Dinesh's Digital Journal

Vibecoding 014 — A P.G. Wodehouse Quote Bot for Bluesky

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

P.G. Wodehouse wrote 97 books. He was also, sentence for sentence, one of the funniest writers in the English language. Most people know Jeeves and Bertie Wooster. Fewer know the Blandings Castle stories, the Mulliner tales, or the sheer density of comic simile he packed into every paragraph.

I wanted a bot that would surface this — not by dumping quotes randomly, but with structure. A different format each day of the week. The similes on Monday (they are the most shareable, and they earn a second slot on Saturday). Dialogue exchanges on Wednesday, posted as a thread. Character spotlights on Thursday. A wildcard on Sunday for whatever didn’t fit anywhere else.

Vibecoding 013 — Two Years of WhatsApp Links, Sorted and Searchable

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Clear Writing Community WhatsApp group has been running for over four years. Amit Varma started it, and it does what it says — a few hundred people sharing things worth reading. Good articles, podcast episodes, essays, the occasional book. I’ve been in it since a little more than two years.

The problem is WhatsApp. Every link is buried in chat. The good ones get scrolled past, the useful ones are impossible to find again, and there’s no way to answer the most obvious question: what does this group actually share?

Vibecoding 012 — Reading The Wealth of Nations with a Paragraph-Level AI Tutor

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Building a Personal AI Reader for The Wealth of Nations #

Project #12 of the 100 Vibe Coding Projects challenge

I’ve been meaning to read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations for years. It sits in the cultural background of every economics conversation — the invisible hand, the division of labour, the theory of wages — but the full 900-page text is dense and I kept bouncing off it.

Vibecoding 011 — What 128 Episodes of Amit Varma's Podcast Recommend

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been listening to Everything is Everything — Amit Varma and Ajay Shah’s podcast — for a while now. Every episode is dense. Books, papers, essays, songs — recommendations come fast, buried in show notes that you’d have to open episode by episode to find. I kept thinking: somebody should just compile all of this.

So I did.

This post explains how I built three reference spreadsheets — one each for books, music, and articles — covering all 128 episodes of the podcast. Everything is on GitHub if you want to poke around or build on it.

About

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Hi, I’m Dinesh. #

I work in cybersecurity — the part where you spend years building defences, and then watch someone click a phishing link anyway.

I came to security through the military, which turns out to be decent preparation: in both fields, what gets you isn’t the threat you planned for.

By day I think about risk, governance, and incident response. By night I build small things with AI, read source code nobody asked me to read, and post Kannada philosophy to Mastodon.

Clear Thinking — Book Notes

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results by Shane Parrish

STOP! This is a moment when you need to think.

The goal: to train ourselves to identify the moments when judgment is called for in the first place, and pause to create space to think clearly.

The space between stimulus and response is where clear thinking lives.

The person who learns how to think clearly ultimately applies more of their overall effort toward the outcomes they want.

Essentialism — Book Notes

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown

The commitment to doing only the things that were truly important — and eliminating everything else — restores the quality of your work.

Give yourself permission to stop trying to do it all, to stop saying yes to everyone.

The Essentialist way

The way of the Essentialist is the relentless pursuit of less but better.

Essentialism is a disciplined, systematic approach for determining where our highest point of contribution lies, then making execution of those things almost effortless.

How to Take Smart Notes — Book Notes

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens

On bias and systems

If one were to attempt to identify a single problematic aspect of human reasoning that deserves attention above all others, the confirmation bias would have to be among the candidates for consideration.

A good system will force us to act more virtuously without actually having to become more virtuous.

The antidote: indiscriminate gathering of any relevant information regardless of what argument it will support.

The Little Blue Reasoning Book — Book Notes

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Little Blue Reasoning Book: 50 Powerful Principles for Clear and Effective Thinking by Brandon Royal

On perception and mindset

Selective perception is the tendency to see the world the way we would like it to be rather than how it really is. The sound thinker suspends judgment and is not unduly influenced by stereotypes, prejudices, isolated experiences, or preconceived notions.

On creative thinking

Creative thinking is “backdoor” thinking.

The Upanishads — Book Notes

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Upanishads translated by Eknath Easwaran (2nd Edition)

We spend our days in the familiar world of our five senses, but what lies beyond that — if anything — we have no idea.

The real drive of these ancient texts is not so much to know the unknown as to know the knower.

Three texts, three formats

The Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Dhammapada are among the earliest and most universal messages sent to inform us that there is more to life than the everyday experience of our senses.

Verbal Judo — Book Notes

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Verbal Judo: The Gentle Art of Persuasion by George J. Thompson, Ph.D.

On knowing people

To be a contact professional you must first, of course, be in contact with yourself.

You have to learn to read people carefully.

If you know yourself and you know the opponent, you can win a hundred percent of the time.

If you’re going to work for others and represent them, you must not allow people to push your button or pull your trigger. The question is: how do you build a trigger guard? Know thyself.

Vibecoding 010 — The APK Analyzer That Runs on Your Machine and Tells No One

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Building an Offline APK Security Analyzer in Flask #

Project #10 of the 100 Vibe Coding Projects challenge

I’ve been doing APK security analysis manually for years — pulling the file, running jadx, grepping through decompiled source, eyeballing the manifest. It works, but it’s slow and the output lives in a terminal window that disappears the moment you close it.

What the Heck Do I Do with My Life? — Book Notes

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What the Heck Do I Do with My Life? How to Flourish in Our Turbulent Times by Ravi Venkatesan

The world is becoming more fluid — volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA).

The true potential of any person is unknown and unknowable. With a combination of intentionality, years of toil and reasonable luck, most of us can accomplish more than we might imagine possible.

On mindset

Vibecoding 009 — KaggaBot: Automating Daily Verse Posts With GitHub Actions

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What’s Mankuthimmana Kagga #

Mankuthimmana Kagga — often called the Kannada Gita — is a collection of 945 philosophical verses by D.V. Gundappa (DVG). Written in the 1940s, it wrestles with life’s biggest questions with a rare combination of humility and depth. It deserves a wider audience.

KaggaBot #

It’s a small automation that does one simple thing: post two verses from the Kagga every day to Mastodon (an ad-free social media platform), automatically, without anyone pressing a button.

Vibecoding 008 — I Asked AI to Help Me Build a Home Radio Server

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I Asked an AI to Help Me Build a Home Radio Server. Here’s What Actually Happened. #

I have a few hundred MP3s sitting in a folder on my laptop — old Kannada film songs, some Tamil classics, a few English albums I ripped years ago. I wanted to stream them to my phone, maybe share the stream with family. Simple enough idea.

Vibecoding 007 — Putting 945 Verses of Kannada Philosophy on the Internet

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Building a Bot to post Mankutimmana Kagga verses to Mastodon #

D.V. Gundappa’s Mankutimmana Kagga — 945 verses of timeless Kannada philosophy — deserves a wider audience. So I built a Mastodon bot to post one verse at a time, twice a day, complete with transliteration and English explanation. Here’s how it came together.

The Prompt #

The project started with a simple ask to Claude: “Create a Mastodon bot to post Kannada Mankutimmana Kagga verses with a short explanation, configurable on how often to post.” From that single sentence, Claude scaffolded a complete Python project — kagga_bot.py, config.py, kagga_verses.py, and a scraper to pull all 945 verses from a public repository.

Vibecoding 006 — One Page, Five Sources, Zero Noise

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I wanted a single place to read cybersecurity news from the sources I already trust — SANS ISC, Bruce Schneier’s blog, Brian Krebs, Bleeping Computer, and Zack Whittaker’s This Week in Security. I wanted something purpose-built for security, with AI-generated summaries short enough to scan quickly.

The result is SlashSec: a single HTML file, no build step, no server, no dependencies beyond a free Groq API key.

Vibecoding 005 — Making a 30-Year-Old Codebase Approachable With AI

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Curl Source Explorer: Learn a 30-Year-Old Codebase Without Getting Lost #

Curl has been running on virtually every computer on the planet since 1998. It’s one of the most-used pieces of software ever written — and almost nobody who uses it daily has ever read a line of its source code.

