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.

Lessons in Human Psychology, Or How I taught Machines Kung Fu

Shantanu Goel

I Know Learnt Kung Fu

I Know Kung Fu

Imagine yourself in a Hollywood Thriller. You wake up in a dark room without any memory of how you got there or what are you doing there. All you know is you need to get out somehow but don’t have any instructions on how to do so. You can’t really see anything, but someone keeps shouting random words. Every time you do something, you either feel a sharp bout of pain or a bit of exhilaration that becomes your sole guide. Gradually, you figure out the connection between those random words and your actions and you start making your way through and soon see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Bytes and TIL For Week 52 2025

Shantanu Goel

Laser Engravers!

  • Thought about buying a portable laser engraver, started with xTool F1 Lite and almost settled on xTool F2
  • Seemed small enough to be portable so I can use it in my balcony to avoid venting complications
  • F2 also has a higher power diode laser than F1 Lite, and a small IR laser for some acrylic/metal work too!
  • But then decided against it finally. Unsure how much I’m going to use it for all the hassle. Maybe some day!

Some notes about electronics

  • Pomodoro cube

Bytes and TIL FOR Week 51 2025

Shantanu Goel

macOS and miniforge

  • On macOS, if you install miniforge, by default it always updates bash_profile for conda init, even if your shell is zsh.
  • To fix and use conda/miniforge properly, run conda init zsh after installing miniforge.
  • miniforge / conda change the prompt to add the currently active env name to the shell which is not needed if you already use something like oh-my-zsh/startship etc
  • To remove this, run conda config –set changeps1 false

Learnt about Snapblocks as a better alternative to scratch

https://x.com/nileshtrivedi/status/2002634236319134008

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.