You’re Awesome :)

… and I’m Vishnu! I love Arch Linux, Android development, open-source, and programming in general. If any of these are of interest to you, let’s get connected. Or, if you’re just surfing around too, drop me a message – I love talking to new people. :)

DialogMusicPlayer: the whole story

DialogMusicPlayer is a simple and minimal music player dialog. It was built out of my frustration with my device’s stock music player requesting unnecessary permissions just to play a music file. The basic version was built within a day on a skeletal level. I thought of DMP as a simple project that would only be used by me on my device. I made the code open source & left it on GitHub....

February 17, 2024 · 3 min · Vishnu Sanal T

Script to Complete etLab faculty feedback survey

Hii, glad to meet a fellow KTU student! Sooo, you log into etLab to check attendance for a class you have been skipping, to check the marks of the series tests, or to submit an assignment that you painstakingly copied from someone! :) There, you are redirected to the survey page, and you can’t do anything else in etLab without completing this freakin’ survey. We all know, how everyone fills out this form; “excellent”, “very good”, “appreciable” etc....

January 24, 2024 · 1 min · Vishnu Sanal T

How to Reinstall Grub on Arch Linux

Sooo, you have a crucial deadline to meet, or you have an important assignment to complete. You turn on your PC, and, surprise, surprise, the PC decides to go into the BIOS menu! You try to force a restart, only to end up with the same result. Next, you start panicking & call “that-Linux-friend”. If you don’t have such a friend, don’t worry; I have got you covered with this blog!...

January 19, 2024 · 2 min · Vishnu Sanal T
overleaf timed out error message

Timed out on OverLeaf? Don't worry, try this!

What are we up to here? So, you finally decide to work on that document you’ve been putting off for three months, or you want to work on that PPT that is due tomorrow! You grab your tools, open all the resources in 1500 Chrome tabs, and copy pasta everything onto your OverLeaf template. All is well for the first part or so, then you get a warning, and boom, suddenly OverLeaf says it won’t compile anymore!...

November 19, 2023 · 2 min · Vishnu Sanal T

Binary to Decimal Conversion - Did You Know This?

Binary to Decimal Conversion - Did You Know This? Hi! How do you convert a binary number to a decimal? Say, 1011001110010001: What I used to do looked like this: 1 * 2 ^ 0 + 0 * 2 ^ 1 + 0 * 2 ^ 2 + 0 * 2 ^ 3 + 1 * 2 ^ 4 + 0 * 2 ^ 5 + 0 * 2 ^ 6 + 1 * 2 ^ 7 + 1 * 2 ^ 8 + 1 * 2 ^ 9 + 0 * 2 ^ 10 + 0 * 2 ^ 11 + 1 * 2 ^ 12 + 1 * 2 ^ 13 + 0 * 2 ^ 14 + 1 * 2 ^ 15 Mostly it ends in me making some mistakes & I find myself starting over!...

December 18, 2022 · 3 min · Vishnu Sanal T

When code made me feel like a "failure"!

Dramatic title, huh? Originally written to answer “What was your biggest failure?” for an application, I felt like I would share it here, too. :) In the initial release of one of my projects, DialogMusicPlayer there was a need to convert the path received to a new format (Uri to absolute path) to play the audio file because the MediaPlayer class needed the path to play the file. But, due to the increasing limitations Android is enforcing on newer devices and different manufacturers & platforms returning using different formats, it was difficult to do this conversion....

September 2, 2022 · 4 min · Vishnu Sanal T