Keep Your Cuppa Warm with Ember

There's nothing quite like starting your morning with a steaming cup of chai, rich with spices and robust English breakfast tea. Picture this: you're on your backyard porch, savoring each sip, surrounded by birdsong. But then, reality hits, and you have to dive into your morning emails and messages. After 45 minutes of intense digital correspondence, you reach for your cup, only to find it cold and unpalatable. Ugh.

For years, my daily routine included reheating my forgotten cup of chai in the microwave—a hassle, to say the least. That was until I discovered the game-changing Ember mug, a sleek solution designed to keep your drink perfectly warm for hours.

Ember: The Mug That Redefines Warmth

Ember isn’t just any mug; it’s the epitome of smart drinkware. With a built-in heating element, it keeps your beverage warm for up to 4-5 hours. This means my chai stays hot and enjoyable until lunchtime, transforming my mornings.

Ember Mug v1

The Ember mug stands out with its superior build quality. Made from a special ceramic material with an aquaphobic coating, it’s incredibly easy to clean—just a quick rinse, and it’s spotless. No residue, no fuss. Plus, it comes with a sleek charging base, ensuring your mug is always ready for action.

Smart Temperature Control

One of Ember's coolest features is its temperature control via a mobile app. Pair the app to your mug using Bluetooth, and you can monitor and adjust your drink’s temperature to your preference. It’s an effortless way to ensure your drink is always at the perfect warmth.

Worth the Investment?

You might wonder if all this technology is necessary for a mug. Isn’t it easier to just reheat your drink in the microwave? Sure, that's practical. But once you experience the consistent warmth Ember offers, you’ll see the difference. It’s a significant quality-of-life improvement, turning each sip into a small pleasure. After a few days, using any other mug feels like a step backward.

More Than Just a Mug

Ember’s lineup includes a smaller cup, a tall tumbler, and a travel mug. I personally use the 10 oz regular mug and the 12 oz travel mug. Both have revolutionized my hot drink routine. The regular mug, after five years of daily use, still looks brand new. The travel mug, a Christmas gift from last year, keeps my green tea perfectly warm throughout the day. These mugs are built to last and truly enhance your drinking experience.

Ember Travel Mug

Ember Travel Mug

Final Thoughts

Whether for yourself or as a thoughtful gift, an Ember mug is a fantastic addition to any hot beverage lover’s life. Once you try it, you’ll wonder how you ever managed without it. Get yours today, or add it to your next gift list—you won’t be disappointed, and soon, your whole family will want one too.

Indian Innovators - Manoj Deshmukh

At some point in everyone’s career, we have looked on with envy at someone who is clearly enjoying their job because they really love it. You review your own daily grind and feel, what if I quit my job in a few months and start building that Etsy shop for selling anime-themed products? Admit it, you have thought along those lines more often than you would care to admit.

Today, my guest on the Indian Innovators podcast is Manoj Deshmukh. He is a software engineer and my classmate from PICT. A few years ago he quit his highly successful software executive job and got serious about his hobby - making custom fountain pens. Since then he has had amazing success, as fountain-pen lovers all over the world have found his website and have been ordering pens from him, so much so that his current backlog for pen delivery is about 2 years. Yes, that’s right - if you order a pen from his website today, he can only deliver it to you about 2 years from now.

The cliché “follow your passion” is absolutely brought alive by Manoj. He makes each pen by hand, making one pen a day. He researches ink delivery mechanisms, designs his own, and experiments with new wood and acrylic materials. His finished products are quite stunning and very comfortable to write with.

Watch our interview and find out how he finally gave up his day job and turned to make his hobby his daily addiction. You can order his pens at fosforpens.com

Manoj Deshmukh - Artisanal fountain-pen maker

Indian Innovators - Anil Lamba

As a young entrepreneur starting my first company back in 1993 at the age of 24 in India, I had a really severe shortcoming in my skill set. I had no idea how to manage the money we were earning from selling BBS subscriptions for my startup, JabberWocky BBS.

My partner, my younger brother was still in school, and I had just graduated from computer engineering college myself. The only thing that I learned in college that was of any use, was hacking Linux. And that skill was acquired on my own without any help from the college staff or syllabus.

In the approximately six years or so (a story for another post😀) I spent in engineering school, they tried to teach us everything from Thermodynamics and Strength of Materials to Compiler Construction and Linear Circuits. But the one subject that no one taught us was finance.

Even today, none of the engineering syllabi offer a course on financial basics, like reading a balance sheet, raising corporate capital, and forming a company?

Luckily for me, one day in 1995, I saw an ad in the local newspaper on a Financial Basics class taught by another young entrepreneur named Anil Lamba. I signed up for the course, and over the next ten weeks, every Saturday was spent learning how to be a financially literate entrepreneur. That course changed my life and put me on the path of financial freedom. I was able to navigate the deliberately complex world of corporate finance and manage the entirely crucial world of personal finance.

Today, my guest is Anil Lamba himself. We have kept in touch through all these years, and I have watched his training program grow to a successful enterprise at Lamcon Schools. He is the author of many best-selling financial books (all of which I own). His first book “Romancing the Balance Sheet” is required reading for anyone who even thinks of starting their own company.

Watch our conversation, and hopefully, it will reaffirm your own financial literacy or get you on the path to it. I cannot emphasize how important this is for everyone.

Indian Innovators - Anil Lamba, Financial Literacy Educator

Indian Innovators - Maria Partapurwala

My guest today is Maria Partapurwala. She was my classmate in elementary school back in Pune, India. After graduating from college and setting up a family with two daughters, she ventured into the field of Yoga.

Her dedication to her craft and to her students is inspiring and highly motivating. I feel that there is too much desire to be a technically perfect yogi or yogini. Rather than that, Maria goes for empathetic yoga teaching, where students appreciate the finer points of yogic exercise and meditation and improve the overall quality of life rather than just the flexibility of their bodies.

Watch and listen to her inspiring story and how she turned a debilitating back injury into a successful yoga school - teaching hundreds of students every day to manage their health better through exercise and fitness rather than medicine and drugs.

PaperCircuit - Indian Innovators with Maria Partapurwala, Yoga Center Founder

Indian Innovators - Vivek Mundkur

Welcome to the PaperCircuit podcast series - Indian Innovators.

My first guest is Vivek Mundkur. I have known him since about 1993 when I first started getting interested in hang-gliding. I was an aero-modeler until then and my aero-modeling guide, Capt. Bhole mentioned that I should meet up with Col. Vivek Mundkur and try out hang-gliding. That was a life-changing moment for me.

I got to know Vivek really well as I learned to hang-glide and later built my own hang-glider with him. We flew it one afternoon in 1995 at the hill behind his Kudje farmhouse. I also learned sailing, wind-surfing, and the art of jugaad (tinkering) from him over the course of many years in the 90s.

View and listen to our chat and see first-hand why he is such an inspiration to everyone…

Vivek Mundkur -pioneer of hang-gliding in India

PaperCircuit Podcast - Indian Innovators

Today is the launch of my PaperCircuit podcast - Indian Innovators. I have been meaning to launch a podcast, ever since the first podcast showed up on my iPod almost 16 years ago. That was the This Week In Tech podcast by Leo Laporte.

During the last few months of COVID, I finally buckled down and put together a plan to interview some amazing Indian creators, mentors, and motivators that I have known throughout my life. These are people I have known first-hand and have caused deep impressions on me and shaped my life so far.

I plan to do these interviews as a limited series of 12 episodes - interviewing a dozen interesting people that have influenced and befriended me. The podcast will be available on my YouTube channel and also on Apple Podcasts. Hope you enjoy the series.

Live for Live Music... →

House band, Gem City Grill, Monrovia, CA

House band, Gem City Grill, Monrovia, CA

One of the biggest victims of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the live music industry. There’s nothing like going down to your local dive bar on a Saturday night and rocking away to your favorite local band. I miss that a lot.

The larger venues like the Hollywood Bowl, the Forum, Madison Square Garden, and every large stadium in your local city have been waiting silently to ring out with music.

Not knowing when these times will ease public participation and allow musicians to resume their livelihood is the focus of this great article.

I, for one, hope that we can get to enjoying music safely, very soon. Freebird, anyone?

Claude Shannon deserves more recognition than Einstein →

MIT-Claude-Portrait_v0.jpg

Courtesy: MIT Museum

Claude Shannon invented Information Theory by coming up with a mathematical model for it. If not for him, you wouldn't be reading this blog on your mobile device right now.

