Meals menu at home during Lockdown (March 2020-Aug 2020)

 The lockdown days in Pune were difficult as we were afraid to go out much to get food and vegetables so meals were sort of short cut types with not much variety. Some of the dishes I cooked with unfailing regularity were as follows:

Breakfast: Uttapa for Sona or oats with milk, Bread and cheese or Bread cheese omlette for us

Lunch: One out of Lauki ki sabzi, Karela alu sabzi, Drumstick brinjal alu sabzi in rotation

             Masoor or Toor Dal on most days, Rice (Sona has 1 spoon of rice)

             Sometimes (Once or twice a week) Chicken nuggets or Basa fish or egg curry

Dinner : Chapatti, 

               One sabzi out of  Bhindi alu sabzi, Mushroom subzi, Alu Mutter, Alu gobhi, Baigan fry

                Curd

Very rarely I would make Veg Biriyani, Lemon Rice, Cakes or Noodles

Cakes made on gas oven for her Baba's birthday by Sona

Dhokla prepared by following a recipe from the internet turned out to be nice and tasty

Samosa made by Sona

Special Tomato soup by Sona for me when I was down with Corona like symptoms was very tasty

and helped me recover quickly

 

Special Chocolate cake on my birthday

We ate a lot of seasonal fruits: Grapes, Mango, Pomegranate, even Litchi was available for one or two weeks in June and then Guava

New activities learned: Lockdown was a lesson as it taught us to manage without maids or even the services of barbers/ or laundry services. Had to do sweeping, mopping, washing dishes, hair cutting.

I even tried my hand at painting the bathroom door

One definite advantage of the worldwide lockdown was decrease in pollution levels. We had a good view of the faraway hills from our balcony which used to be hazy earlier.

Hope this lockdown ends so that we are able to go to Kolkata soon to celebrate Durga Puja there this time.

Fault correction for Laptop Camera turning on/off in video mode

 Recently after an update of Windows 10 in Sona's laptop , her laptop camera suddenly started behaving erratically. In video mode the camera would start turning off after every 2secs and then turn on again. This caused problems in taking online tests with digital proctoring. Since we were in lockdown, getting laptop to HP service shop was also ruled out. Then I decided to troubleshoot it myself from help articles in the internet. 

  First I tried updating the driver for the camera, so I uninstalled and then again reinstalled the drivers. This did not work. I thought that Kaspersky must be hampering access to camera, so went to privacy settings and disabled the web cam protection. This did not work. Then disabled Kaspersky from running and all firewalls switched off which did not help. The problem persisted irritatingly. Then I tried to remove the Camera app from Microsoft, but it could not be uninstalled. It had to be done from Power Shell command. Following the online commands from Microsoft help I uninstalled and then again reinstalled the Camera app. No luck the problem still persisted. I then thought that the last resort would be to try to restore Windows 10 operating system to an earlier date when the camera had been working properly. But I would loose a lot of work which I had done in the intervening period. From the internet another thing I tried was altering the registry editor to enter a new key 'EnableFrameServerMode' in the Windows given path. But this solution too did not work.

Then lastly in one of the posts I read that changing the name of the driver folders slightly had helped many people facing the same issue as I was having with the camera. I did the change and Eureka!!

the camera started working properly. Eternally thankful to the program developers who can go through the code and find solutions to such problems and then publish it online so others can benefit. 

The hack 

Go to C:\ProgramFiles\Realtek

Change RsProviders folder name  to RsProviders_ (as backup)