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Manjaro is a fantastic way to get a fully-featured Linux desktop up and running in minutes. Its graphical installer, sensible defaults, and curated package selection making it a great choice for both newcomers and power users. However, over time, I found that Manjaro’s repositories lagged behind Arch, and—at least for the XFCE flavor—stability was not what I expected. I wanted to keep my working setup, but move to a system that is easier and more stable to maintain: pure Arch Linux.

Rust is a systems programming language that aims to provide memory safety, performance, and concurrency. It achieves this through a combination of features such as ownership, borrowing, and lifetimes, which allow it to enforce memory safety at compile time without needing a garbage collector. This makes Rust particularly suitable for performance-critical applications and systems programming, where manual memory management is typically required. Rust’s zero-cost abstractions promises that high-level features do not incur runtime overhead, further enhancing its performance. The language’s concurrency model is designed to be safe and efficient, making it easier to write concurrent code without the common pitfalls of data races.

The Rotrics DexArm is a quirky and intriguing addition to the world of 3D printing and laser cutting. Unlike traditional laser cutters, it’s a 4-axis desktop robotic arm with modular versatility, allowing it to switch seamlessly between roles like laser engraving, 3D printing, plotting, and even gripping objects.

Using GNOME Keyring on XFCE on Manjaro is not complicated, but the documentation of ArchLinux doesn’t apply and you can scratch your head for a few hours before getting what you want. Well, loose no more hair, here are the simple steps.

Installing Manjaro Linux with system-wide encryption and a modern Btrfs filesystem can significantly enhance your system’s security and functionality. However, the default GRUB configuration doesn’t account for non-US keymaps at boot, potentially causing headaches when entering your encryption password. This guide walks you through setting up encryption, replacing GRUB with Systemd-boot, and configuring Secure Boot for increased security (and cooliness 😁).

SWIG is a wrapper generator that is able to connect compiled libraries to a bunch of scripting languages. The process is mostly automatic, but to tackle some corner cases, you have to help the generator do the right thing. In my library, all functions would return an integer, which is an error code. A special function, following the same behavior as strerror_r, can be used to retrieve the meaning of a special error code. This is a pretty usual mechanism for C code. But that’s not the way scripting languages work. In their world, functions are rather supposed to raise exceptions.

Last week, I was preparing a data analysis report using Jupyter, Pandas and Matplotlib (to only quote a few bricks of this wonderful framework). One of the figures had two subplots, the second being an enlargement of a region of the first. To make it obvious, and at the same time show the old MATLAB Fanclub how so 90 they were, I decided to put an arrow from the first to the second subplot.

“Hey, Pal! How are you? Remember that little project I had on the CubieTruck? I resumed hacking on it. But it’s a pity, I lost my root password… I have to start all over again. Any chance you remember what silly password we choose together?”