Posts on snblog

Theatrhythm: Final Bar Line Review (Nintendo Switch)

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 17:29:33 +0800

It’s the Final Fantasy rhythm game! It’s lots of fun, but I do have one major gripe with it. I’m not some kind of rhythm game conniseur, but I do play a few here and there. This is one I’ve sunk over 40 hours into over the past few months, and I quite like it!

Music

Music for a rhythm game is quite important! I first thought, and to an extent still do, that Final Fantasy music isn’t exactly ideal for a rhythm game. I say this because a good chunk of songs here are orchestral or somewhat ambient, but I’ll talk more about this later. As for the music itself, it’s an amazing selection. There are a lot of songs here, from pretty much all of the Final Fantasy games, and if you’re willing to shell out for the DLC, there are quite a few songs from other games by Square Enix. Not considering how the music affects the gameplay, 10/10!

Doom (2016) Review (Nintendo Switch)

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 20:16:28 +0800

Complete

All you really need to know about this port is that it’s a very good port. Yes, it runs at 30 FPS and its quite low resolution but come on…do you really care that much about it? The entire game is here in all of its glory. It’s a perfectly competent porting effort.

Story

I’m aware there’s an entire lore to Doom but I have zero knowledge of it (and don’t really care too much of it). In this version of Doom, there is some semblance of a story (especially compared to the original) but it’s not particularly important or prominent throughout the course of the game. You can get by just fine without paying any attention to it.

Ridge Racer Review (PSP)

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 14:33:20 +0800

Nice racing game with a good chunk of content, nice user interface and good graphics (except for some of the cars which can look exceptionally chunky).

The main thing about this game is the arcade handling model. It’s unique; it feels rather awkward at first and looks quite ridiculous sometimes (i.e. your vehicle moving straight when it’s perpendicular to the track). It’s tuned for drifting your vehicles long distances and it feels good for that purpose.

Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath Review (PS Vita)

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 14:32:17 +0800

Stalled

Gameplay here is a mix of a stealth platformer and a shooter, and it works surprisingly well. My only qualm with this is how the story is structured. The gameplay loop is as such: you get a mission to eliminate/capture a criminal, so you go to that guy’s hideout (this is where you find the mix of platforming and shooting) and have a boss fight with him. This works well enough. However, from the amount I’ve played, you just keep doing this again and again and again and the story doesn’t seem to progress very much.

Midnight Club: LA Remix Review (PSP)

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 14:31:05 +0800

Complete

Pretty good open-world arcade racer with nice visuals and a lot of content, but can get very repetitive.

To clarify: I enjoyed this game but I never really played this for long stretches because of how repetitive it is.

I don’t think the repetitiveness comes from the race variety. In that sense, it’s similar to other open-world racers. It’s just that (I thought) each career mode was fairly long, and there are two of them!

Lumines: Electronic Symphony Review (PS Vita)

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 14:29:58 +0800

Compared to its PSP predecessor, this definitely lacks a few gamemodes. BUT, that isn’t much of a downside since the core gameplay is here with lots of visual variety.

This seems like one of those games you can play in short bursts but that NEVER happens. It’s very easy to sink lots of time into this.

Gameplay here is pretty standard fare, but there are a number of powerups/special abilites you can unlock which grant you perks once they’re ready, which does take a while. I recently found you can speed this up by 1% every time you tap the rear touchpad.

Jet Set Radio Review (PS Vita)

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 14:28:59 +0800

Complete

I loved this! Very nice visuals, soundtrack and gameplay loop. HOWEVER, the only thing that might let this down for you are the controls. You can get used to them and they aren’t too bad once you do, but they’re definitely not great. They often feel rather unresponsive.

Story definitely isn’t the focus of this title, but there’s lots of character here.

Gameplay mostly revolves around spraying graffiti in a number of locations within a set time limit. The time limits look generous but you can very easily lose track of time while finding each location or collecting paint cans (these are like your graffiti ammunition). This game definitely rewards knowledge of each map, and because of this, I found a number of levels taking a few attempts to clear.

