Ever since I've graduated on September 2022, I've not had a job. Maybe a crappy internship, but I wasn't provided with a 'certificate', or letter that proves if I've worked for them. That was around October 2022, and I quit voluntarily at the end of January 2023. Since then, I've not worked anywhere as a software dev, be it internship or full-time, because the job market is so fucked up in India.

Now, how do I explain this to avail scholarship? I have yet to read other scholarship docs from other countries in Europe, and I'm already shitting solidified blood-clots reading this from the DAAD Helmut-Schmidt announcement document:

a curriculum vitae in reverse chronological order including the date of issue (format: europass, please note: the europass template does not include a date, please add it yourself) with exact information about your studies and practical experience; gaps of three months or more must be explained

(Update: And I just realized that I am an idiot for not reading that this is only for non-STEM folks. Well, it looks to me that DAAD for STEM is also almost the same, with more stringent requirements.)

In my college, there was no research programs - I mean, you know the typical 'Indian colleges encouraging academic plagiarism', so I didn't learn or do shit. And obviously, I have no job experience. I did contribute to open-source from GitLab, a few Ruby gems, a new unknown front-end framework for JS, then Nixpkgs and now Guix, but that's it. Honestly, I wouldn't even call it contribution, because only a few patches were merged - most of it was just me interacting with those folks. After that, I've done nothing since September 2023, because my laptop broke and there were no spare parts. Maybe a little bit of playing around with Nix and Guix, writing package expressions and that's it.

How do I explain this? CVs are supposed to be at least 2-3 pages, but this? I can't even write half a page with this.

I'm sick of my laptop breaking after just three years. I want a laptop that:

• comes with a nice APU
• does not have a dGPU
• comes with a chonky thermal solution
• has lots of battery juice
• has lots of modern ports
• is repairable
• is rugged, bulky and thick
• is equipped with a nice, thonky keyboard
• isn't one of those stupid, low-quality "gAmIng lApTOp"

So far, only the X220 and MNT Reform comes close to this description - the former is a really slow machine for today's time, and for some reason, still damn expensive. The latter is just too expensive to the point that I'll have to sell all eight kidneys in my family.

Do they sell anything like this in today's time, with a reasonable price?

PS. Thick is a strong requirement. I want a really nice cooling solution, plus it also serves it's purpose as a melee weapon to removed-slap those ultra-book trash-talkers.

With the release of Unicode 16.0 this September, I may finally be able to use my own language's script. But I am not sure if OSes will directly support the latest version of Unicode immediately. How long should I expect these changes to be available on my local OS?

With that being said, I would like to work on creating my own font, maybe also migrate a few corpuses from the wrong script to the original, new one, as well as work on transliteration.

All of this is impossible for a single person - but I would like to take it slowly. What would be a good place to start? Do I need to keep anything else in mind while starting on this journey?

The person I am talking about is Dr. Palaniappan Manickam aka Dr. Pal, a board-certified gastroenterologist from Sacramento, California, who is also a YouTuber. He's created various videos targeting Indian netizens, most of which are decent, but not without adding his own twist of misinformation, that are considered unscientific - some of them have been debunked here and here (auto-captions available).

I can't help but think why YouTube would immediately remove videos that spread misinformation, but only when it affects the western world, but not the other part? Clearly, this guy's video is in English, he participates in collaborations with other misinformation-peddling YouTubers - the consequences of which a few percent of the billion people in India have to face - which is still, a lot of people? Sure, you can complain that it is the responsibility of the Indian government - but they are themselves in this business of pseudo-science. When there's no one taking responsibility, I can't help but feel helpless about the lies people will hear.

Edit: And to why this matters, there's an on-going case in the Supreme Court of India. Said "guru" sold Coronil kit, and mocked dying doctors. What did the kit do? It had high concentration of lead. Dr. Cyriac Abby Philips fought against it - and the system tried to punish him.

Should I be worried about this development?

So far, I've tried Stract and 4get, and I'm not impressed with how limited they are - they're not accurate, and no image and video search is what turns me away from them.

Metasearch engines like SearXNG aren't that impressive, their results have too many filler results. My experience with manually tweaking their search also did not go well. Any alternatives with good defaults?

My main laptop is dead, so I'm on a potato laptop with a 6th gen Intel i3 processor and 4GB of RAM. I have IceCat installed, but I really don't like the defaults it provides.

Maybe I am in the wrong here, but from the Arkenfox page, I've read that having way too many extension is bad - there's an unbelievable amount of these plugins. IceCat being on the older ESR version is a big no when it comes to security. Last but not the least, I want to create a separate, non-secure profile to use normal pages, but IceCat has hard-coded blocks on several websites.

And that is exactly why I'm looking to move to LibreWolf. But the issue is that there is no pre-built binaries available for my distro. I've waited the entire day for this browser, and I'm tired of having to come back to a frozen desktop, or build fails while waking from sleep.

I'm trying the build once again, and I just wanted to know how long it takes to build, so that I can leave it uninterrupted.

Seven refineries processing Moscow’s crude in India, Turkey and Bulgaria continued exporting refined fuels to the EU.

Morrison is often associated with the youth counterculture. As someone who was born in the 21st century, I want to know what type of person he was, to people who were able to witness his era.

It could be anything about him - his influence, his music, his personal life, his relationship, activism, childhood, or the type of person he was, if his musics were popular and was his life tragic, or filled with happiness? I don't want to hear the Wikipedia summary, I'm interested in what you think as someone who enjoys music.

For those, who do not know what the Gemini protocol is, think of it as a modern, light-weight HTTP alternative without CSS or JavaScript. In layman term, you could see it as Web 1.0 reinvented. It uses GemText instead of HTML. For folks who want to try it out, you can either install a Gemini extension for your HTTPs browser (which kinda defeats the purpose, as modern browsers are heavy), or download a dedicated Gemini browser like Lagrange. Here's a few sites you can access in Gemini.

Personally, I love it, although I miss a few stuff, like for example, multimedia, streaming and stuff like that. The memory foorprint is very low, and pages are super-fast.