Greetings, Earthling 🖖

I’m Shantanu, aka Shaan.

Your friendly neighborhood co-inhabitant of this tiny speck of dust, I maintain this site as a stochastic log of my calculations towards the futile aim of weeding out the anomalies from the equation that gives me my “42”.

In my Clark Kent mode, I spend my day at The Trade Desk, trying to crunch through petabytes of data and trillions of queries every day to understand the human behavior and make the advertising technology world a little bit better.

Before that, I spent a couple of decades in the Semiconductors world at Qualcomm and Google, building processors and AI accelerators, tinkering with chips, operating systems, device drivers, human interface devices, security et al.

When the lights go out everywhere, I like to don my maker hat and build stuff that no one wants.

I like to make and break things around me ranging from my smart toaster/TV to my web and phone apps to my car, strumming a bit of guitar, 3d printing stuff, and of course, shit-posting on twitter @shantanugoel.

Sometimes I post some of my travel and 3d print outputs on instagram, because I’ve been told by my gen-z interns that that’s a thing to do.

Do check out some of the other subdomains that I run.

Bytes and TIL FOR Week 50 2025

Shantanu Goel

iCloud sync exclusions

One can avoid syncing a file or folder in iCloud drive by adding a .nosync extension to it (for a file) or a .tmp extention to it (for a folder). Quite a bit backwards if you ask me, but it is what it is.

A few TILs and notes for Fnirsi FNB-C2

Got this USB power meter/tester a few weeks ago

Updating Fnirsi FNB-C2 Firmware

  • Download the firmware from fnirsi website
  • Press “OK” on FNB-C2 and connect a USB cable to the data port (USB sign) on C2 and to a PC
  • A drive will appear on the PC with about 8 MB size
  • Unzip the firmware and copy the bin file to the drive
  • It’ll take a couple of minutes or a bit more, without appearing to move but when the copying is finished, the device will automatically reboot with the new firmware
  • You can check the firmware version by going to Settings->About on the device

Running a capacity test on a device using Fnirsi FNB-C2

  • This can be done directly on the FNB-C2 device itself but it has a limit of 9 hours max, which may be problematic if you are testing a large capacity battery/power bank etc. Hence, the need to do it on PC which doesn’t have such limits.
  • Download the USB Tester Tool software from fnirsi’s website.
  • This works only on windows or linux
  • Open the software, and connect the FNB-c2 device to a USB port on host to the data port on c2
  • Set the sampling rate (anything you want according to need), start cur (acc to need but non zero preferably), stop cur near 0 (but not exactly 0, something small. Otherwise there’s some minimal current always flowing even after the battery runs out), stop time to 5 seconds or so. Then click on create and then start
  • Connect the input and output ports on the c2 to the device under test, and the load respectively
  • Make sure the CAP and NRG items under Auxiliary Record are set to record/display as needed
  • Now, sit back and let the capture happen

Testing Anker MagGo 633 Battery Capacity after 3 years of Usage

  • Anker seems to hold up pretty well despite a lot of active usage across these 3 years
  • Still maintaining 94%+ battery capacity
  • Below are the results Anker MagGo 633 Battery Test Results

Setting up Kopia on Synology to Backup MBP

Shantanu Goel

Why?

Who doesn’t want to backup all their stuff, that is:

  • Fast
  • Reliable
  • De-Duplicated
  • Has all the encryption, scheduling, and tons of extra bells and whistles?

Well, Synology Synology Active Backup for Business (ABB) has all of it, that I use to back up all my Windows and Linux devices. However, on M-series MBPs, the ABB agent requires installing Rosetta. I don’t want to do that, and so far I’ve managed with Synology Drive Client and other approaches.

More Is Less

Shantanu Goel

Sora 2 launch by Open AI, which many are terming as AI Tiktok made me think. Growing up in India during the 1980s, television was a simple ritual. Every evening, Doordarshan had our attention with its prime time shows. I’d sit cross-legged on the floor, eyes glued to whatever was airing. Sprawling family sagas of Buniyaad and Hum Log and the suspense with scares of Rahasyamayi Qila. Sundays were rare treat days with my favourite He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, but also epic journeys of Mahabharat and Chandrakanta whose opening theme songs I can still recite word to word, beat to beat. Byomkeysh Bakshi and Bharat Ek Khoj used to delight to no end.

Your Parents Did The Best Job They Knew How To Do

Shantanu Goel
I believe the sun should never set upon an argument
I believe we place our happiness in other people's hands
I believe that junk food tastes so good because it's bad for you
I believe your parents did the best job they knew how to do
I believe that beauty magazines promote low self esteem
I believe I'm loved when I'm completely by myself alone

In the Winter of 1999, as I was preparing to get to college, I was a regular run-of-the-mill rebellious teenager, convinced I was unique, that I alone held the keys to life, the universe and everything else, while my parents fumbled in the dark. They could never identify with the “new” world. Their advice felt archaic, shackled to a conservative past that couldn’t possibly sync with the rapid pace the “modern world” was evolving at. Every suggestion they offered seemed wrong, every boundary they set was an affront to my budding independence. I was certain they didn’t understand me, and worse, they never could.

Ampcode - First Impressions

Shantanu Goel

Intro

I’ve been seeing a few folks talking about Amp recently, which is an agentic coding tool built by Sourcegraph, the folks who had built Cody. I have worked with Cody before and had a great time with it before it got overshadowed by Windsurf/Cursor etc, so I wanted to give Amp a try as well. Now, this is NOT a full fledged review but only my first hands on impressions from implementing a mid sized feature over the weekend. Thanks to Quinn (CEO of Sourcegraph/Amp) who gave me a bunch of extra credits to try it out.