The speed drop over powerline ethernet adapters is a lot greater than I expected, making the weaker WiFi signal actually the more desirable choice here.

So far I've ran 402 miles this year! I largely slacked off during mid year so there goes my grand 1000 mile plan, but there's always the next year. 😆

Before anything, happy New Year!

It's an interesting feeling when the time span of one year gradually becomes shorter relative to the time that has already passed in one's life. If only the actual length of one year also scales with one's age, perhaps we would feel more of the excitement instead of anxiety during the New Year count down. That being said, 2018 was a lot of fun for me, even without ray-tracing graphic cards.

The Amazing 2018

To quote my 2017 self:

If I've learned anything from my past failed plans, it would be to always underestimate my own capabilities when planning...

Yeah, it's totally just that my estimates about the amount of free time I would have was off, as can be seen from the status of my 2018 goals.

• ☒ Run 1000 miles. [405/1000]
• ☒ Finish a marathon.
• ☒ Write 20 blog posts. [10/20]
• ☒ Get the first signature for my PGP key.
• ☒ Install Gentoo.

Knowing that I can always change the 'publish date' of blog entries (thanks to hugo), I grew into the bad habit of starting an article and just then shelving it for months to come. When I finally remember that one unfinished article, I frequently dismiss the idea as not really worth elaborating. Now that I think about it, maybe this is exactly what blogs are for, providing a snapshot of myself that I can look back later, whether my future self find it silly or 'not really worth elaborating'.

The number of movie theater visits I had in 2018 probably accounts for 50% of my lifetime total, and with double doses of disappointment from Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Incredibles 2. By the way, 2018 also saw 90% of my lifetime popcorn consumption. I've never realized those can be such addicting.

Although not a marathon, I did ran my first trail half marathon in May. It was the first time I've ever hit the wall while running, due to bad pacing and unpreparedness for the weather. The race started mid afternoon on a scorchingly hot day. After witnessing quite a few people stopped to walk in the first 2 miles, I started off quite a bit faster than my intended pace fueled by a stupid sense of superiority, and hit the wall right at the mark of 4 miles. Fortunately the feeling faded away as I walked the next half of the race, gulping ice-cold Gatorade at every hydration point. However, the ice-cold Gatorade was another trap—temperature dropped rapidly as sun started to set and my stomach started to complain about all the chilly liquid. As the finish line appeared within 400 meters of my sight, my legs were hit by the strongest cramps I've ever had. After barely making it through while being surpassed by 3 people right before finish line, I could only be happy to learn that I was still not the last one: actually, I'm even the first one in my age group (whose size is one). The somewhat illegitimate feeling of compliment, mixed with a bit of salt and guilt made the race a wondrous experience.

The Spectacular 2019

Since Google is deprecating Inbox in the coming March, I've lost my last excuse for clinging to Gmail. I'll try to gradually fade out my Gmail usage for my own email server.

On the front of searching for best solution for blog comments, quite a few bloggers I follow have started embracing IndieWeb and Webmention. In a lot of ways, Webmention was the exact thing I wanted: federated blog comments, posts, and more. Yet I'm reluctant to move further away from a static site, not to mentioning most easy-to-follow Webmention solutions I have found relies heavily on third-party services. The IndieWeb movement itself though is fairly intriguing. I've never had much use for Keybase aside from it being a hub linking most of my online presences (decryption and encryption does not work without uploading PGP private keys, and I have no one to securely chat with), perhaps I should just replace it with rel=me links.

Diving into C++17 was fairly enjoyable during the past year, so I'm looking into learning other new programming languages. Rust and Julia have been on my radar for a while, especially Rust. Having a full suite of officially supported tools makes writing Rust a smooth and deeply satisfying experience. I'll try to dive deeper into both languages and hopefully put them into some uses.

