Tech

I ended up finding these two JS libraries that are both extremely lean, so they do not put a damper on your site’s performance and both are based on canvas.

topbar

topbar offers developers a solution where they can create a loading bar at the top of the screen to help users track their reading progress and understand how far along the document they have reached. It’s an extremely simple library to use and offers a unique, highly customizable solution. The loading bar you’ve likely seen during page load is courtesy of this lightweight and performant library.

confetti

This is a fun little library that allows devs to create confetti effects and animations.
Here is one of the basic ways in which you can use it.

Here is an example of snow flakes falling. Switch the blog theme to dark for best experiene!

What if I want to see shooting stars, here we go!

And so on you get quite a few ways to create these confetti like effects. You can even customize one for yourself by changing a few settings like origin and spread. I don’t know about you, but this has become my go to library for confetti-like effects.

Books

I will be completing Premchand’s Kafan and other short stories by the end of this week. Along with that, I have been reading The Discovery of India and it is so informative that my reading pace has slowed down considerably due to all the note-taking. Once I am done with Kafan, I’ll only be concentration on Nehru’s book.

Movies

This week I watched two movies. One was good, the other, not so much.

Nosferatu

In 19th-century Germany, Ellen Hutter’s traumatic connection to the nefarious Nosferatu, also known as Count Orlok, unleashes a catastrophe. As Orlok gains power and begins to passionately desire Ellen, her husband and a group of allies struggle to stop the vampire’s deadly plan. You can find my complete review for this movie here. This was the good movie.

Karwaan

Avinash, a depressed IT professional, embarks on a trip to retrieve his father’s mortal remains after he’s involved in a fatal accident. Avinash’s friend Shaukat, an eccentric man, tags along with him for this journey. On the way, they are joined by a rebellious teenage girl named Tanya. Their road trip across southern India makes them introspect about life, unexpected friendships, the losses we inevitably face, and the courage to be their true selves.

However, I feel it was a pseudo-intellectual ride that wanted to impart a lesson and preach to the audience instead of trying to convey a good story. There were scenes and dialogues that made me cringe. The story deviated so much from its primary track that I just could not take it. Dulquer Salman and Mithila Palkar did a good job portraying their characters, but some of the decisions their characters make in the story are impossible to explain. Without bashing this old film much, I would recommend it to people who have enough time to spare and want to watch a simple road trip movie.

And that’s it for this week’s update. Will aim to finish Kafan by next week and maybe watch a good art-house movie this weekend ✌️