Categories
Productivity Reviews Thoughts

My first iPad

In 2019 September, I bought my first ever iPad: the iPad Pro 11″ 2018. I remember how excited I felt when I finally got it. The reason why this took 8 years since the launch of the first iPad for me to get one was for two simple reasons.

  1. I was poorer back then
  2. iPad was still using iOS and the software was limited

The moment that they announced iPadOS, it really piqued my interest that I can potentially have a small portable tablet that can act as a laptop replacement. The “meh” part about this is that the cost of the iPad is pretty much the same as a laptop; but at least I get to experience an entire different class of computing device.

You might be looking at the date of this post and think, what took you 1.5 years to write about this tablet that has already been outdated by the latest 2020 iPad lineup? I was taking my time to evaluate the things that I do on it, and how those activities change over time. It’s absolutely not because I procrastinated and forgot to write about it.

Leisure 📺

If I had to choose the one thing that the iPad does well, it would be leisure and content consumption. My desktop setup consist of a 32″ 4K Curved Monitor with Logitech Z623 (THX) Speakers, yet I absolutely love watching Netflix on my iPad. Consuming media on the iPad provides a really satisfying experience, and it’s an experience that I can bring with me on my commute.

At the beginning I felt like I was standing out like a sore thumb for being “that guy” who watches shows on a tablet on the train/bus. But after a couple of months, I completely internalized that people really care a lot less about you than you think (the spotlight effect) and just focus on finding a comfortable position for my journey and not watching any questionable content (p.s. please don’t watch Redo Healer in public).

Continue reading “My first iPad”
Categories
Learning Thoughts

Communication is hard

Recently watched something from CGP Grey on YouTube again that really clicked in my head and just wanted to note it down on my blog in case I forget about it.

From 1:42 to 2:28

If there is anything I’ve learned from thousands of spoken words, it’s that human communication is hard. Way harder than people think. Precisely because people think it’s easy. You just say the words and the other person hear them and bam! Understanding! Alas, no. Words are fuzzy things and you don’t realize how poorly you string them together until you are forced to listen to yourself saying those words. And even if you’re happy with your string of words, you just don’t know how those fuzzy patterns of sound will pattern match in someone else’s brain. Human communication is a dance, and a dance requires partners. We all create content and I think we should all keep that in mind and be much more willing to work with the intended intention of our interlocutors.

CGP Grey

This really clicked in my head because there are so many occasions where I felt that I wasn’t communicating the thoughts in my head across effectively and I search high and low for the right combination of words that I hope would make sense to the others, often following up with “did that make sense to you?”.

But this also made me realize the many other occasions where I thought that I had explained something that seemed obvious to me and simply assumed that the other party understood exactly what I meant.

It also made me aware that many disagreements where the other party said something I found offensive and they said, “that’s not what I meant!”, and I retorted with, “but that’s what you said”; is a counterproductive response which doesn’t help the situation. Being aware of this made me think that I should’ve held my feelings and judgment at the moment and clarify with, “well, what do you mean then?”, and give the benefit of the doubt that the other party simply chose the wrong string of words to express their intention. Alas, it’s not that simple all the time because humans are complicated and will often obfuscate their intentions for various reasons; but simply being aware of this will at least help me navigate the murky waters of communication.

Categories
Productivity Thoughts

Theme for 2021

Health and Progress

What is a theme? Think of a new year’s resolution, only broader and more vague. This is an idea that I was introduced to when I watched this Youtube video last year; and it really resonated with me, hence I’m going for a theme instead of a resolution.

TLDR; of the idea is, a resolution is too stiff, and it usually only sets you up for failure; cause I end up beating myself up over and over for not achieving a certain goal. But a theme is more of a guiding principle than a concrete task. When given a choice, choose the option that follows your theme.

Health

Well, health is something that slowly deteriorate over time if you don’t take good care of it. I am starting to feel the effects of sitting in front of a computer for a 9-6 job. This is effect is compounded with the Covid pandemic and not going outside as often. I was also made painfully aware when I couldn’t fit into my old army uniform pants anymore and had to purchase new ones last year.

I want to do something about it, but setting something like, “I’m going to the gym everyday!”, or “I’m going to lose X kg by Y date!”, puts a ton of pressure on myself and honestly these kinds of resolution has never stood the test of time.

So I bought a road bike for myself because I liked cycling, just that I’ve stopped when my old bike died and didn’t really bother repairing it. For the past month or so I’ve been cycling at least 15km about every other day. Even though I’ve barely lost any weight, I can certainly feel my stamina increasing and walking up stairs has been getting just tad easier.

For diet, when given a choice, I’ll try to go for a healthier option. The point is not to shame myself when I don’t, but to just have a little angel sitting on my shoulder telling me that, “hey, have you considered this other option?”. So far, I think it’s working out. I’ve cut down on a lot of sugary drinks, but… steaks are still a weakness for me.

Progress

This theme is extremely vague, partially because I usually have quite a few things going on at once. The idea is to make progress on all the things that I’ve set out to do; even if I don’t finish them, I want to nudge all of them a little in the right direction and eventually I will finish it. One way of doing this is the second brain methodology that I’ve tried and am still using currently.

For learning, I’ve went for a course called Facilitating Powerful Conversations 1 and I’ve found it extremely helpful in improving my understanding of my own emotions and language in general. Went for online and physical workshops to improve my technical skills. Had some long running tasks for work that I’ve slowly but surely been able to clear them off one by one everyday. The improvement on my health has also been a form of progress. Ideas on making videos about keyboards have been progressing slowly but surely.

p.s. it was ironic that I paused this post halfway to do something else but totally forgot to finish it up until 2 weeks later.

Coming back to this draft made me realize that I have not been making as much progress and I wish on all the secondary stuffs (i.e. side quests). It’s a bit of wake up call but I’m glad I was made aware of this early on in the year. Time to get these gears cranking.

Categories
Development Learning Optimization Productivity Thoughts

Productive 2 weeks in reservist

One of the duties as a Male in Singapore is to serve the national service, and we are called back between 1-3 weeks every year for our “reservist” until we reach MR or “operational ready”.

The past 2 weeks was my turn, and I decided to bring in a cheap $200 android tablet and a keyboard to see how far I could push it. In other words, I want to see what else I could do with it other than just consuming media.

Local VS Code in a browser
ARM64 CPU running Linux packages on an Android tablet

It started with curiosity of finding out how close to Linux I can get Android to be. Termux is an awesome terminal emulator that provides an almost desktop-like experience. I will have a separate write up on how I customized it.

Continue reading “Productive 2 weeks in reservist”
Categories
Learning Productivity Thoughts

Workflow for keeping sane

Ever since I’ve taken on the role as a full-time devops in my new team, the amount of tasks that I have to juggle in a workday has exploded exponentially. I’ve written/complained about it nearly 2 months ago on organizing chaotic information.

It is now time to share what I’ve tried, what worked and what didn’t.

Continue reading “Workflow for keeping sane”
Categories
DevOps Learning Weekly

Weekly: AWS DevOps Certified

At this point I’m not sure whether to call this weekly any more cause I’m just haphazardly writing roughly on a weekly basis but damn it I’m just going to keep this going.

I am pleased to say that I have finally passed my AWS DevOps Engineer – Professional certification! It was quite a lot of hard work, like it was honestly harder than I expected it to be cause most of the questions were situational and very AWS specific in-terms of CICD. Honestly, I took this because I thought it would be easier compared to the Solution Architect Professional. But man I was wrong.

This also means that I would probably be looking to pick up the CSAP cert when I have the time for it, perhaps at the end of the year.

It has been a long time since I’ve studied so hard for something, and it was really helpful not just for the exam, but I realized that there were a lot of tools/services I could’ve used for my current team that we weren’t using yet. I think we are very capable in designing functional services, but there’s still a gap between change management and having full visibility over everything. I’m planning to apply some of the things I’ve learnt in my team, cause it helps to bring us one step closer to having DevOps as culture.

Categories
Thoughts

FFT: Worried that I’m getting jaded

Food for thought used to be a series in my old blogs for something that I just dump my random musings, I’m reviving it now because I’m in a new phase of life.

Up until recently, I felt that people are jaded/spoilt when they spend “unnecessarily” on things they want instead of things they need, or getting the more premium option when the normal option would’ve worked fine.

But after reviewing my spending trends across the past year, I feel like I’m starting to become that kind of person. For example, taking a cab used to be: “I’ll take a cab only if I’m really tired or it’s really just way too troublesome to get there”. Nowadays it’s more like: “I’ll take the public transport only if I’m feel energetic and I feel like it”.

Analysis

I’m attributing this change to having a job, and not having many obligations (yet). “Adult money” as me and my partner would like to call it, is dangerous to us. Given the means, there is an increasing number of things where it does not makes sense to spend the extra/time and effort when money can solve it.

When I think about money as a function of my life energy that I’m exchanging for, I want to spend the remaining life energy (and time), on the things that I truly care about. When I’m meeting friends, the part that matters is meeting the people, not the travelling to the destination. If I can find a tool that gives me a better working experience, it’s worth the extra because it reduces the friction of doing “something”, which has a multiplicative effect on the consumption of life energy.

function of life energy: spending X amount of life to get Y money.

I feel that the relationship between income and the amount someone is willing to spend on conveniences is approximately proportional. The (rough) graph drawn below shows the relationship, and I feel like I’m breaching into the conveniences territory which prompted this FFT post.

income vs amount spent on convenience graph

This also reminded me of The Last Bit in the Container post I’ve read may years ago. TLDR; squeeze your toothpaste if it only takes a few seconds, else it’s not worth it.

Light bulb moment

Have I been misunderstanding those people who have been spending for convenience and quality of life? Is this because that I have not reached the same phase of life as them?

Who/what else have I been misunderstanding?

Moments like this really make me hit the pause button and think really hard about my life.

An interesting conversation I had sometime ago was an advice to “be kind to the older folks in IT” even though sometimes their ideas/suggestion may seem very outdated. It’s because their reality has been shaped by the experience of working with the older systems and they have learnt many lessons the hard way; instead of dismissing it as “irrelevant in current context”, it could just be an old solution to a still plausible problem (that we may have missed).

I feel like I’m experiencing the “You’ll understand when you’re a parent yourself” moment before becoming a parent.

Getting back on track, I don’t think I would change my spending drastically even with this realization because I’m still able to justify for them. What I would do instead, is question myself: “would this money be better spent invested in something?”.

(Ending off this post as I sip coffee on my new $20 thermos mug)

Categories
Thoughts Weekly

Weekly: Rabbit hole of reading PDFs

In preparation for my upcoming AWS Exams, I’ve gotten some PDF materials to go through and study. However, the formatting of the document is terrible, and it made it really hard for me to study.

So I moved to my iPad, hoping that some Apple magic might help with making the text more readable instead of sprawling across the entire width of the screen. That didn’t help.

“There has got to be a way to reflow the text”, I thought. I ended up downloading 3 different PDF reader apps looking for that magical bullet that would solve all my problems.

  • One didn’t have the functionality
  • One worked but it made the format worse
  • One works beautifully, but I cannot annotate or highlight in the “Reflow” mode which made it basically useless for studying

I gave up on the iPad and I thought, there has to be a way on the Desktop that would help me to reflow the text. My default go-to PDF reader: SumatraPDF didn’t have that option. After Googling for way too many minutes, there was basically no obvious option that could solve my problem of having reflowable text and still annotatable (and free).

It was when I came across (rediscovered) that yes, you could convert a PDF into a Word document. So I quickly searched for “Word” in my start menu and guess what, I don’t have it; because I recently formatted my computer. The version I had in the past was my education version that I shouldn’t have access to anymore. But I still tried, logging into my old school email to dig for that option that allows me to install Office.

You currently do not have a valid Office subscription for your account

Web Microsoft Outlook circa Sep 2020

That led me to searching online for what’s the cheapest way to get Office legitimately, preferably something that is a one-time license and not a subscription fee for a product that I only use infrequently. It was during this search that I saw someone mention that “education” should be free. I thought, okay, why not give it another shot.

