Being in a slump

For about a week now, I’ve done nothing but sleeping and watching twitch streams, playing video games (and many other things to waste my time), I’ve done nothing productive whatsoever, however I feel like this will change once I get the new laptop I ordered.
As my chill uni semester is about to end, I will need to prepare for finals (this semester I will only need to write one single final), and I’m thinking about doing write-ups about the various topics of my statistics lecture. The reason for this is primarily for myself to remember various mathematical formulas since I’m not allowed to have a cheat sheet at the final. If I end up doing write-ups about my studies then that would heavily depend on the sheer mass of what I need to study and how much time there is to spend on each topic. I have roughly around a month of time to prepare myself which is more than enough, the study materials other than the slides and the excercise are recordings of (most) the lectures and excercise classes, so that will be a big help going through this, and literally a catalog of questions where the majority of the finals exam questions will come from.
So, I’m very confident I can do this in a month since I managed to do exactly this for various other classes as well, but with only one week of time to study, in far worse conditions. But doing these write-ups could also benefit my colleagues as a help to study and as a broader summary of various topics. I believe dumb pocket calculators are also forbidden during the exam 🤔 (yea I will definitely need to learn these forumlas which I will gladly forget 5 minutes after the exam)

Rust learning continuation

Since I’m currently in a bit of a slump, not doing anything really, I also paused my Rust learning experience. Within the Rust Book, I’m currently in the chapter on concurrency (chapter 16 out of 21) and I believe I will learn some more about that tonight!

M1 MacBook Air

After using my current laptop for about 7 years now (Thinkpad X220) and kinda being forced to use a Windows machine as my daily driver for the past 2 years now;

I finally decided to bite the bullet and buy in on the current MacBook Air generation featuring the new M1 chip. I’m giving Apples hardware and software a fair try to be my daily driver, and I’m planning to only change one thing about this whole vanilla experience and that is the window manager. I will try and use yabai (instead of breaking my wrist by using the track pad to drag windows around) which I believe I can configure to what I have set up on my old laptop, bspwm.
About the concrete setup, experience and other finicky choices, maybe I will write another post about my macOS setup at a later point in time. Talking about future proofing yourself while buying in on the first generation of the new Apple silicon chips seems a bit dumb, but I opted in buying the MacBook Air with 8 GPU cores (instead of 7 because that version comes with only 256GB of internal storage by default, so comparing this to buying the 8 GPU core version which comes with 512GB internal storage by default (so paying for the extra GPU core effectively comes down to spending another 50EUR which seems fair to me as I wanted 512GB of internal storage anyway)) and speccing up the RAM from 8GB to 16GB, since I plan on using this machine as a daily driver (instead of my windows machine 🤮) for about as long as I used my previous laptop.
The only thing I’m worried about is software I use not being optimized for the M1 Chip. I’m also gonna need another external SSD I will use for my new laptop which I still need to go out and buy once I eventually run out of internal storage.

As for my old laptop…I will try to find some use for it as a private, home server, hosting files and maybe hosting my own WoW private server, who knows, but I will definitely still need to grab some of my data from that barely usable thing, and then reinstall the OS, and it will be Arch Linux. I’m using Manjaro on the X220 and it has been working wonderfully until I actively stopped using my laptop and stopped maintaining it. I’m also expecting a lot less of that maintainance frustration from the new Apple machine, a lot less of running into issues you don’t quite understand, which require some time to fix. For example right now, on my old laptop, some part of the desktop environment is completely screwed up, and won’t let me access the network card (???) and once I turn on my network card, parts of the desktop environment stop working, its really dubious to me, and I don’t feel like putting in more energy using a Linux machine as my daily driver.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Linux or GNU plus Linux, as certain folk would say, but I would enjoy something more lenient, which is not prone to breaking down once I update packages after ages (2 years) of inactivity 🤦

There are so many memories attached to this laptop, and a lot of time went into configuring everything and after all it went with me through all the hardships that is the computer science balchelors degree. On the bright side, I’m really keen on using the notorious performance of the M1 chip, and especially curious about its heat dissipation since the MacBook Air is completely fan-less.
However, this Thinkpad X220, first produced almost a decade ago, will always hold a special place in my heart 💖

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading!