Sometimes you find yourself sitting in front of the computer at a loss of what to do to entertain yourself. The entire knowledge of the world at your fingertips and you get stuck…nothing. It was in one of these moments, actually looking for some project to do with my newly finished 3d Printer when I ran out of sites to search. In a rather serendipitous moment, I realised that we are usually only ever exposed to a small portion of the internet and especially so if we are one of the unfortunate single language explorers of the tubes.
Remember there are many languages out there which the Great Google gods and so forth are so helpful in filtering for us, shielding our search results from the litter of sites in languages we can’t understand. But, this is the same internet deity that can also translate anything into anything at the push of a button. So I picked a language and off I went, searching for Russian 3d Printing sites along the lines of “thingyverse.com” etc. if I recall correctly. I stop here to make a point that this is something you should always keep in mind and certainly solved my problem.
Back to my story, I eventually stumbled on to something which I thought so embodied the Hacker ways that it inspired me to write this article. A single Hindi word, “Jugaad” There are many articles here discussing Neural Networks, FPGAs, and complex circuit design but the heart of hacking is bending something to your will and making it do something it was not initially intended to do. Whether it be software or hardware, white hat or not, it remains the same concept. Often these hacks involve something as simple as sticking 2 items together and making them interact for some reason. That’s what the results for an image search of this single foreign word returned. Some of the simplest and most beautiful hacks to solve everyday problems and most often for extremely little if not zero cost.
I write this to share and encourage you to reach out to explore the internet not seen by your everyday use and experience it beyond the small percentage you had before. I also want you to see and recognise the unappreciated and perhaps unknown genius hacking and invention that can be found from the people out there embracing the spirit of jugaad.
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