It seems I had mistakenly deleted my previous post about my ThinkPad X61 (not EXWM, but right after purchase). Here are some photos of it!

When I was running Void Linux on my ThinkPad X61, I had to install minimal xfce4 for i3wm despite that I didn’t want any desktop environment (DE) on it. Now, I switched to Debian 13 but it runs EXWM (see this post) now. It still has to install minimal xfce4 tools, such as thunar if I want to use Firefox, but there’s practically no appearance of any GUI thing in Emacs.

In i3wm I used to use Thunderbird client diectly, but now I can’t do that very conveniently. I could install and open Thunderbird in an Emacs buffer, just like how I open Firefox, but Emacs has good integration with basic IMAP accounts. Although I can’t use school email or other Gmail accounts, I don’t really mind because this computer is my hobby machine anyways.

For minimal setup, this was everything on Emacs side. Note that the default location of Isync and msmtprc are in home directory, in my case it’s .config. For Isync it’s not specified in the Emacs config, but I might have set it somewhere else.

(use-package mu4e 
  :config 
  (setq mu4e-maildir "~/.mail/personal/" 
        mu4e-get-mail-command "mbsync personal" 
        mu4e-update-interval 300 
        mu4e-inbox-folder "/Inbox" 
        mu4e-sent-folder "/Sent" 
        mu4e-drafts-folder "/Draft" 
        mu4e-trash-folder "/Trash" 
        mu4e-refile-folder "/Junk" 
        mu4e-compose-signature-include-separator nil 
        mu4e-compose-signature "Makihiro" 
        user-mail-address "makigo@aubsebian.net" 
        user-full-name "Makihiro GO") 
  (setq sendmail-program "msmtp" 
        send-mail-function #'sendmail-send-it 
        message-sendmail-f-is-evil t 
        message-sendmail-extra-arguments (list "--read-envelope-from" "-C" (expand-file-name "~/.config/msmtprc") "-a" "personal") 
        message-send-mail-function #'message-send-mail-with-sendmail))

In ~/.config, it needs one Isync config for incoming emails and one msmtp config for outgoing emails.

# Isync 
IMAPAccount personal 
Host <your-email-server> 
User makigo@aubsebian.net 
PassCmd "gpg --quiet --for-your-eyes-only --no-tty --pinentry-mode loopback --passphrase <your-passphrase> --decrypt ~/.mailpass.gpg" 
TLSType IMAPS 
Port 993 
CertificateFile /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt 
 
IMAPStore personal-remote 
Account personal 
 
MaildirStore personal-local 
Path ~/.mail/personal/ 
Inbox ~/.mail/personal/Inbox 
Subfolders Verbatim 
 
Channel personal 
Master :personal-remote: 
Slave :personal-local: 
Patterns * 
Create Both 
Expunge Both 
Sync All 
SyncState 1

# msmtp 
account personal 
host <your-email-server (smtp)> 
port 465 
tls on 
tls_starttls off 
auth on 
user makigo@aubsebian.net 
passwordeval "gpg --quiet --for-your-eyes-only --no-tty --pinentry-mode loopback --passphrase <your-passphrase> --decrypt ~/.mailpass.gpg" 
from makigo@aubsebian.net 
account default : personal

Oath2 does not work (or I just don’t know), but passwords do. There are multiple ways to setup the password encryption. I use Gnupg:

$ printf '%s' 'password' > ~/.mailpass 
$ chmod 600 ~/.mailpass 
$ gpg --symmetric ~/.mailpass

If gpg --decrypt ~/.mailpass.gpg successfully decrypts the passphrase, it’s done but if you have a passphrase for it, you need to pass --pinentry-mode loopback --passphrase <your-passphrase> in PassCmd and passwordeval.