As for running and blog posts, I'll try to match 2018's numbers. On top of those, I'm thinking about keeping a record of the books, music, and shows I've read/listened/watched on this blog, along with my thoughts. I actually attempted something similar during this blog's Wordpress days: I once setup a MediaWiki instance for similar purposes, but lacked the motivation to continue maintaining the entries. I'll keep it simple this time, and I should come up with a set of rating system.

What should I do with the remaining 2018 goals? A separate wishlist is a pretty good idea—let's go with that. As a stretch goal, I should probably clean my desktop computer, which is stuffed with four-year-old dirt, cat hair, and dead skin cells.

Here's to another spectacular 2.9e+17 radiation periods of Caesium-133!

I finally bite the bullet and installed Gentoo on VirtualBox (totally not motivated by the front page wishlist), thereby achieving my ultimate digital @5c3n510n (or descent according to DistroWatch).

Jokes aside, the installation process is surprisingly pleasant: the Gentoo Handbook is wonderfully written, and seems to have a plan for everything that might go wrong. I like the Handbook more than ArchWiki's Installation Guide as it also details the rationale behind each step I took, which is often a fun read in its own right. I would go as far as saying the Gentoo Handbook is actually more beginner friendly, as it carefully assembles bits of information that are normally scattered all over the place, providing a great starting point for learning how to tame the operating system. Besides, Gentoo Handbook covers more than installation: it also contains other necessary setup processes to set up a usable system. I will be gradually replicating my current desktop setup to decide if a migration is worth the time.

My very first encounter with GNU/Linux operating systems is Ubuntu 12.04: one of my classmates (vacuuny/A2Clef) was installing it in school's computer labs. There was a time when I would switch between various Ubuntu variants every few days. I dual booted Windows and Ubuntu for a while before switching entirely to Ubuntu in 2014. Much annoyed by the Amazon ads, I tried out Arch Linux as part of my New Year's resolution in 2015. Even with a second computer to look up instructions, it still took me quite a while to adapt to the new system. I ranted "maybe I still haven't gotten the Arch way" in my old blog, but never looked back once I got the knack of it.

I still try out other distributions from time to time in VirtualBox, but never find them to offer much improvements compared with Arch beyond the setup processes, and even more so when considering the excellent documentation on ArchWiki (well now we have a contender). Once I have my desktop environment set up, the experience between distributions is not that different, but the distinctions kicks in when problems occur and I search online for troubleshooting tips. Having more up-to-date packages is another charm Arch has. More recently, the systemd controversy caused me to start shopping around for a new distribution to try out, not so much because of the actual security concerns, but just to see what it is like to use different init system: my time in Ubuntu was spent mostly in GUIs (apt-get and nano was probably the only command I knew for the longest time) without knowing about init systems and Arch was already using systemd when I switched. Aside from Gentoo, the candidates include Void Linux and the BSDs. Void Linux was easy to set up with its installer wizard, yet I didn't feel compelled to move to it. Let's see if Gentoo would change my mind.

For the last few weeks, the right click on my Dell XPS 13's trackpad is getting less responsive: the entire right half of the trackpad sunk around 2mm beneath the palm rest, making clicks hard to register. At first I dismissed it as normal wear, but it turned out that the swollen batteries lifted the left half of the trackpad to such a degree that the trackpad warped. I immediately ordered an OEM replacement (Dell JD25G) swapped out the swollen batteries. XPS 13 (9343) was a breeze to service. The screws that hold the bottom panel (a quite hefty hunk of aluminum) in place are all clearly visible and the component layout allows battery to be swapped with minimal disassembly. I also swapped out the WLAN card (Dell DW1560) for an Intel AC9560, whose drivers are in the mainline Linux kernel.

The trackpad felt normal after the battery swap, of course. However, the fact that average laptop battery starts to degrade around 18 months surprised me quite a bit. Mine lasting nearly four years is probably quite decent. Newer laptops uses prismatic cells (those slab shaped batteries also found in phones) instead of cylindrical ones, as can be found in my first laptop, Dell Vostro 3750. Roughly speaking, prismatic cells trade size for lifespan by emitting external casing and gas vents found on cylindrical cells. The battery swell is caused by gas build up, which might have been avoided in cylindrical cells with vents. It's interesting that (easily) removable batteries have largely disappeared in consumer laptops - even the large desktop replacements (to be fair, those spend most of the time plugged in anyways). The only consumer electronics that still almost always have removable batteries I can think of are cameras.

After the incident, I started to browse current laptops on the market as the new quad/hex core laptop CPUs are quite tempting an upgrade (my XPS 13 has a i5-5200U). I was not a huge fan of the latest XPS 13 (9380) mostly because of the port selection: I just don't have any USB Type-C devices, so the 1 Type-C plus 2 Type-A combination found on XPS 13 (9360) is superior in my opinion. Besides ports, the onboard WLAN card and removal of full-sized SD card slot also make the latest model less appealing.

I also came across the Let's Note line of laptops from Panasonic, which are reliable, lightweight business laptops that often comes with removable batteries and a wide spectrum of ports. If only they weren't so prohibitively expansive, doesn't have those ugly "Wheel Pads", and come with US keyboard layout, they are quite the ideal laptops. I like the aesthetics of 2016 CF-MX5 series the most, but that won't make much of an upgrade.

More realistic choices include HP's EliteBook, Lenovo's ThinkPad T series, and Dell's Latitude/Precision lines. I vetoed EliteBook because all of them had a huge glaring proprietary docking port that I might never use. Latitude 5491 seem to have cooling issues due to the 45W TDP CPUs, while Latitude 7390 and 7490 both seem quite decent, with options to disable Intel ME and official Linux support. ThinkPad T480 pretty much ticks everything on my list, but it seems that the next iteration T490 will no longer have the bridge battery system and only one SODIMM slot, pretty much like T480s.

Hunting for second-handed machines is also an option, but it defeats the purpose of the upgrade since my primary motivation is the new quad core CPUs. Some may argue our laptops are overpowered already, and indeed my XPS 13 still feels pretty snappy though, so I'm not in urgent need for an upgrade. However, I did come up with a list of what I want in a laptop in case the ideal candidate shows up someday.

• Good Linux driver support.
• Below 15 inch in size and low travel weight. XPS 13 converted me from a DTR enthusiast to an Ultrabook follower: it does feel nice to be able carry a laptop all day without feeling it.
• Non-Nvidia graphics. Both AMD and Intel has better open source driver support and I use my desktop for tasks heavily reliant on GPU.
• Reasonable battery life (6 hours or more) and removable battery.
• Not-too-radical port selections, not until all mouses and flash drives default to USB Type-C at least.
• Standard components and easy to upgrade, i.e. SODIMM slot for memory, PCIe for WLAN card/SSD.
• A nice trackpad. I'm rather insensitive to quality of laptop keyboards so anything marginally decent would do. It would be really cool to have an ErgoDox laptop though.
• Not-super-high-resolution display. I'm not too picky about screens either, but 4K feels like an utter overkill for laptops this size that provides marginal improvements while draining more power. I've always used 16:9 displays, but I'm open to trying out different ones.

I've started using security keys in conjunction with OTP for 2FA. However, it really frustrates me that a number of websites only fully support security key under Chrome, namely Google (registering new keys only work in Chrome, but Firefox is making a fix), and now Github ("We recommend updating to the latest Google Chrome to start using security key devices"). Considering MS's Edge rebuild and Skype refresh, I guess that's why we can't have nice things.

Turns out my keys work fine on Github under Firefox today. Hopefully it is just a one-time-thing.

Looks like Google Inbox's web front end is still alive as of April 2nd! I've switched away from the Inbox app on my phone, and set up forwarding on Gmail so that I can use the stock iOS Mail app. However, I still much prefer Inbox's web front end to that of Gmail. Let's see how much longer it will last.