Aaruni's Blog v 3.0

Recently, I was able to get my hands on a shiny new Lemur Pro from System76.

The unboxing experience was novel. Certainly a breath of fresh air.

The insides of the box has a grid, and some fun doodles on it, with some encouragement to flatten it out and take it forward. The packaging used inside the box is really clever. Things are fixed to a cardboard scaffold using some plastic, which are held in place when things are folded the right way, and slide right out when you open up the scaffolding.

Some time in early September, I came across this tweet by a Michael Dominick, on the Jupiter Broadcasting telegram group.

Now, I’m not generally into visual design. I live my life in boring old cinnamon with a conky on top. And I haven’t changed this in almost half a decade now. But when the incentive is a Lemur Pro, I can be flexible. After double checking that the offer applied to me in Germany as well, I started poking around in gnome-shell theming.

I have recently been experimenting with S3 compatible storage, in an effort to find the most efficient way to expand the storage my server has on offer.

After scouring the web for options, and briefly settling on S3F, I discovered s3backer.

The Problem

Storage in S3 happen via “objects” in “buckets”. Each object is at least 4 kB in size, with no upper limit as far as I know. But objects cannot be updated. Suppose you store myFile.odt as an object on your S3 cloud. If you then edit the file, and want to store the changes on your S3, it will first discard the copy it already has, and require you to push the entire file again to cloud. While this is not a problem for read only data, this quickly adds a lot of overhead to “hot data” : data that is read from and written to often. Not only is this method wasteful for repeated rewrites of a file, in my experiments writing big files directly to S3 (over S3FS) was also painfully slow.

Portal has always been a legendary game in my head. I have wanted to play the Portal series of games, ever since I came across the meme “The cake is a lie”

This vacation, I was lucky enough to be gifted this game. And to my joy, the game lives up to its legend.

Portal is essentially a puzzle solving game, with puzzles getting harder and harder as the game progresses. But the game is a lot more than just that. The game presents you with a physics sandbox of sorts, with the ability to create and play around with “portals”, man sized quantum tunneling teleportation gates. For the layman, put a portal on this wall, put a portal on another wall, walk into this wall, and come out of the other wall.