# PassCmd for Isync and passwordeval for msmtprc 
"gpg --quiet --for-your-eyes-only --no-tty --pinentry-mode loopback --passphrase <your-passphrase> --decrypt ~/.mailpass.gpg"

Further Configurations

• Isync
• A Complete Guide to Email in Emacs using Mu and Mu4e

This blog originates from a mythical supremacy of science degree coming from a friend of mine.

First of all, there is no doubt (at least to me) that science sounds cooler than engineering just because of the amount of math and whatever is required to study the natural sciences, which are usually not required to the same extent for engineering because it also requires other skills such as application and creativity.

From this argument, clearly there’s no winner regarding which field is harder since both require different sets of disciplines. The illusion that engineering seems to be easier is merely a byproduct of how broad the field is, with so many possibilities that the more difficult aspects get harder to notice.

The statement that science is cooler than engineering now sounds no more convincing than intellectual masturbation.

Stock Android does not provide a way to edit /etc/hosts directly and rooting phone always comes with some risks. Besides, newer models are usually not supported; usually it takes about a year or two.

personalDNSfilter is a DNS filter proxy that allows you to block ads but also allows you to set extra /etc/hosts. Since my note-taking appliaction is hosted on my old laptop at home and my router does not support NAT loopback, I can’t access to it with my phone within home Wi-Fi. Now it works like a charm.

My Google Pixel 6a had been in use for around 3.5 years. Honestly, it was one of the best phones I’ve ever owned/used. I did have some overheating issues, though not serious, in the first couple months. Other than that, it basically does not heat up at all; it has about 2 days of battery charge; the performance was perfectly smooth. The only dissatisfaction I can needle-pick is that the camera was not great in long distance. I had troubles taking photos of presentation/blackboard clearly afar, but for scenery I don’t mind; I’m not a big fan of high-resolution photography anyway. Nonetheless, the biggest pro of Pixel phones is that they are supported by GrapheneOS which ironically removes Google by default and provides extra security features.

Sadly, about a month ago the microphone started not working properly, which ultimately led me to switch.

My budget was 50k yen (282.21 EUR) or less, and I found four appealing candidates.

1. Sony Xperia 10 VI (about 53k)
2. Nothing Phone 3a (about 54k)
3. Nothing Phone 2a (about 39k)
4. Motorola g64 5G (about 23k)

Motorola was eliminated quickly after watching some review videos on YouTube; the build quality just doesn’t make me believe using it for over 3 years, which is a minimum requirement.

Nothing Phones have very positive reviews (I also have Nothing earbuds). Both models outperform other phones in the list which really makes it seem like a no-brainer option. However, high performance (good numbers on the board) is not my priority; aesthetics and longevity are. Although Nothing Phones are indeed beautiful and they seem to last long, I found myself not able to look away from the good old Xperia.

In fact, I’m a long-time Xperia enthusiast. I own a Z3 Compact, a X Performance, and a XZ1. While the design is sometimes questionable, the Xperia 10 line has a special place for me.

As for which Xperia 10, VII, released about two weeks ago, has a wider screen (19.5:9) and is very expensive, so no. V, released in 2023 (one year after I bought my Pixel 6a), is cheaper but not as good as VI in terms of performance and is already 2 years old, so no. The winner is Xperia 10 VI!

I purchased it on Oct 30, one day before Halloween.

Low Effort Review

Phone is beautiful, light, and compact.
Works as expected.
Battery life is as good as expected.

When I obtained this domain, Cloudflare provided free email forwarding service which allows me to receive emails headed to @aubsebian.net from other email servers. At the time, Gmail was the only option and frankly, it was quite convenient to use both Gmail and aubsebian emails on one platform.

Allowing multiple email accounts on one host email account is called aliasing, and the setup was fairly easy. The problems besides privacy are slow synchronization/fetching (one time I had to wait over one minute) and potential useless personalized ads.

I reached out to the company where I currently work part-time, the company was started with email magazine service, but they are going to terminate it. Also, it does not even support TLS encryption, which is actually surprising to hear in 2025.

I ultimately switched to Sakura Internet (or this Japanese Wikipedia page), which is a Japanese cloud and hosting service significantly backed by the government. Interestingly, the government also began using it as its internal cloud service since 2023.

The fetching speed is like instant. By the way, I have PGP key available as well (see homepage).

My beloved ThinkPad X61 is going to have a “software” upgrade.

For a long time it has been running Void Linux with i3wm, then I switched to Debian 12 with TTY by default. While the idea was to minimize the time using any graphical interfaces, there are just too much demand on viewing PDFs and browsing. Besides, rendering Japanese on TTY requires extra work.

So, I did some research and found EXWM (Emacs X Window Manager), which makes Emacs THE window manager itself. Surprising, I have no complaints at all. It works fantastic.

I chose Debian 13 as the base system mostly for the stability. For newer software compilation which requires newer build tools I will just temporarily use the unstable branch.

Fun fact: in EXWM, exiting Emacs (like exiting any Emacs) is basically logging out, so it’s important to get used to debugging within Emacs without closing/opening like a noob.

As Notion is being aggressive with data collection, I decided to switch to an alternative that allows me to self-host. Outline is something similar to Notion, with lacks of some popular features such as calendar and database but fortunately I don’t need them anyways.

This website is hosted by Cloudflare, which is integrated with GitHub, while subdomains, for example Outline in this case, are locally hosted. Since it is my first time locally hosting a website, it did take some time to make it work. Mostly it was nginx; configuring it was not so intuitive.

I’m using it as my solution of note taking and documenting research progress.

Reference: this link.

On Linux this is a standard feature, but on Windows you have to open the Registry Editor. Open the Registry Editor, navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop, and edit the UserPreferenceMask value as follows:

9F 3E 07 80 12 00 00 00

Next, in the same location, edit the ActiveWndTrkTimeout value as follows:

150 (set the base to decimal)

Note that 150 here is the delay in milliseconds before focus kicks in, so set it to whatever you like. Once you’re done, log out and log back in.

If you want raise-on-hover

If you want the window to come to the front when the cursor moves over it, go to Control Panel\Ease of Access\Ease of Access Center\Make the mouse easier to use and check “Activate a window by hovering over it with the mouse”.

Most GNU/Linux distributions ship with a Western-language spell checker like Ispell out of the box. Of course, Windows doesn’t make such a convenient tool easy to install.

I use Ispell for English spell-checks in Emacs, but getting the same thing working on Windows was not so easy, so I’m writing it down.

First, it seems that on Windows Hunspell is more popular (or maybe easier to install). I thought there could be no big difference between them so I chose to go with Hunspell.

Procedures

Open PowerShell as administrator and run the following, one at a time:

Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass 
Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('http://internal/odata/repo/ChocolateyInstall.ps1'))

Next, install Hunspell via choco.

choco install hunspell.portable

Then download the English (or whichever language you want) dictionary from LibreOffice Extensions. The downloaded file is an oxt, but it’s basically a ZIP, so extract it one way or another. Place the relevant dictionary files (.aff and .dic) into a directory that is on Hunspell’s search path. You can find Hunspell’s path by running

hunspell -D

Then run

hunspell -D -d en_US NUL

to install the dictionary. Replace en_US with whichever language you want to install.

That’s the setup done. Now just tweak your .emacs and you should be good. If you installed Hunspell via choco, it’s added to PATH automatically; otherwise, either add it to PATH manually or put the full path on the third line.

(setenv "LANG" "en_US") 
(setenv "DICTIONARY" "en_US") 
(setq-default ispell-program-name "hunspell.exe")

This might just work, but on newer versions of Emacs it sometimes doesn’t, for some reason. The error looks like this:

ispell-phaf: No matching entry for en_US in ‘ispell-hunspell-dict-paths-alist’.

According to this page, the fix is to patch ispell.el.

