CS+Ling Webring 2026-06-07T04:11:25.107960+00:00 https://csplusling.github.io/ CS+Ling Webring Repair, Revival https://sriya-g.github.io/blog/repair-revival/ 2026-04-27T00:00:00+00:00 Almost two years ago, I was in the market for a new MP3 player after I stopped using Spotify. I wanted a device separate from my phone to listen to music on; VLC was fine, but I thought not having music access 24/7 would make me appreciate it more. Also, I'm clumsy and tend to accidentally fast forward/skip songs when I use touchscreen controls, so I wanted something with physical buttons.

With my budget, I could afford one of the various generic players sold on Amazon. The UI looked uninspiring, and I was concerned about build quality, but I could afford them and they looked portable. If I remember correctly, prices for the most popular models tended to be around $30-40.

Around this time, I also watched a few videos of iPod repairs, which reminded me that we had a gen 4 iPod sitting in a junk drawer at home for over a decade. Over the years, I tried to charge it a few times, but it showed an error screen because of the dead hard drive. In my most recent attempt, it didn't turn on at all because the battery was completely dead. For about $60, I could buy a new battery, CF to IDE board and SD to CF converter to replace the old drive and battery, as well as the tools to open up the iPod.

(If you want to flash mod your iPod, 1. make sure to read relevant info about your iPod model!!!! and 2. skip the cheap SD to CF converters and just buy the iFlash SD to CF converter or another one that is known to work consistently. None of the tips I found online could make the cheap one I bought work, so I ended up wasting $10. In fact, you may be better off just buying the dedicated iFlash converter board if one exists for your iPod model.)

Yes, I spent $20ish extra on parts and tools than I would if I bought a new MP3 player, but the iPod I have originally cost hundreds of dollars and has a level of quality and polish that isn't present in a $30 generic player. Not to mention it's repairable and (especially if you have a 5th gen or newer iPod Classic) there are plenty of parts and even upgrades available. I also kept this iPod out of a landfill, which I would value at least $10.

It's also not a "scary" repair at all. If all you're replacing is storage and battery, you don't need a soldering iron or even a screwdriver, just a pry tool to open the back. I had zero previous experience repairing anything and after watching a video on opening the iPod (and referring to iFixit when needed) I was basically all good.

Why bring any of this up?

I've seen a lot of articles recently about people my age embracing old technology like CDs, vinyl records, Walkmans, and iPods, in addition to non-music technology like retro game consoles, film, instant, and digital cameras, and even flip phones.

As someone who's been interested in these things for years, it's nice to see them catch on so I have more people to talk to. I wanted to share my experience because I hope people who are interested in old technology try to keep it out of the landfill.

If you're interested in CD players and want a portable player, try going to a thrift store and looking for used ones before you buy a brand new one. If you own some broken retrotech at home, why not try to repair it before buying a new one? At worst, you'll learn some things before buying the new one. Not only will it be more "authentic" to the time period (if you care about that; it's totally fine if you don't!) but keeping these old things in use keeps them out of the trash.

]]> Feed readers are awesome! https://sriya-g.github.io/blog/feed-readers-are-awesome/ 2026-03-22T00:00:00+00:00 RSS/Atom* feeds may seem like a relic of the past, but they're still relevant as a way to glean useful and enjoyable content from an increasingly insincere Internet. I have a feed that I recommend using if you want to see my blog posts.

Plenty of people have written about feeds, but I wanted to put down my personal reasons on why I like them.

(*sidenote: RSS and Atom are news feed formats. Most feed readers will support both.)

Customizable

You choose your sources. Only your favorite news outlets with high quality reporting, not the slop that goes viral on social media. Your favorite blogs that no longer get drowned out by the louder parts of the internet. Even your favorite social media creators, divorced from the forces of that social media's algorithms, can be found (Not all social media websites have feeds, but some do).

Crafting your feed list is very intentional. What do you enjoy seeing?

Sidenote: Learning intentional browsing

My generation grew up with algorithmic social media. The algorithms of most popular services push the most "engaging" content to the top regardless of whether you follow them, unlike chronological timelines of the past that were typically limited to who you followed, or the even older Internet where you actively had to seek out websites and blogs.

One day, you decide to leave these services (or significantly decrease their use) and go for an alternative. But you're stuck: unlike the past services you used that pushed the most engaging content to you automatically, this new service asks you who you want to follow, and only shows you that content. But what if you don't know who to follow, or what you want, because you've never had to think about it? How can you find people to follow without the algorithm telling you who to follow? The content in your new "feed" is so boring!

