A Recap of Year 2016

It's about the end of this year and I felt like I should put together a recap post for this year. The thing is I'm not posting as much sine I have been busy elsewhere. (New home it is ;) )

But a lot of things happened. I started the year with a switch to Linux Mint, but after using it for 3-4 months got bored, and instead switched to KDE Neon distro which showcases latest plasma developments and certainly is cutting edge and exciting. But because of stability related issues - yeah it's cutting edge ;C - I had to abandon it. So couple of months back I'm back on Ubuntu. Actually my old Acer laptop which boasted of 1GB of RAM and was proving to be bane of all Linux distros I was trying, died second time. It turns on and everything seems to be working except no display. Maybe the LCD panel is gone or maybe the connector is damaged, I don't know. I don't have a spare monitor to connect to the D-SUB port so I can't check if it's really working or just making stupid noises. Maybe I'll get a monitor in near future and put this to work, maybe. 

So now I'm left with the blue Lenovo - blue because there's another Lenovo which my Sister uses which is black and had AMD A4 5000K APU inside, so that makes mine the Intel Lenovo which doesn't sound as good as Blue Lenovo. It's Pentium D + 2 GB+500GB machine which is working fine since last year I replaced it's battery and keyboard. Having 2GB RAM it's lot forgiving and manages to run everything fine. So that meant I'm sticking to Ubuntu since it just works now. (Previously it was bit of struggle on 1GB Acer J.) 

On Windows front, I'm sticking to tried and trusted Windows 7 - no surprises here. 

Mid year was quiet with me busy with things and work at office with assignment to a new project. 

In Sept, I got an Intex Aqua Fish to try out Jolla and it has been a good experience overall. They have good amount of work to do, there are many things missing, but there are updates and things are looking at least ok for Jolla. Lets see how far they make. I posted my experience of various things about Aqua Fish and Sailfish in many posts. I have not yet tried to use Aqua Fish as my daily driver. Will try soon.

Last but not least my Nubia Z9 Mini completed one year in Oct and to celebrate I replaced the factory applied screen protector with a tampered glass screen protector purchased for all of INR 169/-. Hahaha. But the original had acquired a number of scratches and was looking really scruffy. So the new one makes the phone look newer right away and better on eyes.

Meanwhile I started on a Sailfish App but after spending a some time on it I realized that I am not able to give it enough time to make it work. So I scrapped it. 

Ubuntu translations have continued and it's my pleasure to state that Marathi Language support have passed Tamil Language and is right behind Punjabi - got to keep kicking. This was possible because I got hold of butt-load of upstream translations for Inkscape. Still merging them with the po file from Launchpad was no mean feat and took me about a week. 

So that's all for Yr 2016. A lot has happened here in India with Demonetization, Black Money Issues, New Corruption scandals, Terrorist attacks and still we keep kicking. 

What's for new year? Well I'm thinking about getting a Raspberry Pi or some similar board and doing a TV Connected home computer with it, I'm just not sure if it'll serve the purpose that well. Lets see, I'm going through the available hardware and actual requirements. Might come true. The Dead Acer might see the light of day too. And The Blue Lenovo should keep going. That's all 2016! 

Adios!!!