ISSUE DATED DECEMBER 30, 2025 BANGALORE, INDIA

AMAN'S GENERAL MISHMASH OF
DESIGN, DATA & CODE

THE DEFINITE, ILLUSTRATED & ANNOTATED ANTHOLOGY OF MY VARIED PASTIMES

tl;dr

Nifty clicky-click stuff,map-alicious eye-candy stuff,snazzy chart-y-chart doodads,arty schmarty stuff,code-y code stuffand if-i-don't-know-it-i'll-learn-it stuff.

Notes

Updated 29 Dec 2025, 07:22 am IST

Last track: 52km

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Last track: 52km

Heard and seen, here and there

From the Notebook

NOTE Dec 18

![](https://aman.bh/src/content/micro/photos/2025/12/lanbels.jpg) I think it is...

I think it is absolutely incredible that I can import vector labels of place names from the 19th century into QGIS. I can barely get geospatial data for India in 2025 where I want it, but 19th century data? Right on man. GB1900 has got you covered.

The GB1900 project was a crowd-sourced initiative to create a gazetteer, released under an open licence, by transcribing and geolocating all the place names on the second edition County Series of six inch to one mile (i.e. 1:10,560) maps of Great Britain, published by Ordnance Survey between 1888 and 1914, and thus out of copyright.

You can view this in your browser at the National Library of Scotland website, it also supports queries to find places that start or end with a phrase (maybe you're searching for all "mews" in London?).

109,193 entries end with a space followed by "Road", "Street", "Lane", "Rd." or "St."[3] The abridged gazetteer includes 1,617 entries for "Manor House", 1,496 for "Manor Farm", and 454 for "High Street".

I couldn't find a better way to import this into QGIS, so if you're interested, you'll need to add a new WFS connection and set the URL as https://geoserver.nls.uk/geoserver/wfs which loads a lot of layers. I was interested in London so I found the layer with all point details for names in gb1900_21_December but there are many more you can discover.

Why would this be of interest? Don't we already have better, 'new' data? Maybe you wanted to find 10,000 miles of old, forgotten footpaths or maintain an archive of names for future developments.

Other interesting miscellany, hastily shared.

all notes

BOOKMARK Dec 12

Anirudh's stories from Meghalaya

One failed plan after another, even though I had no plan. I wanted to know who I should blame for all my troubles and of course, it is me.

My friend and flatmate recently ditched our flat in Bangalore to go on a solo trip that has taken him from here, to Chennai, onwards to Ongol in Andhra Pradesh, then to Chattisgarh, further to Kolkata and then finally to Meghalaya where he wanted to go initially. When I first heard about this unplanned-plan I was skeptical because I like planning things to the dot, but now I am glad to be wrong because this trip has given me some great posts to read. He has a flair for writing which I had no idea about but it is extremely endearing and entertaining to read. Here are some of his other posts from this series:

The best part is the finding the wacky nicknames he assigns to each of us. I am roommate, but there are more colorful ones to be found.

NOTE Dec 4

Here's what I am looking...

Here's what I am looking forward to at this year's BLR Lit Fest:

Day	Date	Time	Venue	Event	Speakers
Sat	06 Dec	10:00 am	Watchtower	Keynote: Being Banu, Being ಬಂಡಾಯ (Baṇḍāya)	Banu Mushtaq with Prateeti Punja Ballal
Sat	06 Dec	10:45 am	Watchtower	The Outsider: A Memoir for Misfits	Vir Das with Anna MM Vetticad
Sat	06 Dec	4:45 pm	Left Barrack	Meet the Savarnas	Ravikant Kisana with G Sampath
Sat	06 Dec	6:15 pm	Open Cell	Aye, Aye, AI	Anil Ananthaswamy, Karen Hao with Indulekha Aravind
Sun	07 Dec	10:45 am	Watchtower	Empire of AI	Karen Hao with Samanth Subramanian
Sun	07 Dec	3:45 pm	Right Barrack	The Great Indian Brain Rot	Anurag Minus Verma with Ravikant Kisana
Sun	07 Dec	5:15 pm	Open Cell	AMA with Manu Joseph	Manu Joseph
Sun	07 Dec	5:45 pm	Open Cell	Travels in the Other Place	Pallavi Aiyar with G Sampath

In the news

AI Research collaborations

Deforestation in Brazil

Just for fun

Who's Ahead in the Word Games?

Rhea and I play word games daily and we're pretty competitive. Since January 2024, we've tracked every game. These charts show who's been winning more recently.

Wordle

Mini

Connections

Wordle

Mini

Connections

Listening

459. The Suit, Savile Row, and Smartly Dressed Men 459. The Suit, Savile Row, and Smartly Dressed Men

60%

PODCAST LOG

……………………………………………………………………………………

459. The Suit, Savile Row, and Smartly Dressed Men

[███████████░░░░░░░░░] 60%

Part Two: King Leopold II: The First Modern Bastard

[█████████░░░░░░░░░░░] 46%

606. Enoch Powell: Rivers of Blood

[████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░] 21%

Part Two: How Peter Thiel Became the Gravedigger of Democracy

✓ DONE

Part One: How Peter Thiel Became the Gravedigger of Democracy

✓ DONE

Part One: King Leopold II: The First Modern Bastard

✓ DONE

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Through projects spanning film censorship (CBFC Watch), elections (Who Is My Neta), urban infrastructure (BLR Water Log), other public data and a rout of government websites, we demonstrate how thoughtful design and documentation can help in bridging the gap between data availability and usability to expand the digital commons for citizens, researchers, and journalists.

Vivek and I gave a talk at the IndiaFOSS Open Data Devroom on our work at [Diagram Chasing](https://diagramchasing.fun), covering our design and development philosophies, behind-the-scenes of CBFC Watch and why open-data suffers in India.

I was at DA-IICT (Gandhinagar, India) for the three weeks teaching a module on web design to their M.Des students. I love websites and code, but 'making' websites means something different in 2025. Is it all AI? Is it just UI/UX? IDTS. In my course intro, I wrote, "...what does it mean to learn web design in an age where a cat walking across a keyboard might accidentally 'prompt' a website on ChatGPT? What, you might ask, is the point?" So, this course evolved from being one on learning how to code to broader, more interesting things like the small and indieweb, personal digital gardens, open-source philosophies, and making with code for the sake of having fun. I don't know of many design courses anywhere that include learning Git and web frameworks. Everything from this module is open-source and public, from the slides to student submissions. I've put all their handmade, handcoded work on a showcase site.

In this two-week course for design students at Chitkara University (Chandigarh, India), I taught a range of topics that introduced visual and statistical thinking to the students. We worked with our own personal data, analyzed large datasets through a no-code, visual-programming interface called Orange Data Mining, learnt how to quantify qualitative data through movies and produced two print-posters that brought all these learnings together.