Switching to a feed reader instead of reading news updates on social media is similar. How can you find new content that gives you the same high as scrolling your personalized recommendations?

I have two pieces of advice. First of all, most of that "high" comes from seeing engagement from other people (real or fake). I needed to taper it down, learn to just enjoy the content itself instead of the engagement and hype around it. Stop reading comments sections! Block them with a web extension if you have to.

Secondly, find out if your favorite news outlets have RSS/Atom feeds, and look at blog aggregators to find new blogs you're interested in.

List of blog aggregators that might be useful

Can be local

You can subscribe to feeds locally, on your computer (with some of the clients I listed below.) Of course, this means that if your computer is destroyed or lost, you lose access to your feeds, their read status, articles you marked as "saved" in your feed reader, etc. But it also means you don't need to rely on having access to the feed reader service's servers, which also means you won't be paying a subscription fee to save your feed information to said servers (or relying on the goodness of their hearts to keep providing the service for free.)

If you choose this path, make sure to save your feed list somewhere safe!

Everything you want to see

A RSS/Atom feed for a source shows you their posts, in chronological order. Depending on the website, they may have a feed for all content, or separate feeds for different subjects, or both, so you can pick and choose what you're interested in.

If you're a publisher with an RSS feed, you don't need to worry about your fans missing out on your content because it didn't go viral and reach the top of their social media feed. If you're a fan of a blog or news outlet that uses their RSS Feed, you don't have to worry about missing out on new content because it didn't go viral, the newsletter got buried in your email, etc. You see it in your feed reader.

If you want, you can see updates from your favorite news sources, blogs, and even some social media in one place.

Many options

Want to read your feeds on an online service you log in to? There are options for you!

Want to read your feeds locally with a GUI? There are options for you!

Want to read your feeds locally in the terminal? There are options for you!

Want to read your feeds on your e-reader? In fact, there are options for you!

Want to fetch feed updates and store them on your server, then read them in a local terminal client, with two-way sync? Believe it or not, you have options! (This is what I do)

Having so many options can be somewhat overwhelming when you're used to only having whatever your proprietary social media feed supported, but it just means you have plenty of feature choice.

No more infinite scroll

The infinite scroll really gets me sometimes. I have to abstain entirely from browsing certain websites for fun, because I know I won't be able to stop.

But sometimes, I still want updates from my favorite creators who are on these websites. In some cases, these websites have RSS/Atom feeds for specific accounts that I can use to only see new content from those people. These feeds can be somewhat hidden; RSS Lookup can help.

For example, I use the hidden YouTube channel feeds (found with RSS Lookup) to follow my favorite YouTube channels. I get an update in my feed reader when they post a new video, and I use Unhook to hide literally every other UI element so I can't click onto another video and keep watching endlessly. I even hide the video information so I'm not tempted to click on the channel and watch old videos. I still get to enjoy my favorite content, but on my terms. modified youtube UI only showing video What my YouTube UI looks like now. Notice how there is nothing to look at or click on except the video I'm watching (Dankpods). Once the video I intended on watching is done, I just leave.

With newsfeeds and a feed reader, this principle can apply to the entire Internet. Check your reader, read what's new, then move on.

]]> Mouse Fan Tries Tiling WM https://sriya-g.github.io/blog/mouse-fan-tries-tiling-wm/ 2026-02-26T00:00:00+00:00 Why

For fun :)

Real answer: I use my laptop too much. I wanted to make it harder for me to get distracted by switching to new keybinds, etc, so I didn't have the muscle memory to open the most distracting apps anymore.

First Impressions

I chose Sway. I was a bit overwhelmed by the new keybinds at first (I didn't look at them before I started) so I found a cheat sheet online and saved it so I could refer to it at any time.

I liked the ease of switching workspaces and wmenu. I didn't like the borders but couldn't figure out how to turn them off. Opening applications felt more intentional because I had to type their names in instead of just clicking on them. I use multiple terminal windows a lot, and opening new terminals and seeing them side by side is nice.

More setup I did

  • Changing my wallpaper :)
  • Finally removing borders (added a line of config to my Sway config file)
  • Spending about an hour trying to figure out how to autoconnect to my home wifi
  • Replacing wmenu with Rofi as my default launcher so I could actually see all of my programs
  • Replacing the default bar with Waybar, then finding a config I liked
  • Increasing my touchpad sensitivity so I could move my mouse faster
  • Configuring Sway to assume my laptop was to the left of my monitor, not the right

Final results!

