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 スル 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.

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.

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.

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.