Weekly Post #11

To buy or not to buy Macbook Air

I have been waiting for Apple to drop the M3 on the macbook air. And now they have refreshed the Macbook Air with M3 I am on the fence. One of the reasons for wanting Macbook is seamless integration of my Apple devices. With GSConnect/KDE connect, I am able to send and receive images, and do bidirectional copy paste(although you need to manually go into the KDE connect and push the clipboard connects). I want to make the switch but my thinkpad is going strong with 32gigs RAM. It feels wrong to want a macbook air. But I still it because of my dependence or love for Apple’s notes+reminders+calendar.

Sick

I have inexplicably fallen sick. Chills, high temperature, runny nose and throat pain. I am trying to get this post compiled before the effects of tylenol wear out.

Where is my spring?

It is March and the weather in California isn’t reflective of the calendar season - Spring. I should be out and about in the mornings enjoying the pleasant weather instead of tugging my blanket. Hopefully it doesn’t get skipped.

Mail clients in Linux

Since my move to Apple I have been using Mail.app for my emails. I use it on my work mac and become quite depedent on it. And sadly the landscape of email clients in Linux is pretty disappointing¹. I tried geary, thunderbird, kmail and all seemed to be underwhelming coming off using Apple’s mail app. And ever since using mail app I can’t get myself to go back to viewing mails in the browser.

TWIL

You can’t catch python requests module exception using the generic exception. It needs to be requests.exceptions.RequestException

There was a code at work that was doing something like this:

try:
  r = requests.get(url, params=)
except Exception as e:
  logging.exception(f"failed with {e}")

The above code was causing the server to crash because requests’ exception isn’t a subclass of Exception.

The correct implementation should have been:

try:
  r = requests.get(url, params=)
except requests.exceptions.RequestException as e:
  logging.exception(f"failed with {e}")

Reading stalled

This is bad, I set myself a rather audacious goal for the number of books I wanted to read this year. Saying, I am off course is probably understatement because I haven’t really read a book in over a month now 😱.

Giving Ali Abdaal’s ideal week a try

I am going to give the ideal week suggestion from Ali Abdaal’s youtube video a go. The premise is to basically sit down and create a new calendar. Block out time in the calendar for what your ideal week would look like².The benefits to this

1. You know what you are doing/you ought to be doing the coming week.
2. You don’t have unrealistic expectation for yourself.
3. You know how much of the stuff you want to do would actually get done. This also helps in prioritizing.
4. You will feel good about seeing things planned out if you are like me.

So wish me luck and will update on next week’s post on how this goes.

Emoji’s in emacs

• emoji-list (C-x 8 e l) - lists all the emojis.
• emoji-insert(C-x 8 e i) - opens minibuffer to conviently insert emoji.
• emoji-describe(C-x 8 e d) - to describe an emoji.
• emoji-search(C-x 8 e s) - search for an emoji and insert it.
• emoji-recent(C-x 8 e r) - list recently used emojis.

Icon for my pseudonym/website.

I have been dabbling with procreate to create an icon for this website/my pesudonym. This is close to something that I like but still in the process of refinning.

Through the lens

Internet map

• Linux vs BSD

  Enjoyable read. Talks about the philosophy differences between Linux and BSD. And the history of the terminologies.

• First AI software engineer

  Pretty neat! but read 👇🏻 before you start to panic

• How AI will affect your career