I picked up a Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Snapdragon X (14″, Gen 9) laptop a few days ago as part of the Black Friday deals, I managed to get it foraround $1900. This is a quick post to outline my thoughts on it. My use-cases and software # Docker Desktop Kubernetes VMs Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform and CDK) Studying (LaTeX, ProctorU for exams) Design and Build Quality: # Great build quality, solid top cover and keyboard materials. ...
Been a little while since I made a post. I’ve spent the last week in NZ, coming back to visit family. I went to Invercargill, the southern-most city in New Zealand at the base of the South Island. I’ve never been but I’m pleasantly surprised. The weather was surprisingly pleasant, the people lovely, wide roads and a really relaxed environment. I also popped out to Bluff which is roughly 20 minutes away. ...
I recently finished the book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less - by Greg McKeown. I enjoyed it and found it quite useful. The book definitely could have been shorter (it’s roughly 250-300 pages), but I think some of the lessons are useful and can be applied personally. It’s similar in nature to Atomic Habits. Summary of some good points in the book (some overlapping concepts): You can’t do it all. ...
I recently decided to migrate to NixOS for my main laptop. I utilize a desktop with Windows (mainly for gaming), but the laptop I use more for development, learning and day-to-day usage. I made the switch from: Windows 11 - for the vast majority of my laptops lifecycle. Manjaro ArchLinux (Now) NixOS Each of the Distributions I thoroughly enjoyed. Manjaro - My first venture into non-Debian-based distributions for full-time usage. I’ve used Fedora too, but only for temporary testing. ...
New Site # Created and hosted my new site. Basic web site using Hugo to statically generate my content. Public-facing content is deployed from Github Actions Private-facing content is deployed from Buildkite, via an agent hosted in my homelab. IaC # Public: Terraform Github actions Private: IaC is handled via Ansible from the initial clone, to the application deploy. Everything resides in a single mono-repo. Goal # The goal is to host a minimal set of homelab tools that can be recreated a moments notice. ...