I was playing around with my artistic mind to come with some logo for the system. I ended up starting with something when I had to create a scannable QR for visiting the site and after playing around, here is where a small and big logos are, along with the new QR code.
I often talk about how distracted I get or how you may run into many issues as you start working through whatever you are working on. I was going to just make this entry, link a couple of images and be done with in 5 minutes.
But if you look at the time, it is already 30 minutes or more since I started. What happened are three things; I suddently starting thinking about something, had to learn more than what I knew on the top of my head and my computer started hanging.
The work itself would have taken all this time - it is simple; for the purposes of website I would have stored and served iamges in .png format in one/two sizes. But suddenly I started thinking about a different format and I needed to spend more time
Also, if my machine hangs, I end up killing the power and restart the whole thing. LIke I mentioned earlier, as time goes, my habit is to have easily 10-25 things open in my PC and all is lost when the m/c is hard reset. which is why I spend so much time writing scripts and coming up with other ways to quickly do things
Also, some gap I get like this is when I choose to go to kitchen; I kicked off my cooking for the day only now as I survived with a little bit of food from last night.
Anyway, for now here are the images, I will explain more later.
Really tiny one, if I just need an icon:
This is a bit bigger, where you can show a clear image and will be used in banners etc
This is a scannable QR code that can be printed and anyone with a mobile can just scan this and get going:
2026-09-04 15:27 - 16:14
I mentioned earlier that I reviwed host.co.in, my webhost with TrustPilot as the customer rep requested in the beginning. TrustPilot doubted my genuine review and pulled the review off, sent me a notice, which was mostly automated.
They gave an option to give additonal info to manually verify if I was persistent and allow the review. I sent a reasonably dtailed email reply and made an entry here also, for them to read
I am happy, very happy so far which host.co.in has to offer; the most important aspect of it is how little it costs. at ~72 rupees a month, including tax, payable as 1600 rupees or so for an entire 24 months is a great start.
I am still not ready to summarize what all it offers. In fact, I am still wishing that a couple things could have been available or be made to work, which I may try.
But in comparison to having to spend say 500 rupees a month or more, there are obvious limitaions and I am still unhappy with just one or two aspects
All said and my point was this is a great place to start. Good services when they cost low enough for almost anyone to be able to use need great recognitions.
Also, while I do come across some problems, the shared hosting setups involvign Apache+PHP+cPanel combination is a well utilized, well used and well tested framework that millions of website use (in fact most websites use this option and not nodeJs etc.) with at least two decades of solid history
If you were to start a new initiative, you can pretty much push yourself to the limit and implement as complex system demanding so much in one to two years, just with this option. If you really need something better, you would have created so much before you can thing of going to spending 500 rupees a month as opposed 70 rupees a month.
TrustPilot did come back, acknowledged my email and turned the review back on, accepting its genuineness.
Like I said, in two to three weeks I may explain how much a ~75 rupees a month hosting can offer you as I do keep finding day by day as I think through the design and operations
2026-08-04 15:12 - 15:24
My last record was three days ago. I often thought no matter who is listening or watching, if I get into some habit, some mechanism in a way that every day I talk about what is happening around me and record it somewhere, I might be motivated enough to actually do some work.
I still spend an hour or more in the evening which serves as a one hour break from sitting in front a PC all day both to my mind and my body. This is also the time the one or two peacocks come to visit before the retire for the day
If I were to write down all the things that happened inside my mind in the last three days, it would take probably 4-8 hours. Because even if nothing seems to happen, lot do actually happen.
The planned one hour recording of the evneing too, often becomes two hours. I created a manual procedure of how to record my voice in the mobile, transfer it to the PC to process a little further, aggressively reducing the size, upload the file to google drive and then make an entry in recordings page and probably add an entry to the history page
I somewhat finalized this procedure three four days ago. The only difference now will be that I may want to adjust the volume levels to make the recordings consistent eventually figure out the right set of mics to use.
The procedure is different if I choose to use the mobiles as opposed to the PC. But they are coming real close.
While this is happening on one side, I keep playing around with the web host to see what all this lowest cost option provides. It is too soon to summarize and is very tiring.
Also i started gaining traction in writing the PHP code also which will become the server side programming
If I were to blindly just make a few webpages, this would have been straight forward. I am in fact a perfectionish or at least somewhat of an artist while dealing with programming. Lot of things have to be perfect or at least look well organized, well thought of and efficient.
Thinkign about making highly functional website, not just showing some text here and there makes me want to create a proper foundation on three fronts at a bare minimum
One is the code itself: the code has to be very structured and well designed. all the things I would have come up to have a high level design in the past had NodeJS server on a VPS offering me full control of the OS.
Now it is PHP based and with almost no control over the environment and with many limitations enforced by cheap hosting arrangements.
Apart from the code/program itself, a good development activity will have other things in mind: proper testing setup and backup setup. Me being hard core like I am, I probably am overengineering a few things here and try to reinvent all my wheels
Also, I tend to make a highly complex work environment and eventually will deal with atleast a dozen terminals with which I constantly deal with and a PC with already 2-3 mobiles. This may even become bigger, with one or two smaller Pis/Radxa PCs added to the mix and an android TV.
Slowly I really try to have many little things here: like usig tmux, vim and many scripts to maintaint the computing environments. all this take a good deal of my brain.
While it may not seem much, there is a lot of foundation work happening so far.
2026-08-04 14:19 - 15:10
I have spent years of imagining how new things can begin. "Imagining" mostly involves dreaming of something happening, often with how people will react to the outcomes.
What happens in parallel is incredible amount of fact finding, price checking and analyzing the possibilities. Somehow, it had become my second nature to do this. I do that with full interest.
The end goal however is always making something happen for real. So far, in my life, this rarely happens. At least if I compare how much I dream of happening vs what actually does happen.
The usual next step after the start is satisfying an intense need I have to see whether something can happen or not. You would try to experiments, just tiny ones, to see whether a system/problem can support what you want.
In the current case of starting with a new PHP based web hosting system, I am trying to see the most basic functionality working or not.
I thought of using PHP in my life may be 15 years ago first, then 10 years ago again. I used to think of Java as an option before. And for five years before the last five I thought of microsoft based C#/.net or Go based systems.
The last five years however, I have always assumed I would try to use only nodeJs for the server side as browser side already uses Javascript.
But now, I am going back to PHP because as you will find out soon if you walk the road I walk, it is cheapest web development platform to start with.
As of today, if you want nodeJs or .net/c# or java options, you will most likely need a VPS, something like your own machine on the internet that is rented to you. Even the smallest such option will start @ 500 rupees a month or more.
PHP based options however like i bought this time can be as low as 100 rupees a month or less or $1 a month in internation currency.
I can explain why this is, someother time. But even if I don't, If I simply continue talking about the development options I think you'll see why it is cheap.
That said, the next big thing is whether it supports everything I need. That's why I am started to explore now.
Actually my needs are not much. Especially once I decided to stick to a low cost option. What I need is a very minimal programmable system on the server, accessible by anyone in the world. There should be the ability to store data in a database, preferably sqlite (a very fast local option) and ability to read/write files
My plan for deveopment will most likely be to push complex tasks to the browser anywayso, I usually won't need the server to do much other than serving the pages with the code to the browsers and store data in the server that needs server side storage.
PHP seems fine so far. It is definitely not NodeJS. But it will do for now.
If you could really track my progress over the last four days (or three, I can't remember), you will see that there is some daily progress.
But If I have to specify a reasonably tangible milestone, it would be demonstrating a a CRUD setup. CRUD is an acronym for systems that have a data storage mechanism. Create, Read, Update and Delete. The stand four operaions yuo with data.
Let me reiterate a couple of things. It is not like any of this is totally new to me. But I have not worked exactly with this system and this provider.
Starting with buying an option and my computer not having any setup to create a website in this way, the first milestone will be to end in a simple page that can show some data, say a list of people for instance, and give the ability to see, add and remove people from the list.
In two three days this should be complete. But As I often say, my mind is no more a simple mind; it is carrying years of thoughts, plans, possibiities, knowledge, emotions, distractions and so on.
What could have happened in a day these days take weeks as I get distracted by many different thought as I try to concentrate on one thing at a time.
2026-08-01 13:31
One of the biggest problems that I face in this world, especially when I constantly have to look for really affordable services that I can reliably avail. Host.co.in's package is a good thing and something I would recommend anyone following this road I take.
For rupees ~1600, I got something, a very small hosting package that is valid for two years - very basic, some space, a single domain pointer, php, db support and email. Ideally, I would have liked a VPS option that can run nodeJs and give me a full ssh access but that is 10x expensive than this.
I was surprised when I could get their customer/billing reps to respond quickly as the activation process was taking some time and when I pinged them. The manual steps involved in this process could have taken a day or more but when I pinged them, they were pretty immedite and got things movig one step at a time.
It is not perfect. I did have many issues in getting some services working, like new user/email creations etc., but things pretty much resolved by themselves as day progressed.
I wrote a very good review in TrustPilot explaining this and a couple days later TrustPilot responded saying they doubt the genuiness of my review as it appeared fake. I took the time to add this entry and also respond to them with sufficient information to prove that this was not a fake review.
It is important that you have a reliable webhost if you walk the road. It is amazing if you can get one for 1600 rupees for two years. Someday, I will go for a VPS if I could afford 10x of what I can afford today. But the experience with a provide starts at this entry point where the cheapest option is the starting point and I have wait till I see enough traction and promise to go for higher options.
