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Checklist to rent a house in India

April 2, 2022 / / 0 Comments

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.

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Running xrandr wakes up the dGPU

November 21, 2021 / / 3 Comments

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.

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Asus Strix G15 Advantage Edition – Post buying checklist

October 10, 2021 / / 1 Comment

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.

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Debian Bullseye setup with NVIDIA hybrid graphics

June 19, 2021 / / 1 Comment

I had been using PopOS on my laptop for a couple of years, but wanted to shift back to using the i3 window manager. My laptop has the NVIDIA MX150 graphics chipset along with the inbuilt Intel GPU and the primary reason to use PopOS was to get switchable NVIDIA graphics working properly. I had trouble getting this to work back in June, 2018 but I expect it to work now with recent versions of the X.Org Server and the NVIDIA graphics driver.

To get recent versions of the Linux kernel and various packages I will be install the testing version of Debian code-named Bullseye. This may vary based on the time when you are reading this post.

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Vagrant development environment for PHP

January 15, 2020 / / 2 Comments

As a developer, I work on projects that require a variety of software, each tuned to different configurations. The easiest way to achieve this is to set up a virtual machine and configure that as per the need of the project. This allows me to keep my host machine clean, and share the virtual machine with other developers on the project.

In this blog, I’ll describe the configuration of a Vagrant machine that I’ve setup for PHP web development. Here’s a link to the box on vagrant cloud.

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