General updates and miscellaneous thoughts

No, no, it's not time for a teary-eyed end-of-year thing quite yet, I just wanted to have something up before the holidays. I don't know.

I've just been feeling numb, for the most part. It's hard to focus, it's hard to make myself do anything. I'm trying my best, that's all I can say

That being said, I have been incrementally working on something quite exciting and LIGeR-related but even larger in scope... stay tuned for that 🫶🏼

Woof, long time no see... err, read. Whatever.

It's been a busy few weeks... with classes starting again, while I've had time, I've certainly lacked energy. Things are alright, even if they could be better.

I'm working on a few fun things you might want to stay tuned for... I'll make the updates when they're done, of course, but until then, that is all!

I'll write updates more often if only I have something to say, aheh

...what a month, huh?

...should've made that the title. Anyway

Yeah, it's been a while, I know. Things have been a little chaotic. I was on holiday for a while — some elaboration on that will be provided in time. After that, not much of note happened, though I have been sick these past few days, which isn't fun at all :(

That being said, classes start tomorrow again. Fortunately, the schedule is a lot lighter than last year, on account of this being the MS course, as opposed to the final year of a BSc. Either way, I'm not looking forward to getting up at the brink of dawn again, but I'll do what must be done.

Other than that...? I've been working on LIGeR, or rather trying to; I just now this evening managed to settle on the rules for an actual invokation and communication protocol, which I'll detail in an appropriate blog post in the Software section, or on the LIGeR pages themselves.

Side note: I really hope I can finally get that stupid campus network to actually work. It never has, for me at least. I mean... on Linux and Android — it has no issues running on Windows. grumblegrumble.

Even so, I'm no longer dependent on Word to take notes that synchronise easily. Having worked out a secure way to connect home, as long as there's Internet where I am, I can use rsync on a neatly-enough-ordered "notes from class" filetree and it'll only push whatever's changed, so that's certainly nice.

And... I think that's all. If anyone's actually reading these more or less in "real" time (i.e. on the order of days and weeks after publication)— well, I'm shocked, but also thank you, I hope you're having a great day. I love you.

I don't really have an excuse, but I bought myself a ThinkPad.

Well, technically, the excuse is that I'm going to keep the thing for a good few years since it's durable and performant enough to allow for that. Other than that, however.... nnno, no excuse really.

ThinkPad p14s G5

Click image to open full size

It's a brick of a thing, let me tell you... people were right, it's properly hefty, despite it not being "from the good old days" (in which, to be fair, I would expect they were even more robust). Either way, it feels incredibly solid, the keyboard's amazing and so is the screen, I think it's absolutely worth its price, even if it's still really big to my sensibilities...

More interestingly, I've found that the RTX 500 Ada that's in there is shockingly good for scientific computation specifically... look:

What you're looking at are the results of a benchmark that I like to do because it's pretty simple to set up, even though it takes a few runs to make sure they're consistent. It's by no means scientific, but still. You're looking at the render time of a protein-membrane complex in PyMol with its raytracing option, rendered on the components specified next to them, at 1920x1080 in a constant and controlled position and angle.

And yeah, I was just as surprised as you (probably), it's "supposed" to be on the level of a mobile 1660 or something, and here it is trading blows with some pretty serious hardware, all while sipping power and not really heating up that much under prolonged loads.

I hate NVidia as much as the next pretentious linux user, but since I've switched to Fedora and the driver issues magically went away (I can't recommend Fedora enough), being on NVidia has been shockingly pleasurable. Optimus works great, too, meaning that the card isn't even on unless I specifically launch a program on it!

Anyway, if you're the type of person who would think about getting a ThinkPad, do it. Seriously. You're not gonna regret it. Just make sure it's a T- or P-series, check the 🌐 Lenovo Product Specification Reference for the case materials, internals and whatnot, and get it. They're amazing.

(Just don't forget to install a real OS on it if it comes with Windows from the factory like mine did, pffhehe)

I've been struggling to make myself do anything (as is traditional, it seems), but I managed to make some progress on ⛓ LIGeR today, I started the ⛓ spec docs in fact!

Overall, I've been feeling... blank. Indecisive? Volatile... not sure what word to use to describe it best. Either way, it's particularly hard to word myself correctly and to keep myself... stable, whatever that may entail.

Going to sleep late might have something to do with it... I'll try to fix that, but you know how it is with me and willpower, snrrk. Either way, things aren't as bad as they could be, but they sure could be better. Even wording this very blogpost is unusually difficult. I feel like I don't sound like myself. :(