bit, but I am in no way wrong.

The emergence of Low Code and No-Code Tools

As with everything these days, I stumbled into the world of low-code or no-code tools due to COVID-19. When India had only a handful of cases and people were trying to build a website to track the pandemic, I built a web app using Python Django which quickly became irrelevant and costly to run.

Instead, a live dashboard was built using Google Sheets as the database and API. A simple HTML page with some React code became the frontend. It was fascinating to see the innovative way in which the entire thing was working. At one point I saw 89 people actively editing the sheet, updating data, and 100,000 others consuming it on the dashboard. It changed the perception of web development completely.

Future of Web Development

Ever since I have been intrigued by this notion of building things on the web without the traditional idea of database-backend-frontend. While all of those things might exist, it is abstracted away in a way you are not actively working with a setting up VMs, database server, compiling code – that sort of nuts and bolts.

https://nocodelist.co/ is a website that lists tools that allow one to do that. It has tools for almost any task conceivable.

  • You want to draw the UI adjust colors and generate Angular code that you can just add business logic to – UI Bakery has you covered
  • You won’t convert your Google Sheets into a Database with a REST API – there are at least 8 apps for that
  • How about a drag and drop UI builder that you can directly hook into your database without a backend server? – AppSmith will let you do that

In each of the instances above, there is a lot of details that are abstracted away into the tool. Only the part which actually requires human decision making is left for the developers to decide.

Just as we moved from writing HTML by hand to building shadow DOMs using JavaScript, we might be moving from writing any JS to defining just the logic.

Conclusion

For a modern frontend developer, HTML is a second thought. The frameworks like React, Vue, Angular have created a way for us to think about the web in terms of components instead of HTML tags. We might soon be thinking about web apps in terms of user-flows while the frameworks will deal with the components.

You could even say, we already do and that I am late to realize it.

Data Science – First Impressions

After some thoughts on what to learn next, I enrolled myself into IBM Data Science Professional Certificate program. It is beginner level program to provide the necessary foundations for Data Science. I have completed 3 courses so far:

  1. What is Data Science?
  2. Tools for Data Science
  3. Data Science Methodology

I liked all the courses so far. Despite IBM Cloud tools’ big presence, the courses cover the concepts in a somewhat generic way.

This post is NOT a review of the course or certification.

This post is mostly about my first impressions on the domain of Data Science.

1. It’s not strictly a science

Data Science doesn’t have a clear definition. Everyone defines it the way they want. Murtaza Haider – author of Getting Started with Data Science puts it simply as

Data Science is what data scientists do

It is not statistics either, so I guess instead of inventing a new word for experimental statistics, data analysis, visualisation and model building, someone called it science.

2. Engineers will probably hate it

If there is one underlying principle that defines engineers, it is their love for certainty. Engineers strive to build systems governed by a set of rules that will produce predictable outcomes. Data Science is actually quite the other way around, you start with a question and move towards an answer which could be anything, valid or invalid. It is a frustrating experience to go the full way without knowing where. Sure, we get some hints here and there throughout the process. If one has the “journey is more important than destination” attitude, it is a good ride. But if you yearn for certainty or get frustrated mid way through the process, you will probably end up torturing the data to confess the way you want it to.

3. The Jargon

It is a field of jargon. Everything has a specific word/phrase. If you open the data in excel and see it, you will probably call it inspecting the data. As a data scientist, you do the same with a couple of lines of Python Code on a Jupyter Notebook and call it “Exploratory Data Analysis” or EDA, if you change value or format them to a specific standard is “Data Manipulation” or DML (did that thing even need a 3 letter acronym?). If you query some data, do some manipulations, it is a Extract-Transform-Load or ETL pipeline.

While some of them are valid terminologies (like ETL) which exist to communicate effectively, some of them are just marketing jargon which exists to make stuff seem bigger than they are.

