KDE Plasma 6.6 was released yesterday, and since I’m an Arch Linux user (btw), I already have it installed. I use sway on the desktop, primarily because it handles multi-monitor setups so well, and KDE Plasma does not. One of the major annoyances I’ve had with it, is that virtual desktops switch on both my monitors....

After the long rant about the mechanical keyboard market, I bought the best mechanical keyboard that meets nearly all of my requirements - the Royal Kludge R87 Pro. 87% - Compact enough but not cramped No wireless, no batteries, obsolescence and stuff to worry about Ins/Del/Home/End/PageUp/PageDown key array at the...

It’s been busy since the new year. We had a 3-day weekend and I got some time to myself to mess around with new things. I’m not even a half-decent guitar player. When I’m alone, and I have a drink, I loosen up just a bit and I can make some noise that’s likeable, at least to my ears. I think of myself as a guitar...

I’ve owned mechanical keyboards since the early 90s. It was a rebranded variant of the Model M. I’m no stranger to mechanical keyboards so I know why they resonate with so many people. The TVSE Gold here in India later became the affordable, no-nonsense mechanical keyboard for a long time. There was even a USB...

I took a few days off around the past weekends and turned them into four and five-day weekends. Things were pretty uneventful, but I wasn’t too productive - just being lazy, having a drink or two every other evening, binging on shows and movies but very little gaming. The game I play obsessively had a release right...

Not sure if it’s the GTK versions or Wayland or Hexchat has been left unmaintained for so long, but it’s pretty slow when I switch buffers from ZNC. I happened to look for alternate GUI IRC clients (I use weechat on the headless server sometimes). I ran into Libera’s IRC client recommendations. Halloy is just what I...

Among the list of cool tools I discovered and tried out lately on my Linux boxes are autofs and chezmoi. autofs solves the problems of network shares that are unavailable when your machine boots. The service automatically mounts network shares (nfs and Samba are of interest to me) when you access them. The Arch wiki...

I have been fascinated with planes, civil aviation in particular for as long as I can remember. I faintly remember my father’s newspaper cutouts of aircraft like the Airbus 300, stuck on our apartment door like a collage when I was 4 or 5. It was around the age of six that we moved to my parents’ own apartment in...

There are some products that I just don’t need to be wireless or smart. I think that is true for a lot of people, but surprisingly neither customer nor manufacturers seem to get it. My (conspiracy) theory is that they are manufacturing products wireless or smart, so that they can sell your data or have your product...

After much planning, anticipation, hyperventilating, preparing for the VISA formalities, we finally made our trip to Istanbul in late November 2025. The trip went smoothly. Istanbul has always fascinated my father. We spent about a week there and it was amazing. It was my second time there and I loved it just as...

Even YouTube tried to do an Unwrapped thingy this year. It is awful and I am not including it here, but some of the others can be nice. I won’t lie, I like that Spotify creates a playlist of the music I listened to this year. I listen to the playlists from previous years. I tend to look for what others are reading,...

I recently wrote about wanting to setup mpd/mopidy for Spotify but some things weren’t working the way I intended. I ran out of patience and installed ncspot instead, and it’s been great. It’s fast, the authentication is simple and the keybinds are near vi-like. It even lets me navigate and modify my Spotify...