Author: Nayar

Published on by Nayar

Trip to Madagascar: What is Diurnal Air Temperature Variation?

I was told Madagascar is almost same climate to Mauritius. So I did some research and indeed. The temperature matches that of Mauritius. I see Antananarivo will be 19 to 23 degree Celsius.

It would be kinda comparable to a Curepipe temperature in Mauritius.

But then I noticed something else. Have a look at the minimum and maximum temperature difference. In Mauritius is it around 5 degrees (23 – 18). But in Madagascar, it’s like 13 degrees ( 23 – 10).

During the day you may be fine wearing just a t-shirt

But on other occasions or at night, you might need to have 2 sweaters and 1 t-shirt.

 

But it’s alright. Just be prepared and you’ll be fine 🙂

Published on by Nayar

I bought a Macbook Air M1 in 2023 instead of Asus Zenbook 14 OLED

My Asus Zenbook UX310UQ which I bought in 2018 served me very well except in 1 department: battery life. Recently, the battery would just die randomly so I had to keep it plugged in at all times. So I needed a laptop with adequate battery so that I can work on the move or even be my sofa.

I was deciding between an Asus Zenbook 14″ OLED (which has a gorgeous display) and a Macbook Air with the M1 chip. It was about Rs 10,000 cheaper than the Macbook with similar specs.

The RAMs cannot be upgraded on both laptops unfortunately and 8GB is very limit in 2023. I decided to opt for the Macbook M1 specially after hearing excellent reviews about the battery life and performance.

It really didn’t disappoint in that area. I got 8 hours of battery life in the first day and I even run some machine learning codes on it. However 256GB of storage is really limiting. Every time I would install a software, it would bring me anxiety about filling the disk. The 8GB Ram honestly “feels” more than adequate for web browsing and even coding. However it would swap to the SSD a lot in the background which is rumoured to cause damage to it. Since everything is soldered to the board, replacing the SSD will not be possible thus the Macbook might be bricked earlier than expected. I haven’t found lots of people actually reporting dead M1 SSDs on forums. Please share if you find some with me.

I was quite surprised to discover that the laptop can be used without signup with an Apple account. The OS even updates without it. However in order to update Apple apps such as Numbers, iMovie etc from the App store, you will need to signin using an Apple ID.

The MacOS is really nice in terms of keeping your screen real estate. The window borders are virtually inexistent. On my KDE laptop, so much pixels were wasted to draw the borders.

The widgets feels much more luxurious than on KDE. Is it the better screen or just better graphics. I don’t know

And 1 thing which really impressed me was whenever you open the lid, the laptop is ready to be used. My Linux laptop would take like 5-10 seconds to be ready from sleep.

Some cons:

  • No print screen button
  • SSHFS is really slow. I got like 3MB/s. https://osxfuse.github.io/
  • Python/git stop working after update
  • Youtube was not playing in full HD. I could see the blurriness
  • You get only 1 year warranty as compared to 3 on the ASUS
  • Every one has a Macbook in a cafe. I had to place a sticker to recognise mine.

Product photo of Macbook M1 Air (purchased April 2023)

After 1 year of using it, I had to upgrade to a more powerful one since the M1 Air is not really built to run large language models on them. So I sold it to my sister who I hope will take care of it 🙂

Published on by Nayar

Speaking at DevCon 2023: E-commerce Chatbot in Creole

Can’t believe it’s already 1 week since we had the DevCon at Caudan Arts Centre in Mauritius. It was a wonderful 3 day event in which we got the opportunity to learn lots of stuffs.

I spoke about the progress which my startup LEFINTECH LTD has been doing in the realm of helping the Mauritian economy go online. We are currently working on making an E-commerce chatbot in Creole language which is also partly funded by the MRIC (Mauritius Research and Innovation Council).

The Q&A session was invaluable as we got lots of feedback on how we can better improve our coding and dataset generation.

Beyond the stage, there was lots of networking opportunities around the conference area. It was amazing to see so many talents who are interested by Technology in Mauritius.

If you are also working in the field of E-commerce and Creole in general, do not hesitate to get in touch with me on LinkedIn or Facebook.

Have a nice day 🙂

 

 

 

Published on by Nayar

2 Years investing in Mauritian Stock Market.

Today marks exactly 2 years since i first purchased stocks on the Mauritian stock market.

Yeah. I bought 100 shares of MCB. But then the prices dropped after that so I purchased more and more as I gained more confidence.

I regret to not having bought more of the stocks at those cheap prices but anyways. It’s good that I started. I invested in 11 companies since then.

 

So how is my return today, after exactly 2 years you ask?

Well well well, I made some substantial loss of around Rs 40k with 4 stocks (18k + 19k + 0.5k + 2k). But these are just paper losses as I haven’t really sold them since I bought (unrealised loss). But on the the rest of my stocks, I made some quite some money; again just paper gains as I haven’t sold them for a profit. I did receive like some 60k of dividends throughout these years.

How much did I lose as compared to the US Dollar? On 18th May 2021, USD was Rs 39.45. Today is it 45.50. That’s about 15% loss in purchasing power.

But my portfolio grew about 10% in these 2 years. Therefore my purchasing power compared to USD was around -5%.

If I would have just bought USD in May 2021, It would have been more profitable. But anyways, I think I’m kinda satisfied with my portfolio. It’s quite liquid and gives dividends. My Compound annual growth rate (CAGR)  is 4.88% currently which is slightly above what banks would give as interest on fixed deposit. Fixed deposits don’t go down in value though.

Yeah. Sometimes the stock value goes down and you’re like wondering is it transitory or something really bad happened. But as I said, I did lose substantially with some stocks. I also made the mistake of listening to some of my friends instead of just trusting my guts and my analysis. Fortunately my main stocks are covering my losses.

I hope you enjoyed reading my experience. Have a great day or night wherever you are 🙂

Published on by Nayar

Speaking at DevCon 2022 Mauritius

I had the opportunity to speak again at the Developers Conference at Caudan Mauritius. It’s a must attend event for any person working in IT.

Upon my arrival I was given a speaker gift.

Reminds me of Mark Zuckerberg a bit. Maybe I’ll destined to be rich as him too. Lol 🤣

My first topic was “My First Baby Steps with Git”. It was aimed towards students held developers who have not yet started using Git. Despite being in peak lunch time, there was quite a good turnout on attendees. There were good interaction with the crowd. Thanks to my friend Avish to have taken photographs during my sessions.

The second talk which I held was more geared towards IoT enthusiasts. I showed a little demo on how we can integrate social media with internet of things. For example, I demoed how to turn on a light bulb using a Facebook message.

Bonus: My friend Vidush invited me to his talk as a guest along with Priyeshan and Alex. We got the opportunity to share our story on how we got into the entrepreneurship journey. And the question time was lit. The audience didn’t hold back their questions. They took full advantage of the panelists present. There’s indeed a huge interest in entrepreneurship in Mauritius. I hope we can become the silicon valley in the Indian Ocean. There’s still a long way to go.

The other sessions I attended were of really high quality. I was really happy with the conference overall. I hope the future events get even bigger and better.