4. The Ah..ha moments

This is the best thing about Data Science according to me. It is those moments when your perception is altered by the data or when the output is altered by the perception. Engineering by its nature is application of established principles, we get our ah..ha moments when we learn a new concept invented by a scientist. But in data science the data can produce such moments by their mere nature of being exploratory in nature. Since we start with a question and follow the data to the answer, it usually results in a light bulb moment.

5. Practicality

This is the area which is most conflicting for me. Things like “Data is the new oil” has been said for close to a decade now and the general consensus seems to be that more data the better. But both my personal experience as a teacher and the case study about a health insurance provider in the course have made me wary of the practicality of this approach. I can write about my personal experience as anecdotal evidence. But I think I would give a more data oriented reason (the post being about data science and all).

Explosion of healthcare administrators in the US

While studying the data science methodology, it becomes acutely clear how this happened. I am not saying data science is the root cause of the problem, but it is definitely a contributing factor as no model built by any data scientist can be static. It is iterative process which keeps cycle of data collection modelling and output going. So when overdone, it feels more of a problem than a solution.

6. The machines are coming for the data scientists

The hype for data scientists went mainstream, I think with the McKinsey report of 2018 saying there will be a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 data professionals in US alone. Followed by data scientists becoming the highest paid in technical jobs. Going by IBM tools that I have used during the course, I don’t think the hype will age well.

Money is in automation – an estimated 70 to 90% time is spent by data scientists in collecting and preparing the data for the analysis. If there is anything that computers were invented for, it is to automate such mundane processes. Even if a company is saving 50% of that time, it is great cost saving. So automation tools will cut down the work and thus the demand for data scientists.

Side Note: You can create a free account at cloud.ibm.com and checkout their tools to get an idea of the direction and sophistication of the tools that are being developed.

Uncertainty of the outcome – as mentioned earlier, not all organisations will gain from having a data science team. Apart from the data, a variety of things like – organisation size, scope for data driven decision making and the talent of the data science team all impact the outcome of the exercise. Combined with off the shelf offerings from IT companies, data scientist’s role might shrink to just an computer operator in some cases.

No, I am not saying data scientists will become obsolete. Just that it is not going to live up to the hype.

Before you throw brick bats

I have completed only 3 of 9 courses in the program. Once I complete another 3 courses, I think I will have a better understanding of things and will revisit the topic again.

Thinking about the next step as a Python Developer

Disclaimer: The analysis is not a bullet proof analysis. Despite writing code, and throwing around numbers, this might still be a random observation. Stack Overflow Job board is a not an indicator of everything. So take everything with a pinch of salt.

Python or Full Stack?

As someone who identifies as a Python Developer and uses Python as the primary language for programming, thinking about what to learn next is confusing. I primarily do “Full Stack development”, that is write backend API in Python Flask/Django and use modern JS (React/Vue) for the frontend. But recently I am seeing a disconnect between the idea of “Python Developer” and “Full Stack Developer” in the job postings. Full Stack development seems to be defined more or less synonymous to JS development. Python Job postings on the other hand are more closer to dev ops, systems development, data analytics and machine learning.

A simple experiment

So, I devised a simple experiment to verify what I seeing is in fact something of a trend and not a random observation. Look at the job postings on Stack Overflow for skill demand and use that as an indicator.

  • Go to Stack Overflow Jobs
  • Set the “Tech you like” to node.js – 139
  • Set the “Tech you like” to django + flask – 61
  • Set the “Tech you like” to python and “Tech you don’t like” to django+flask – 266

huh, what?

Web Development in NodeJS is more in demand than Web Development in Python and Python’s general purpose demand is way more higher than Python Web Development.

For the sake of simplicity, I have considered Django + Flask as the entire Python Web development.

Okay, so my observations and confusion about “Full Stack Development” becoming more and more Node.js development is in fact valid and I wasn’t imagining it.

What’s up with Python?

