Following up on the previous post [From Fydetab Duo to HP Chromebook X11], I have been using the HP Chromebook X11 for a while. The overall experience is quite good, but I encountered two annoying bugs. Here I record the solutions.

Recently, many token-selling providers have been raising prices in disguised ways. Just as everyone was getting used to “AI is getting more expensive,” DeepSeek did something absurd — they permanently cut the price of V4-Pro to a quarter of the original.

Recently, while doing differential gene expression analysis, I needed to map the expression values of DEGs onto KEGG pathways. I used Bioconductor’s pathview package, but the resulting nodes were ridiculously large and the colors were wrong. With the help of AI, I fixed the issues and also picked up a new patching technique along the way.

I recently helped a friend build a small tool that processes sequences from an input file and generates XML in a specific format. My friend isn’t comfortable with the command line, so a GUI was needed. The input data also had confidentiality requirements, meaning all computation had to happen locally. Normally I’d build a desktop app, but considering long-term maintenance, I wanted to try an offline-capable PWA. I checked and found that Pyodide already ships pandas as a wasm package, so there was nothing extra to do on the runtime side — let’s go!

It’s been barely a month since I wrote [The Perplexity of Modern Laptop and Tablet Choices], and here I am again.

That’s right — the same person who confidently declared “I’ll stick with the Fydetab Duo for now” at the end of that article is now sitting in front of an HP Chromebook X11 typing these words.

The essence of human nature is “it smells so good” (after swearing off something). My essence is tinkering.

I previously wrote a blog post about using pixi’s tasks feature to fix missing dependency issues with Bioconductor packages (like GenomeInfoDbData, BSgenome.Hsapiens.UCSC.hg38, etc.) after installation. At the time, I only knew the problem existed but didn’t understand the root cause — I was just providing a less-than-ideal workaround.

But recently, with insights from AI responses, I finally figured out the real reason — it all comes down to the post-link script mechanism in the Conda ecosystem.

I recently switched to another batch of commonly used AI tools — some pleasantly surprising, some left me speechless. Here’s my honest record. Multica: Master of Cyber Livestock ManagementMultica’s...

Good news — the new company also provides laptops, and I got a Lenovo Xiaoxin 14 Pro with 32GB of RAM, the best-spec work computer I’ve had in 8 years.

The bad news is it has a glossy screen, and the office lights are so bright that the glare hurts my eyes. Luckily I also got a monitor, so I just use the external display (too bad the OLED has better colors…).

Every time I get a new machine, I used to configure SSH keys for GitHub to clone and push code. But I never bothered to keep track of the keys, so I ended up recreating them repeatedly. It wasn’t until I ran into multica and browsed the issue tracker that I realized GitHub provides GitHub CLI (gh) for quick authentication…

I maintain a package channel on prefix.dev to distribute some self-built packages. Since I’ve been busy with work recently, I haven’t looked after it for a while. Today I checked and noticed that the Actions had mysteriously stopped running… So I looked into the reason and decided to document a few other issues as well.