A friend asked me what kind of things they have in Refresh Colombo. Here’s what a typical session looks like. Pics are from the August meetup.

Binku is coming to Sri Lanka in a few days. Who is this Binku? What does he want from us? Please think over the following facts about him before you think of welcoming him to Sri Lanka. Most of us haven’t actually met Binku in real life. We don’t know what kind of a crook he really is. Binku ...

We had a small Colombo Show HN Meetup this weekend. The plan was to hold a Colombo Hacker News meetup. Then we thought it’s better to make it a Show HN meetup, where participants show some work they’re doing to the audience, explains the developer stories behind it and the crowd gets into a constructive discussion. A meetup of this ...

Some people don’t seem to understand the concept of life expanding photos. For example, when I posted a life expanding photo yesternight, Madhawa replied by posting a link to a porn site saying that it would expand the life more. Stop. Looking at naked girls isn’t what really extends your life. I think it’s high time I explained the reasons behind ...

I got to know about mosh recently from a tweet by gaveen. Mosh is a replacement to the good old ssh command. It solves some of ssh’s biggest annoyances. mosh handles connections internally When you’ve ssh’ed to a server and your internet suddenly drops, that ssh connection gets broken. With mosh, you wouldn’t have to worry about this because it ...

Viva64 develops PVS-Studio, which is a static code analyzer for C/C++/C++11. But their popularity has come from the fact that they run this software on quite a few major open source projects around the internet and post the results. They hit the mark of 1000 error samples yesterday. Their bug database is a treasure trove. For one they expose bugs ...

As you can see from the above image, the power and ground pins of a USB connector are situated on its either side and the two data pins are placed in between. Also notice that the data pins are situated a bit inward compared to the power pins. As a result of this, when you plug in a USB, ...

Nearby.lk is a promising Sri Lankan startup which aims to create a platform that lets you find places around you easily. What? Another one of those? Well, yes. In fact, Sri Lanka is yet to get a proper location-based service that lets you find places and businesses nearby. Nearby.lk focuses on filling that gap. A service of this nature should ...

We’ve seen hundreds of twitter clients come and go. Only the fittest survive in this frenzy. And Streamie is going to be one of them. Streamie is a browser-based twitter client, so it’s cross-platform from the outset. It’s timeline is real time, as in Tweetdeck. But these are not what make it ...

Apparently not. He died by a natural cause related to the illness he’d been suffering. But what if he really did commit suicide? That’s a dumb question. Coz Jobs was actually against suicide. If he wanted to, he’d have committed suicide long ago, when he was diagnosed with the terminal illness. ...

When you come across a nicely built website, don’t you always wonder what technologies the site is built with. Perhaps a sneak peek at the page source can give you some idea. But there’s an easier method. There’s this nifty little Chrome extension called BuiltWith (available for Firefox as well). When you’re in a webpage simply click the BuiltWith icon ...

Just wanted to repeat that if you don’t fucking like a tweep who you follow, just frikkin unfollow him! For example, if you hate the stuff I post you should unfollow me instead of whining all the day about them. Some of those who can’t stand my tweets have already unfollowed. (DM me if you want a list) Long gone ...

The day before the christmas Thilanka said, ‘how about we build a Sinhala typing tutor?’. I said, ‘why not?’. We finally ended up building an English one. Its beta version is now live at http://typing.lk. Typing.lk is basically a place to learn and practice touch typing. The site has three modes at the moment: Learn, Practice and Code. The first ...

I’ve always been a chess enthusiastic. But the problem was that I had no one to play with and I hate to have to play with computer. Then @e4c5 told me about chess.com where you get to play with real people. Was playing there for about two years and used to have a 1600+ rating. And then I stopped playing. ...

Food review blogs are popping up like mushrooms these days. For example, my friend Savindri (or @PhuckYou_ as some of you may know her) started this Tuk-Tuk Thosai thing. She’s got some really good stuff there, you should certainly pay it a visit. But the problem with the food she reviews is that almost all of them cost a hell ...

I’m a pickpocket. That’s my sole livelihood. Now don’t call me a criminal; picking pockets ain’t that bad. For one, I believe that nothing in this world happens by chance. No good deed goes unrewarded. Likewise, no bad deed goes unpunished. That’s just the way things are. If your pocket was picked that means that you have done something that ...

Bookhub.lk was launched two days back, and Sri Lanka has finally got a proper ebook store. Proper I say because the project is backed by two giants: Etisalat from the mobile world and M.D.Gunasena from the book industry. There have been previous attempts like pothpath.lk (which isn’t a store after all), but Bookhub is fortunate enough to have the ...

Suicide is one of the noblest ways to put an end to your life. Some people tend to label suicide as cowardice, but they themselves are the real cowards. It is not very easy to make the mind to attempt suicide, even more difficult is the act itself. It takes a real person to successfully [...]

So I was going through some of the old unread feeds in my Google Reader and came across this post by Mayooresan on Dialog’s MyTV service. Had heard of MyTV, but didn’t have a time to try this out earlier. I started off by sending an SMS saying ‘MYTV’ (w/o quotes) to 678. It replied me back with a link ...

PayPal doesn’t fully support transactions for Sri Lankans. Yes, we can pay for stuff with Paypal, but we can’t receive money from others. This has always been a major problem for the country’s freelancers. Most clients prefer making payments via Paypal. There are several other options like Moneybookers, but none of them are as popular as Paypal nor are supported ...