Looks like the S-Pen is losing the air gestures and Bluetooth capabilities that allow it to act as a remote camera shutter on the latest Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra. I suspect it is due to the requirement of magnets in the new Qi2 wireless charging feature that’s being added.
The earlier editions of the Ultra series used to have stylus detection issues with magnet based accessories (like this reddit post notes), like cases which gave it MagSafe like capabilities. In fact I encountered this issue with my S23 when I tried a MagSafe equipped case with the S-Pen not working properly around the middle of the screen where the magnet is positioned on the back.
Not much to be done I suppose as the new model trades off the advanced stylus capabilities in favour of faster charging.
It’s been a while since I posted about my photography activities and the phone reviews, and what better time than the new year to look back at some of the memories created over the last year.
Here’s a couple of moonshots taken last year with my current phone – the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra that I got back in 2023. I’ve put the 30x zoom versions first followed by the regular wide angle photo to give a sense of the zoom. All were taken during our 2024 summer trip to Kashmir (first set in Phalagam, second in Srinagar on the Dal Lake).
I have been trying out Google’s NotebookLM over the last few days, and I thought of taking a shot at generating a podcast from the “What if” exhibit images that I had come across during my visit to the Birla Science & Technology Museum in Kolkata last month.
I had created a PDF from the images I had taken from the exhibit and uploaded it to NotebookLM as a source. Below is the audio overview from this file – just give it a listen.
This is nothing short of astounding given the way in which it is presented by the 2 hosts not just categorizing and covering each of the scientist’s contribution, but also explaining some of the key terms and providing context for their work. The last 4-5 min are even more interesting as it looks at the big picture and talks about nation building.
I also gave the interactive mode (currently in beta) a try wherein you can interrupt the hosts with your comments and questions. I brought in the family connection to Upendranath Brahmachari (my father had incidentally created the wikipedia page back in 2005), and also asked about potential conspiracy theories surrounding the lives of Homi Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai. They seemed to do a good job of integrating my comments before bringing the discussion back on track, even sounding slightly vexed by the multiple interruptions.
Looks like 2025 is going to be another big year for the AI related developments given the plethora of announcements at the end of last year, and Google definitely has something interesting going on as always. Just hope that they don’t shut it down.
In case you are curious, here’s the PDF that I used:
And here’s the text summary that NotebookLM generated from the file:
Here is a list of all the scientists mentioned in the sources, along with their contributions:
Chemistry
Thiruvengadam Rajendram Seshadri: Awarded a fictional Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research on plant chemistry, primarily in oxygen heterocylics, and his contributions to the isolation and structural elucidation of flavonoid pigments.
Prafulla Chandra Ray: Awarded a fictional Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research on organic and inorganic nitrites and pioneering modern chemical research in India.
Asima Chatterjee: Awarded a fictional Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her contributions to medicinal chemistry, with a special reference to alkaloids, coumarins and terpenoids, alongside her advancements in mechanistic organic analytical chemistry and development of anti-epileptic and anti-malarial drugs.
Physics
Homi Jehangir Bhabha: Awarded a fictional Nobel Prize in Physics for explaining the scattering of positrons by electrons with exchange, his work on Dirac’s theory of the positron, the passage of fast electrons and the theory of cosmic showers.
Meghnad Saha: Awarded a fictional Nobel Prize in Physics for formulating the Saha Equation, which allows for the calculation of the degree of ionization in a gas, a concept important in analyzing the spectra of stars and nebulae.
Satyendra Nath Bose: Awarded a fictional Nobel Prize in Physics for his work describing elementary quantum particles, leading to Bose-Einstein Statistics which fueled the quantum revolution.
Jagadish Chandra Bose: Awarded a fictional Nobel Prize in Physics for his quasi-optical experiments on the properties of very short radio waves, leading to improvements in the coherer and contributing to the development of solid-state physics.
Physiology or Medicine
Upendranath Brahmachari: Awarded a fictional Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for creating the drug Urea Stibamine, used to treat visceral leishmaniasis or black fever, a severe infection caused by the Leishmania parasite.
Dilip Mahalanabis: Awarded a fictional Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for being one of the earliest practitioners of vital oral rehydration therapy, whose research into diarrhoeal diseases saved millions of lives, including vulnerable infants.
Other Sciences
Birbal Sahni: Awarded a fictional Nobel Prize in Paleobotany for examining evolutionary trends and geographical distributions, suggesting a separate order, Taxales, within the conifers.
John Burdon Sanderson Haldane: Awarded a fictional Nobel Prize in Evolutionary Biology for his work in relating Darwinian evolutionary theory and Gregor Mendel’s concepts of heredity.
Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis: Awarded a fictional Nobel Prize in Statistics for formulating the Mahalanobis distance – a statistical measure of comparison between two data sets – and for his work on innovative techniques for conducting large-scale sample surveys.
Salim Moizuddin Abdul Ali: Awarded a fictional Nobel Prize in Ornithology for his systematic bird surveys across India and authoring books popularizing ornithology.
Edavaleth Kakkat Janaki Ammal: Awarded a fictional Nobel Prize in Botany for her contributions to plant breeding, cytogenetics, phytogeography and her development of several hybrid crop species, including varieties of sweet sugarcane that allowed India to cultivate its own.
Anna Modayil Mani: Awarded a fictional Nobel Prize in Meteorology for creating India’s first ozonesonde, making it easier for scientists to monitor the ozone layer.
Vikram Ambalal Sarabhai Jain: Awarded a fictional Nobel Prize in Space Science for initiating space research and helping develop nuclear power in India.
Verghese Kurien: Awarded a fictional Nobel Prize in Dairy Science for transforming India’s dairy industry by streamlining effective management and distribution strategies, making India the largest milk-producing country in the world.
Mankombu Sambasivan Swaminathan: Awarded a fictional Nobel Prize in Agricultural Science for his contributions to the Green Revolution in India by introducing high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice, further developing high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice, and spearheading mass movements with farmers and scientists. His work helped save India and Pakistan from certain famine-like conditions in the 1960s.
Manali Kallat Vainu Bappu: Awarded a fictional Nobel Prize in Astronomy for jointly discovering the Wilson-Bappu effect with astronomer Olin Chaddock Wilson.
Vijay Pandurang Bhatkar: Awarded a fictional Nobel Prize in Computer Science for architecting India’s national initiative in supercomputing, where he spearheaded the development of India’s first supercomputer PARAM in 1990.
I previously wrote about the second device that I got about coming to Dubai, but not much about the first one which was a gaming laptop. So here’s a bit about the laptop which also doubles as a local AI driver thanks to the Nvidia GPU (the RTX3060).
Soon after getting it back in 2022, I tried running the Stable Diffusion models and it was quite a bit of an upgrade over my original attempt on a plain GPU-less Windows machine. The generation times came down to 10s or so, and has gotten even faster as the models and tools have been optimised over the last couple of years. There are quite a few projects available on GitHub if you want give it a try – AUTOMATIC1111 and easydiffusion are among the more popular options. Nvidia has also got a TensorRT extension to further improve performance.
With that out of the way, I also discovered LM Studio which allows you to run LLMs locally with a chat like interface thrown in, and you can access a bunch of models like Meta’s LLama. The response times are of course not as fast as the freely available online options like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and the likes, but you effectively get unlimited access to the model.
Here’s an example from a conversation I had with LLama regarding the coffee meme from Ace Attorney game series:
Being deeply entrenched in the Apple ecosystem definitely has its advantages as the devices typically work well together, be it the iPhone to Apple Watch or with the HomePod & iPads. Getting out is another matter, of course. When I ditched my dead iPhone 11 Pro & switched to the Samsung Galaxy S20 FE last year, I also got an iPhone SE as a backup phone which continued to pair with my Apple Watch. This setup was ok from the fitness tracking point of view, but for me, notifications on the wrist is the USP of smartwatches.
Design & Features
So, after a month of trying to avoid another gadget purchase, I opted to get the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 which is one of the few models with Wear OS 3. While it did have pretty much all a sensors & hardware features as my Apple Watch Series 5 like always on display, sleep tracking, ECG etc. (plus a few more like blood pressure monitoring, SpO2 & body composition analyzer), the ECG & BP sensors are not active in India yet. Haptics are much better on the Apple Watch through. However, you get pretty much similar hardware, but at half the price.
The display on the Galaxy Watch is round, which does take some getting used to when swiping around, but feels more natural to me as majority of my old school watches were round. The controls are somewhat different with 2 buttons on the side, and a touch bezel which can be used for quick scrolling similar to the Apple Watch’s crown. The Classic version of the Galaxy Watch does have a hardware dial instead of the touch bezel, but the price & weight go up significantly.
On the strap front, the Galaxy Watch uses standard 22 mm bands, so the costs are significantly lower. My preference is for the Milanese loop bands & magnetic leather bands for formal occasions, & velcro ones for regular home use. The Apple Watch has a bunch of 3rd party options, but those are 2-3x costlier than the standard watch varieties (Apple’s own straps can cost as much as other smartwatches themselves). Also, while the mechanism for securing & removing bands on Apple watches is quite novel & convenient, 3rd party options can be a bit finicky and don’t work as smooth.
Apps & Notifications
Notifications themselves are quite decently managed, though you do need to use the touch bezel to scroll through them quickly when they pile up in the notification centre. You also get a good number of options to act on the notifications unlike on the Apple Watch. However, you may need to scroll quite a bit to get to them as the notifications can take up a good deal of vertical space along with the response options.
Complications & watch faces are also handled very differently with complication support varying from face to face. Wear OS also supports full screen widgets which feel more like complications.
There’s also a bunch of standalone apps & phone app counterparts (sometimes broken into multiple apps), similar to the Apple Watch. There’s also a browser if you want. That said, the app situation is probably better on the Apple side, but it’s pretty much stagnated at this point with some of the initial developers like Uber even discontinuing support for the Watch apps.
Health & Fitness tracking
While the watches may have parity in terms of hardware sensors, the biggest difference comes in the way fitness data is handled between the watches. Apple has the Health app as a central hub which can share necessary sensor data with multiple other apps. On the Galaxy Watch, and possibly on Wear OS/Android, there is no such standardised central hub due to which most of the data beyond basic step counts is locked within Samsung’s health app, or whichever app (say Google Fit) you use to get the reading, be it getting a heart rate reading, logging your weight or recording a workout. In fact, some of the advanced sensor features do not seem to be supported on other apps.
The situation will of course be similar on other platforms which may not even have support for 3rd party apps. For me, this is a reasonable tradeoff and I am using Samsung’s Health app to track the vitals for the time being.
Closing
You can also answer calls on the Galaxy watch in a pinch just like on the Apple Watch, and support is limited to phone calls as well. The speaker is also fairly loud which is good enough unless you are in a noisy environment. Battery life has been typically better on My Galaxy Watch than on the Apple Watch as I can also comfortably wear it to sleep and charge it towards the end of the next day.
I am getting a very similar experience to the Apple Watch with my Galaxy Watch, and it serves my primary need of notifications on the wrist with few tradeoffs, but also a bunch of new features at half the price of the Apple Watch. Ultimately, I have been able to replace my iPhone 11 Pro & Apple Watch Series 5 combo at the a slightly lower cost than it would have taken me to get a 11 Pro replacement.
Watched the movie a few weeks back with my family and what I took offense with is with the opening scene where not only is Sooryavanshi’s father using a colour monitor in 1993 in India, but it seems to be running Windows 9x (likely Windows XP with the silver theme going by the 3D taskbar look and green start button).
Digital India in 1993
As for the rest of the movie, it is typical Rohit Shetty affair, so expectations were set accordingly.
I had never used Android as my exclusive daily driver, and my last proper Android phone usage on the Mi 4 was in parallel with my iPhone 5s around 6-7 years ago. A lot has changed in this time, and a lot has also remained the same especially when it comes to the customizations possible.
Here’s a quick rundown of the key new features I’ve recently (re)discovered on this side of the fence.
Ad blocking with Blokada
Ad blocking apps are of course nothing new on the iOS side, but are largely limited to browsers & webviews at best. This is where Blokada for Android comes in. It sets up a local VPN on the device and does local DNS filtering a la Pi-hole to block ads across apps. There is going to be a slight performance & battery life penalty, but you get ad blocking on the go. You can sideload the full featured version, or just get the Slim version from the Play store. It’s also available for Android TV, in case you do not want to use Pi-hole.
You can get similar functionality on the iPhone side of things, but need to use cloud services to get similar features which add on subscription costs & connection latency.
SMS Organizer
Custom launchers, dialers & SMS apps have been around from the very beginning on the Android side and have also been one of the biggest attractions of the platform. That said, the way we use SMS has changed a lot and it has become more of a platform to get transaction notifications, esp. for OTPs. This of course means that you have to be really careful in which custom apps you choose as a rogue app could easily siphon off your identity or bank balance.
That said, the SMS Organizer app from Microsoft Garage is a really smart app that makes life much easier and feels like a breath of fresh air after having used the iPhone Messages app for the last several years.
Transaction messages don’t just get a separate tab, but the notifications are also designed to highlight the key portion. Promotional & personal messages get their own tab as well. Then there’s the tab for reminders, finance & offers – each of which intelligently parse the messages and put the key information in a usable or actionable form. So, you can glance your bank, credit card, EPF, PPF & other such accounts including a transaction list (not completely accurate at times due to duplicate messages), get a reminder of your upcoming bills & travel plans and also surface the coupon codes that get sent in umpteen promo messages.
Then there’s the simple but great QoL improvement due to the ability to mark all messages as read and delete old OTP messages after a certain period. It also backs up the messages to Google Drive in case you want to restore later.
I’ve also been using the Microsoft Launcher which neatly integrates with Outlook and makes it easier to glance upcoming work meetings.
Windows integration
Yet another point around a Microsoft feature for Google’s OS. When I had switched to iPhones in 2014, it was from a Lumia 720 and Microsoft was still making Windows Phones at that time. Now, Microsoft seems to have embraced mobile devices & the cloud and their apps have features to further this vision. The Microsoft Phone Companion app on Windows makes it easy to connect to any Android phone, and in my case, the Samsung Galaxy S20FE has the required apps pre-installed.
Microsoft’s Phone Companion app in action along with the Swiggy app running from the mobile on the laptop
While it is not quite the kind of integration between macOS & iOS devices, there are many ways this is more fully featured as you can not just control basic settings like volume but also access your phone’s notifications, messages, photos & apps right from a Windows machine. This makes it quite easy to stay tuned to a single device, unless you are a Mac user, or are using a work laptop where this feature is restricted.
Working on large screens
This is a perk of Samsung devices with DeX support where you can connect to a larger screen like a monitor or TV (USB to HDMI dongle required) or to a PC (wirelessly or through a USB cable), and then get a desktop like experience.
I got a USB-C to HDMI adapter which also has a USB A port & USB C pass through charging, which allows me to connect a key + mouse combo along with the monitor to access the DeX mode. This mainly comes in handy when you need a larger screen to edit audio/video/images taken on the phone, or just want a larger screen to view content.
Also a quick mention of the split screen & hover apps feature on Samsung devices that has been supported since the earliest Galaxy Note devices, and has been available on iPads for a while but not on iPhones.
Automation
iOS devices have made great strides on this front with the Shortcuts app which started off as Workflow before being acquired by Apple. This largely pales when one compares to Android veterans like Tasker & Llama that have been around since the early days. Services like IFTTT & Zapier can also do more on Android than iOS. Then, there are the Shortcuts contemporaries like Google Assistant & Bixby routines which provide an easier interface.
Most of my automations deal with silencing & unsilencing the phone based on different conditions like location & time of the day. This is where the iPhone’s hardware mute switch gets in the way as automations can’t alter its state.
I’ve been using Pi-hole running on a Raspberry Pi 3B+ for the past 2 1/2 years, and it has really spoilt me to the extent that I have forgotten what ads on web pages and mobile apps look like (the limited travel in the last couple of years has also helped). It’s pretty effective in getting rid of the pop-up mobile ads and the in page banner ads on all devices connected to the wifi.
The setup process is quite simple if you have your own router or at least change the DNS server on the home router:
First off, get hold of a Raspberry Pi (even the model Zero is powerful enough for the Pi-hole), and the necessary peripherals like a case, SD card, charger & LAN cable. There are many readymade kits with the OS preinstalled sold online including Amazon, which saves a good deal of time.
