Emil's Corner
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November 05, 2021

Life Update - October

Time goes by so fast. It is November already. After taking it easy for almost 8 full months it feels like months just fly by with the amount of work I have with school and personal projects.

Learning

We have a capstone project going on in school right now and most of my learning time has gone towards that. We are building a continuous non-invasive blood-pressure monitoring device. I have no prior experience with biosignals or embedded devices so this has been the perfect learning opportunity for me. I have gotten the chance to work with embedded programming and signals from a PPG and ECG sensors. I have learned some C-programming and how to read and save data from a serial port with Python.

I have been slowly learning more Rust too. By learning Rust I have also learned more about memory management and heaps/stacks etc. There are so many important programming topics that I have missed by only using high-level dynamic languages like Python and JavaScript.

Reading

The Uninhabitable Earth - Really eyeopening book. David Wallace-Wells really managed to put the climate change into words and numbers that everybody can understand. It was quite number-heavy and America-centered, but still a really good read to anyone who does not really understand how serious the climate change situation is. I have been reading quite actively about climate change, but this book had a lot of information that I was not aware of. To be honest, I'm not sure if all the figures in the book are reliable (I have not fact-checked them), but it really tells the scale of the disasters that await us and the next generations in the near future.

How to Read a Book - I started this book already in August, but put it on pause when I got new books in September. I believe that every person should read this book. It opened my eyes to the fact that I don't really remember anything from the books that I have read. This book didn't really have any new information in it, but it opened my eyes to the fact that books can (and should) be read just like research papers. You start by looking in to the introduction/abstract and then to the conclusions, then you skim the table of contents and the book itself etc... You take notes on the parts that are good and the parts that you don't understand. Then you dive deeper into the book/paper and look into the parts that you did not understand or that you missed. You read reference books/papers and search for alternative texts about the topic etc. Funnily enough this was one of the books that I mostly skimmed through. Not because it was bad, but because I have read tens of blog posts about it and it felt that I knew half of the book already.

Back with Arch Linux

In last months post I started an experiment with Pop!_OS, but to be honest, that did not last long. I think I installed Arch back after one week. Pop!_OS is a really nice and polished distribution, but there was too many things that annoyed me compared to Arch.

For example:

  • On tiled mode, notifications steal focus. You are writing in the terminal or sending a message on Element/Discord/IRC and a notification pops up and steals the focus. This alone drove me crazy.
  • I don't like window title bars on Linux so I toggled them of in Pop!_OS too. This worked weird, because some windows still had the title bars (Spotify for example) and some windows still allocated space for the window buttons (Firefox for example).
  • Some windows tiled while other (Spotify again) did not respect tiling.
  • Sound output defaulted to my microphone. Every time I restarted the system or unplugged the headphones, the sound output would change to my microphone.

Now some of these problems are Ubuntu-based like the default audio output weirdness and some are application-based like the weird behaviour with Spotify. But the point is that I have never had these problems with Arch.

So after a week I ended up installing Arch with i3 back. Arch just feels like home to me. There are many things that annoy me with Arch too, but I know how to fix them in Arch.

Giving MacOS a chance instead

I'm working on a few projects now that require me to take the Macbook with me and work outside of my home. Together with the release of macOS Monterey this seemed like a good chance to give macOS a try as my main OS. It's nicer to have one development environment to use for everything and no need to sync everything between two machines.

There were a few main annoyances that made me change to Linux in the first place (I was primarily a Macbook user for many years before).

  • My home WiFi disconnects every few minutes to few hours with the Macbook.
  • When using the external monitor, the Bluetooth audio disconnects if I skip a video too many times or play/pause many times in a row.
  • There were some color issues with the M1 Macbook when it was new. Colors were faded when you connected the external monitor to the Macbook and you needed to reconnect it many times until they were correct.
  • Macbook would wake from sleep every 15 minutes powering on the external monitor and lighting up the whole apartment waking me up.
  • macOS has the worst window management of all the modern operating systems. Even Windows has better.

I'm happy to say that with macOS Monterey and some fixes most of those problems are away.

  • WiFi still randomly disconnects, but at most once per day. I'm going to try and use the Ethernet when I'm at home.
  • Bluetooth audio seems to work correctly now.
  • Color issues are gone.
  • Sleep problem is still here, but I disabled sleep when connected to power so it is not a problem for me anymore.
  • Window management is still trash, but I use the split full screen mode most of the time and Rectangle otherwise.

It has been a learning experience migrating from Arch back to macOS, but it has gone by surprisingly easy. macOS has mostly the same CLI apps that Linux has and all the other apps expect the calendar are the same on Arch and macOS. I feel that for school usage and the amount of meetings and online lectures I have, macOS is a much better experience. For development it still comes behind Linux though. Homebrew for example is no match to Pacman and AUR. I also need to use VMs and that is currently not possible with the M1.

I have used the Macbook for a week now and I have gotten used to the macOS way of doing things. The M1 also definitely feels much more powerful than my i5 on the desktop.

Other stuff

I challenged myself to a "Sober October" because my eating and drinking habits had gotten a bit out of hand during the summer. During it I lost 3kg and felt much more energetic and productive. The weight loss was mostly bloating from all the beer and carbs that I had enjoyed before, but it still feels really good. I usually eat cleaner and live healthier during the winters and enjoy more during the summer.

I also spent too much time on researching and trying Dvorak and Colemak keyboard layouts. I spent something between 30-40 hours reading about alternative keyboard layouts and trying out Dvorak and Colemak, but ended up back with Qwerty. I really enjoyed Colemak and I would like to change to it some day, but right now I have more important things to spend my time on than learning a new keyboard layout. I need to write a lot of reports and essays in school and writing 5 words per minute on Colemak does not help with that.

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