Recent content in Home on xie
Hi there! That’s a new monthly update. Last one was TWO MONTHS ago, oh no! But I have an excuse. At the beginning of June my family came to visit us in Malaysia. These were busy weeks, I didn’t even have a laptop most of the time. When I noticed this page was stale, I could only jump into the sea. That obviously wouldn’t help! In June, we’ve visited Borneo, KL centre,…
I was exploring China with Tzeyu during winter holidays, visited Sichuan. And you know, I think if not firewall China could be easily competing with other Asian hubs of digital nomads! I’ll write from a perspective of living in Chengdu but some details will be the same for other New Tier 1 cities. Big problems Internet: it’s very bad and VPN doesn’t help much. Language barrier:…
I needed to do batch operations with images and get a merged PDF output. Desiring to minimize a number of tools, at the end I’ve done all processing with ImageMagick and Ghostscript. Zsh and GNU parallel were also my friends. Convert and Chop 4 sides convert input.png -crop +300+300 -crop -300-300 output.pdf Convert and Rotate convert input.png -rotate -90 -page A4 output.pdf Convert many…
I wanted to write a blog post about Malaysian fuel prices. RON95 petrol and diesel are subsidised by the government. Compare these graphs. Diesel price per litre, in ringgits RON95 petrol price per litre, in ringgits RON97 petrol price per litre, in ringgits These subsidies are also a reason why it’s illegal to fuel a car with RON95 if you’re a foreigner. Did you like the graphs above?…
Today I learned: git clone breaks symlinks on Windows system. Thankfully, I used symlinks in my project by mistake and I could delete them. On internet there’re people who rely on a bunch of symlinks and search for hacks to workaround msysgit issue. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5917249/git-symbolic-links-in-windows/59761201
It’s believed, that if we have a problem, we search for a solution to it. Unfortunately, sometimes Homo sapiens do that in reverse order: they have an idea, want to release it but search for a problem to have an excuse. I see it among amateur programmers. New coders learned to use a hammer (any technology) and they invent nails That’s a great way to learn: if you need to handle a…
I came into 7-Eleven store in Thailand and purchased a SIM card five months ago. Some time later, I received an SMS from Airbnb. Your Airbnb reservation request for May 13-14 in Yerevan was accepted Initially, I was momentarily afraid of being hacked, but I soon discovered that SMS was sent to Thai phone number, even though I hadn’t registered Airbnb account to it. Probably, that was because…
Can you remember yourself at 10 years old when a parent said, “That’s money for an ice-cream, choose one”? And you should have been happy, but the problem was the phrase"CHOOSE ONE". There were plenty of different flavors available—berries, chocolate chips, nuts, and so much on. And you yet, you had to choose just one. It felt unfair. Nah, mum, take the money back.…
I arrived in Thailand 3 weeks ago. In 2 days, I’ll be in Laos. And I haven’t had mobile data all these days! Well, to be more precise, I’ve purchased a monthly pack of mobile data just this afternoon. (I’ll need a connection on the road, and a weekly pack costs the same as a monthly pack.) Let me skip the reasons and get straight to the point. That was an enjoyable…
Last days I’m helping in searching of a missing Russian girl. I don’t want to describe that story a lot as it’s midnight already, I wrote more messages and letters than I wrote in a month. and I’m very tired. So TS;RTI (too short; read that instead) is here: reddit, notion with well-structured but Russian info. The main reason I’m writing that post is that the girl…
There’s a Russian word “huyachit”. It’s a curse word that you can’t use it near Russian serious people. Part of it refers to male genitals, as is often the case. The word means “to work hard”. Very hard. You would say the student huyachil (a past tense of huyatchit), if he/she got all A’s or 100% marks. In China, they huyachit with a 9-9-6 schedule.…
That’s a musical about revolution and American founding father Alexander Hamilton. Don’t close this blog post if you haven’t attended a musical before! This one is special. It tells the story with hip-hop and rap, and mixes R&B with classic Broadway tunes. The story narrates about Hamilton’s journey from his humble beginnings as an orphan in the Caribbean, to his arrival in…
I smashed an ant. And nothing happened. I was a child when I saw the ruined life of an ant. Probably that was the ant. Probably that ant was an with a well-organized colony. Perhaps the ant had a family and a past, but now its future was cut short. You saw the body; soon it’d decompose leaving memories and a bridge built from twigs. The brain was crushed, the heart no longer beats.
I constantly move from one spot to another. These are my last locations and sometimes upcoming plans. If you want to know what I’m doing currently, have a look at my now page. 2026 April 26 – June 30: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia April 25 – April 26: Malacca, Malaysia March 27 – April 25: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia March 25 – March 27: Pulau Kapas, Malaysia March 24 –…