Abijeet Patro, Author at The Curly Braces

Contributing to Wikimedia software projects

Lately, I’ve received numerous emails from new open-source contributors requesting guidance in contributing to Wikimedia software projects. There are a lot of useful resources available, and this post is an effort to gather these resources in one place. Time to get your reading hats on.

Some background: I work as a software engineer in the Product department at the Wikimedia Foundation since 2019. The information / views shared on this blog are my own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.

Lekhan (लेखन) – A journaling system

At the end of the year, I enjoy looking back and reviewing memorable moments from that year. It gives me happiness, a sense of accomplishment and fulfilment. Unfortunately, I’ve not been doing a good job of tracking these events. I don’t take many photos or write reviews since I don’t know where to post them. I’m not very comfortable with storing all my data with Google or other big tech hence I plan to host / build something simple myself.

Checklist to rent a house in India

I like checklists. They give me confidence that I’ve covered everything of importance, and if I did miss something, I can go back and update the checklist so that I don’t miss it the next time. I recently shifted cities and had to look for a new place to rent. I prepared this checklist to keep track of things we want to have in the new house.

In the last decade, I’ve lived in 3 rented houses. This list reflects my preferences. Please conduct your research based on your requirements. I’m sharing it here with the hope that it helps someone and that others can build on top of it.

Running xrandr wakes up the dGPU

TLDR; Running the configuration utility xrandr wakes up the dedicated GPU on your machine. This is not a problem on a desktop but running it periodically on a laptop will drain your battery and might have other unintended consequences.

The rest of the blog describes the issue I faced due to running xrandr repeatedly, how I identified and circumvented the problem. Let’s begin.

Asus Strix G15 Advantage Edition – Post buying checklist

After using my old Asus Vivobook S15 for about 3 and a half years, I bought an Asus Strix G15 Advantage Edition (G513QY) laptop in August 2021. It’s an all AMD laptop with a Ryzen 5900HX CPU and Radeon 6800M GPU. I prepared a checklist for things to check and do after I got the laptop. Most items on this list should apply to any laptops, but a few are region and model specific. Sharing it here with the hope that it helps someone else.

i3 window manager setup on Debian Bullseye

In this blog, we will look at setting up i3 tiling window manager, and a status bar for i3 named i3status-rust. All of this is tested on Debian Bullseye. Some basic understanding of configuring i3 is expected.

This is part 2 in a series of 3 blogs regarding setup of Debian Bullseye on a Laptop with i3 window manager. Read part 1 here.