Gran Turismo Review (PSP)

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 14:27:38 +0800

This has the ENTIRE foundation needed to make a good game. Good graphics, great framerate (60 FPS!), nice car selection, good track variety, so on and so forth. The only issue here is that it lacks, for the most part, any game at all!

The deal here is that you select a car, select a track, select a gamemode (one from time trial, drift and race), and then race to earn money to buy more cars. That’s literally it!

Final Fantasy IX Review (PS1)

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 14:16:37 +0800

Stalled

Preface: I have not finished this game, but I plan to in the future.

As it stands, I love pretty much everything about this game except for the portion that takes up the majority of gameplay time: the battle system.

Maybe I just haven’t understood the battle system properly or I’m not taking proper advantage of it, but in this context, I found the Active Time Battle (ATB) system incredibly finicky.

Borderlands 2 Review (PS Vita)

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 14:07:39 +0800

Stalled

I’m not going to be reviewing the game itself, more so the port.

This game on this platform specifically is quite a technical achievement, and despite its technical flaws, I still think it’s very impressive, even today. However, these flaws are not negligible and are why I dropped this game.

These screenshots are from the PS Vita! If you didn't know what you were looking for, you'd be forgiven for thinking otherwise!

Here’s the major issue: framerate. For a fast-paced shooter like this, you NEED, at the very least, a STABLE framerate. This game does NOT achieve this by any stretch of the imagination, even when you overclock. Maybe there are other graphical tweaks I could have made, but this is the experience I had.

Assassin's Creed III: Liberation Review (PS Vita)

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 14:03:51 +0800

Abandoned

This is genuinely such a peculiar video game, and at no moment did I find it particularly enjoyable. The only thing this game has going for it is its graphical fidelity (not it’s performance!) on this particular system.

First up: the narrative. From what I know, there are 3 parts to it. I played as far as halfway through the second part, but my thoughts seem to extrapolate to the third as well. The narratives are extremely disjointed! You start the game in a town and do stuff there, and then without much warning they plop you into the second part of the story which takes place in a swamp. I thought they’d give me some kind of explanation as to why I’m now in a swamp doing stuff for a different person, but (as far as I played) they didn’t!

Cool Math Question IV

Wed, 05 Nov 2025 10:21:58 +0800

Prove that $\lim_{x \rightarrow 0} \frac{\tan(x)-\sin(x)}{\sin^3(x)} = \frac{1}{2}$

Let’s first expand the $\tan(x)$ into $\frac{\sin(x)}{\cos(x)}$.

$$ \lim_{x \rightarrow 0} \frac{\frac{\sin(x)}{\cos(x)}-\sin(x)}{\sin^3(x)} $$

Now, we’ll simplify the fraction by simplifying the numerator.

$$ \lim_{x \rightarrow 0} \frac{\sin(x) - \sin(x)\cos(x)}{\cos(x)\sin^3(x)} $$

We can cancel out one of the $\sin(x)$s by taking it common in the numerator.

$$ \lim_{x \rightarrow 0} \frac{\sin(x)(1 - \cos(x))}{\cos(x)\sin^3(x)} $$

So now we have:

$$ \lim_{x \rightarrow 0} \frac{1 - \cos(x)}{\cos(x)\sin^2(x)} $$

The real trickery is finding out what to do now. So far, I don’t think there’s any way to just “know” what to do at this stage, so you’re gonna have to do some trial and error. I found, after some time, that multiplying by the conjugate of the numerator helped!

Graphic design and AI

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 13:04:26 +0800

After playing around for a bit with the current tools for AI image generation, I’ve found that AI is more competent than I thought at generating graphics for things like posters or social media posts. What really surprised me was how much better text generation has gotten. I tested a Chinese image generation tool called “Dreamina” and also Dall-E. Dreamina is genuinely miles ahead of Dall-E (at least the version I used) to the point where if you weren’t looking too closely, you might not be able to tell that the stuff produced by Dreamina is AI generated. Dall-E’s results had such a blatant AI look.

What do I think of bluetooth headphones?

Sun, 12 Oct 2025 09:35:44 +0800

It’s a weird article but my thoughts here extend to bluetooth headphones in general. The context for this article is that I acquired a pair of Airpods 4 with A.N.C effectively for free.

In short, I think they’re cool things; I can see why people like them and they definitely can be more convenient compared to wired headphones; but once their time is up I am NOT re-purchasing them or any other kind of bluetooth headset like this.

Why do people use proprietary software?

Thu, 28 Aug 2025 13:23:39 +0800

Note! I’m going to be generalising a fair amount here! If you think I’ve unfairly generalised something—I know! I just want to get my point across without constantly noting exceptions.

I recently acquired a Macbook Air for my university work. I had originally planned on doing a Windows laptop (like a Thinkpad) instead and then installing Linux on that but I honestly think that would have been a much bigger headache than I had originally anticipated. This is not to say Linux doesn’t work well or anything—after all, it’s been my daily operating system for over 4 years! But you cannot ignore that there is some jank that comes with it.

Starter Org Agenda Configuration

Fri, 25 Jul 2025 16:11:27 +0500

I spent some time setting up Org agenda to (most of) my liking yesterday, so I'll write about some of what I learned doing so. This article isn't a guide to actually using Org agenda, so I'll leave that up to you.

Table of Contents

Blogging with Hugo in Org mode

Mon, 21 Jul 2025 20:29:24 +0500

I'm back on Emacs nearly 2 years later! Might as well start blogging there…

The only real thing you have to do after setting things up is to create your posts with a .org extention. If you used to run hugo new content/posts/article.md, now you should run hugo new content/posts/article.org.

Frontmatter

You'll have to create a file in your archetypes folder (do not modify the default.md file like I did at first!) called default.org. This is where you'll put your template frontmatter. I don't use a lot of frontmatter for this blog, so mine looks fairly simple:

How useful are (academic) notes?

Fri, 18 Jul 2025 20:34:54 +0500

I’ve noticed that in the past 2 or so years of my education, I take notes during classes but I barely ever use them. I’d often wonder why I even took notes at that point.

The answer to that is that notes function only to make sense of whatever I’m studying. However, notes are not a priority anymore, and I’ll prioritize paying attention in class as opposed to taking notes.

PS Vita Screenshot Transferring

Fri, 18 Jul 2025 12:35:25 +0500

I take a lot of screenshots on my PS Vita but transferring them over to my computer is a bit of a hassle for a few reasons. Sony’s CMA is not available on Linux, and QCMA (which is on Linux) is a bit janky, so neither of those are viable options for me. What I have to do is manually grab the screenshots from the Vita’s filesystem.

However, a USB connection to the Vita or directly inserting its SD card into my computer doesn’t work for me, so I’m left with the world’s fastest file-transfer protocol: FTP¹! But that aside, the biggest hassle when getting your screenshots like this is how they’re stored. Screenshots are stored randomly in subdirectories inside of the screenshots directory.

Why I Stopped Using LastFM

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 20:40:29 +0500

Originally written on 29/6/2025.

It restricts what you can listen to your music on

You’re confined to listening to your music library on devices that support scrobbling (one way or another). By and large, this isn’t a huge issue on modern hardware but if I want to use my beloved MP3 player or even my Playstation Vita to listen to stuff then no scrobbling for me!

Moreover, it restricts the software you can use to listen to your music. Your music player of choice might have no scrobbling feature OR the scrobbling feature might be broken, and that’s that.

Manage multiple Neocities websites from the command line

Fri, 11 Jul 2025 13:35:43 +0500

The neocities-ruby utility works great for managing your Neocities websites from the terminal unless you have multiple websites you’d like to manage this way, since the official utility does not provide any methods to have multiple accounts logged in simulateously.

Some searching around led me to this issue on Github which gave me enough information. It turns out that you can use this utility if you specify your website’s API key before running a command, as such:

`1`	`NEOCITIES_API_KEY={Your API key} neocities`

New Music Discovery System

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 20:52:33 +0500

For pretty much the entirety of the past year/year-and-a-half, save for a few exceptions, 99% of my music listening revolved around video game soundtracks. They’re still in regular rotation but I am beginning to move on.

Part of what I hate about streaming services is how they constantly nag you to keep on discovering music as if that’s a good thing. Having used that sort of system before, you (well, at least I) end(ed) up forgetting a good chunk of songs that I liked in the pursuit of discovery. Ever since I started curating my own music collection, a lot of the urge for music discovery has died down. But that’s besides the point.

Using my MP3 player differently

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 11:51:40 +0500

Back in January I wrote about an MP3 player I had purchased and rambled about my dislike for the device. Since then, I had repurposed an old phone as a dedicated music player — which, mind you, is a nice thing to do. However, with my entire music library at my disposal at any moment, I found myself falling back into my old music listening habits (back when I used to stream music) of skipping most songs and not finishing them at that, and so on and so forth.

A question on linked lists: make it make sense!

Tue, 08 Apr 2025 13:18:28 +0500

I’m new to linked lists, so this question drove me up the wall! The question (in question) is from an A Level computer science past paper (from summer 2021 variant 42).

The main demands of this question aren’t anything too complicated. They were:

create a node class
write a procedure to output the nodes in the linked list
write a function that adds a node to the linked list

Foreword

This exam wanted you to implement the linked list as an array of node objects, with your null pointers represented as a -1.

Quick-and-dirty random encounter mechanic in Godot

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 14:32:04 +0500

We’ll be writing a barebones random encounter mechanic here. From my experience with some 90s to mid 2000s JRPGs, I think random encounters generally work as such:

Start a timer of a random duration that counts down to a random encounter
Pause this timer if the player stops moving / is idle
Resume the same timer when the player starts moving again

This is what we shall implement.

Project setup

We’ll have a total of 3 scenes: one for the player, one for the “main” scene, and one that contains the code for the random encounters.

Ys Origin Review (PS Vita)

Tue, 25 Mar 2025 21:24:15 +0500

I just finished up with Ys Origin, so I thought of giving it a review.

Story

Story definitely isn’t the focus of this title. There is a story, there are characters, and things happen, but none of it ever feels particularly important. I found myself neutral to most of the characters, and by the time I found myself starting to like some of them, the game ended! Part of this may be because I’ve never played any of the Ys games before this, so there might be some context I’m missing.

The Cheap MP3 Player Experience

Sat, 25 Jan 2025 21:30:50 +0500

I picked up a cheap MP3 player from AliExpress for the equivalent of ~$11 (at the time of writing) a few weeks ago. I’m not a fan!

The MP3 player in question is a Ruizu X02. I have exactly 2 major problems with it, but before I go over that I’m going to gloss over what I like about it.

What I like

Hardware! Most people would complain about the hardware but I’m not going to. Even for the price, I think the build quality is just fine! It’s lightweight and made of a kind of soft-touch plastic, but it feels solid enough! I like the physical controls on this, and while they don’t work the way you’d expect them to, that’s more of a software issue.

Dealing with this integral once and for all

Sat, 21 Sep 2024 17:43:43 +0500

The formula sheet Cambridge gives you during your exam tells you the following about this particular integral:

$$ \int \frac{1}{x^2+a^2}dx = \frac{1}{a}tan^{-1}(\frac{x}{a}) $$

This works for integrals of the form $\frac{1}{x^2+a}$ where $a$ is any rational number. You can still use this for integrals of the form $\frac{1}{bx^2+a}$, where $b$ is also a rational number; we just have to modify it a bit. What we’re looking for, in essence, is for the coefficient of $x^2$ to be $1$.

Finding a more intuitive appoach to determining the acceleration of two obejcts attached to a pulley

Tue, 03 Sep 2024 17:17:46 +0500

The title is a bit of a mouthful, but I’ll explain what we’re trying to do here.

Consider the following:

Two particles $A$ and $B$ have masses $0.35$ kg and $0.45$ kg respectively. The particles are attached to the ends of a light inextensible string which passes over a small fixed smooth pulley which is 1 metre above the horizontal ground. Initially particle $A$ is held at rest on the ground vertically below the pulley, with the string taut. Particle $B$ hangs vertically below the pulley at a height of $0.64$ m above the ground. Particle $A$ is released.

Cool Math Question III

Tue, 20 Aug 2024 17:02:34 +0500

Here’s the question:

$x$ $g(x)$

-27 3

-9 0

21 5

The table shows three values of $x$ and their corresponding values of $g(x)$, where $g(x) = \frac{f(x)}{x+3}$ and $f$ is a linear function. What is the y-intercept of the graph $y=f(x)$ in the $xy$-plane?

$x$	$g(x)$
-27	3
-9	0
21	5

This looks a lot more complicated than it actually is.

$$ g(x)=\frac{f(x)}{x+3} $$

then

$$ f(x) = g(x) \times (x+3) $$

Moreover, we know that $f(x)$ is linear, so if we were to theoretically input the values of the $x$s given, we could work out a gradient! From there, we could form an equation and solve for the y-intercept.

Cool Math Question II

Fri, 26 Jul 2024 16:47:34 +0500

$$f(x) = ax^2 = 4x + c$$
In the given quadratic function, $a$ and $c$ are constants. The graph of $y=f(x)$ in the $xy$- plane is a parabola that opens upward and has a vetex at the point $(h, k)$, where $h$ and $k$ are constants. If $k<0$ and $f(-9) = f(3)$, which of the following must be true?

$c \gt 0$

$a \geq 1$

Let’s start off with this piece of information:

Setting up Obsidian with Syncthing

Sun, 07 Jul 2024 16:37:04 +0500

I’ve known of Syncthing for a while but only got around to setting it up a few days ago.

Note that my usage of Obsidian is very simple; nothing more than tasks and a calendar. I’ve heard of conflict issues with larger note collections, but there is a bit in this article about mitigating that issue. I’m not aware of how well it works for those larger note collections.

Setting up Syncthing

I’m not going to write another getting started guide for this. There are already plenty. The official getting started guide is great!

Cool Math Question

Fri, 28 Jun 2024 15:19:02 +0500

This is from the SAT. It gave me a bit of a pause but was fun to work through.

In the given figure, $BC$ is the diameter of the circle. If the length $BC$ is equal to $132$ and the length $AB$ is equal to $\sqrt{363}$, what is the value of $\frac{BC}{BD}$?

The first thing to realise is that $\triangle ACB$ is a right angle triangle. If you have two chords intersecting at a point that lies on the cirumference of a circle, they meet at right angles.

Neofetch is dead! So what?

Tue, 25 Jun 2024 15:15:59 +0500

There’s a case to be made for not using unsupported software, but it really depends.

I’ve been seeing videos on Youtube regarding the end-of-life for neofetch, and they’re all talking about alternatives to it. For this sort of thing, you don’t really need alternatives, do you?

I mean, neofetch is literally just a system info application. So what if it isn’t updated anymore? It’s not like it’s incredibly buggy or something, nor does it have any major security flaws. If neofetch told you your system information when it was being maintained, it’ll still do the same now. Keep using it then! You don’t need alternatives to it!

Patching DWM

Thu, 20 Jun 2024 15:11:11 +0500

Patching DWM is incredibly finicky if you choose to use auto-patching programs. Manual patching is the way to go!

I’m going to be applying this patch here: focusonnetactive .

Let’s first acquire the patch itself. I’ll save it to a “patches” directory where my DWM source code is located.

The deal with patching manually is being able to read diff files. It’s not too difficult, but any formatting is nice to have. I use the bat pager (an alternative to cat), and this gives me a good idea of what needs to be done.

Playstation Vita as a Music Player

Sat, 08 Jun 2024 14:59:59 +0500

I’m trying this out, and I haven’t committed to it as of yet. There is a lot of jank here if you choose to go down this route. Benefits and drawbacks, all the rest.

There are pretty much 3 options for music playback here. You have the default music player, ElevenMPV-A, and VitaShell. Each have their problems. And there are a fair few of those.

Default music player

This is probably the most fleshed out music player you’re going to get here. It has your standard Artist/Album/Song/Genre support, playlists too, though all things considered, this is quite primitive.

Setting up DWM

Sun, 26 May 2024 19:19:39 +0500

It’s a pretty long article, so here’s a table of contents:

Table of Contents

Installation

Preamble

There are many better installation guides out here on the internet, but the gist of the procedure is generally the same. The only thing you’re going to have to do some research on is the dependencies. Each Linux (or BSD) distribution is going to have different package names for each dependency.

Turning Suckless into Suckmore

Wed, 22 May 2024 21:06:39 +0500

This is an excerpt from Turning Suckless into Suckmore .

“So you have just migrated away from something like the i3 tiling window manager because you think it’s too bloated, and you have shunned the heavier terminal emulators like Xfce4 Terminal and even xterm. Instead you feel amazed at the simplicity of suckless and you’re now running the dwm tiling window manager instead, with a ton of patches and scripts added because of course dwm is useless without transparency, gaps and a glowing status bar with the latest weather report, a volume indicator, and all the other bloatware you left behind in GNOME or KDE. And you run the st terminal emulator, again with a ton of patches and scripts added because the terminal emulator needs to look like the GNOME Terminal and behave like Vim. And in order to glue all the different parts together with all the other terminal and window based application you’re running you have to maintain a huge repository of dotfiles and scripts that need to be automatically updated using cron because of all the daily tinkering you’re doing.

Need for Speed Most Wanted 2012 Review (PS Vita)

Wed, 22 May 2024 20:41:51 +0500

I can boil down my thoughts on this game as such: great port, meh game.

A Great Port

It’s a full open world racer, has very good graphical fidelity for the thing it’s running on, maintains a decent enough framerate, and all the rest. I’ll put a few screenshots below, and while it may not look particularly appealing in this format, it looks a lot nicer in person.

As is par for the course with a handheld port, there are graphical rough edges.

Change your Linux distribution and keep your data!

Tue, 21 May 2024 20:27:20 +0500

I remember watching an LTT vdeo about Linux when I started out with this operating system. He mentioned how easy it was to change your Linux distribution while keeping all your data. I’ve since learned how to do that, so I’ll be writing about that here.

You can, of course, copy your data to an external drive and restore from there. You can also not do that and keep your data on your internal disk.

2-Dimensional Arrays

Sun, 19 May 2024 20:17:50 +0500

All explanations I’ve heard from teachers AND from the few textbooks I’ve read have such a convoluted explanation of this data structure.

To put it simply, a 2-Dimensional array is nothing more than a single array that contains multiple other arrays. That’s it!

array_2d = [
  [1, 2, 3],
  [4, 5, 6],
  [7, 8, 9]
]

When you arrange it like this, you see the tabular structure everyone talks about.

Integrating Inverse Tan

Sat, 30 Dec 2023 19:23:02 +0500

We’re going to do some integration by parts!

The thing to realize is that you can integrate singular terms by parts. $tan^{-1}(x)$ is indeed a singular term, however it is the same thing as $tan^{-1}(x) \times 1$. There’s nothing to stop us from integrating that expression by parts.

Let’s get started.

$$tan^{-1}(x) \times 1$$

For our purposes, we’ll integrate 1 and derive $tan^{-1}(x)$. It may sound a bit stupid, but we can’t integrate $tan^{-1}(x)$ at this moment since that’s the whole point of this exercise! Anyways,

Waiting for Animations

Sat, 02 Sep 2023 19:07:48 +0500

I’m talking about the use of animations in interface design.

The point is, I don’t want to wait for your animations!

They slow down the usage experience. Waiting for a paragraph to bounce into frame, or images to slide into the viewport are things that slow down navigating a site/app/whatever. The problem is having to wait for them to happen. These kinds of animations may look nice, but they’re only good when you don’t have to wait for them!

Choosing not to Rice

Tue, 29 Aug 2023 19:04:11 +0500

After installing Void Linux again, I made it a point to not rice my desktop, at all. I fell of the “ricing” train a while ago, but I still bothered with theming QT apps and stuff so everything looked somewhat consistent.

I am so past that now. What’s the benefit of not ricing your desktop? You don’t care about how it looks! That means, whenever you run into a rogue app who doesn’t respect your system theme, you don’t care! That’s absolutely blissful!

Void Linux Post-Installation

Sat, 26 Aug 2023 18:14:49 +0500

Today, I reinstalled Void Linux. Mostly just to start fresh and get rid of the cruft I had accumulated over the past few months. There are certain things that don’t work on my hardware, not specifically with Void, but Linux in general. These are things that need to be fixed.

In case it is of any help, I’m doing this on a late-2012 iMac, since I’ve found that Macs have unique issues running Linux.

A Report on Renewable Energy

Thu, 17 Aug 2023 17:58:01 +0500

This was a school project (for IGCSE Global Perspectives, if you’d like to know) from back in mid/late 2021, and there’s no harm in putting it here. I will preface by saying that this is the first report I had ever written in this format.

Table of Contents

Introduction

The topic of energy sources, specifically renewable energy sources, has come to importance in recent years, and for good reason. With the the population of the world increasing year over year, and with it projected to reach around 9 to 10 billion by 2050 (UN, 2019), the amount of carbon emissions released annually is bound to increase to, possibly dangerous, levels. Switching current energy sources from single-use sources to renewable energy is one of the ways that has been recognized to reduce carbon emissions, but only around 15% of the world’s energy comes from such sources. Why are countries adopting renewable energy sources at such a slow rate? What is stopping them from doing so?

SSH and Android

Wed, 16 Aug 2023 17:50:32 +0500

SSH is a pretty nifty tool. I don’t have any servers (yet) or anything of the sorts, but it’s a neat way for me to access my computer from my phone. It makes transferring files and stuff much easier (easier than KDE Connect at times). For some reason, my SSH setup thing stopped working, so I’m going to fix it. I’ll put the intstructions here so that I (and you) can reference it again in the future. This is for connecting to a computer from an Android device.

Is the Madness Ever Going to End?

Sat, 12 Aug 2023 17:42:21 +0500

This is an excerpt from: Is the madness ever going to end?

“There is something seriously wrong with the IT industry. It’s so bad that I haven’t managed to find a single industry with the same massive amount of stupidity, with the exception of perhaps the fashion industry. It’s like the IT industry has been paralyzed in some strange kind of mass hypnosis.

Creating a Colour Scheme

Tue, 08 Aug 2023 16:44:18 +0500

I like this website’s (current) dark mode. So I had a go translating this to a terminal colour scheme. It is somewhat reminiscent of the Solarized colour scheme. Here is a screenshot:

Zellij, Helix & Lazygit

Foreground/background:
- foreground: #ffe8c1
- background: #132f35
Regular colours:
- black: #183c44
- red: #da4949
- green: #bcca15
- yellow: #ffb02e
- blue: #35a6e6
- magenta: #d343a2
- cyan: #38c995
- white: #ffe8c1
Bright colours:
- black: #235662
- red: #ff5757
- green: #ecff14
- yellow: #ffd694
- blue: #4cbfff
- magenta: #ff4cc2
- cyan: #35ffb6
- white: #ffd48f

I made a few versions of this theme for some of the software I use.

Tiling WM Quickstart

Sat, 05 Aug 2023 19:53:41 +0500

I’ve spent about the past year using window managers on-and-off. I have, however, gained an amount of experience with i3 and Qtile. I shall attempt to make getting started with these two WMs a bit easier here.

Please do note that my configuration experience i3 and Qtile is nothing crazy. Everything in this article is just enough to begin getting around these WMs, something I had a bit of trouble with when I started out with this kind of desktop.

No-Fuss Terminal Workspace

Sat, 29 Jul 2023 19:08:25 +0500

Working in the terminal is something that I have been steadily warming up to over the past few months. I think its obvious that this kind of workflow isn’t for everyone, but it doesn’t hurt to try it out, does it? Here, I will share a few terminal apps that I found pretty easy to use.

Table of contents below:

Table of Contents

Text editing

There are many options for text editing in the terminal, and this has become my preferred way of writing notes and writing code. There are, obviously, downsides to this approach, but, generally, I feel like this constitutes a net positive in my books. The gain in speed, especially when you take the time to learn your way around a text editor is amazing. Options are plentiful, but plenty require lots of configuration.

A Wonky and Imperfect Display Font

Sat, 10 Jun 2023 18:07:52 +0500

This was an attempt at creating a font. It is, rather clearly, wonky; very much so. However, given its status as a first attempt, I gave myself that margin. I wanted to make something. Something I did make. Here it is:

And a few designs with this font…