A stream of content from members of the Astoria tech community
This month I attended HOPE - Hackers on Planet Earth. As always it was quite interesting and inspiring. I left full - overwhelmingly so - of excitement and ideas to do interesting things.
Some of the highlights for me were:
A talk from a non-profit that helps North Koreans get rooted devices to …
I stumbled across the dc command, after mistyping cd. It’s a math tool. It’s pretty esoteric in my opinion, but you can switch bases, which means you can do something like convert from a hex color to rgb, albeit digit-by-digit.
I recently learned about the wcurl command. It’s a wrapper around curl, focused on making downloading files simple without passing options. It has some heuristics to figure out what to do with the given URLs, and in my testing it’s pretty good. For simple file downloading, I think this will replace regular curl calls for me.
I was muttering the abbreviation API (a, pee, eye) under my breath, and shifted over one phonetic stop to “ape pee eye”. The puerile interpretation is right up front, which did make me giggle, but it also made me question if there was anything that actually existed with that sound.
This month, or rather last month as I'm a few days late, I spent back in my home town: São Paulo, Brazil.
During my stay, me and my brother met a few times to play together. He played the drums, I played the piano. We …
Last weekend me and my girlfriend went on a trip to Wildwood, NJ. As we walked around, we started noticing way too many cool neon signs. Intrigued, we did some research and made a wonderful discovery: Wildwood is "the Doo Wop capital of the USA".
Every once in a while you play a game that is unlike any other, that transcends genres, that you can feel the author speaking through it to you, and that you can tell will stick around in your mind in some way or another probably forever. Hyperbeat is one of …
This year I bought more shirts than ever. Mostly because I decided to go to as many concerts as I possibly could.
Slightly late for November, but better late than never!
As November rolled by, and the Christmas mood took over, I put on an old school Christmas songs playlist on YouTube.
This month I went on a two week long road trip through California with a friend. We sailed on Lake Tahoe, walked over sand dunes in Death Valley, and hiked between the mountains in Yosemite Valley. We saw the oldest trees on Earth at the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest, and …
My pick for song of the month this time around is a track that played at Spectacle Theater before the movie started (the movie was Mirage Men (2013), by the way). The lyrics are very poetic, and the instrumentation has this eerie and underground feel to it. It's a great …
It's been almost two years since I posted the "Collecting pins" post! It's time I shared an update.
Somewhere along the way I decided to get more organized and started a spreadsheet to track all the details about my pin collection (has this crossed the line to the unhealthy hobby …
Just two days ago I went to an immersive theatrical experience called Viola's Room. It started in a girl's bedroom with dim lighting and a few beds made on the floor as in a sleepover. On the headphones, a beautiful song started playing. The moment was so magical it's hard …
Today I want to try starting something new. Every month I'll share one song that stood out to me throughout the month.
For this first one, even though it's already midway through August, I still really feel the need to share this song that has marked my days throughout July …
I've recently updated the blog's theme and I felt I should make a post not only to document the reason but also to archive pictures of the blog before and after the change for the future.
When I created this blog, I chose nikhil-theme as the theme because I found …
Last year, on the "Collecting pins" post, I mentioned that I usually wear my pins on a beanie, but was still looking for a good alternative for the warmer months.
After thinking more about it, I realized a necklace would be the way to go. It doesn't depend on any …
In the "CardOS: Writing an OS for the Cardputer" post I shared about the OS that I'm writing for the Cardputer and that the next step was to move away from the Arduino toolchain. It took me two months but I finally did it. The end product was this commit …
I recently got the M5Stack's Cardputer. I was motivated to get it because I knew other people personally that had it too, so we would be able to share our progress, but I was worried it might end up being just another board that sits in my closet forever untouched …
Last year after talking for a while with someone during a conference they asked me for my LinkedIn to be able to connect with me, to which I answered I didn't have one.
It started innocently about one year ago as I was looking for a gift for a friend. We played a lot of League of Legends and Ragnarok Online back in the day, so I wanted to give him something to remember that. Eventually I came across these pins:
This month I attended the Embedded Linux Conference Europe, which was co-located with the Open Source Summit Europe, and took place in Dublin, Ireland. This was my first time attending a Linux conference in-person as a contributor and it was a very special experience.
As someone who cares about FOSS, I'm always happy to move to a FOSS alternative when one shows up, provided there aren't any big drawbacks.
Back when I was in University and starting to learn the ways of Git, I only knew about two Git hosting options: GitHub, the mainstream …
Last month, as I was writing the blog post with all the statistics for the blog's two year anniversary, the "Blog statistics after two years" post, I decided that I really wanted to have a plot with emojis. From the moment I thought of this I knew it couldn't simply …
In 2014, while on a school trip to Germany, I bought a Razer Tiamat headset. The sound was great and for the most part it was comfortable. Its only issue was the clamping force, which was a bit too much, and gave me headaches after long hours of use.
One day I was scrolling through Reddit as usual, when I saw a post linking to this blog post: I quit my job to focus on SerenityOS full time. I was intrigued by the backstory, the premise of this OS, and also by the fact that its development was being …
This month marks one year since I bought a Nexus 5X and started using LineageOS, so I thought I'd share my experience.
About one year ago, a friend told me he found a really good deal for a Nexus 5X online. The Nexus 5X is an old phone …
Recently I decided to learn assembly. I already had a reasonable understanding of how it worked due to some classes that touched the subject in university, however I never had the opportunity to really write assembly code.
Since my everyday computer is an x86-64 machine, it made most sense to …
One interesting feature of Pelican, the static site generator I use for this blog, is the internal link expansion syntax with {}. It is documented here. Some examples are {filename}, {static} and {author}. The purpose of the syntax is to have shorter and easier aliases to link to internal content in …
Another post going through stuff I set up for my desktop environment a couple years ago and that have used ever since 🙂. This time I'll show the menus I've created using rofi.
So, what is rofi? It's basically a program where you feed a list of options to it, and …
Five years ago when I moved to the i3 window manager, I started using its status bar, the i3bar. It is text based, and it's up to you what gets shown there. However it is not very modular: it's weird to combine different information to be shown since everything has …
Earlier this month I was spending a few weeks in another country. It was late at night and I was once again looking over my personal files and thinking if there was a better way to organize them in folders.
Several years ago my mother gave me a Kindle Paperwhite 2. I have read a few books on it since, but it never felt like it was really mine. Locking the screen showed some annoying ad, all books bought from Amazon were protected by DRM, books transferred through USB only …
I've been using pelican as my static blog generator since I started this blog about one year ago. It only took a bit of configuration to get the blog up and running, and a bit of searching through pelicanthemes to find nikhil-theme which is the theme I'm still using.
It's been a full year since I started this blog! So I thought I'd take this chance to talk a bit about the blog itself: How it started and my thoughts on it.
I had already thought a bit about having my own blog. Having a little corner of …
As I previously mentioned in the "Moving to Wayland" post, I recently moved to a new computer. Moving can be very annoying if you use a heavily configured system and don't have all the configurations easily available to just move over. Since I do regular backups of my files, which …
Hey, first non-technical blog post 🙂.
Anyway, I haven't talked about this before here, but I'm really interested in playing the piano. When I was younger I took some guitar classes, but I always wanted to play the piano, and a couple years ago I finally got one! I've been playing …
In the middle of January, my computer decided to surprise me, and not in a good way. Differently from all the quirks I've come to expect from it after all these 6 years of use — faulty keyboard, flashing screen, bad audio jack — this time it was worse, and it wasn't …
In the previous article of this series, I went into all my Taskwarrior and VIT customizations, and my workflow with them, that enables me to organize my tasks and get them done. Tasks, however, aren't the whole story when getting organized.
Another crucial component of organization is having a calendar …
Two years ago I decided to get more organized about my life. During that time I read the Getting Things Done book and discovered Taskwarrior, a task manager for the terminal which doesn't get in the way.
Now that I had a working serial cable for my Nexus 5, as described in the "Making an UART cable for the Nexus 5" post, I was ready to face some action and help in upstreaming.
Looking through Brian Masney's TODO page there were a couple options, but the one …
My file manager of choice is ranger. It's terminal-based, provides keybind mapping for everything making me more efficient in navigating my files, and it's incredibly extensible by enabling the creation of custom commands in python. If that wasn't enough, it also has a ton of other great features (extensible file …
Music is life. I really love listening to music, although not the same kind of music all the time. Most of the time though, anything goes: I like to listen to any of the songs I have at random. But when I'm doing something that needs concentrating (like writing this …
One of the main ideas of GTD is to have a context associated with each task, so that it is very easy to see which tasks can be done in your current context. I organize my tasks with Taskwarrior, so to make it work with contexts, when adding a new …
For a long time I used offlineimap to synchronize my emails between the email providers and my computer. Having access to all my emails offline on my computer is pretty handy. But after seeing the brutal efficiency advantage of mbsync over offlineimap, and having had delay issues with offlineimap myself …
Recently, me and a friend started digging into making the Nexus 5 run the mainline Linux kernel. The purpose of this is, apart from a great learning experience, to make the Nexus 5 run a Linux distro, like PostmarketOS, instead of Android, while also having lifetime updates delivered from the …
