2023年第45周周报-en

Last week I’d planned too much and didn’t finish; this week, with extra unplanned work on top, I didn’t do daily task lists—I set a few important tasks and moved them forward.

The first half of the week I mostly set up environments for the lab and my mini PC. The lab machine is a Dell PowerEdge R730; it has its own boot flow called Lifecycle Controller. I spent about half a day on it—I was naive and thought a USB install would just work. I installed Ubuntu Server and CasaOS on the lab server so any machine on the LAN can open it in a browser; terminal access is over SSH. I think that’s a decent setup for what I can do right now. My mini PC also runs Ubuntu Server; I plan to use it as an edge node. Buying a Wi‑Fi card cost me a day, then wireless wouldn’t connect (over the weekend I learned from the vendor group that the Wi‑Fi antenna was bad); buying an Ethernet cable cost another day—only then was the system basically ready. I’ll configure what edge computing needs later.

The second half I spent a lot of time on the blog. I didn’t want to create a new Markdown file and paste the publishing boilerplate every time. I first moved the blog to xLog—I thought that fixed it, because importing old posts, the look, and the writing flow all felt good—but I hit a dealbreaker: adding tags crashed the page (not sure if others saw this). (Update: after switching from Zorin to Windows that stopped happening… so I did end up on xLog; in VS Code it was still too much hassle… mostly I’m lazy… the thought of opening VS Code, fixing formatting, adding images killed the urge to write.) Earlier posts were imported so I never tagged them and didn’t notice. That would’ve been fine—import like before—but you can’t add brand‑new tags to posts already published; it seemed you’d have to delete the post, fix tags, and re-import—too tedious and against why I migrated. I looked for other options. I’d seen a senior using something xLog-like; I found one, tried Vercel, didn’t like it and gave up. Other writing platforms mostly don’t support tags, so I dropped those. Notion-as-blog looked fiddly and I didn’t like the look. I asked that senior what they use now—they said VS Code. I looked at Hexo extensions for VS Code; one looked good. I checked Notion and Obsidian plugins; not satisfied. In the end I decided on Hexo for the site and VS Code for writing.

Blogging in VS Code looks roughly like this:

I also spent ¥200 at Wanwang (Alibaba Cloud) on a ten‑year domain—felt like a good deal.

On Saturday I watched WBG make finals while I finished the domain setup. I was really happy; I was alone in the lab and laughed out loud. Finals against SKT T1—still need to bring it.

I won’t cross-post everywhere or “run” the blog for reach—that’s not me. What I post here won’t go on xLog. The point is to keep notes and thoughts; a weekly recap helps me think, and the blog is one way to express that.

Almost every day after getting back to the dorm near midnight I’d play games and sleep late, then wake up late. Next week I can’t keep that up—even if I go back earlier to play.

Next week the focus is MIT 6.824 labs—I need to get past the intimidation. Slowly it’s doable; today I read source and annotated and could follow it. Trust myself and don’t slack. Finishing 6.824 this year would be a win.

I thought I had more to say; once I started the weekly note I wasn’t sure what to add.

That’s it for now—see you next week ^^