I realized after moving to Chicago that almost no one here play rhythm games (slight exaggeration). So I now have a heightened urgency to set these up myself… Here are guides to set up a few. A side note: distrobox is a useful tool that now comes pre-installed on Steam Deck, which is especially valuable considering that Steam/SteamOS doesn’t want you to modify anything pre-installed on the Deck. The Steam Deck has a strong enough built-in GPU to handle all of the games listed below. Read more...

Why am I doing this I was billed for roughly $25/mo for my old setup on Linode/Akamai, which seemed a bit high for me. In addition, I conveniently have a spare computer that I am not using for anything else. Finally, moving to a new city (and hopefully not moving again anytime soon) meant change, so I decided to try and convert my old setup to a local, true “homeserver” setup. Read more...

I first moved to Houston in July 2019 for grad school, and left on 5/1/2024. I was a very different person back in 2019, Houston was also a slightly different city. Fast forward almost five years… I now hold a PhD degree, a lot of my foundational beliefs about the world have changed, and Houston… has evolved a bit as well. This might be somewhat of a longer blog post, but I want to talk a bit more about my perceptions and experience of Houston after the past 4-5 years. Read more...

Yes, that’s the news: after almost exactly four years of working with my Ph.D. advisor, I finally defended my Ph.D. dissertation as of 2/27/2024. No need to congratulate me; I really don’t feel much of a difference, aside from the fact that I have no mood to work today. So I figured I’d just jot down my thoughts about what happened, and what will happen from here on now. Doing a PhD I believe it is somewhat of an insider joke in the life sciences field that the Bachelor of Science degree is a “B. Read more...

It has been a while since anyone ever DM’d me on Firefish. I am not a particularly popular guy after all. So, imagine the surprise I had one day when I received 10 new notifications on a day when I haven’t even posted for #Caturday yet. Sure enough, I received DMs from a spammer, which has been pointed out by stux to be an issue on his servers a short while ago. Read more...

Since it has been a while I talked about gaming: here are some recent favourites! Last Command This is a rather interesting mixup of a bullet hell and snake-style controls. Probably wouldn’t be exaggerating to call this “Snake 2.0”. That… pretty much explains the entire gameplay. Basically, you are playing as a combat robot who has to fight through various challenging foes. Movement is exactly like Snake; along with that, you attack by collecting data packets, analyzing them, and then hitting the enemy’s core. Read more...

My Framework laptop arrived on 12/20 in the evening, so it has now been almost four weeks that I have been using this primarily as my daily driver. I figured it might be best for me to do sort of a long-term review. Ordering I ordered the AMD CPU which was still on preorder mode the time I placed the order, so it took a week or two before my batch started officially shipping. Read more...

This is a general-purpose guide for self-hosting and/or using alternative services for a bunch of stuff. This guide may get longer as time goes on. Using git It is possible to set up a git repository from pretty much anywhere with data connection: a provider like GitHub, a SSH server, a random directory on your hard drive, … To initiate a repository, run git init --bare. Running without --bare leads to issues. Read more...

First of all: see Hugo’s Quick Start Guide, which should explain most of the necessary basics. This guide serves as an extra for things that are not as obvious. Installing hugo hugo is available on most Linux distro repositories, and can be directly installed via the package manager. Notably though: on Debian Stable (which is the de-facto choice for most servers), the default hugo version is not recent enough. Instead, it may be advantageous to use the latest compiled binary. Read more...

Migrating to hugo This has been a long time task in the making. I have first heard of hugo way back when I just joined Fosstodon: that was when a lot of the blogging folks were talking about using hugo in their workflow. I didn’t catch up on the trend at that time, but I did end up trying hugo a bit: however, the part of having to learn a new command line package, along with the seemingly unnecessary steps of writing markdown files, deterred me at the moment. Read more...