When AI Meets Bedil: A Conversation on Poetry, Meaning, and Machine Insight
But beneath all that, a profound reality is that we’re building tools that can engage in subtle, reflective, and culturally rich conversations.
BlogEtcetera
Thoughts on this, that, and the rest
BlogEtcetera
Thoughts on this, that, and the rest
Reclaim Your Terminal: How Lazygit Supercharges Your Git Workflow
Finding the right tools for your development workflow is a constant struggle, and Git tooling is no exception. Despite the plethora of Git clients available, none of them ever felt quite right. For a while, I settled on GitFiend. It…
Why XFCE Makes Windows Optional
Windows isn't the default anymore. Xfce is fast, familiar, and finally polished — running it on Fedora's bleeding-edge spin, coming off years of i3, and I haven't noticed a single performance hit.
Solving the i3 Startup Race: Why assign Fails for LibreOffice
I tweaked my i3 configuration to automate application placement. During this process, I encountered a frustrating issue. LibreOffice was ignoring my workspace assignments. While the main suite started correctly, specific components like LibreOffice Writer refused to land in their designated…
Why I Ghosted My Blog (And What Brought Me Back)
It’s been quite a while…. such a long time that I can’t think of how to begin anymore. To be honest, I wasn’t sure I’d blog again. It wasn’t because I did not have anything to say. Somewhere along the…
Marx, Engels and Lenin in Pul-e-Charkhi Prison
With all the hype about Marxism and Socialism, I remembered this story. Someone in my family back in the 1980s spent some time in the infamous Pul-e-Charkhi prison. They had taken him because of suspected links to anti-government elements. There…
Maximising your layover in Doha: A personal guide
Having lived in Australia, I’m no stranger to long-haul flights. If you’re going to be stuck on a plane for over 15 hours, why not break up the journey with a layover that feels like a mini-holiday? For travelers between…
Volunteer Computing
Volunteer computing is an arrangement where volunteers provide or donate their computer resources to projects. That way, these projects are able to do really advanced and time-consuming computations. Most of these projects are scientific trying to solve different problems. Some…
A Shared Ramadan Experience
We are only two Muslims in our workplace, but every Ramadan almost everyone else fasts one day to share the Ramadan experience with us. Our work organises a dinner for those who fast. This year, one of our colleagues emailed…
AWK One‑Liner: Total a CSV Column in Seconds
Imagine you have a file with multiple columns and you need to quickly get the total of a column in command line in UNIX. The easiest way is to use AWK in the command line. Let’s take the following file:…