About V. Subhash

To whomsoever it is concerned, blah blah blah … blippity blippity blippity … blah blah blah … blippity blah blippity … blah blippity blah … blah blah blah.

Who Am I

I am an Indian writer, programmer and illustrator. I grew up in Chennai but have settled in my native Kerala. As a result, I can

• speak: Malayalam, Tamizh, English, Hindi
• write: Tamizh, English
• read: Malayalam, Tamizh, English, Hindi, French

I have forgotten how to write Hindi and Samskritam that I learned in school. I taught myself French and forgot much of it. I have taught myself to write in Malayalam several times and unlearned it each time without much delay.

My books

I pursue numerous hobbies and interests, several of which have become the subject of my books. I now have written and illustrated 30 mostly non-fiction books.

• Quality: My books make even the most boring subjects interesting. Even my tech books are written in a humourous style. I do my own formatting using HTML, CSS and Javascript, not Adobe products.

  

  Some of my books are exquisitely illustrated.

  

• Writing Expertise: I started learning computer software in 1994 and got my own PC in the year 2000. I then began creating websites and software, and also started blogging. Whenever I did research on a new subject, I would dump all knowledge I gained from the effort in an article. Some articles became free ebooks on my site. As early as 2003, I had created two ebooks using HTMLDOC. I ventured into publishing paperbacks quite late in 2020. I finished my first year with 21 books. By then, I had accumulated a lot of published/unpublished material that could be turned into books. Besides that, I am a professional technical writer. There is no subject that I cannot read and understand… except mathematics. That stuff makes my brain melt.

• Writing Process: I wrote, designed and illustrated all of my books on my Linux computer using only free and open-source software (FOSS). Unlike other authors (who invariably use Microsoft Word), I write my manuscripts in plain text (using a text editor called Pluma) and use a shell script to build my books as EPUB ebooks and printable PDF interiors. This automated book production process is based on CommonMark, a new standardized version of MarkDown. Incidentally, I wrote the first book on CommonMark. This website is also written in CommonMark.

• FREE books: Several of my books are available for FREE on ebook sites. For other books, full/sample PDF downloads are available.

• Book covers: I create all my book covers myself. I use Inkscape and GIMP.

  

• Future titles: The conventional wisdom for authors is to write more of the same to build strategic depth in their chose genre. I cannot follow this convention because I am no one-trick pony. Each one of my non-fiction books is in a separate category. I dump everything I know in one book and that is it. I write what I like, not to market. In fiction, which I started recently, I do not know what will happen. The one novel that I had written is unbelievably good because it is based on real-life incidents. I think I have exhausted all interesting events and anecdotes in it. Well, once again, I am at the end of my rope.

• Fiction direction: My furious pace of publishing non-fiction books has slowed down and may have come to an end. I ran out of hobbies and interests on which most of my books were based. To kill time, I published my first fiction book Unlikely Stories. This novel is an anthology of supernatural/paranormal urban fantasies wrapped in an extremely funny love story. I did not have much confidence at first but was very surprised at what I could accomplish in the end. This is the best fiction book I have ever read. This is not some vain boast. I have read a wide variety of fiction writers. Compared to them, I see no competition. (In fairness, I stopped reading fiction over two decades ago and never read any romantic fiction. Maybe there is or was someone better, methinks modestly.) However, I am still the best satire writer ever! On that, there is no doubt. (The snowflakes crowd has thinned out the competition.)

  

  This book is based on several real-life incidents. My probe into aliens revealed that they are really employees/contractors of military/space agencies of several governments. When I tried to publish my findings, they forced me to publish them only as a fiction book titled Unlikely Stories.

• One that got away: One of my tech books was published by Apress/SpringerNature in 2023. Quick Start Guide to FFmpeg is a 300-page full-colour book with lots of photos, screenshots, code examples and tables. It is a fun book and is richly formatted with accessibility/usability features. It is ideal for anyone who needs to edit or process multimedia files including studio professionals, broadcast personnel, video content creators (such as Youtubers), podcasters, librarians, archivists and webmasters. This book was originally published as FFmpeg Quick Hacks in 2020.

  

• Paperbacks: Sadly, not many of my books are available in India in paperback form. Ebooks are available everywhere. For a full list of books under my name, check out:
  http://www.vsubhash.in/books.html

  The paperbacks have to be imported and are unaffordable to most Indians. If any Indian publisher can publish the book in India at competitive rates, I would like to license my copyright to them.

My software

I have also created numerous software applications for desktop, mobile and web. I started programming in C and wrote a line editor with support for Epson dotmatrix printers. Later, I used Visual Basic to create a popular software called Subhash VCDPlayer. It was a shell over Windows Media Player but had a lot of features copied from PowerPlayer, IrfanView and Winamp. I later taught myself HTML and CSS, and built a personal website. That also became popular and I upgraded it with Classic ASP. Later, I built some mobile apps for the Android, as I did not want to use the native apps built by Google and Twitter. I then rebuilt this website using my own PHP-based CMS. It is a work in progress. I have dabbled in some Arduino projects but they have been put in cold storage because I am busy with writing and updating my books.

My articles

Over two decades, I have written thousands of articles, reviews (books, films, music, entertainment, news and media), funny memes and cartoons on this website and my blogs. Some of the articles have been published in newspapers, magazines and other websites.

My website

This site initially ran on plain HTML. When I learned Classic ASP, all my HTML articles became ASP pages. As Bugs Bunny would say, ‘What a maroon!’ I later built a no-name CMS to manage this ‘dynamic website’. Because of web hosts placing unusual restrictions, I went back to having a mostly static site and a few dynamic scripts. My site used to block Internet Explorer. It was the first website to do so on the Internet long before it became fashionable to tell visitors to switch to Firefox or some other standards-compliant browser. It now blocks Googlebot. It will soon be warning visitors not to use the spyware browser Chrome and the spyware OS Android.

• SqlSiteServer: This is written in PHP and uses SQLite DBs. I run it locally and manually upload the static HTML pages that it generates through FTP using FileZilla. The CMS does support dynamic pages. The USP is that it is a Javascript-free CMS. I will eventually add automated FTP uploading and a mailing-list management system.
• Illustrations: I create all new graphics on this website myself using GIMP or Inkscape. (In old articles, you will find third-party images. They have been used under fair-use terms of US copyright law.)
• SSL: This is an http site without an SSL certificate and it will remain like that. Web hosts often forget to renew the free but by-design short-lived Let Us Encrypt SSL certificates. Trigger-happy browsers block access when this happens so I am not going to get the free certs or the paid ones. Almost every malware-spewing website has a paid SSL. The SSL cert merely acknowledges that the crooks are who they claim to be and are not spoofing some other crooks (heaven forbid that!). My site is a harmless static personal website. It does not even require Javascript. It loads on every device out there and is very accessible, even in the ancient Mosaic browser! It is the new control-freak browsers that are a problem.

My philosophy

• RSS: I hate social media and prefer RSS for publishing and consuming news. Social media makes nice people bad and bad people toxic. If I may plagiarize Churchill, I say fight your idealogical enemies in the comments section and in the forums but the only thing we need to hate is hate itself. If you want to be a scumbag, be an original scumbag (based on your own sweet demerits). Do not be a phony facsimile of the jerks littering the Internet. Get rid of your smart phone and get a landline or a dumb feature phone in its place. Unshackle yourself from the tyranny of tech. Do not live your life for the worthless people of social media.

  You can subscribe to my RSS feeds to (anonymously) get notified of:

  • new books and articles -
    http://www.vsubhash.in/rss.xml
  • blog posts -
    http://www.vsubhash.in/blogs/blog/rss.xml
  • tweets -
    http://www.vsubhash.in/blogs/tweets/rss.xml

• Smartphone: I do not use a smart phone. I created Android apps such as Subhash Browser & RSS Reader (because I hate Google and their Chrome spyware), EmailTweetor (because I hate Twitter) and TwitterToRSS (a near-anonymous personal Twitter server that runs on 127.0.0.1 (localhost)) for people who are forced to use smartphones and its spyware apps.

  

My computing experience (not knowledge)

In chronological order…

• Programming languages: assembly (debug), QBASIC, C, FoxPro, Oracle PL*SQL, sh, Visual Basic, VBScript, Javascript, Java, C#, FreePascal, PHP, bash
• Web: HTML, CSS, Javascript, VBScript, Classic ASP (VBScript), XHTML, HTML5, ASP.NET (C#), PHP, MarkDown/CommonMark — I try not to use frameworks and CMSs that I did not write.
• Mobile: Java ME, Android Java
• OS: DOS, SCO Unix, Windows, Linux

Frankly, I have forgotten what I learned years ago. Even with the languages that I am currently using, I do not try to remember anything. I create a static library of routines and use it wherever I can. I hate bloat and try my best to avoid using frameworks and libraries created by others.

I have stopped using Windows and moved completely to Linux. I find that free and open-source software, such as LibreOffice, GIMP and Inkscape, are more than enough for my needs.

I use the Mate desktop environment, which was created to continue the usability, accessibility and customizability features of the Gnome 2 … features that were removed and presented as the new paradigm of desktop computing by the Mac-worshipping control-freaks who developed Gnome 3. I prefer functionality over flashiness.

My hobbies

In the last few years I taught myself several things that became books later:

• designing house plans as per Vastu Shastra,
• riding a motorcycle,
• Do-It-Yourself electronics and
• installing solar power panels and inverters (including AC house wiring).

They may not be hobbies per se but they were worth the while.

My other interests

• Vintage radio shows: Being a fan of vintage American radio shows, I was inspired to write a jokebook. It is one of the biggest jokebooks of all time.

  

• All forms of traditional Indian music — classical, classical and tribal
• Western music from the 80s
• Music from the former Soviet Union
• Bad/old movies and TV shows from the West, particularly from the 80s
• Movies and music from Hong Kong & Japan

My photo

What happened to my face? Why is it transparent? Unless you are a celebrity, there is no good reason to post your photo online.

If you do have to have to use a human-looking photo online, then use a photo transmorgification (‘AI-generated photo’) service. Confuse and contaminate data-mining systems. [There is no such thing as Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI is just software.]

I do not post personal stuff on social media. Many years ago, I had set my blog to automatically re-post to Twitter and Facebook. I later wrote a Javascript script (browser script) for the pleasure of seeing those posts individually and automatically get deleted from the Facebook activity log. Subsequently, I closed that Facebook account, not wishing to provide it any more information however non-personal. I have used some Twitter accounts for my political satire books. I also use my EmailTweetor app to mass-delete anyone who dares to follow these accounts. My site blocks the Googlebot, the search engine spider.

My name

If you are not from India and are wondering how to pronounce my name, then it is soo-baah-sh, not sub-hash. And, my one and only name is Subhash. A lot of people outside the Western world have just one name. The initial V comes from my father's name. Because of the tyranny of tax officials, people all over the world use two names. If you are writing to me, you can begin the message with ‘Hi Subhash’ but not ‘Hi V.’.

Contact Me

If you wish to contact me about this website or my books/illustrations/software, you can email INFO at VSUBHASH dot COM.

If you wish to use license content from me, it might be helpful to first read my licensing policy page.