Hi dear reader! My old 2015 Macbook air had been struggling with the last few MacOS updates and an old battery for quite some time now, and my ADHD brain likes to spend time on such things absolutely not worth the effort. While I could be working on my side-projects.

So back in December, I had decided to ‘give it a new life’. In doing so, I also ordered a cheap pack of stickers from amazon (because why not) and proceeded to install Omarchy on it. The vibe coded OS that my youtube and twitter bubble was hyping at the time. And it has gotten way worse now. But that is a rant for another day.

It was a bad choice.

Not just because it was vibe coded and had absolutely no design thought or element to it except that it installs fast and comes with a bunch of tools installed for devs. But also because I had no experience with Arch linux and the insane world of ricing and getting excited about the different flavours of window management I could run and customise. Getting up to speed felt like a full time job. Suffice it to say, it was not for me.

Unfortunately I could not get off of it the normal way by sticking a usb in and installing something new. Somehow, the EFI lock on this macbook was triggered and I did not know the password, nor the apple account it was associated with. Apple being apple, does this kind of thing at the hardware level, and the Apple store refused to unlock it since I did not have the proof of purchase anymore. I gave up on it.

Until yesterday, when I realised that this is the kind of problem LLMs are best at solving. I brought up a clanker and blabbered the situation to it, and lo and behold, there was indeed a way.

I could just download the ISO file from with Omarchy, update the Grub config to point it to a downloaded iso file — or in this case to the Limine config because it was Arch, and then just make that as the first option to boot from.

There were a few more steps involved of course, but I won’t bore you with it. Long story short, I now have Linux Mint installed and I think I will like this much more.

^{P.S: I also installed Steam and bought a Flight sim game from 2006 for 4 euros. Will see what else it can run. Excited.}

Book I want to read

The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi, by Shannon Chakraborty

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by S.A. Chakraborty | Goodreads

Shannon Chakraborty, the bestselling author of The City…

I have been reading The City of brass by this writer and thoroughly enjoying it, and even though I still first need to finish that triology, this one is already on my list.

Interesting reads

1. Kids turn podcast comments into secret chat rooms..
   Kids find a way, specially teens flirting. When I was working at Noon, my previous company (Edtech), I learned how everything was fair game. Lecture comment section, Docs/notes, Canvas with scribbling support when text and audio isn’t available in a room and they are supposed to review notes together. When we avoided them sharing phone numbers and email in chat using regex, they started using Symbols and glyphs. They find a way

2. Google’s Project Suncatcher prototype in orbit
   Well, cloud could may very well in above the cloud soon. There are loooots of questions and concerns you could come up with if you think about it more than a few minutes, but since they are still trying, so it must be worth it.
   

A project I discovered

Run pi coding-agent sessions in remote sandboxes ("pods"), from a terminal or a phone, on a server you run yourself.

GitHub - pi-pod/pipod: pi pod: run pi coding-agent sessions in remote sandboxes, on a server you run yourself · GitHub

pi pod: run pi coding-agent sessions in remote sandboxes, on a server you run yourself - pi-pod/pipod

I share this specifically because it seems like something custom build for me. I have a somewhat similar setup and may actually benefit from this if it works out

A photo I took

^{I did not take a good photo this week so here is one from around the same time last year}

Thanks for reading, see you next Sunday. Wish you a good upcoming week! ✌🏽