Bam! Logging in with my student email through the official Microsoft Office site gave me an option to download a genuine version of Office that is properly licensed. The best part? I apparently performed some kind of voodoo in the past for claiming office, and the license actually belongs to my personal account and it all ties in nicely with my existing documents.

I finally have Word now.

Yes, it was able to convert PDFs into a Word document, no problem. This solves my reflow and annotation problems.

Then I thought, hey, doesn’t this mean that I could now study on my iPad?

Pushed the document over to my iPad then I thought, “wouldn’t it be nice to have Word here too”. I remembered that I was able to use it freely on my 8″ Xiaomi Tablet. Downloaded it, fired it up and it asked for my account, I logged in, only for it to tell me that

You currently do not have a valid Office subscription for your account

IOS Microsoft Word circa Sep 2020

Confused, I did a quick check online, so…

Apparently, any devices >10 inches are considered professional use, which basically rules out all iPad Pros out there. Which means that I would need to purchase a subscription in order to use it. Nevertheless, this caused me to open the Pages app for the first time ever, and it managed to open up the document flawlessly.

It was at this point when my girlfriend asked me, “why not just print this out?”

….

In my relentless pursue for a digital solution to read a damn PDF comfortably, it totally slipped my mind that sometimes having a physical copy is much simpler and elegant.

Lesson learnt indeed.

Categories
Keyboard

Keyboards: SA Profile Key Caps

As I slowly sink into the rabbit hole of the world of mechanical keyboards, I finally got my hands on my first set of SA Profile Key Caps from Domikeys [AliExpress].

left: kailh switch testers; right: Domikey ABS Doubleshot keycap set

For those that are not familiar with key cap profiles, here’s a quick primer on them. Key caps comes in various shapes and heights, most common of them are OEM and Cherry Profile which are on most of the pre-built mechanical keyboards.

SA profile as you can see is much higher and has a retro feel/look to it. I have been curious about it cause I think it has a type writer look which tickles my fancy.

I bought black and white because I realize that I didn’t have any basic sets like these. Coincidentally, this goes really well with my Black Drop CTRL keyboard that I’m currently using.

It feels distinctively different

I have tried OEM, Cherry, DSA, XDA keycaps before, but SA is a whole different beast altogether. The main difference for me is that the gaps between the keys are much wider than I’m used to and it feels like my fingers will always fall into the crevices when I’m not too careful with the way that I type.

The other difference is its weight. Because it’s so much taller than the other keys, there is obviously much more material to it, which makes it heavier. But because the keys is heavier, it makes typing feel lighter. It also feels sturdier because these are some thiccc bois.

I like it. The keyboard definitely has a nicer thock sound with SA key caps.

What’s next?

I have two GMK key caps set shipping in Oct and Dec. And I am extremely excited for them.

  • GMK Blue Samurai
  • GMK Mito Laser

My main motivation for getting this set is because I didn’t like how cheap the PBT key caps that came with the CTRL keyboard feels. I’ve swapped them out with another cheap set that I have but it only improved the feel ever so slightly.

Have also placed an order for the Keychron K6 (hot-swap version) which should be arriving this week as well. This would be purely for experimenting different switches and possibly be my portable keyboard when I feel like working outside.

Down and down the rabbit hole I go.

Categories
DevOps Learning Weekly

Weekly: Microsoft Azure

Took an online introductory course (Udemy) on Microsoft Azure AZ-900 because lo-and-behold, my team has chosen the Azure platform for our translation services (will write more about this next time).

As someone who has been 99.99% working on the AWS platform and Linux systems in general, Azure feels pretty foreign because most of the concepts seem to tie into the Windows systems more so than anything else.

  • Access control? Active Directory
  • RBAC? Active Directory
  • Networking? Virtual networks
  • Pricing? Subscriptions
  • Compliance? Almost everything under the roof

The main difference I find between AWS and Azure is that: AWS is a loose collection of services that are “grouped” through networking, Azure is a logical collection of services that are “grouped” by “folders” of resources.

Continue reading “Weekly: Microsoft Azure”