Now I was intrigued with finding out what’s happening to Python. What are those 266 other listings? Where is the demand for Python coming from? Also, I am getting a little worried about continuing as a Full Stack (Python) Developer. To get a better idea of the situation, I downloaded the RSS Feed of the Job postings for Python + NodeJS, extracted the categories for each posting and created a map of the 30 most mentioned categories.

Selection_022

Each Job posting is a row with the top 30 categories as columns. If a job positing falls under a category, it is marked 1, otherwise zero. Then I created a heatmap of the correlation matrix of the table, which will tell me how the technologies are related to each other.

heatmap

Anything that has a positive correlation has the value printed in green. Armed with this data, we can make a few observations:

  1. REST and API are not correlated to Python, but to NodeJS
  2. Event Flask and Django are not correlated to REST API
  3. Python is associated with system languages like C, C++, and Java more than web technologies.
  4. Flask is associated with more technologies than Django. Especially to Micro-Services technologies like Docker and Kubernetes.

Predictions

  1. General purpose Python web development will probably go the way of Ruby-on-Rails.
  2. Python Web development’s growth will increasingly come from micro-services and API systems which will sit on top of Machine Learning / AI based services.
  3. PHP, .Net, Java all have their own full-stack definitions and job postings, but I think NodeJS will continue dominate this term.

Final Thoughts

Identifying the next thing to learn for a Python Developer doing Full Stack Development means identifying the area of focus. Taking the time to retool in Node.JS might be as good a choice as learning micro services architecture with a bit of DevOps or learning Data Science and ML. Picking a path and moving ahead is looking more of a necessity at this point.

And I am left wondering which path to choose.

Things I Learnt in Investing this Year – 2019

1. Credit Card

So far…

When @_sodabottle taught me the basics of personal finance, one thing he said was, “Credit Card and EMI are like the swear words of financial dictionary. We should be at least 10 miles away from where those words are uttered”. I think the advice is one of the best for a person who is about to get his first salary and learning about saving. It inculcated a mentality where I always saved the money required to buying anything.

What changed..

.. this year, is that, I was finding it hard to balance the irregularity of a freelancer’s income and the regularity of monthly bills. The transfers would get delayed anywhere between 3 day to 3 weeks. Credit cards solved that for me by giving interest free credit for upto 30 days. I spend on the credit card, takeout cash on the Debit card. There is always enough buffer in the bank account so I don’t stress about not having sufficient balance for my SIP payments.

What I learnt? Never do cash withdrawals with Credit Card as interest calculation starts from the day you withdraw cash. 30 day interest free credit is only for payments. So,

Payments – Credit Card
Cash – Debit Card

Another bonus of having credit card for payments is that, it shows a healthy bank statement, comes in handy when applying for VISAs to travel abroad.

2. Interest Rates & Gilt Mutual Funds

One of my biggest learning this year was how interest rates, bonds and yields work. I am happy that I converted it into actionable investment strategy.

Disclaimer: Don’t take this as investment advice. I won’t be responsible for unsatisfactory results. I am keeping things vague purposefully so you will read, understand and apply.

Basics

Gilt Mutual Funds are mutual funds that buy Government Bonds with the money we put in them. Govt bonds are the safest way to invest money because governments don’t default that easily (except in rare cases, look up Sovereign Default, it is an interesting topic). But Gilt funds are not. This is because Bonds are traded. So the value of the bond might go up or down based on a lot of things. This is usually tracked by a value called GSec 10 Yr Bond Yield. When the yield is high the price of the bonds are low and vice versa.

gilt_fund_graph

What I learnt…

Because of this the value of the bond might go up or down. If you invest during the wrong time you might get less than what you put in. So, when is the right time?

My thumb rule is – invest when 10 Yr GSec yields spike more than Bank Deposit rates.

I did a simple graph based analysis in this post Investing in GILT funds
. Doesn’t explain much, but if you know what are yields, repo rates and read the comments on the graphs you will get an idea of how to time your investment.

3. Liquid Funds

In 2018 I moved from Bank Deposits to Liquid Funds. Liquid funds use the money we give in short term debt bonds called “commercial papers”, which is a technical name for bonds which mature in 3 months – 6 months..etc,. Maturity is basically the borrower paying back the sum borrowed with interest. Due to their short term nature they are usually very safe and there is almost never at risk of negative returns.

liquid_fund_graph

Notice how the returns is almost a straight line going up.

What I learnt..

The returns vary in relation to Repo Rates. While I get a constant rate in a bank deposit, this allows me to get better rates when repo rates raise. Of course there will be times when it under performs as well.
liquid_fund_performance

Despite a small risk of getting poorer returns than fixed deposit why I prefer Liquid funds:

  1. The risk is actually very small. Most times the returns are similar to bank deposits
  2. There is no maturity period involved. What that means is I get whatever interest has accumulated on the day of withdrawal, unlike a fixed deposit where I have to forgo the interest if I break the FD before maturity.
  3. I have the flexibility deposit any amount and withdraw any amount at any time. Setup an SIP, this becomes a Recurring Deposit.
  4. If I happen to never need this fund and it sits for more than 3 years, then I get indexation benefit. That means, I pay tax on not for the full interest, but for the interest earned after adjusting for inflation.
  5. There is no TDS involved as in bank deposits. And Tax calculation itself is advantageous when doing partial withdrawals as everything is measured in units.
    See this post on how this calculation works.
  6. Some Liquid funds offer same day withdrawal upto 50,000 and full withdrawal in 24 hours. Comes real handy as an emergency fund. So there is never this worry of putting in redemption request and waiting.

I have kind of taken advantage of Liquid Funds to the fullest this year and would continue to use it.

4. Corporate Bonds & Funds

While I am big fan of Liquid funds, the Corporate Bond Funds is another debt fund that which focuses on corporate bonds. One of my friend recommended that I look at Short Term or Ultra Short term Corporate bond fund, because they gave better returns than a Liquid Fund with a slightly more risk.

corporate_fund_graph.png

I was evaluating if I should opt for this instead of Liquid Funds this year. Instead ILFS, DHFL ans Zee all defaulted on their debt sending multiple Debt funds down to dizzying depths – upto 50% down on a single day. This has scared the crap out of me. I have decided to revisit this category sometime later.

Buying bonds directly

Buying Corporate bonds which give 9, 10 even 11% interests have been an enticing thought for a while. But after the default episode and evaluating the amount of money I want to invest in a debt fund, I have decided against this completely.

  1. Buying Bonds directly only increases the overhead in terms of accounting for taxes.
  2. You always have to buy them in lots. So if you are a little short or in excess it is irritating.
  3. Buying bonds of a single company increases risk. Most funds only lost 5-10% when the defaults happened. If I had owned a bond instead of bond fund, it might be a complete 100%.

Maybe I will think about corporates bonds when I am dealing in Crores.

5. Equity Funds

5.1 ELSS Fund Consolidation

ELSS funds require the shortest lock-in period of all 80C Deductible investments. Salaried people might have other avenues to for taking advantage of the 1.5 Lakh deduction, for a freelancer, I find ELSS the best option.
In 2016, I setup SIPs to 3 Mutual Funds because I wasn’t sure which one was better. So I went to MoneyControl.com sorted by returns for 1YR, 3YR and 5YR, and chose 3 names that came consistently in the top 10. This year, I compared the returns and cancelled the poorly performing 2 and setup another SIP to the better performing one for the combined amount.

Good Performance – Axis Long Term Equity
Poor Performance – ICICI Pru Long Term & Franklin Templeton Tax Saver

Note: FreeFinCal says there is no real reason to use ELSS, because there are other ways in which you could deal with 80C deductions. Take a look

5.2 Index Funds

I wanted to invest in something other than ELSS and on my search to find a good Large Cap Equity Fund ended up with this in April.

passive

Around April 2019, all the top Large cap funds were Index Funds. Passive Investing is a big theme in US. As more and more managers struggle to beat the Benchmark indices it becomes a game of luck to invest in the right fund. My personal experience with ELSS is proof to that. Despite all three funds being in the top 10 of ELSS category 3 years ago, now only one remains there. This convinced me to setup SIPs in Nifty 50 Index Fund and in Nifty Next 50 Index Funds.

  1. Index funds despite being called as passive funds are actually actively managed in a way. The growing companies get added, the laggards are removed via Index Rebalancing twice every year.
  2. Index funds kind of puts the investing on an auto pilot. I don’t have to take stock of the returns and see if I am doing better than the Index and adjust.
  3. Point 2 is important because, if an active fund underperforms after 1 year, I have to redeem the units and switch it to a new fund. This would mean, I have to pay taxes on the gains.

Having said that, I think there are really good active funds out there focusing on a variety of themes, company sizes and industries which have been producing a lot more than the Index. It requires a bit of hunting and follow ups once every year.

6. Timing Investments

After I decided to invest in Index Funds, I started wondering if there is something that I can do optimise the timing of my purchases and increase the returns via Index ETFs. I did some analysis to use 50 Day Simple Moving Average to buy lower than average price … long story short, “Just do SIP”.

Here is the full Analysis: Investment Strategy: SIP vs SMA 50

If you are interested in other such optimisation strategies see this page on StockViz. Invariably every one of those will hold up SIP as the best strategy.

7. Annuity Plans by Insurance Companies

A friend got sucked into an Annuity plan in 2018 by SBI Life and another one was about to be last month by HDFC Life, hopefully the reader doesn’t.

Annuity plans are the ones which have a description something like this – Invest X amount with us for 5 – 10 years. We will then give back X for double the period 10-20 years or 2X for the same amount of years. There is usually a cool of period involved after the investment period when neither you pay the insurance company, nor they pay you. It also includes accidental Death cover.

Whenever some approaches you with such an investment plan, do one thing, run. I will actually go one step further:

Whenever an insurance company offers you an investment plan – Run

Here are the reasons why:

  1. If you apply the run of 72 and calculate the interest rate based on the annuity starting period, or do a IRR calculation using an Excel Sheet you will find that the interest rate they are offering you is less than Bank FD Rates. I am yet to see one annuity plan which does better than bank FD.
  2. The reason they are able to double the premium for the same number of years or the premium for double the number of years you invested is because your money would have doubled by the time they start paying back at 6% interest rate. (72/12 yrs = 6%) Almost all annuity plans will have 11-12 years as the cutoff after which they start paying you back.
  3. They gloss over the fact that 4.5% the first year and 2.5% every year will have to be paid extra as GST on the premiums. If you include that, the annuity returns wouldn’t even come to 6%.
  4. You can get better returns by buying Govt of India Bond at 7.4% or 6.9%
  5. You can do better by investing the money yourself in a Liquid Fund for the same number of years. You will have a bigger corpus including what would otherwise go as GST.
  6. If you stop anytime in the middle of the agreed period, you only get back what they call as surrender value which is I have see between 10-80% what you have invested. Yeah. They won’t even give your money back, forget doubling.
  7. The Life insurance they include is just a cover to sell this product and the insured amount won’t matter much and is usually a multiple of your premium. If you want life insurance, get a term insurance separately for a multiple of your annual salary, so your family’s requirement is actually taken care of.
  8. If you are really thinking in terms of 10-15 years, I think allocating a portion to Equity Fund is a smarter thing to do instead of falling for assured returns.
  9. If they claim returns are tax free, kindly remember, paying 40% tax on 12% gains still gives you 7.2% gains which is higher than 6% tax free.

Moving back from Mac to Windows + Linux

Content Warning: Rant ahead

As my Macbook Air is becoming more and more restrictive to the things I could do, due to low memory of 4 GB and 128GB SSD, I decided to buy a new laptop with better specifications. After some filtering and comparison on Flipkart and Amazon, I finally settled on Lenovo S540 14″ with 8 GB RAM and 1TB SSD. It also came fitted with a 2GB Graphics card which I think will help working with ML algorithms easier. While the hardware is great for my requirement, the software is a complete let down.

Issue 1: Windows Font Rendering is Crap

The screen is a full HD 1920×1080 display in 14 inches. One would think the display would try to match that of the display of my Macbook Air (1440×900), but nope. Not in a million chance.

The system recommends a scaling of 150% for good results, anything below that the system font Calibri starts breaking down and there seems to be no anti-aliasing effect.

There are a couple of solutions to this problem, like setting the scaling to 100% and increasing the font size separately. This works to a certain degree, but doesn’t achieve the smoothness of 150% scale.

Now I have an interface that seems to be adjusted for my Grandma’s failing eye sight.

Issue 2: Microsoft loves Linux – My Feet

I think the whole MS loves Linux non-sense started almost the same time I bought a Macbook. So I never experienced what it meant. I now get what it meant, they wanted to sell Linux machines on their Azure cloud and that’s about it. Whatever contributions they must have done, should have centered around that goal. Because installing Linux in a Windows 10 machine is more difficult now than it was 5-8 years ago. Back then, it was just a matter of knowing how to partition disks and ability to choose the boot disk. Now I had to:

  • Create the bootable disk in a specific format for UEFI compatibility
  • Run a command to change the Storage access method from RST to ACHPI
  • Go into BIOS and disable Secure Boot, and change the ACHPI
  • Boot into Safe Mode so that the disk can work with changed storage
  • Finally boot into install disk and install.

What should have taken me 15-30 minutes took me 2 and a half hours.

Issue 3: Windows 10 is a Data Collection Pipeline

I am really horrified at the number of buttons that I had to turn off during the setup process and I still find as I use the system.

Issue 4: Application Management in Windows

Windows Store is a disaster, I don’t know what is installed in my system and what isn’t. There are tiles for games that aren’t installed and there is no way to differentiate between a tile of an installed application and a tile of a shortcut for an application that is recommended for install.

Issue 5: Why are tiles in Start Menu?

With 150% scale, it always feels like I am seeing only a part of the actual screen when the tiles come up. I don’t understand how MSFT understood that they should go back to the start menu but decided they will keep the tiles nonetheless. Either tile or don’t, consistency please, the mashup is nuisance and everybody should just learn to live with it.

Issue 6: Application Management in Ubuntu

So everybody has been bit by the centralised application distribution model. But tell me which serious software actually gets published? At least none of the ones I seem to use, even in the Mac OS ecosystem which started the stores concept. MS Office, Adobe Creative Suite, IDEs like PyCharm, Android Studio, Eclipse, Browsers… everything is package download from vendor sites. But that hasn’t stopped Canonical from creating Snap store. Now I seriously don’t know why there is a software centre and also a Snap Store and there is good old apt package manager.

The Good Bits in Linux

It’s been 24 hours of hell with the new system. Yet, not everything is bad.

  • Once up and running, I haven’t encountered Wifi or Bluetooth driver issues.
  • The Kernel seem to be pretty stable.
  • Grub has themes and OS selection is stylish.
  • Memory usage is pretty low
  • Font rendering and antialiasing is spot on. I think I just need some time to get used to 16:10 to 16:9 aspect ratio
  • The drivers for the Graphics card are in place
  • Tap to click and Natural Scrolling keep my UX is same across both my machines

Conclusion

After a frustrating 24 hours of the setting up the system. I have completely given up on Windows. As ususal Linux will be my primary OS. Will turn to Windows for recording tutorial videos or when collaboration required MS Office, or maybe games. If money wasn’t an issue, I don’t think I would have moved from Mac to PC at all. Things like 3 finger application switching, desktop switching are still etched in me. So, personally I prefer

  1. MacOS
  2. Ubuntu
  3. Windows… I would try my best not to boot this thing.