Notes

Published on 2021-06-07

Table of Contents

Hello, is this thing on?

Hi, I’m back after 3 months of absolute silence. I hope you’re doing well despite these trying times.

Yet another new writing platform, really?

Look, I really did believe Writefreely will be the end of it all but sadly, I ended up having mixed opinions about it.

This weekend, I found out that the entire thing broke on its own and locked me out of my own drafts because of an update which adds OAuth functionality, fun.

It lacks a lot of things that I consider good software require, most notably, in this case: any form of update guides.

Seriously though, I thought that this software would allow me to write stuff quickly but in reality, it doesn’t.

Back to Emacs, then

Recently, I’m back to Emacs with org-mode. However, unlike before, I’m actually using something built-into org-mode rather than using something like Hugo/Jekyll which has sub-par support.

Honestly, I feel dumb for not discovering thing much much earlier but only a couple hours ago, I discovered ox-publish.el which adds website publishing functionality to Org!

I just finished setting stuff up and migrated my old posts from the awful Writefreely instance of this thing. While I was considering migrating posts from my old blog, I decided not to mainly because it’ll be a chore making it ‘look’ the same.

General updates

I’ve been really busy these past months and will be busy for the next couple more months with personal stuff.

However, I should have more free time in a couple of weeks which should allow me to have much more intimate writing sessions and overall more time for personal development.

Writing Bucket list: Nix

I always been considering writing a blog post about Nix, the package manager which utilizes the purely functional deployment model.

However, I don’t think I’m experienced enough with Nix to be writing posts about it, especially considering its intimate situation of lacking major documentation.

Some people may think that I should still write about it but I want to write something extensive and in-depth about it because it truly deserves the attention and care.

For now, if you’re an introduction to Nix, I recommend the Nix Pills series or even the original papers: The Purely Functional Software Deployment Model, NixOS: A Purely Functional Linux Distribution.

I describe the current situation with Nix to be similar to early Haskell (pre-Real World Haskell) where you really need to dig through papers, source code, mailing lists, etc. to find quality and accurate information.

I really do hope someone out there is writing a book about Nix but I could see why no one is currently doing it as it is still in early-late development stages. Hopefully, it’ll mature once Nix Flakes is not locked away behind the experimental gate :-)

New computer setup

I replaced my desktop with a new lightweight 14” laptop. It’s a Clevo NV41MB which I bought from PCW.fr. It’s a pretty nice configuration with 1 TB NVMe, 11th Gen Core i5, 16 GB of DDR4 RAM.

I’m running Windows 10 as the primary operating system, mainly because I need to run a notable amount of applications that only run on Windows.

Yes, Wine and Proton exists but sadly, they don’t suffice with my requirements.

On Windows, I use Windows Subsystem for Linux extensively to run Linux applications, most notably GNU Emacs in GUI mode. I run X410 as my X11 server in order to enable GUI applications on WSL.

I know there’s WSLg but it’s not ready for prime time, yet.

OpenBSD is installed as a secondary operating system that I use sometimes. It runs quite stable, however, Intel Xe Graphics is known to be buggy everywhere so yeah but surprisingly, a lot stabler than my adventures with amdgpu, so that’s something!

Also, yes, convieniences such as Wi-Fi, suspend, etc works fine as far as I can tell. I have some annoyances with my keyboard not working sometimes on X11 but I’m not sure if that’s because I’m running my keyboard via my Thunderbolt Dock or something else. Oh well.

Anything else…

Well, I don’t know anything else that I would like to share in this rather lengthy blog post but I’ll just stop here.

See you later,

Yuki.