Due to the changes in the Evernote restrictions, I migrated all my Evernote content to Amplenote. Amplenote so far is quite good, the only thing I am not happy with is the web clipper. I can hardly clip the content with the format of the webpage itself. As a result, I come to Obsidian.

Unlike Amplenote, Obsidian works as a desktop application. If one wants a synchronization feature, then he/she needs to pay. If one wants to work with a free version, then one can setup other synchronization services such as Dropbox.

I am always using tint2. But recently, I found that tint2 is frequently crashed. As a result, I decided to find an alternative.

There are 2 alternatives that I am trying. xfce4-panel and lxpanel. Comparing these two, I personally prefer xfce4-panel comparing to lxpanel. The main reason is that I can drag-and-drop the target window the target workspace easy, while lxpanel only allows drag-and-drop between workspaces.

However, xfce4-panel doesn’t have configuration like lxpanel, which causes difficulty to do the backup.

Recently I found that volumeicon startup doesn’t use correct device.

So, I changed to pa-applet.

I am trying to switch from Brave browser to Vivaldi. Those online review articles that compare both browsers are too surface. There are several things I need to highlight, however these issues may be caused by extensions I am installing.

Vivaldi issues:

1. Bookmarklet causes address bar changed.

2. When we zoom a page, then we revisit the page on other tab, doesn’t retain the zoom level, yet Brave retains it.

Brave issue(s):

My favourite code editor for my works is Emacs. But Emacs is slower to start compare to other lightweight text editors, such as Mousepad, Gedit, Featherpad, etc, because it involves a lot of plugins/packages.

I always need text editor for some quick and temporary notetaking. Atom is not a good solution to me, because it is too bloat, depends on Electron.

The following features are what I need

• Drag and drop to open file

There is a very interesting Android app, NewPipe. It is not available from Play Store. But we can get it from F-Droid.

The best feature is that, we can play YouTube playlist on background! Yes, meaning we can build our best playlist, then play the songs using PipeWire in background. Moreover, it is ads free. I mean, thoroughly ads free.

In order to find an ads free app, I will prefer to use F-Droid instead of Google Play.

Recently, I downloaded a PDF of Stubium Biblicum （思高） Chinese Bible, with 7000 pages. I found that most of the PDF reader fail to read any page immediately. Only Dropbox built-in PDF viewer can do it.

At the end, I tried to use F-Droid, and found Librera Reader.

It is ads-free, and can read large PDF at any page instantly. Great!!

Calibre is a great tool to create ebooks such as EPUB format. I sometimes convert ODT format to EPUB format so that I can read some documents on my Android phone, using FBReader.

Recently I downloaded some PDF ebooks. And when trying to read from laptop, it causes eyestrain. Unlike journal articles, a journal article usually uses the layout of two columns. More columns mean that the text has narrower “width”, and it helps reader to track the line easily.

mpv is super powerful multimedia player. Though I use SMPlayer sometimes, SMPlayer can either use mplayer or mpv as its multimedia engine.

I found a useful usage of mpv, that’s to play YouTube playlist through command-line, without opening the video or through web browser.

To invoke a YouTube playlist, we must make sure the playlist URL has only the list parameter, if there is v parameter, then it will not work. Eg,

I am using two software to make my working experience healthier, since I sit in front of computer everyday and whole day.

• Redshift or f.lux - Protecting eyes
• Workrave - Avoiding Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI)