After I upgraded my computer to Ubuntu 18.04, I was fed up with how laggy things are, especially for Atom and Gnome Shell. Since all of my finals are over, I decided to try out new things.

Ahem. This is my 7^th attempt to write a blog... Hopefully it’s not gonna fail like last time!

In the previous attempts, I hosted my blog with blog sites such as Wordpress or Blogspot. For this time, as you can see, I host it in my own website (powered by Github Pages), so it will (hopefully) be different!

And, you see, the blog content is not that important. The most crucial thing is to get the technology right. What I’m using right now is called Pollen markup, which is pretty much a domain-specific language based on Racket’s @-syntax. Pollen sets up a server which recompiles files automatically whenever it detects file changes. The markup itself is very cool in a sense that you just write whatever you want to write with arbitrary made-up semantics tags, which is very pleasant to write using the said syntax. Then, you can go back and define and format what those tags are supposed to be. The programming part is equally pleasant because it has X-Expression which is a cool version of XML. Pollen supports outputting multiple targets: LaTeX, html, plain text, or whatever you want to output. Basically, you program the document, so you have an unlimited power to do whatever you want.

I switched from Ubuntu to Macbook Pro since 2013 and was very happy with it. About 5 months ago, the screen was broken, so I planned to buy a new one. Knowing that the new version will have a major change, I was very excited and decided to wait until it’s released in order to buy it. To my disappointment, it incredibly sucks.

A lot of my friends suggested me to get a Thinkpad X1 Yoga which looks really cool. I waited until Thanksgiving to get a big discount. The laptop arrived in early December. The first thing I did is to install Ubuntu 16.10 because I hate Windows!

Following are my settings. I write these particularly for myself in the future so that when I need to set things up again, I won’t have to spend a lot of time figuring out what to do!