I was expecting the keybinds to be harder to remember, but the ones I use the most (opening Rofi, opening terminal, switching workspaces, exiting programs) really stuck in my brain. For the other keybinds, I still have to refer to my cheat sheet sometimes.

KDE Plasma really takes care of a lot of things for you. I had to reconfigure my wifi connections, etc through my terminal for the first time (though I probably could have used KDE System Settings, which I still have access to, I couldn't open it through wmenu and I didn't set up Rofi yet). It felt like starting to use Linux all over again. The troubleshooting process was fun though.

The default Sway config file is nicely structured and provides a lot of examples, which helped me figure out where to put my lines of config. Because the config is a single file, it'll hopefully be easy for me to port it to my next laptop or PC.

My favorite thing about Sway is probably being able to close programs with a key combo. It's very satisfying. Also, having a browser open to view instructions and a terminal command right next to it is useful. No more dragging my cursor down to the bottom of my screen to switch programs.

There's probably more I can configure (I want my custom cursor back!) but I'm happy with what I have right now.

]]> Cool stuff (ongoing) https://sriya-g.github.io/blog/cool-stuff-ongoing/ 2026-02-16T00:00:00+00:00 Blog Posts

Videos

]]> Still buying CDs in 2026 https://sriya-g.github.io/blog/still-buying-cds-in-2026/ 2026-02-10T00:00:00+00:00 I used to use Spotify. I was on the Free plan, so I could only listen to music on shuffle, and I had a limited number of skips each hour. It basically turned my music listening experience into a slot machine, pulling the lever six times to see if I'd get one of the songs I wanted from each playlist. At some point, I also noticed that playlist shuffle song sequences would repeat, with some songs always coming after other songs in a predictable way. Others have had this issue too. Even if it was a deliberate design choice, I disagree with it. If shuffle isn't truly random, why label it as shuffle in the first place? I'm sure I would have had a far better experience if I paid for Spotify Premium, but as a high school student with no income, it wasn't possible for me at the time.

Shortly after I graduated high school, I deleted my Spotify account and decided to start collecting CDs. I wanted to "own" my music, and I personally prefer buying CDs to buying digital albums. I can pick up a CD, read the booklet it (usually) comes with, and use it. It's like functional merch for my favorite artists, and even brand new, it's usually around the same price or only slightly more expensive than the digital version of the album. If you buy the CD used, it might even be cheaper. I've bought CDs for literally 25 cents that I ended up enjoying. I recommend checking library sales, garage sales, thrift stores, and record stores.

I usually listen to albums that my friends recommended on services like YouTube (Music) and Bandcamp, track my listens with Last.fm, and then buy the CDs of the albums I listened to the most so I could back them up and listen to them in full quality, offline, with no ads. For me, buying a CD motivates me to give the whole album a try, not just the best-known tracks. I sometimes discovered that I liked almost every song on albums I only listened to two or three tracks of on Spotify. Other times, I realized that an album that didn't have many songs I liked when listening to individual songs actually sounded great when it was listened to all together.

Of course, buying CDs means I spend money anyway. As of right now, base Spotify Premium is $13 per month (I could get a student discount, but if I paid for Premium, I would probably end up doing it long term). The CDs I buy new are usually around $10-12 each, so instead of listening to any of the millions of songs available on Spotify's catalogs, I get to add about 10 new songs to my "catalog" per month. This seems like a bad deal, but I tend to listen to the same albums over and over again, so it's not like I would take advantage of the whole Spotify catalog anyway. Also, if the price increased so much I was no longer willing to pay it, features I care about were moved to higher paid tiers, or I just decided to stop using Spotify, I would have nothing to show for the money I'd spent over the years.

What about music discovery?

It's true that I discovered some of my current favorite artists through Spotify recommendations and playlists. But more often than not, I would only listen to the few songs that got recommended to me, not the rest of the artist's discography. Since my free plan had limited skips and played plenty of ads, I usually just tried to listen to my favorite songs before I ran out of skips or the ads got too annoying. I didn't want to waste skips or waste time listening to ads just to hear a song that I ended up not liking.

I bought my first CD ("I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got" by Sinéad O'Connor) at a used item sale right before my first semester began. I recognized the artist's name, and the CD only cost a dollar, so I decided to take a chance on the album and bought it. I didn't have a CD player at my dorm yet, so I looked up the album online. I ended up listening to "Nothing Compares 2 U" on repeat. This song, and album, probably never would have been recommended to me by Spotify's algorithm because I mostly listen to upbeat pop and electronic music.

Spotify is not the only way to discover music. Many of my all-time favorite albums were recommended to me by my friends. There's no shortage of music critics and articles online who usually have their own recommendations. Sometimes I find interesting new albums by browsing Bandcamp's top sold albums in my favorite genres. Even if you would prefer a personalized music algorithm based on your own listening tastes, Last.fm has worked ok for me and lets me aggregate my listening from many different platforms (There are also self hosted options.)

Buying CDs vs. digital albums

If 99% of the time I listen to my CD backup (through my self hosted streaming or iPod) and not directly from the CD itself, why do I bother buying the CD, which takes up valuable shelf space and can't be delivered instantaneously?

Services like Bandcamp, Qobuz, and occasionally some artist websites let you buy music files. (I don't count services where you "buy" music that is then locked to their proprietary platform as "buying" music unless you can get the actual files with no DRM. I don't want to rely on a service that could get shut down some day and then lose all of my purchased music.)

If I chose to buy music files instead of CDs, I could skip the part where I go to a store in person/wait for my CD to get delivered and back up the CD, and skip straight to adding the album to my streaming and iPod. This has some benefits: not needing the cardboard and plastic of the CD and its packaging, saving shelf space, avoiding shipping costs and environmental effects, and less effort on my part.

In many (not all) cases, the digital album music files cost as much as a brand new CD would, or even slightly more. This may be worth it to you if the files are 24-bit FLACs compared to only 16-bit CD quality, but personally I can't usually tell the difference, and CD quality is good enough for me. More importantly, if I'm already paying $10+, I prefer to have something physical for that money, something I can hold. I only consider buying digital files if the CD has limited availability (especially when combined with high shipping costs from the few available sources) or the digital files are significantly cheaper than the CD.

]]> reading list https://adhithirumala.com/blog/reading-list/ 2026-01-06T00:00:00+00:00 have read list

lots of cool technical blogs, talks, and textbooks that i've read that i like. here's a list (in no specific order). this gets updated as i either read things or want to read things.

articles

talks/interviews/podcasts

  • all jane street technical talks and podcasts on their youtube - can't link all of them, but they're all phenomenal. favorites include the gpu performance one, the UV one (which introduced me to the software), and the chris lattner interview on programming languages for machine learning.

  • American Express: Elevating Serverless Platforms with Wasm Components - to be honest, i have minimal idea how wasm works. i knew that figma used it to make the in-browser tool really fast, so i wanted to know who else actually used it. mfw when an old credit card company makes a serverless runtime in wasm such that anyone can write code in any language in the backend and have it interface with core libraries like auth. didn't expect amex to do this, but very cool to see that they did.

  • Phillip Wadler - God's Programming Language - lambda calculus twk, programming seems like a fake and arbitrary abstraction over the world, discussing how to come about it from first principles is cool

textbooks/books

to read list

so many things to read, so little time.

articles

20 part essay on linkers - Ian Lance Taylor - probably should figure out how they work

]]> reading list https://adhithirumala.com/blog/reading-list/ 2026-01-06T00:00:00+00:00 have read list

lots of cool technical blogs, talks, and textbooks that i've read that i like. here's a list (in no specific order). this gets updated as i either read things or want to read things.

articles

talks/interviews/podcasts

  • all jane street technical talks and podcasts on their youtube - can't link all of them, but they're all phenomenal. favorites include the gpu performance one, the UV one (which introduced me to the software), and the chris lattner interview on programming languages for machine learning.

  • American Express: Elevating Serverless Platforms with Wasm Components - to be honest, i have minimal idea how wasm works. i knew that figma used it to make the in-browser tool really fast, so i wanted to know who else actually used it. mfw when an old credit card company makes a serverless runtime in wasm such that anyone can write code in any language in the backend and have it interface with core libraries like auth. didn't expect amex to do this, but very cool to see that they did.

  • Phillip Wadler - God's Programming Language - lambda calculus twk, programming seems like a fake and arbitrary abstraction over the world, discussing how to come about it from first principles is cool

textbooks/books

to read list

so many things to read, so little time.

articles

20 part essay on linkers - Ian Lance Taylor - probably should figure out how they work

]]>