Blog

CS M. Yamanaka

Upgraded to Debian 11: Bullseye

I went a little crazy today and upgraded my system to Debian 11, Bullseye. Because I am crazy and paranoid, I've never upgraded my existing system. I always wait a few months and reinstall after reading a bunch of forums to ensure that there are no funny rumours about the update. But tonight, my crazy side overtook my paranoid side and did a major upgrade of my existing system.

I don't know, I guess sometimes you have to take a leap of faith and tonight was just one of those nights.

2021-09-18

I had no idea Vim had keybindings for HTML tags (Embarrassing)

I didn't realize that Vim had keystrokes for HTML/XML tags as it does with brackets and quotation marks. It's pretty embarrassing that I didn't know this because I've been using Vim for years but this greatly improves my quality of life while trying to work on my website.

2021-03-05

The Arch Linux Wallpapers are fantastic!

While I use Debian on my main machine, I still have Arch installed on other low-spec notebooks for browsing and testing. Something I appreciated about Arch was that they had their own set of wallpapers in their official repos so if, like me, you don't like to download things, such as wallpapers, from somewhere other than the official repos, Arch has you covered.

While they've had that package available for as long as I've known, I didn't really like their wallpapers (not to disrespect their artistic sense or anything... just my personal preference) when I had that package installed a while back (maybe last year? I can't remember when). I went away from Arch on my testing machine for a while to try out other distros like Alpine, Void, Artix and Arco but eventually decided to go back to Arch recently.

Upon returning, I installed the "archlinux-wallpaper" package again and to my surprise, they have updated the contents since the last time I used it and they are really nice. They've added some nature and landscape type stuff as well as some cool cyberpunk-esque artwork and also some humourous ones.

I think this is one of the reasons Arch deserves to be one of the most popular distros on Earth. Wallpapers and associated artworks may not seem like the most essential part of a distro but they really show how much the devs care about their work. Having a great looking setup with a crisp wallpaper can really improve the user experience and get you psyched to boot up Arch and start working on stuff and as a user, I really appreciate the devs on this one.

2021-01-15

Why I use Debian

How often do you upgrade your system? Sometimes, I forget for a very long time and when I finally get around to it, I notice that there isn't much to update. Maybe just over 100MB. This could be the result of intentionally keeping the number of packages I install to a minimum but in my experience, for the most part, I found that Debian requires very little and infrequent maintenance. As someone who doesn't need the most up-to-date packages, I find this extremely beneficial as it saves me from logging in as root at all for weeks.

2021-01-14

(Spoilers!!) "Hereditary" and "The Trial"

There's an interesting comparison between Ari Aster's film, "Hereditary" and Franz Kafka's novel, "The Trial" in that they have very similar antagonists (for the lack of a better term) albeit with a notable difference in their respective levels of apparent malice.

Obviously (again, spoilers), Pa***n (sorry about the censor but I'm a tad superstitious), being a demonic entity, has explicitly malicious goals whereas "goal" of the villainous entity in The Trial is to run smoothly. It simply doesn't care that much about you. For most normies, neither Pa***n nor the "system" will pose any threat to their lives. However, once a person is marked as a target, they are absolutely powerless before either of these forces.

Both stories share with you the experiences of those who ended up in the crosshairs of these entities and their agendas. They both spend most of the time not knowing that their fates have already been decided.

The real horror in both of these stories is witnessing their admirable attempts to take control of their situation while sharing in their anxiety and confusion regarding the effectiveness of their actions, then finally realizing that they had no chance from the beginning. Truly depressing stuff.

2021-01-08