This article discusses his original paper and how it led to a life of engineering and information theory advances that still hold up today and are being used practically.

When I started graduate school, my adviser told me that the best work would prune the tree of knowledge, rather than grow it. I didn’t know what to make of this message then; I always thought my job as a researcher was to add my own twigs. But over my career, as I had the opportunity to apply this philosophy in my own work, I began to understand.

— David Tse, author of the article

In India, private online data is available freely, with disastrous consequences... →

Source Image: https://restofworld.org

Source Image: https://restofworld.org

The ubiquity of mobile phones over the last two decades in India has been phenomenal. As people in India's most remote village swipe and unlock their smartphone, they enter a world of localized Facebook, TikTok, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Twitter. They buy and sell stuff with a few taps on their phone.

But most fail to realize how their smartphone is opening up their private data to unscrupulous opportunists - both within their close family and friends circle and then the broader scammer group.

This article does an in-depth discussion on how easily scammers can access the most important and private data, like an Aadhar Card (a kind of Social Security ID card) and banking information.

American Food Story... →

This is a spectacular review of an even spectacular food show. Padma Lakshmi continues in the big shoes of Anthony Bourdain and surfaces hard truths that lie behind the international cuisine being adopted in mainstream America often at the cost of the immigrants that brought it in.

But the episode has already exposed the conflict at the heart of American cooking, the inequity of a culture that gets to selectively take and absorb whatever it wants without having to offer anything significant in return.

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Remote Learning - It didn't work... →

The continuing exercise in remote learning seems to have hit a wall. As a father of two teenagers, the first few months of this year have been abysmal in the area of remote learning. Their schools valiantly did everything they could to make it an engaging experience. But as this article discusses in detail, I very much doubt how much actual “learning” the kids imbibed.

This article outlines the problems that surfaced when this whole exercise started in earnest in the middle of March, 2020.

“I think we have this assumption that since they spend all their time on their devices, it’s no big deal for them to learn remotely,” said Janella Hinds, a social-studies teacher at the 500-student High School for Public Service in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood. “But being a digital consumer and a digital learner are two different things.”

Quantum Country - a new kind of book that you will actually understand →

How much of a book do we really absorb and understand? The plethora of reading riches that surrounds us has made it very difficult to take the time to absorb and understand books. And if the topic is complex or requires attention then it is even harder to answer questions after reading the book or even have meaningful discussions about the conclusions in the book.

But here comes a new format for a book, that authors Andy Matuschak and Michale Nielsen hope will make it easier for the reader to understand and absorb the key ideas in it. It’s presented in a new mnemonic medium, which makes it a pleasure to read.

And as a challenge, their topic of choice is “Quantum Computing”. Which really makes it all the more interesting to see if average readers will understand this complex topic.

The pandemic creates opportunities for organized crime.. →

Even though the pandemic has caused disruption in crime, criminals are finding new opportunities. As law enforcement is distracted by pandemic rules and now the #BLM protests, organized crime is having a field day figuring out how to take advantage of this inattention.

“Criminals are humans too,” said Graeme Biggar, economic crimes lead at the NCA, “and they are abiding by the rules.”

How yogurt reflects food trends in America... →

When you think of yogurt, depending on where you grew up, it conjures up diverse images, tastes, and smells. For me, growing up in India, yogurt, or as we called it ‘dahi’ (दही) or ‘curd’ - was set to be made everyday in a brown ceramic bowl. My dad filled it with fresh milk and added a spoonful of the previous lot of curd, mixed it well, and left it in a warm place in the kitchen to set.

We then used curds/dahi in many different dishes - chutneys, relishes, curries/kadhi, and of course, dahi-wada. A delicious snack of fried lentil balls in curd sauce. But the most important use was for wishing us good-luck before our exams. My mom would ladle out a spoonful of dahi on my palm and sprinkle a bit of sugar. I slurped that off my palm and went off to school to battle the day’s exams, reassured of my anxieties that this sweet little delight would be an auspicious shield to ward off failure.

But coming to America, you realize that yogurt here is just meant to be eaten by itself, often sweet and sprinkled with granola and fruit.

The astonishing varieties of yogurt now available in any grocery store in America, reflects the current and future food trends as this article informs in detail..