My Asus Zenbook UX310UQ which I bought in 2018 served me very well except in 1 department: battery life. Recently, the battery would just die randomly so I had to keep it plugged in at all times. So I needed a laptop with adequate battery so that I can work on the move or even be my sofa.

I was deciding between an Asus Zenbook 14″ OLED (which has a gorgeous display) and a Macbook Air with the M1 chip. It was about Rs 10,000 cheaper than the Macbook with similar specs.

The RAMs cannot be upgraded on both laptops unfortunately and 8GB is very limit in 2023. I decided to opt for the Macbook M1 specially after hearing excellent reviews about the battery life and performance.

It really didn’t disappoint in that area. I got 8 hours of battery life in the first day and I even run some machine learning codes on it. However 256GB of storage is really limiting. Every time I would install a software, it would bring me anxiety about filling the disk. The 8GB Ram honestly “feels” more than adequate for web browsing and even coding. However it would swap to the SSD a lot in the background which is rumoured to cause damage to it. Since everything is soldered to the board, replacing the SSD will not be possible thus the Macbook might be bricked earlier than expected. I haven’t found lots of people actually reporting dead M1 SSDs on forums. Please share if you find some with me.

I was quite surprised to discover that the laptop can be used without signup with an Apple account. The OS even updates without it. However in order to update Apple apps such as Numbers, iMovie etc from the App store, you will need to signin using an Apple ID.

The MacOS is really nice in terms of keeping your screen real estate. The window borders are virtually inexistent. On my KDE laptop, so much pixels were wasted to draw the borders.

The widgets feels much more luxurious than on KDE. Is it the better screen or just better graphics. I don’t know

And 1 thing which really impressed me was whenever you open the lid, the laptop is ready to be used. My Linux laptop would take like 5-10 seconds to be ready from sleep.

Some cons:

• No print screen button
• SSHFS is really slow. I got like 3MB/s. https://osxfuse.github.io/
• Python/git stop working after update
  • 
• Youtube was not playing in full HD. I could see the blurriness
  • 
• You get only 1 year warranty as compared to 3 on the ASUS
• Every one has a Macbook in a cafe. I had to place a sticker to recognise mine.

After 1 year of using it, I had to upgrade to a more powerful one since the M1 Air is not really built to run large language models on them. So I sold it to my sister who I hope will take care of it 🙂

Can’t believe it’s already 1 week since we had the DevCon at Caudan Arts Centre in Mauritius. It was a wonderful 3 day event in which we got the opportunity to learn lots of stuffs.

I spoke about the progress which my startup LEFINTECH LTD has been doing in the realm of helping the Mauritian economy go online. We are currently working on making an E-commerce chatbot in Creole language which is also partly funded by the MRIC (Mauritius Research and Innovation Council).

The Q&A session was invaluable as we got lots of feedback on how we can better improve our coding and dataset generation.

Beyond the stage, there was lots of networking opportunities around the conference area. It was amazing to see so many talents who are interested by Technology in Mauritius.

If you are also working in the field of E-commerce and Creole in general, do not hesitate to get in touch with me on LinkedIn or Facebook.

Have a nice day 🙂

 

 

 

I had the opportunity to speak again at the Developers Conference at Caudan Mauritius. It’s a must attend event for any person working in IT.

Upon my arrival I was given a speaker gift.

Reminds me of Mark Zuckerberg a bit. Maybe I’ll destined to be rich as him too. Lol 🤣

My first topic was “My First Baby Steps with Git”. It was aimed towards students held developers who have not yet started using Git. Despite being in peak lunch time, there was quite a good turnout on attendees. There were good interaction with the crowd. Thanks to my friend Avish to have taken photographs during my sessions.

The second talk which I held was more geared towards IoT enthusiasts. I showed a little demo on how we can integrate social media with internet of things. For example, I demoed how to turn on a light bulb using a Facebook message.

Bonus: My friend Vidush invited me to his talk as a guest along with Priyeshan and Alex. We got the opportunity to share our story on how we got into the entrepreneurship journey. And the question time was lit. The audience didn’t hold back their questions. They took full advantage of the panelists present. There’s indeed a huge interest in entrepreneurship in Mauritius. I hope we can become the silicon valley in the Indian Ocean. There’s still a long way to go.

The other sessions I attended were of really high quality. I was really happy with the conference overall. I hope the future events get even bigger and better.

 

 

 

 

I got the invitation by the Linux User Group of Mauritius Meta (LUGM) 2 days before the event but I managed to make the time to attend it. The guest was Lubos Kocman.

I’m mostly an Ubuntu person – my laptop has been KDE Neon since quite some years now which is based on Ubuntu – so it would be interesting to see what are the other side of the world are doing.  Here’s a few interesting points I learnt:

1. openSUSE is now an Umbrella for several distros such as Tumbleweed, Leap and MicroOs. They are different distro suited at different environments depending on your needs.

The event ended by a sponsored drink by OceanDBA. I chose a non-alcohoic drink ofcourse 😛

OceanDBA is a company which provides expert consultancy for open-source databases within the MySQL eco-system. You may read more on them here: https://www.oceandba.com/

And who doesn’t like goodies? The attendees got a copy of LINUX MAGAZINE which also includes an installation DVD. Unfortunately all the laptops which I bought in the last 10 years, I made sure it doesn’t has a disk reader as they have become almost obsolete nowadays (except for Play Station games which I noticed are still sold on BluRay disks)

I hope we’ll be able to have more physical events in the upcoming days in the tech community. Let’s hope this covid thing ends once and for all.

In order to develop awesome product and services for my company LEFINTECH LTD, I need the best possible tools to do so. But the company  is a new startup in Mauritius, we have limited budget so we had to find best compromises in terms of features and price. The LG 29WL500 seems to be the perfect match for me.

Why did I choose ultra-wide instead of 2 monitors?

1. Small footprint on the desk

I live in a very small studio with no place to put a dedicated work desk, I needed something compact. A single 29 inch ultra wide display is perfect. It allows 2 applications to open side by side while still being usable. Website would not go into tablet mode as they do with 16:9 aspect ratios.

2. Price

I paid Rs 11,990 for the screen in shop at Fast Click Bagatelle. 2 x 24″ screens would have costed me around Rs 12,000 – Rs 16,000 (Rs 6000-8000 each). But since I get the benefits of 2 screens in 1 at the same price, it was obvious for me to go with it. But further I saw some discrepancies on Fast Click’s website. At 1 place, it is listed as this:

And in the price-list, we can see that it is Rs 11,590. Was the price increased at some point in time?

3. Spreadsheets are much more manageable.

Working in a startup doesn’t limit your role to development. You have to do lots of things which are outside your comfort zone. Doing financial forecasts/analysis is one of the things i found myself doing very often.

The amount of columns you can display is greater. If you work a lot in Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets or Libre Office, I would strongly suggest to switch to an ultra wide.

Cons

1. Doesn’t has USB-C connectivity so you cannot charge your laptop and send display signal with the same cable #richpeopleproblems
2. The screen is 6bit + FRC instead of a real 8bit or even 10bit. Linux doesn’t support HDR or 10bit so not much an issue. Anyways for a work related environment, it really shouldn’t matter
3. No height adjust: This is a big one. I had to put plywoods underneath the screen in order for it to reach the right height for me.
4. The resolution is only 1080p. Texts don’t look that crisp. at 1440p, this screen would be perfect. But I think for the price, 1080p is still good.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for a screen for work, just go ahead and buy this one. You will not regret it 😉