21.feb.2023
I have just deployed the new niravko.com website.
This is the new microblog format that I’m experimenting with.
I used to use Jekyll for my personal blog, but I’ve come to generally
hate the experience. Hopefully this new system of my own design will work better.
22.may.2021
The TMS website sucks so I made a captcha autofiller
In keeping with the spirit of the times, I’ve started playing in the Nepali
Stock Exchange playground. It is a strange, distorted world for someone like me
who’s used to the determinism of the computer realm. And so far, it has just
proved to be a more fashionable way of losing money. But it’s addictive!
If you’ve ever had to use Nepal Stock Exchange’s Trade Management System (often
called just TMS), you probably hate it. It is at best an
incompetently made software with many glaring issues, hosted over a woefully
underpowered infrastructure that cannot even handle the most predictable of
traffic spikes. On more than one occasion I’ve oversold or undersold shares
because it’s UI was out of sync with it’s database.
Read full post ...14.sep.2020
An Octopus and a Game Engine
I started making this thing as a one-day experiment: a fun little browser-game I
could craft before committing to the everlooming neverending self-judo
one-man-deathwrestle called exams. But it instead ended up spreading out sparse
as intense hour-long coding sessions throughout the Quarantine months.
This is how it turned out finally:
Read full post ...5.sep.2020
पर्खीर'न्छु
I keep on waiting
for a relief; she’ll come barefoot
Like the wind she’ll
blow out the candles I’ve lit
and like the wind she’ll
whisper in my ear
I’m waiting for that
whisper in my ear …
Because I’ve picked up this strange habit of forgetting to exist at times. True,
I wake up in flesh and blood, and I walk through the air as it parts for me. Yet
between my step out of one room and into the other, I find myself dissolving
into thin air: much like a whisper that never finds its ear.
Read full post ...9.jun.2020
Flappy Millennial: An HTML5 Canvas Game
Meet Flappy Millennial. He’s an average guy in his mid 20′s and the future looks
bleak for him. With the threats of climate change, mass-extinctions, rising
authoritarianism, economic depression, unprecedented wildfires and so much more
ever-looming, nihilism has become his background music.
But worry not. For he has an antidote—well, not so much an antidote as a
sedative. He has his phone! Come help this Flappy Millennial ignore reality
while he scrolls through Instagram or something. You should play this game not
because it’s good or anything, but simply so you too can pretend that things are
okay for a while.
Read full post ...25.mar.2020
A Wandering Reverie
On rainy days I’m listless
and wrapped in a blanket I stare
out into the eyes of the vacant sky
the puddles ripple and the wind
she dances by,
brushing my lips with a subtle kiss,
a secret mischief, a certain aftertaste
On rainy days I’m meaningless,
I sip my tea, and count the days
I contemplate the rainy haze
and when there is a sudden chill,
a wandering reverie knocks at my door
she knocks twice-oh, she knocks once more
Read full post ...9.feb.2020
Making मनसा: a Nepali Programming Language
I’ve been working on and off on a Nepali programming language with my friends
for the last few months. It’s called मनसा (IAST: mansā) and I think it’s ready
for an alpha release. If you’d like to try the language out, visit
mnsa.cc - the official website. You can play around with the
language right in the browser without having to download anything, not even a
Devanagari keyboard layout.
This post is a collection of random things I want to say about
Read full post ...7.feb.2020
An easier Nepali keyboard layout
As I wrote in my (excruciatingly long and boring) article on
the Nepali language and Unicode,
typing in Nepali doesn’t have to be a pain. You are absolutely free to make your
own keyboard layout to type in Nepali Unicode (which, by the way, has much
better fonts than Preeti and Sagarmatha). In fact, a few months ago, I made my
own keyboard layout because there’s no way I’m going to
Read full post ...8.dec.2019
Visualize C++ Data Structures using Graphviz and the DOT language
Data structures help structure and organize data effectively, and provide
several abstracted operations on the data. They are elegant and convenient, and
computer scientists love to use them. Implementing these data structures in the
computer require the programmer to flatten the structure into a one-dimensional
model using pointers or references because the memory is actually arranged as a
one-dimensional run of data elements.
It is often necessary to inspect the data s
Read full post ...4.nov.2019
How to Daydream
In the classroom, the teacher drones on and on in his maroon colored t-shirt
that doesn’t suit him. His empty vibrations ripple through out the room,
bouncing off the glass windows shut tight against the summer breeze, mixing with
the clickety-clack of the ceiling fan to create a subtle dissonance, and
stretching indefinitely and interminably in time and in space.
Read full post ...31.oct.2019
Anticipate Blue Light Filters When Designing For The Web
I just noticed that I can’t tell a link apart from normal text on this blog when
I have blue light filter enabled, especially when it’s nestled in a large body
of continuous text. There are a few reasons for this: I use a dark shade of blue
as the accent color of this blog, and I have chosen to remove underlines from
links because of
typographical reasons
(although, there is
[evidence](https://adrianroselli.com/2014/03/i-dont-care-what-google-
Read full post ...16.oct.2019
On the Nepali Language and Unicode
The Nepali language gets very little representation on the internet. Take, for
example, the Nepali Wikipedia which has about 33 thousand articles. The
Esperanto Wikipedia boasts 8 times that number (at around two hundred thousand
articles), which is kind of sad, because Esperanto is an artificial language
created by one person in the 19th century. It is spoken by a meager 2
million people worldwide. Compare this to the Nepali language, which has more
than 25 million
Read full post ...8.oct.2019
Sandboxing Unsafe Executables in Linux for an Online Compiler with Minijail
I wrote a toy compiler few months back. I wanted people to see it, so I put the
code up on Github. But as it turns out, not everyone is willing or capable of
going through the convoluted process of cloning the repository, compiling the
program, installing a Nepali language keyboard and learning an obscure
half-baked programming language just because some idiot put it on Github.