Initial setup is easier with a monitor & keyboard + mouse attached to the Pi. Once this is done you can connect it to your router using a LAN cable and access it through a Telnet client/mobile app like Putty on any of your devices in the home network.
Next, you need to install Pi-hole on the Pi (you can do it during the setup itself), and configure the router to use the Pi as your DNS server. If you are stuck without admin access to your router, then you may need to configure each device to use the Pi separately.
You can also install mobile apps to manage the Raspberry & Pi-hole quite easily through your phone. There are multiple apps available for both Android & iOS.
Once everything is setup, you should have an ad free experience on your devices (not all ads can be blocked of course). I’ve found about 10-15% of the queries on my home network getting blocked, and this includes devices like Android & iPhones, iPads, Android TV, Amazon Echo, Homepods & Windows laptops of course.
It’s been over 16 years since I started this blog, but I have not posted anything in the last couple of years. So, taking another shot at reactivating it by restarting my linkblog posts through Pocket & IFTTT, and a bit of a tweak to the theme as well.
As for my gadget journey, quite a lot has happened in the last couple of years, starting with iPhone 11 Pro that I got to replace my iPhone 7 Plus. I also added the Homepod & Homepod mini towards the end of 2020 along with the Apple Watch 5, Airpods Pro & iPad mini the same year.
I was getting more & more entrenched into the Apple ecosystem till about a couple of months ago when the iPhone 11 Pro died (no damage – just refused to wake up). I ended up getting a Samsung Galaxy S20 FE 5G along with the Galaxy Watch 4 for the same cost as a replacement for the 11 Pro. The rock solid reliability of Apple hardware seems to be faltering for me, with the Airpods Pro also developing an issue on the left ear piece. I’ve also had different issues with iOS over the years ranging from failed updates requiring device resets to crashing home screens, so the OS side of things is not overtly different from Android in terms of stability.
That said, it has been quite refreshing to get into the modern Android ecosystem, with my last proper usage being Android 6 on the Mi 4. Quite a few things seem smarter on the Android side thanks to the openness of the platform, despite the flexibility Apple has introduced in the last few years with Shortcuts & the likes. Microsoft has also done quite a bit to enable integration with Windows. The link to Windows feature is quite handy to get notifications on my laptop in addition to being able run Android apps from the phone on the laptop as well. Then there’s the DeX mode on Samsung phones that comes in handy when editing videos or creating content using a monitor + keyboard + mouse combo, and of course the split screen & floating apps on the phone that have been around since the early Galaxy Note days.
The camera on the new phone is about on par with the 11 Pro with the telephoto having a longer focal length which I prefer, but the ultrawide is not as wide. The camera app performance is not as smooth, especially on the shot to shot performance when using the on screen shutter. I did try a few Google Camera ports, and their shot to shot performance is better but image quality is on the iffy side.
Either way, I’m in the Android ecosystem as my daily driver and the performance has been perfectly fine. Plus, the flexibility in using smarter apps for SMS & the likes is a more than worthwhile tradeoff for the camera performance.
My tryst with the modern PCs started in the mid 90s when the internet was almost non existent in India. At the time, software and games were not easy to come by and magazines like Chip which have away trial versions and freeware in CDs along with their copies were quite sought after. Chip later became Digit in India but the freebies continued.
It was with this thought that I attended the Digit Squad Tech Day in Mumbai today and it was fun to see all the colourful assembled desktops, consoles and mobile phones placed around the venue and fellow Digit Squad members participating enthusiastically in the different contests. Felt quite nostalgic to soak in the geeky environment.
Didn’t sit around idle of course and instead captured a few videos of the front camera fall detection in action for the smartphones on display. You can catch the video here.
OnePlus and Oppo seem to be catching on quite soon and they flash a dialog on screen while Samsung seems to be partially retracting their module. The Redmi K20 pro is similar in terms of responsiveness to Oppo and OnePlus but it closes the camera app instead of showing any alert. The Asus Zenfone 6z provides an interesting experience where you can see the arc on screen as the module rotates to its resting position.
