I started the Nissan 200SX owner's club of South Africa back in 2003, and it is still an active club.

In the quest for a mind-blowing home theatre experience, I experimented with two projectors and planned out my custom-built sound system. It turned out better than I thought!

SmsFu is my first Android app, written back in 2010. It automatically silences notifications from spammers!

eFlatz.com was a social networking site I built to allow people within complexes/apartments/suburbs to communicate with one another and their body corporate.

Cred is a mico-payment gateway built in Ruby on Rails, with a fully-documented REST API and Wordpress plugin, to allow content publishers to charge small amounts for their content.

I used to write a column for ITWeb, back in 2007 when I was working at Cambrient.I wrote about the state of Java, as well as AJAX and other web technologies.

Read the articles

I used to write a blog for Tech Leader: http://www.techleader.co.za/tobykurien. I'm not a prolific blogger though, so my posts were few and far between.

However, it should be interesting to see what I had to say about Netbooks way back in 2008, among other topics.

I blogged about Android development on a South African Android community blog called AndroidZA

About

I am Toby Kurien, an electronics engineer who does software development for fun (and hopefully profit). I am a South African citizen of Indian origin.

What do I do? Well, the simple answer is that I am a freelance software engineer, and I work on my business Nextcloud Hosting. My Resumé has more details. I occasionally blog and micro-blog about technology and other interests.

The long answer regarding what I do is that I am experimenting with an alternate lifestyle. In late 2008 I decided to live a more anti-consumerist lifestyle. So I left the rat race, sold my shares in the company I co-founded, and started working on potentially fulfilling ventures. This is how I started creating web startups, mobile applications, and embedded hardware solutions – technologies that I am really passionate about. These technologies also help me in my quest to use first-world technology to solve third-world problems.

I am inspired by the "four hour work week" lifestyle as described in the book by Timothy Ferriss. I engineer my life by focussing on three things: Health, Time, and Finance. Since 2021, I started reducing my digital footprint, and adopted the philosophy of digital minimalism.

Gemini

I have a Gemini capsule, which can be reached using a Gemini browser, at gemini://tobykurien.com, or via a web proxy. I could've just linked you directly to my capsule via a web proxy, but that kind of defeats the point of Gemini, which is to create a new space on the internet, away from the attention- and surveillance-economy of BigTech, free of trackers and data mining, with a manaical focus on simplicity and pure textual content such as blogs.

If this …

This is my post for Blog Action Day 2009 regarding the topic of climate change

Kind of like a misnomer, but with numbers.

It's amazing what far-reaching implications a subtle change in my routine can have on my life...

There maybe some things to cheer about in the [latest crime statistics][], but it's not all good news, sadly.

If you're thinking of buying a projector, think of buying two rather. Here's why...

South Africa officially switched on its digital TV signal on November 1 2008

My article on TechLeader about Netbooks

They are in your Facebook, mining your data...

Joining the new geek sub-culture of getting things done and getting the most out of life

My recent gadget buying spree has left me with a gold mine of geeky gadgets.

Like "military intelligence", these are words that just don't go together. Right?