So, I started to write a web app to make the program easily
accessible. The web app lets user write code i
Read full post ...14.aug.2019
I can't stop thinking about her
So listen,
It’s 12:30 am. I spent the last hour tossing and turning in my bed, listening to
the scurrying feet of the cockroaches, trying to fall asleep. But sleep won’t
come. There isn’t a single thread of sleep in my body to lull me.
I can’t stop thinking about her. Any time I find myself slipping off, the image
of her smiling that dazzling smile appears out of nowhere and sets my heart
racing again. I remember the line I’d read in a poem by Neru
Read full post ...28.jun.2019
Lana Del dreams of Hetauda
The unfortunate truth is that she doesn’t care. Which is to say if at any
instant the earth blew up, the second between me registering the bang and
colliding on a boulder, I’d be thinking of her. But she wouldn’t.
Which is to say that I have kept her in that part of my heart where flowers
bloom and butterflies flutter all colorful and cheery. But she has kept me in
that forgotten corner where she keeps her small pencils and rusty sharpeners,
inside a neglected p
Read full post ...12.jun.2019
Animating WALL-E on a LED dot-matrix display with AVR
I was asked to animate a dot-matrix display for the robotics club recently. They
wanted something that said “Robotics Club” to hang over their door. We had some
old P10(1r) DMDs which I had worked on in the past to make a little scoreboard
for a robot football match. And, even though I am not very good at it, I really
love animating things. So I decided to give it a shot. I ended up writing an
animation software for the DMD in JavaScript which is unfortunately only as
function
Read full post ...6.apr.2019
Animating a Skeleton in Pixel Art
I animated this a while back. I remember it took me days. First I had to learn
how to actually draw the human skeleton (_The Atlas of Human Anatomy for the
Artist_ by Stephen Peck is an amazing resource). Then I had to distill the ideas
into the bare minimum required to get the picture across. Finally I drew and
animated the whole thing in piskel. The animation
process was quite tedious, at least in part because this was my first try.
Read full post ...5.mar.2019
A Downpour, then a Rainbow
It was a strange afternoon, no doubt. The sun grinned from the west, making
shadows in strange corners and bouncing off whitewashed walls, while the eastern
sky was dark and premonitory with a sinister turbulence. I was walking home
contemplating this contrast and hoping for a rainbow.
First an apprehensive drop hit my earlobe. I continued to walk. The next landed
on my cheek. The women coming out of the shop held out their palm and
lightheartedly exclaimed, “Hurry! It’s starting to rain!”. I continued to walk.
I felt a drop on my eyebrow, then on my nose, then two drops at once and before
I could register that I had lost count, it had started to rain.
Read full post ...14.feb.2019
Implementing the Huffman Compression Algorithm in C++
The final code is in GitHub
_here_.
Da Vinci is quoted saying, “Art is never finished, only abandoned”. I don’t see
why it should be any different for code. With that said, I’d like to declare my
latest project: an
implementation of the huffman’s algorithm
abandoned. It works well as it is, but it can be made a lot better.
Read full post ...4.feb.2019
A Drizzle in Pokhara
If you think being madly in love with your best friend’s girlfriend is
unfortunate, try sitting next to him during a Microprocessor lecture having to
listen to him describe the sex they had the day before. What’s more,
Microprocessor is one of the few subjects I actually enjoy. My friend is
normally a level-headed person who doesn’t speak much. But it seems that the
excitement of the first time is grand enough for him to break character.
Needless to say, I’m miserable.
Read full post ...27.jan.2019
Maybe those really were the good old days
This line popped in my head yesterday with no context whatsoever. Then I spent
the next many hours trying to remember where I’d read it. The answer came just
as suddenly. This line is from the book “Hear the Wind Sing” by Haruki Murakami.
I love how it evokes a sense of deep longing for the past. In many ways, I think
this line is the essence of the entire novel. Time erodes away the humdrum
reality from memories and leaves you with fragments of faded images. No
Read full post ...22.dec.2018
Love blossoms in Winter
I’ll continue to be lost in my incessant thoughts of you. In rainbow dreams. In
lively conversations. In the loneliest of winter afternoons, when the sun is
bright and the breeze cool, and the only flower that blooms is you, on your
first floor balcony eating tangerines.
Read full post ...20.dec.2018
On playing audio using Atmega microcontrollers
I recently made a circuit to demonstrate audio generation using an atmega32a
microcontroller. And even though mostly knew the concepts involved, I ended up
learning a lot.
For one, I learnt that matrix boards are very annoying when dealing with
microcontroller pins. I ended up really messing up the circuit’s backside
because I hadn’t planned beforehand (Did I mention that this is my first time
using a matrix board?).
Next, I learnt that CR2032 batteries don’t
Read full post ...22.dec.2018
Looking at MERN stack
Long ago, when I was a little kid, I found about the WAMP stack. It absolutely
thrilled me to think that I could own a piece of web and make it do whatever I
wanted. I was also a fan of 000webhost back then (then it got hacked). So in a
frenzy of rapid coding and loads of cussing (I was a beginner in both) I built
several web apps. Things like half baked social networking sites, blogging
websites and suchlike. One such invention I remember with particular fondness is
a s
Read full post ...