For about 10 years now, I have been using Dropbox as a tool to synchronize data between my work desktop and my laptop. I do a local backup using rsnapshot, but they were only stored locally on my desktop. So, effectively, I had been relying on Dropbox as a backup solution. Every so often, I read horror stories that Dropbox is not a backup solution. And every time I would read one of these reports, I would think, “Hmm… maybe I should start using a proper backup solution.” I finally bit the bullet and purchased some storage from rsync.net and set up a back up system. Yay!

I am a pen and paper person. On a typical day, I write about 10–30 handwritten pages. (I write on a half-folded printer paper, so it is actually only 7-15 pages “full” pages). For the last decade or so, I have written almost exclusively using fountain pens (Pelikan M200, Pilot Vanishing Point, and occasionally, Pilot Metropolitan).

To reduce the amount of time I state at a screen, I purchased a Oynx Boox Max3 tablet almost a year ago, primarily to read academic PDFs. The 13.3" screen of Max3 is perfect for reading dense IEEE formatted two-column PDFs. Max3 is an Android device and many Android apps work reasonably well on it. So, I ended up using it for internet browsing, reading emails and Slack messages, delivering zoom lectures, and even watching Youtube videos! Clearly, J.K. Rowling had Max3 in mind when she described the newspapers with moving pictures in Harry Potter.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I started using fish after using zsh for about 15 years. After working exclusively on fish for about 3 months, I am now back to zsh. In the end, there was nothing inherently missing in fish, but fish just did a few minor things differently which began to get annoying. Fish’s tab-completion first shows a short list of option (top 10 or so) and you have to press tab twice to see the whole list.

I have been a Dropbox user for over a decade. Part of the attraction for me was that it is one of the few synchronization services that fully supports Linux. I had it installed on two servers, my office desktop, my laptop, and most of my mobile devices. Couple of years ago, my employer moved most of its IT services with Microsoft 365, which gives me access to storage space on Microsoft OneDrive as well. Plus, I have purchased additional storage on Google (for backing up my personal photos). But I never seriously used Microsoft OneDrive or Google Drive for synchronization because all my computers run Linux and neither of these services had a Linux client.

I have been using zsh as my shell for almost 15 years. I spent ages configuring it in the beginning and for the most part I have been happy with my setup. Lately, I saw multiple suggestions for zsh-autosuggestions, which has a tag-line “Fish-like autosuggestions for zsh”. Imitation is the best form of flattery. So, I thought of giving fish a shot.

I use a Haskell static website generator called yst for generating my homepage. Why? Partly because when I first created my professional webpage, I was a Haskell enthusiast and yst seemed cool. After a while, I got frustrated with Haskell (I use Arch Linux, and it seemed that each upgrade would break Haskell install) and moved on. I haven’t used Haskell for a while now.

rofi is perfect for creating interactive scripts, which I like to call rofi selectors. Here are some examples: