Been Busy

2025-01-29T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve been busy.

This month, I had 6 quizzes, 4 tests and 3 major deadlines. All of which had to take priority over almost everything else.

My finals are still approaching, so I’m not sure if I can blog more. At the very least, now I have a one week ‘break’. I’m going to keep it short, but I just wanted to mention a few things that seriously helped me throughout this really stressful month.

Notesnook and the Monograph

A screenshot of the Monograph, with some sections censored for privacy.

I used to be pretty disorganized. This meant that I would constantly forget about deadlines and other important dates. Unfortunately, in my university, there are a bajillion places that I had to pay attention to for announcements. As a result, I decided to create a notepad where I keep track of all these quizzes, tests and deadlines (‘Upcoming Q, T & D’ as I called it). This proved to be integral to my workflow and allowed me to plan for the present and next few weeks.

Notesnook has this free feature that way too few people talk about: Monographs

Monographs are essentially public notes. You can password-protect them, make them self-destruct after view, or you can leave them there (they are, by default, unlisted). Every Monograph is static, so it does not update automatically - and I love that. So, I can edit the note locally on my computer/phone and then ‘publish’ it again (under the same link) when I believe it’s ready. So, what does that have to do with me?

Well, I thought that it would be helpful to my course-mates if I made the note public, so I published it as a Monograph and shared it with them. I’m glad I did, as it turned out to be helpful to them as well and they also helped me if there was anything missing. To my course mates reading this, a major update is underway but it’s going to be gradual. Stay tuned!

I’m planning to subscribe to the Notesnook Education Plan to fully take advantage of Notesnook and to support the developers. I have been using it since the v2 era, and I believe it’s one of the best FOSS notetaking apps. It’s up there with QOwnNotes (which I use to draft my blog posts). Check out /uses for more cool apps I use.

Daudix’s Calendar

I think this angle goes hard, print yours now with the link below!

Despite being a computer science student, I still prefer using pen and paper. It’s in my blood I suppose. Back in high school, I would print out a calendar to use. For me, it’s a lot easier as I would be more likely to remember stuff if I wrote it down rather than if I typed it. Furthermore, keeping track of multiple digital calendars is not fun.

For the past year, I’ve been using Microsoft’s Hummingbird template. However, once I stumbled upon Daudix’s Portal-themed calendar, I knew I had to use it. I’ve always been a fan of the aesthetic and lore of the Half-Life universe (despite not finishing a game from the series. I’ll get to it, I promise). This seemed like the perfect calendar for me. It was also fun to show it to my friends who have played Portal, and they love it as much as I do.

The calendar has seen extensive use this month with all the important dates (so plenty in fact I had to gamify it to cope. Creatively dubbed: ‘Stronghold Protocol’) and man I can’t thank Daudix enough for creating it. I wish him all the best with Ametrine, I look forward to using it once its complete :D

I Gotta Do Better

This is my first year and first semester in uni. I’ve made a lot of nice friends, and they’ve helped me a lot. I want to thank them and apologize for my deficiencies. It’s not even finals week yet and I’m already tripping all over the place academically. I have about three weeks to prepare, and I am on that grind now. I’ve also realized that I need to balance my time right, as working all day is not sustainable as shown by my results and mental health. Going to the Surau/Mosque more often has helped me a lot to clear my mind and soul as well. Oh yeah, don’t forget to sleep early.

I did not keep this as short as I had promised lol. My bad.

This post marks Day 3 of #100DaysToOffload

Why I Decided on a Website

2024-08-19T00:00:00+00:00

Hello World 👋

This is the first and hopefully many blog posts that I will write. There are a lot of things that I have at the back of my head that I wanted to talk about but I’ve never been sure to use what medium I should use until I created this website.

Why Did I Decide on a Website?

I’ve always been that guy who never stops talking about tech, for better or for worse. As with any kid who grew up in the early 21st century, I had ambitions to become a YouTuber. I just wanted a platform to express myself but in the end decided against it because to put it frankly - I am a terrible video editor. In hindsight, it was probably for the better, I can’t imagine relying solely on YouTube as my primary platform of expression (I may explore it again though if necessary, as a side-quest).

When I joined the Linux community back in 2022, it was the first time I started reading developer blogs to keep up with the news surrounding it (when I refer to Linux, I refer to the whole operating system, not just the kernel). This was how I got introduced to the concept of the IndieWeb, which I may end up elaborating on in a future post. To keep it short, this was also how I got introduced to the Fediverse, which can be described as humanity bringing social media back to the hands of the people rather than big corpos like Meta, Google and Bytedance.

Personally, I am very much fond of the idea that social media should be decentralized. Corporate web and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race and the environment. I grew up during a time where the IndieWeb was on its way out from the mainstream. It’s about time that we embrace it again. Thus, this website was created.

One of the posts I plan to write is a full on guide on how to set up your own website with Zola, my Static Site Generator (SSG) of choice. It’s relatively easy (I went through many problems myself so you don’t have to) but there would be no promises as to when that will release though. The lack of video guides on Zola also irks me slightly.

Extra Links

While the links to some of my online accounts can be found in the footer, I’ll repost them here so that people can check them out easier.

Mastodon (an open, federated alternative to Xitter)
Matrix (an open, federated alternative to Discord/Slack)
KDE GitLab (for all my KDE contributions)
Forgejo/Codeberg (a fully open-source alternative to GitHub, GitLab, SourceForge)
GitHub and Fedora Project accounts coming soon.

Muelsyse - Personal