Are you fixing anything this Sunday?

Aren’t Sundays the days when we fix and tweak things around the house? It sure is for me. In fact, it is one the ways I wind down and take it easy. I have not been the sleep-it-off type for decades, but instead, my best Sundays are the ones with chores or tasks that needed completion. Sure, I’ll read a book or listen to music or watch a movie, but I love the hazy, absent-minded soft-focus mode that accompanies Sunday chores and tinkering.

A perennial source of such joy has been our home network. Like those classic motorcycle owners who took pride in maintaining their machines in peak form, my zen space is our home network. Like the proverbial Ship of Theseus, my home network has been continually upgraded and tweaked for at least a decade and a half. Not one component must be the same in it now. I can easily say it’s more resilient, capable, and secure than most office networks.

It’s hard to explain the joy of a well-designed network to someone who doesn’t care, because when it works, it feels no different from a run-of-the-mill one. Earlier this week, our Internet went down when I was driving to office, but I was able to remotely check on it and figure out that our ISP wasn’t at fault. Instead, it was the UPS that had tripped into some strange low-voltage mode after a few outages. A simple reboot restored things.

But I will say there is something that’s been gnawing at me for the last week. Every day at 8.05 am, a set of Apple Homepods in our house start playing the same Carnatic Classic radio station. I can’t for the life of me figure out what is triggering it. I’ve re-checked all existing Apple Home automations, rebooted devices, checked available logs, but nothing.

I guess the scourge of modern tech life will be us humans figuring out how to deal with hallucinating AIs and ghost radio stations. Sigh.

Before we move on to today’s edition, here’s a photo of my favourite Bengaluru avenue tree, the Pongamia. Now that its iridescent spring foliage has settled down to a darker green, it’s flowering time.

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In a few weeks, each of these trees will shed these blossoms copiously, turning the area under their canopies into a carpet of dropped flowers.