Stuff I bought

I’ve been looking for laptop deals for a few months now. Since I go to college, I was looking for something balanced between battery life and performance. I found a YouTube channel called Jarrod’s Tech that basically has a review of most laptops coming out, and between it, some other recommendations and looking at the deals available during Black Friday, I settled on the Lenovo Legion Slim 5. The model I bought has a Ryzen 7 7840HS, 32GB of RAM, a 165Hz 1440p display and a 4070 GPU, which for 1500€ seemed like a good deal.

I’ve been using it for a week now and I would say I’m satisfied with the purchase. The performance is as expected and the battery life is great, over 8h of light use. One thing I didn’t like is the trackpad, it’s smooth but I don’t like the sound when pressing and clicking. As for the software, I’ve had some issues with my current Linux setup, I’ll have to do some research to fix them.

I also found a 4GB RAM for 24€ per year VPS at LowEndTalk that I couldn’t pass up. Also MXRoute had one of the best deals ever, 10GB of storage for $5 a year, so I got that too. And lastly, I renewed my Windscribe VPN subscription for $19.

Games I have played

Lately I’ve been getting into videogames again and have started to complete some games I had in my Steam library for a long time. This is the list of games I’ve played this season in chronological order:

• Prey (2017)

• Viewfinder

• Cocoon

• Resident Evil 3 Remake

• Escape Memoirs

• The Forest

• Resident Evil 7

I don’t think I had ever finished so many games in just 3 months, although they are not very long games which is something I prefer. The one I enjoyed the most without a doubt was Resident Evil 3 Remake, although for many a disappointment, for me, someone who never played the original I found it a lot of fun. It doesn’t create as much tension as RE2 Remake nor is it as scary, but if you want a short and fun game I recommend it. The game that disappointed me the most was Cocoon, even though for many it is one of the best puzzle games. I found it boring and simple except for the last half hour when they started taking advantage of the main mechanic to make more complex puzzles, so just when it got somewhat interesting for me, it was over.

Interesting blog posts

About My Pocket Notebook by Garrit Franke.

Anything longer ago than yesterday should just say the actual date, on Grumpy Website.

Fairphone 5: Keeping it 10/10?, by iFixit.

How two photographers captured the same millisecond in time, by Ron Risman.

I hacked the Magic Mouse, by Ivan Kuleshov.

Open Source does not win by being cheaper, by Anh-Tho Chuong. A great article on how open source software should be sold.

Testing PCIe on the Raspberry Pi 5, by Jeff Geerling. The Raspberry Pi has been announced and it has PCIe!

Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem, by Scott Jenson.

The most copied StackOverflow snippet of all time is flawed!, by Andreas Lundblad.

The past is not true, by Derek Sivers.

The Tailscale Universal Docker Mod, by Xe Iaso.

Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly, by Paavo Huhtala.

Wifi without internet on a Southwest flight, by James Vaughan.

Writing Documentation for Your House, by Luke Hsiao.

Other links

autorestic, an awesome wrapper around the already awesome restic backup tool.

heroicons and tabler-icons, for some easy copy-paste SVG icons.

Paper Tactics, a website in which you can play a turn-based called Virus Wars, never heard of it before but it’s pretty fun.

screenshot-to-code, convert a screenshot to code using GPT-4 vision.

There’s a mechanical watch feature called a “hack”, from Dave Anderson’s Mastodon. I’ve also discovered that in watch lingo a “feature” is called a “complication”.