That’s partly because diving into a mature C codebase is intimidating. There are no onboarding docs for the internals, no guided tour, no one to ask why a particular function was written the way it was. You’re either grepping through 170,000 lines alone, or you’re not reading it at all.

Vibecoding 004 — Building My Own Interview Coach for a Security Role

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Prompt Used: #

Build an interview simulator, for an upcoming job interview for a senior cybersecurity role. Generate flashcards which will give me appropriate vocabulary for risk, governance, leader, team building, story-telling in STAR format, context-action-impact frameworks. The web-based app, should help me practice consistently by keep track of my effort in terms of practice time, weak areas, strengths and allow me to add sources for topics, content, role specific job descriptions if available. Example Role: Director SOC

Vibecoding 003 — Extracting One Usable Idea From Every Podcast Episode

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

One Usable Idea From Every Episode #

Project #3 of the 100 Vibe Coding Projects challenge

Think Fast, Talk Smart is Matt Abrahams’ podcast on communication — 270+ episodes, each guest offering their best advice on how to speak, listen, and connect more effectively. The problem: that advice is scattered across hundreds of hours of audio. Nobody’s reading the back catalogue.

Vibecoding 002 — I Rebuilt Winamp's Visualizer in a Browser Tab

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

VIZMIX — A Winamp-Inspired 3D Audio Visualizer for the Browser #

Project #2 of the 100 Vibe Coding Projects challenge

The prompt was simple: build something that visualises music the way Winamp used to — but in a browser tab, using X, Y and Z axes instead of a flat frequency bar. Claude took that constraint seriously.

Vibecoding 001 — The URL Sanitizer That Strips Trackers Before You Click

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Two big ideas here #

Idea#1: Use an LLM, to create something, anything
Idea#2: Do it for a 100 days
A third, meta idea, is to write about what I’ve done (aside: why is this a meta-idea, will write about it later)

Today’s vibe-coding idea: create a browser extension for a URL sanitizer. #

It removes all tracking parameters from the link before rendering it in a new tab. Tool of choice: Gemini - got this idea from S Ananand’s talk

First Steps

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What I did Today #

Static code review.
Initial impression of the curl git repo.

How Things Went #

Everything seemed so overwhelming and not knowing where to start and what next.

One thought was to use an automated static code analyzer. ChatGPT suggested SonarCube, and so I started down another rabbit-hole, hopefully not a disastrous decision.

cURL Docs: Reading Notes

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Scope #

Browsed around the https://curl.se/docs/ and gaping at the vastness of the tool’s architecture

Key Observations #

Be consistent, and spend atleast 15-20min each day, in exploring the portal
Ask yourself, what can I do, to contribute? It may be too early, but having the question at the back of your mind would be useful

Currently Writing

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Pitch to newspaper #

What is the idea you want to pitch
WHy is it important / interesting

What’s in it for them #

Readers will learn something new and useful
?
??

Questions #

Identify gaps in your understanding and learning

Pattern Matching

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Interesting Insight #

Came across an interesting insight on the Risky.Biz podcast.

In the example discussed in the podcast Episode #824, this was mentioned in the GreyNoise newsletter, which noted a total drop in telnet traffic.

Apparently, a vulnerability in the telnet protocol is likely to drop soon. And the service providers have probably been nudged into blocking all Telnet traffic.

Roadmap

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Roadmap #

Regular cadence
Roadmap of ideas
Incrementally better content

Next Actions #

What next?

Search Inside Yourself — Book Notes

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Search Inside Yourself by Chade-Meng Tan
With forewords by Daniel Goleman and Jon Kabat-Zinn

Emotional intelligence enables three things: stellar work performance, outstanding leadership, and the conditions for happiness.

EI is the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings, discriminate among them, and use that information to guide thinking and action.

On attention

Mindfulness trains attention that is strong in both clarity and stability.

Jon Kabat-Zinn’s definition: paying attention in a particular way — on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally.