u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)

I like computers, trains, space, radio-related everything and a bunch of other tech related stuff. User of GNU+Linux.
I am also dumb and worthless.
My laptop is HP 255 G7 running Manjaro and Linux Mint.
I own RTL-SDRv3 and RSP1 clone.

SDF Unix shell username: user224

  • 2 Posts
  • 66 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • I really hope I’ll be able to work just night shifts.

    Say… 21:00 - 05:00.

    During summer break I usually took 21:00 - 03:00, with company-provided transportation usually ending up being around 18:00 - 06:00. Yeah, 6 hours work, 6 hours travel, but I like travelling, and this gave me an excuse. I wasn’t yet tired when I got home.

    But, school forces me to wake up at 04:30. Feels awful. If that were PM, sure, but no. 8 hours of sleep, impossible. At 20:00 my brain is finally starting up.

    But there’s more to it than just sleep cycles.

    Night vs day.
    Day: People everywhere, nowhere to be alone. The roads are full, more than they should be. You can always hear them, and I am sure smell, and almost taste them too. Oh, look, but the sun is shining strong, the beautiful yellow… piece of shit that burns my eyes full-time, making me see so much I cannot see anymore. Imagine snow, nice, fluffy, cold, yes, but in daylight, a reflector, a mirror of pain, when will that liquefy?
    And in summer time, when there is no snow, you might feel positive, look at the sun how it paints the grass and flowers, but it paints you too. You’re red, you’re hot, you’re sweating, there’s nowhere to hide, the rays shine everywhere. When did you last drink? Who knows, but it feels like a drop of water landing on your tongue could somehow erase this misery. The more you think about it, the thirstier you get.

    Night: Walking through the city, alone. Cool breeze hitting the face, the city lit dim by sodium street lights, but I still wish I could dial them down. There’s some white LED lights too, I can see how they’re more useful to others, but for me it’s a night, I want a night, crave it. In the past they were operated by simple light sensors, you could turn off entire streets by shining a flashlight at them, or so I was told. Not the case anymore.
    If only they could all die out. Whether it’s orange sodium lights or sharp white LED lights, they’re still just trying to bring the day into the night.
    The stars. Can’t see the stars. Light pollution. Who are the lamps shining for? There’s no one anymore. What a waste of power.
    But there’s still some dark areas.
    When my eyes adjust to it, that’s great. They feel rested, almost like my eyelids are shut, but I see. I see just enough.
    With the lack of light, you realize what it meant. It’s not a friend, it’s a noise. Loud, persistent distracting noise, whispering right into your brain through the eyes. It whispers, it talks, you step out of the shade it screams, you look at the snow - it shrieks in your brain painfully.
    Moon reflects just enough. I can walk comfortably, see the hedgehog and not step on it, yet not enough to see and read the ads.
    The light doesn’t whisper, I can hear. I can hear the breeze moving leafs, I can hear it move across the fields of grass long overdue for cutting. It was there during the day, but so was the sun, and people and the cars. I was deaf, but now I am not.
    And I am alone. Alone in a good way. It feels like the space is mine, the air is mine, it smells better… maybe it’s the (lack of) cars.

    It gets best when the morning just starts turning up. Still dark, still quiet, still empty and comfortable, but things are starting up at the train station. I can hear a faint soothing roar of idling train long in the distance. I can hear it across the otherwise quiet city.
    The sun has risen somewhat, it’s illuminating… not yet this part of the planet, but the space above it. Space where the satellites orbit and they reflect the light back down. I can watch the so many dots moving across the still dark sky. I am looking up at them, nobody out to think I am dumb staring at the sky for minutes, of which I am only reminded by the neck pain.
    Whistle!
    The morning train is ready for departure. The engine sound gets nicer as the train speeds up, then fades away. But it’s also a reminder… the day. It’s coming, slowly murdering the night.
    Light, people, noise, smells… a misery. It’s here again, and you are supposed to be happy about it.


    Sorry, I typed out a bit too much. I hate the day if you couldn’t tell xD








  • This is not a suggestion, it’s probably fairly stupid, but it’s what I’ve been using.

    I’ve been using a convertible ThinkPad L390 Yoga as eBook reader as well. I never considered a 2-in-1 laptop, but it was cheap and I heard the Yoga versions have better colors (display). I thought I’d never actually use it in tablet mode, that my touchscreen would be unused, free of smudges. Hell, I didn’t know what I was missing, it’s awesome.
    I’ve been using it to read eBooks, in portrait orientation as a tablet.

    Software wise, Arch Linux (btw), KDE Plasma 6, Arianna eBook program.
    Not optimal to be honest, Plasma 6 has some annoying bugs, and Arianna is broken as of recently. I suspect some depency issue, but anyway, for the time being I use the Flatpak Arianna package.

    But I do like the experience. If I need to check some word in dictionary I can do it on the same device. Plasma 6 has touchscreen gestures, for example I use sliding from right to switch between windows. So, Arianna and Firefox with Wiktionary open at once, reading the book, unknown word, long press it, copy, slide from right, Firefox window, paste into Wiktionary, boom!
    And to save extra power I use Bluetooth for network connection rather than WiFi. 1Mbps is plenty for dictionary searches.

    Oh, important to me, when turned around there’s a deactivated keyboard on the other side that I can fidget with while reading. I feel like it helps keep me from getting distracted by something else. Just mashing the keys with my right hand fingers and clicking the trackpad with left.

    Disadvantages of this:
    Hardware wise, it’s a 1.5kg 13.3 inch eBook, so… perhaps not your glass of water (I don’t drink coffee ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯).

    (No need to read further, this is specific to software I run on it.)

    Software wise, well, you can choose different software, but bugs. Visual glitches like the taskbar switching to floating when using virtual keyboard or the window occasionally staying retracted from where the keyboard was (fixed by toggling affected window out and back into fullscreen) are okay.
    What’s worse, inactive window translucency can get stuck, i.e.: if the window gets stuck translucent even in foreground, and you close it, it’s now permanently on screen as ghost window and you’ll have to log out and log in again.
    Worst, toggling Bluetooth (usually when done quickly after log in) may crash the system partially. The GUI completely freezes, tty works, but reboot won’t fully work. It will get stuck mid-way, so I recommend logging in as root, enabling magic sysrq (echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq), issuing reboot, let it freeze, then Alt+SysRq+REISUO (one by one while holding down Alt and SysRq keys) to shutdown.

    (Bluetooth service cannot be stopped or killed, nor plasmashell)

    P.S.: Use Wayland with touchscreens. X11 has no touchscreen support, it just emulates a mouse pointer which is suboptimal.