The Advisory Boar

By Abhijit Menon-Sen <>

Two coffee grinders

I used a hand-cranked coffee grinder for five years, but breaking it and getting another one has taught me a lot about making coffee.

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Coffee Can Investing

Mr. Talwar, a fifty-year old salaryman with a net worth of 45 million (4.51 crores), was sitting alone in the dark on the balcony of his apartment in NOIDA with his favourite single malt, worrying about his uncertain future.

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Moving to modern Neovim

; updated

I spent an uncharacteristic weekend playing with the latest Neovim features, and found it unexpectedly rewarding.

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Exactly how much physical memory is installed?

I've often wanted to calculate the exact amount of physical memory installed in a system running Linux, and I finally stumbled across a satisfying solution today: look under /sys/devices/system/memory.

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Building Sourcetrail

Here's how I downloaded and built the source code for Sourcetrail and all its dependencies, as a first step towards getting involved in its continued development.

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Nextcloud+OnlyOffice: a self-hosted Google Docs alternative

Running Nextcloud 20 and OnlyOffice 6 is a workable alternative to using Google Docs for collaboration in small, private teams.

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Convos rocks!

Convos is a persistent IRC client that you can use from any browser. After twenty-odd years of running ircII, I've become a happy user of Convos for the past few years.

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Removing obnoxious colours from Slack with Stylus

I have to use Slack at work, and the obnoxious bright colours it uses for people's names in the “Compact” message view have always annoyed me. Today I finally did something to get rid of them.

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“Possible missing firmware…” warnings from update-initramfs

You're installing a new Linux kernel or drivers or some other package that needs to update your initramfs, and you see a message like this:

update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-5.4.0-53-generic
W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/rtl_nic/rtl8125a-3.fw for module r8169
W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/rtl_nic/rtl8168fp-3.fw for module r8169

What does this mean?

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Sourcetrail needs support

Sourcetrail is an open source visualisation tool that helps to understand complex code bases.

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