At the moment that’s line 1127:

- (affix-file (concat dict ".aff"))) 
+ (affix-file (concat (file-name-sans-extension dict) ".aff")))

Apply the patch, then finally run M-x byte-compile-file path/to/ispell.el, and it should work.

Article: Distance-Based ISA for Efficient Register Management

Challenges in current register management

Despite the fact that modern processors’ insane capabilities of parallel instruction executions and scheduling capabilities, they still face the problem of register renaming process, a process that follows right after decoding process.

What does register renaming do?

Register Renaming is a technique used in modern CPUs (1995 and later) to avoid false data dependencies during instruction execution, especially in out-of-order execution. Consider the following scenario:

R1 = R2 + R3 ; Instruction A 
R2 = R4 + R5 ; Instruction B

Here, instruction B writes R4 + R5 into R2, which is read in instruction A. When executing several instructions at once, such as parallel and superscalar execution, WAR (Write After Read) hazard might happen to R2, meaning that the value of R2 can be written in instruction B before it is read in instruction A.

By reserving more physical registers than logical ones, R2 in instruction B can be stored somewhere else to avoid WAR. For example:

P1 = P2 + P3 ; Instruction A: R1 → P1, R2 → P2, R3 → P3 
P9 = P4 + P5 ; Instruction B: R2 → P9

In summary, the main use of register renaming is for out-of-order execution to maximize throughput. Remind that out-of-order instructions is different from re-ordered instructions for pipelining, since the latter does not require additional physical registers.

The challenges of register renaming

Register renaming demands heavily multi-ported memory, which consumes substantial chip area and power, making it difficult to scale the rename width (number of instructions that can be renamed per cycle) easily. Additionally, maintaining the mapping between logical and physical registers is inherently complex. For instance, in an event of a branch misprediction, all renaming tied to the mispredicted instructions must be reverted, requiring the mapping table to be restored to its prior state. As the Re-order buffer (ROB) grows, these overheads increase proportionally.

Distance-based instruction set architecture in a nutshell

Instead of reusing registers, distance-based instruction set architecture (ISA) uses a sliding buffer to store the results of instructions. The result of each instruction is stored in the sliding buffer (reserved physical registers) so that register renaming is unnecessary. Consider the following example:

X = [2] + [3]

where [2] means “use the result of the instruction that is 2 instructions before me”. The indecies are managed by a register pointer (RP), indicating the offset between “current instruction” and “previous instructions”. Since there is a limited number of physical registers. RP resets its value every time it reaches the buffer’s capacity.

This approach indeed eliminates the need for register-renaming hardware, thereby resolving the bottlenecks associated with traditional register-based architectures.

Also, as shown in the article, there are other methods that implements this novel ISA, such as Clockhands and TURBULENCE. Nevertheless, these methods all relate to the author of STRAIGHT: Hidetsugu IRIE from The University of Tokyo.

In Emacs, I can use mozc-emacs-helper to type Japanese without triggering system input method (IM). However since I don’t have “use different input method for each window” enabled because it kinds of fucks my brain, system IM sometimes remains active in Emacs. The fix is to edit the Exec line in Emacs’ .desktop file as follows.

Exec=env XMODIFIERS=@im=none GTK_IM_MODULE=xim QT_IM_MODULE=xim /usr/bin/emacs %F

This problem does not happen in xfcee though. Turning on system IM Mozc using its keybind directly turns on Mozc inside of Emacs.

The default way of creating a Python virtual environment is through something like the following command:

python3 -m venv .virtual-env

where you cannot effectively specifcy which version of Python for the specific virtual environment. Conventionally, you can specify it by a README file, but this takes extra steps.

pyenv is a tool which exactly solves this problem. Nevertheless, it is generally a great tool for handling multiple versions of Python.

For example if I want to create a virtualenv with a specific Python version, I can achieve this by doing:

pyenv virtualenv 3.12.8 virtualenv-test

Then, activate it whatever directory I am at in the shell:

pyenv activate virtualenv-test

Read more about virtualenv here.