Culture

Culture is esoteric to people who live or belong to it. It’s a representation of how they live, they dress, celebrate festivals, engage with people and their cuisine. Food is not the best way to get a deep understanding of a culture since culture is an amalgamation of different components that coherently come together to form what we know as culture.

Food is a source of energy and needed by mankind to survive and we cannot live without food. It’s needed by people all across the world. They may have different ways of obtaining and preparing their food. However, just by understanding how the food is obtained or prepared doesn’t make one understand their culture. To deeply understand culture, one needs to understand their history, clothing, language, films and religion. It’s a composition of all these entities that embodies a human being that is ingrained to their culture.

Getting an understanding of festivals would help one know about how people come together and celebrate. There is a festival in the South of India, celebrated in the state of Kerala known as Onam. It’s celebrated over a period of 10 days marked by flower arrangement on the floors of their houses in different patterns and sizes that progressively increases in size until the final day. The final day is marked by a grand lunch with friends and family. Festivals are one of the many components that can be used to understand culture.

Clothing is another component in the myriad of components that form a culture. It’s analogous to a cake that has many cake pieces. The cake is the culture formed by all these cake pieces. Clothing is one piece of the cake. Traditionally, people in the state of Kerala used to wear a garment called the mundu that is wrapped around the waist and they wear a shirt on top. Many people still wear it day to day however the trend is shifting to the westernized form of clothing. People do wear their traditional attire during festivals and weddings.

In conclusion, to deeply understand culture, one would need to understand all the components that form a culture and it’s not just food.

MS Graph PowerShell Error: Insufficient privileges

Many of you may have started exploring the graph PowerShell offered by Microsoft since the AzureAD modules are soon to be deprecated.

Now you may have noticed this error: “Insufficient privileges to complete the operation”

This relates to the permissions that we grant while using the Connect-MgUser command. This is for connecting to Azure AD. In Microsoft docs, you may find the Connect-MgUser command to be

Connect-MgGraph -Scopes "User.Read.All","Group.ReadWrite.All"

Notice that the values passed to the “Scopes” parameter are “User.Read.All” and “Group.ReadWrite.All”. The User has Read only permissions. So, if we go on to create a new user which is a write operation, it will throw an error that says Insufficient privileges.

Now, let’s make a slight modification to the Connect-MgGraph cmdlet.

Connect-MgGraph -Scopes "User.Read.Write.All","Group.ReadWrite.All"

We have changed “User.Read.All” to “User.Read.Write.All”. This would give us sufficient privileges to create a new user in Azure AD 🙂.

Adding Google Maps Transit Routes To Google Calendar

Many of us have used Google Maps to travel around the world. You might have used it as directions while driving or if you are in a big city you would be using transit directions to navigate.

Google Maps allows you to add Transit directions to your calendar. Let’s say that you plan on going to Lincoln Center of Performing Arts in New York City from Washington Square Park. You plan to leave Washington Square Park at 9:25 AM and set your directions.

You choose to go by the 1 train. Now, if you scroll to the bottom of this section, you would see the “Add to Calendar” button. This would add your transit directions to Google Calendar!

So, once you click on the Add to Calendar button it will open up Google Calendar.

And if you scroll down, it will show you the route. Don’t forget to save it to your calendar 😊

Copy Link to Highlight Feature in Chrome

Whenever you share an article with friends, you send them a link. The link takes them to the top of the page. But what if, you wanted to share a particular section of an article that is way below on the page?

In comes the “Copy Link to Highlight” feature in Chrome. This allows you to share a link that directly takes you to the section of the article. Let me Illustrate this point with an example-

Let’s say we want to share this article https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/26/paris-asks-scooter-sharing-services-to-restrict-speed-to-10km-h/ . And we want our friend to see a particular section on this page that starts with “In September, the City of Paris..” . So, we go to that section and highlight that set of words by selecting it and then right click on it. As you can see on the screenshot below it gives us a popup menu with a few options. Let’s select “Copy Link to Highlight” option that is right below Copy.

This would generate a link that looks like this https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/26/paris-asks-scooter-sharing-services-to-restrict-speed-to-10km-h/#:~:text=In%20September%2C%20the%20City%20of%20Paris . So, once you share this link with your friend it will directly take them to that section on the page.

But before doing this make sure to update your Chrome Browser to the latest version. You can do that by going into your settings chrome://settings/ and then selecting “About Chrome” on the last item of the left navigation. This would ensure that you have the latest version of Chrome.

Amazon Fire Stick

Amazon Fire Stick helps in making your TV a “Smart TV”. All you need to do is plug this device to the HDMI Port in your TV and then you would be able to connect to the Internet!

With Amazon FireStick you can access Youtube , stream Netflix (if you have a subscription, of Course!) and the countless other apps out there. It comes with the new 2nd Generation Remote that facilitates smooth and fast navigation. It has also got a built in Alexa Voice Search that gets activated with a press of a button! So, you can search for your favorite shows without moving your fingers.

You can get the FireStick by clicking on this link.

React

React is a popular JavaScript Library that was developed by Facebook. It is used to build the Front End of an application. Part of the popularity has to do with it being used in companies like Facebook, Netflix, Airbnb. It has got a huge community of developers.

This is something that I have started to learn and I will be publishing a series of articles sharing what I have learnt so far.

So, stay posted!

How to reset Auto Increment to a specific value in MySQL?

Once a column is set to Auto Increment the value would Increment by one for every record added. Therefore, the column value for each record would be unique and hence it could be set as a primary key. There may be times when you would want it to Increment from a specific value. This is how it can be done-

ALTER TABLE table_name AUTO_INCREMENT=1001;

 

In the above example, Auto Increment would begin from 1001 rather than 0.

 

How to stop receiving calls from Telemarketers?

Many of us might consider receiving calls from telemarketers a nuisance.  Fortunately there is a way where this can be stopped. One can do this by going to the Federal Trade Commission’s Registry at https://www.donotcall.gov

PHP MYSQL Error Message-mysql_fetch_row expects parameter 1 to be resource-

This is an error that one faces when they use mysql and mysqli Interchangeably. Functions that begin with “mysql” are deprecated and no longer supported in the latest versions of PHP. So, one should either use mysql throughout the program or mysqli, mix and match doesn’t work. Mix and match might work in the grocery store that might help you to get sale prices but unfortunately it doesn’t work here! 😀

 

Pixlr: An Online Photo Editor

Whenever we think of photo editing, the first thing that comes to our mind is Photoshop. But, unfortunately Photoshop is something which not everyone can afford so they would have to look at some place else. One of the tools which they could take a look at is Pixlr.

Pixlr is an Online Photo Editor that can perform the basic editing functions like cropping, resizing, adding a white space etc. It may not have all the features of Photoshop and hence it is not a recommended substitute. But, with that said it is always good to give it a shot and see what you can achieve by playing around with it!