I’ve been limping along for a while now on an old Intel i5-4200u based laptop that I picked up in graduate school back in 2014. These days I’ve taken to doing more and more light work away from my desktop, and dealing with the machines anemic CPU has started to exceed my patience, to say nothing of some of the fixable annoyances like a defucnt battery and a terrible physical experience in the form of weight and a non-responsive touchpad.
I wanted to highlight my experience with the March KDE Neon upgrade from Plasma 5 to Plasma 6. It is far from noteworthy that so many folks have run into a sea of different bugs and pain points right after the launch, and I am no exception.
Of note though, is I’ve had two instances where my system was rendered pseudo-unusable by failed upgrades. I say pseudo-unusable because in each case I could get a browser and core software working, and in the better case even the full desktop with minimal wrangling.
Just a quick note for fellow users of the Anki SRS software specifically running on Linux. Since my update to Jammy (Ubuntu 22.04) a while back, I ran into an issue where some subsets of words or input combinations would cause ibus to barf with rather annoying consequences. Until this last week, this would only manifest when typing a specific subset of katakana words.
Typing ในใซ for example, would die right after typing the ’s’, and then the input manager would start typing directly in Latin characters until I re-invoked all of the keyboard shortcuts to effectively restart mozc and ibus.
I don’t know if there has honestly been an uptick of it recently, but of late it seems a not insignificant fraction of the folks I interact with online have selected now as the moment to either get into 3D printing as a hobby, or to dramatically upgrade their setups.
3D printing was just taking off when I was in college. My recollection of it was always that the process was very cool, but finicky and unreliable at all times. The things people produced were always little trinkets, and it never really struck me as a practical tool. In 2018 when I started work professionally, I found my new employer made heavy use of laser sintering based 3D printing to produce valves, nozzles, and pressure chambers of unusual shape and size. It still seemed very niche, but the applications to high-performance metallic structures where machining could be either prohibitively expensive or impossible made more sense than what I had seen to date.
This is a relatively quick post. I’m a Linux user pragmatist. I firmly believe in the ideals of Free and Open Source Software, but I’m not opposed to paying for my software. Furthermore, when it comes down to it if I absolutely need to, I can accept having to use some proprietary tools provided they are functional and don’t inherently violate my privacy and my rights as a person.
All of this is a long winded way to say I’ve been looking at tools that are Visio-esque to help plan out the area I’d like to function as my office. Historically I would have done this with a tool like Inkscape, but I really wanted something a little more focused on the task at hand. I’m not a fan of having to manually manage the scale of the room.
Back in December, when I got re-started in Fediverse as Twitter started into its decline, I took the anniversary of my Ph.D. defense to briefly comment. Not much time has passed since then, but I felt the need to reiterate and put a stake my statement at the time.
Every time my group at work brings on a new graduate, I keep my mouth shut about grad school as long as possible. I don’t think anyone should be required to take on the baggage I’ve built up, or to listen to me yell at the clouds about it without active prompting. I don’t see value in trying to highlight my Dr-ness to get work done, and I want to save everyone the wasted time. My existing coworkers eventually let the new hires know about my Ph.D., spoiling the illusion I maintain of “just being another engineer.” At that point, the new graduate will usually ask about going back to graduate school for a theoretical Masters or Ph.D. I’ve found myself continually reaching for this statement, to read in full to them, to minimize the ranting I would fill their ears with otherwise.
It’s been quite a while since I did any public writing with any regularity or any expectation of imparting anything of value to a reader of what I wrote. In a workplace environment I write prolifically for a whole host of audiences, but that writing is typically technical in nature, or at a minimum technically adjacent. That writing will likely never see the light of day, and indeed most of it is highly specific to the individual program I’m working at any point in time.