The Advisory Boar

By Abhijit Menon-Sen <>

What is Nehru Place?

It's hard to describe a place where you can find, next to an authorised HP outlet, a chap with syringes full of coloured ink who will refill your inkjet cartridge on the cheap.

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Celebrity security ordeals

I'm tired of people getting worked up about “demeaning and humiliating” treatment that some celebrity occasionally suffers at the hands of airport or other security personnel.

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Fighting the fixers: thermal paste edition

While cleaning accumulated dust out of Hassath's Athlon64 heatsink the other day (to silence an overheating alarm), I accidentally lifted the heatsink off the CPU and broke the layer of thermal paste. After that, of course, the machine refused to boot at all, emitting a loud siren-like wail at startup.

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Sify nullband service

Sify broadband never once worked for us.

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Film and the Historical Imagination

Hassath and I attended and enjoyed a two-week summer course on the depiction of historical ideas at the Media Research Centre in Jamia Millia Islamia University, Delhi.

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Switching video cards with Ubuntu/Xorg

Speaking of broken hardware, I tracked down the source of my most recent random lockups to a flaky old video card.

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Introducing Loathsxome: minimalist weblog software

By the time I managed to set up Blosxom and some plugins to my liking, I ended up with a complete rewrite that I named Loathsxome.

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André Béteille: Religion and Society

An excerpt from an opinion piece by André Béteille about how religion and society cannot be studied independently.

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My beloved Chenbro PC-611 cabinet

The first “real” tower cabinet I bought was worth the enormous premium I paid compared to generic cabinets.

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Buying LPG on the black market

It's surprisingly easy to buy LPG cylinders on the black market in Delhi.

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