Host.co.in provides that entry point but the architecture has to rely on PHP and have very limited server control. The disk space is just 2GB, I am pretty sure unlimited bandwidth is just some lame marketing term all these providers use but I extrapolate from what I would have if I bought a VPS plan to assuming I can have ~100 GB of bandwidth quota per month, which is not bad to serve mostly textual content to a smaller audience.
If there is a need, I would have bumbped this service up to the smallest VPS first which will be around 540 rupees per month with tax (if paid yearly), with a bit more powerful system but with a full control: it is basically like havign your own tiny server up there. That time the storage space will be 75 GB (30x as what I have now) and 1TB transfer per month, which as I plan for what I can serve will be ~30 GB per day, which will make it easy to serve hour long audio files without worrying too much and little video files also.
After adding this entry I am going to send a note to TrustPilot to reassess how genuine this experience is.
2026-07-31 12:11
This is a long road. Today was mostly doing things manually. The sequence is this:
1) record an audio in the mobile in the smallest size possible (use termux instad of android's recorder app.
2) transfer it to the PC, and compress it more using ffmpeg as termux-microphone-recording isn't perfect
3) save the file in google drive and share the file
4) update this website's recordings page and history page
5) eventually get google gemini to transcribe the text
It just started. Today is just trying things out. eventually, this should result in one or two commands to run and things should happen as easily as possible.
2026-07-31 00:17
One of the first few things I need to do is get some kind a system that can take my speeches, long and short, convert them to text.
Today, even as I thought I am going to limit my speech to an hour as I try to document some thoughts that go through my mind that day, on a daily basis.
I ended up talking to my phone for two hours and twelve minute. That is too long, unnecessary and will become very repetitive.
What I will need to make is a process where I can speak through the day, record them, and store them in the smallest size possible for future reference and others to hear if needed.
But more important requirement is that I need to be able to extract the text of the speech and pubish in the website. Such text will be easy to light to serve, easy search through, and translation to other languages will become a possibility
Making a system is much harder than just simply using what someone else has created. As of today, I could just use my mobiles Recorder app to recorder my voice; just upload it to google drive and share the files; submit to google Gemini for returning the transcription and use Gemini to translate.
Easier said than done. I could explain whether this is the only possible scenario or whether I have some problems with it.
When you have a lot on your mind and looking at a very steep learning curve, you can not always be clear on what happens at your mind at this point.
For reasons that I may explain later, I decided these are some additional work I need to do each time I end up recording my long speeches:
1) First convert the audio into smaller files but using lower quality as android's quality of recording is unnecessary for me. For example, today's android file is 71MB even at the lowest quality I recorded. But I then use ffmpeg to convert it a bit and it becomes 17MB, which is sufficient
2) Instead of submitting such long files for transcription, as I was go through the internet to see how large of files can be submitted to Gemini, I decided files to be sliced into files of 30 minutes or less in time
3) I quickly tried to see what options I have that I can use in my PC without using the internet much and decided I will make a web page to help me slice the files.
That's what started once I started speaking and it 40 minutes past midnight and I not even halfway through.
2026-07-29 00:40
Any activity may need a place in this world to become real and tangible. s75 exists in three places: my mind, my house and a webserver hosting s75.in.
I decided to go for one of the cheapest hosting options available in India to begin with that can suppose some minimal programming and reasonable amount of space.
A typical shared hosting @ host.co.in seemed reasonable with the most common features provide anywhere and I think I only need php, support for sqlite and some disk space (2GB is provided) accessible through a proper domain name: s75.in.
Cheapest hosting option, while coming with what seems like a good support for the price, did seem to come with a whole lot of glitches. but so far, i can still get things started.
Starting a new website from scratch is like renting an empty office space somewhere with some easy to use tools to set things up.
I haven't had a need to do anything in php or work in this kind of hosted setup for over a year. It did take more than day to get a hang of things
In a span of 18 hours awake, 5 hours sleep and 7 hours awake, s75 is where it is now as I am able to write this up and upload it to where it can be seen from everywhere.
Here are things that happened during this period:
1) Setup the webhosting account
2) Play around to create user accounts for ftp and email
3) (Re)Learn php enough to put up a couple of pages here, working thru' some issues
4) Tried to gain confidence with the purchase asserting it may give me sqlite support
5) Make a simple logo, a QR code (couple of times) for easy access & reference
6) Print a physical copy, do crude lamination and make it ready to hang outside
godaddy has been keeping this domain for me for a while and it started pointing to this new server.
2026-07-28 15:36
After starting and stopping a few things over a hundred times and doing nothing, s75 becomes an attempted reality, of one man, his mind and his wishes for the world.
2026-07-27 07:15