Hyderabad For Adventurers

Hyderabad has a lot of offer for adventure seekers, listing few of interesting activities, places, clubs and more..

Places for Trekking

Hyderabad has a lot of spots for trekking related activities, listing a few:

  1. Khajaguda Hills
  2. Peerencheruvu Lake
  3. Maula Ali Hills
  4. Bhongir Fort (Outside Hyderabad)
  5. Gandikota Fort & Belam Caves (Outside Hyderabad)

Trekking & Bicycling Clubs on meetup

There are a lot of clubs from Hyderabad on meetup.com which are very active. Listing here few of them:
  1. Greater Hyderabad Adventure Club
  2. Hyderabad Trekkers Club
  3. Hyderabad Adventure & Trekkers Club
  4. Hyderabad Bicycling Club

Events in Hyderabad

Following are few of events for people interested in events like Cycling, Running, Triathlon, Trekking:

  1. Republic Cycle Ride (Jan)
  2. Republic Cycle Ride (Aug)
  3. Airtel Hyderabad Marathon (Aug)
  4. Hyderabad Triathlon (Nov)
  5. Hyderabad 10K Run (Nov)
  6. Hyderabad Rockathon (Dec)
  7. Brevet Calendar (Long Distance Cycling)


If you are visiting Hyderabad & up for any of these activities / places, I would be more than happy to host you! Feel free to message me on my couchserfing profile: https://www.couchsurfing.com/people/ram-dayal-vaishnav. See you 🙂

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Sideloading Oculus Go with Firefox Reality

Update: As you can see from tweet above, the Firefox Reality app is directly available on Oculus AppStore now and you do not need the sideloading anymore, however if you still want to play around with latest version of Reality, here are basic steps. Few of the steps mentioned below are described in detail at Firefox Reality’s Sideload github wiki.

Prerequisites:

  1. ADB setup on laptop
  2. Oculus app on mobile
  3. Account setup on https://dashboard.oculus.com
  4. Firefox Reality APK – it can be downloaded using instructions given below –
    • Go to https://github.com/MozillaReality/FirefoxReality, click on  ‘Build results’ at the bottom of README.md
    • Click on ‘Firefox Reality for Android – Build – Master update’
    • Click on ‘Run Artifacts’ tabs
    • Click on ‘public/FirefoxReality-oculusvr-release-signed-aligned.apk’ to download APK

Steps for sideloading:

  1. Start Oculus Go
  2. Connect Oculus App on mobile with Oculus Go
  3. Turn on Developer Mode from Oculus App
  4. Connect Oculus Go with laptop via USB cable & make sure its appearing in list of devices shows for ‘adb devices’
  5. ‘adb install /path/to/your.apk’
  6. Look into ‘Oculus Go’, go to Libary -> Unkown Sources -> Click on firefox-reality & boom! You are done!:-D

Troubleshooting:

  1. Your Oculus Go is connected to someone else’s account? – If you want to connect it with your account now, then you will have to factory reset this device by following these steps –
    1. Turn off the Oculus go by pressing the power key (look in the display where it shows you the confirmation for shutting it down)
    2. Turn on by pressing Power button & Volume – button together & follow steps to factory reset.
  2. The Oculus Go is not able to recognise the controller? – You can go to Settings tab of Oculus app on mobile & find currently linked controller with your connected Oculus Go’s information. Just Unpair it and use ‘+ Pair New Controller’ option.

Investment tips for beginners

Its good to start investing as early as possible, even with very small amount. You can plan your investments for one(more) of these goals:

Tax Saving:

ELSS Fund or Tax Saving Mutual Fund is best option to save tax under 80C. Also this amount is usually locked for 3 years and more and can be used as medium/long term investment. Other options to utilize 80C are PPF / EPF / Tax Saving FD etc. You can choose from ‘Top Rated Tax Planning Funds’ on value research website. E.g. ABSL Tax Relief 96.

Park short term liquid money:

  • Debt-liquid category funds are safest for this, transfer money above a threshold from bank account to this fund. You can take out this money whenever you need easily. E.g. Reliance Liquid Fund.
  • Arbitrage fund is also good option, specially tax efficient for higher tax bracket people. E.g. Axis Enhanced Arbitrage Fund.
  • At least convert you bank account to sweep account for better returns. E.g. Saving plus account in SBI.

Index funds:

One of safest options, these funds are very good in other countries and getting better in India. For long term planning, these are being considered as good option. E.g. ICICI Prudential Nifty Next 50 Index Fund & UTI Nifty Index Fund.

Different ways to invest:

  1. Direct investment: Go to individual fund house and invest, with added benefit of lesser expense fee. You can track investments from different fund houses at KTrack & myCAMS apps.
  2. Regular investment: You can go to your bank’s mutual fund portal & go for regular (indirect) investment. It has benefit of ability to track all investments in a single screen, but the downside of having higher expense fee.

Other suggestion: Go for a term insurance as early as possible in life.

5 easy to adopt food habits which worked for healthier me

Following is the list of things I follow to keep myself nutrition rich. Note, I am pure vegetarian and hence chose the list accordingly.

  1. Meals Timings: Heavy breakfast (never miss breakfast), lunch & light dinner along with at least 3 other small meals in the day (like pre-workout meal, snacks, fruit/salad bowl) with a golden rule of having a big/small meal every 2-3 hours.
    • You can choose timing from Early Morning / Breakfast / Mid-morning / Lunch & Evening Snack / Dinner / Bed time, based on having pre-workout and post-workout, fit in these according to your schedule. Sometimes, one can have 2 evening snacks and skip bedtime snack, depending on the kind of routine you have.
  2. Workout meals: Usually to be taken within half an hour before & after workout – if your workout is close to one of the major meals, then you can have a light workout snack before and after 5 minutes.
    • Options for Pre-workout meal (filled with carbs which will fuel your body and will help losing fat instead of muscle wasting):
      • [light] 8-10 Soaked peeled almond (also drink the water)
      • [light] Banana & Honey (5 to 10 minutes before workout)
      • Oatmeal with milk
      • Carb rich Protein bar
    • Options for Post-workout meal (protein rich meal to repair your muscle tissues and to help in recover from pain and internal swelling, also to build muscle mass):
      • [light] Sprouts
      • [light] Protein rich Protein bar
      • [light] Dry fruits & seeds mixture (Seeds – Flax seeds, Chia seeds, Pumpkin seeds, Magaz seeds, Watermelon seeds, Muskmelon seeds, Dry fruits – Almond, Cashew, Raisin, Walnuts, Peanuts)
      • Boiled chana / Boiled Rajma / Grilled paneer
      • Coconut water
  3. Tips for lazy weekends: Don’t stay hungry, if you feel little hungry and eating food might take some time, better to consume something for quick energy. You can keep following things at home for a meal, or for quick energy while your food is on the way or cooking (most of these can be taken with milk/curd):
    • Muesli (like Kelloggs Muesli Nuts Delight)
    • Dalia (like Patanjali Instant Wheat Dalia)
    • Jowar/Bajra Poha (like HealthSutra Jowar poha, Tasty Sorghum Flakes)
    • Cereal (like Kelloggs Special K Multigrain Oats & Honey cereal)
    • Oats (like Quaker Oats Kesar flavour with Kishmish)
    • Cornflakes
    • Liquid snacks like smoothies, fresh fruit juices, plain milk, greek yogurt, fruit and curd.
    • Some evening snacks which don’t take too much time in cooking and planning.
    • Seeds & Dry Fruits mixture is also very helpful on weekends for quickly eating.
    • Roasted Diet (like Patanjali RoastedDiet Oats Mix Wasabi/Flaxseeds Black Salt)
    • If you want to prepare something quickly:
      • Sandwich
      • Poha
  4. Preference: Few comparatively healthier option
    • Prefer Brown/Multigrain bread over white bread
    • Prefer peanut butter instead of plain butter
    • Prefer brown rice over white rice
    • Prefer to each different types of Roti, like Jowar Roti, Bajra Roti etc
    • Prefer whole fruits or fruit smoothies over Fruit juices.
    • Prefer Jaggery, Jaggery sugar or Honey instead of Sugar
  5. Generic tips for healthier you:
    • Very Important: Make sure you drink at least 3-4 liters of water everyday, at least 600ml – 1 liter right after you get up in morning.
    • Always eat salad with food
    • Drink Yakult at bedtime
    • Take a lot of milk, milk products (specially curd & paneer). Also Dal, Rajmah, Chhole etc for Protein.
    • Buy some protein bars (both carb rich, protein rich & mix) & keep handy (specially for pre & post workout, if you don’t find anything else).
    • Always keep some eatables (Millet biscuits, Ragi biscuits etc) & water bottle in your bag when you go out of home.