I’m getting that with Gmail and 2 google sheets open (just as an example workload), my system says Zen uses 899 MB of memory, while Firefox uses 1261 MB. However, the way they split tasks into different processes (or at least the way my system monitor groups them) seems to be different, so I’m not sure how much of that difference is real.

Looking at the browsers task manager, they report about the same amount of memory by the browser itself, and for tab handling FF seems to grab more memory when opened, then decrease over time, whereas Zen seems to have a more consistent memory consumption. Sheets tabs use equivalent memory in both, and Gmail uses about 20% more memory in Zen. Both use an insignificant amount of CPU, of course.

Zen does feel more responsive, but it’s not a dealbreaker. Good to know the customizations aren’t causing catastrophic resource usage though.

Edit: My only other thing I find wierd is that its kinda hard to close tabs. You have to use the right-click menu – even using the ‘c’ keyboard shortcut only selects it, and hitting it again moves to another option!

Hmmm this feels like Vivaldi built on Firefox. I like the tiling for tabs! Overall pretty good, would like to see the tab tiling separators smaller, but that’s a small gripe. Looking forward to see where this goes!

I just use Zettlr (a markdown editor optimized for writing research papers). I wish it wasn’t an electron app, as it’s paggy as hell sometimes on Linux, but it’s the best balance I’ve found between features, ease of use, and stability.

It’s…not. The original press release is typically hype-y, but the part that toms hardware article really mangled is that they didnt find a way to do it, they found a new design for a device to do it.

So all their products are breaking…

To be honest, I’m not sure if it would be more concerning for them to have just one fatal issue with their process, or two unrelated ones.

At least according to Wikipedia, small amounts of carbon (< 2.14%) in the final alloy are an important component in controlling the ductility, which agrees with what I thought I remembered from materials classes (although I am not a materials scientist). Obviously not using the Bessemer process drastically reduces the amount of carbon necessary, but trace carbon is important.

Hmm I hope it lives up to the hype. I wonder what this new display tech is.

Hmmm I guess I haven’t really compared them on documents over about 20 pages, and even then it was just a qualitative judgment.

Jabref is so great, but do read the documentation when you start. Its easy to use without reading any of it, but there’s so much functionality beyond the basics that I just found out recently, and makes it so much easier to use!

LaTeX is just fundamentally not that fast, especially when pulling in lots of packages. I’m running it on a server with a i7-12700K and 64 GB of RAM, but I didn’t really notice a slowdown when running it on an old laptop, they’re both about the same speed as the official overleaf. With longer or more complex documents, I usually split it into multiple files and edit them on their own, then use \include{} to being them into the final file with proper formatting and the right preamble. Of course, thats using a local MikTeX install, so YMMV.

To be honest, I’ve always wondered why you can’t like “pre-compile” a bunch of packages into a binary and include that to speed things up. I’m sure there are good reasons, I just don’t know them.

Oh I got it running eventually. If you were on Linux, it’d be fine, but since on Windows the docker engine runs inside WSL, the ports exposed to a browser in Windows are not the same as what Overleaf is trying to expose in WSL.

I checked it out, seems interesting but I still prefer Feeder. Mostly because I couldn’t get Read You to actually show text/images from a page, for instance XKCD.

Also LyX will not seamlessly interconvert with a TeX file, even though it seems like it ought to. Pandoc conversion between TeX and markdown seems to be less fixing each time, but is also not 1:1. For writing where I care about being able to draft quickly, I’ve settled on writing markdown with embedded LaTeX with something like Zettlr, then converting to a LaTeX with Pandoc for final formatting. You can also convert to Word better from md than from TeX, for those collaborators who refuse to comment on a PDF.

Just FYI, I’ve done this, and if you’re not super familiar with Docker network permissions it can be more than a bit funky, especially if you’re on Windows. I’m sure it’s trivial for folks who’re used to docker, but getting the right ports configured is a bit of a pain.

If you’re on Linux, I found Gummy to be the closest to Overleaf’s constant recompilation. My default has always been TexStudio, it has a good UI, but you can also use a VSCode extension. These are all just editors, though. You’d also need to download LaTeX locally. On Windows, that’s MikTeX, on Mac it’s MacTeX, and on Linux texlive is usually already installed, but you may need to install packages. On Debian-based distros, they’re grouped into collections like texlive-science.

I will say that I’ve helped friends who were very used to overleaf to a local editor, and they were quite frustrated that TeXStudio wasn’t exactly 1:1 with the overleaf UI. Please know beforehand that if you’re expecting to be able to do things like open images in the TeX editor to check on them before inserting them, that’s not gonna happen.

Happy writing!

Yeah, even if you don’t hack em, I just use it for ebooks from my library and that works great. Not open source by a long shot, but wayyyyy better than kindle.

…and neovim. For a more IDE-like environment there’s also LunarVim.

Zettlr and JabRef

I can answer questions 2 and (tentatively) 4!

When freezing samples, they are cooled rapidly to form vitreous (noncrystalline) ice. If the ice warms enough (and that temp is still well below 0°C), it can transition into a crystalline form. This makes the ice expand and become spiky, which can damage proteins and cells.

For differences in LN2 usage, not every dewar is created equal. Age, the degree of vacuum between the walls, and the distance between the inner and outer walls can substantially affect the thermal conductivity, and thus the boil-off. Differences in how they are capped (which by nature can’t be vacuum-insulated) can also change their efficiency.

That is weird. I don’t think i’ve ever seen a sample dewar that couldn’t last two weeks, most are fine for a month or more. How the hell are they designing their sample storage system, that it’s only go of for four days? Are they insulating with Styrofoam?