Here’s some background about my current project, feel free to skip straight to the tips section below.

As of recently I’ve been hired as an undergrad research assistant at UTK. I’m developing a reimplementation of PatchWorks by Austin Henley (who I’m working for).

The new project is now named CodeRibbon, since we’re essentially starting from a clean slate in terms of codebase, and we’re rethinking a few human interaction factors.

For the reimplementation we wanted something that can be used in the real world, since the plan is to make CodeRibbon open source and easy to install & use.

In the end we chose to make it an Atom plugin because of how easily and rapidly we can prototype and design a full IDE experience. It’s not called “the most hackable editor” for nothing.

So here are some useful tips I’ve learned while working on Atom plugins.

I hate the lack of volume uniformity across the web, YouTube videos range from far too quiet to far too loud, Bandcamp has no adjustment of it’s own, even in Discord individuals can be four times louder than another, and changing volume levels for every different video I watched finally got to me.

So now, I never have to touch the volume controls on a video every again.

at least IN THEORY; I still end up doing so by habit occasionally…

Here’s how you can also have always-level audio on Ubuntu 18.04:

I recently built a new mid-tower PC, but made some decisions worth writing about.

I had a few goals in mind when building this (over the course of a few months), but most importantly I was going to use for gaming.

Also, I wanted to run VR. And you probably already know that I’ll only have Linux installed on the PC, so that’s where my build strategy topics come in:

A.K.A Why do all my USB 3.0 Hubs break?

I’ve gone through two powered USB 3.0 Hubs now, one still kinda works, sometimes, the other, well I sent that one back because it didn’t even last 6 hours during my normal use.

But then I thought,

I just burnt the second powered USB Hub I bought, am I expecting too much from them?

And I might just be expecting too much…

Today, Chrome 69 arrived on my daily driver.

I was not impressed.

You’ve probably heard, the internet is all over how Chrome started hiding the www and m subdomains, and further obfuscating the URL by hiding the protocol in an ealier release.

Today, I was horrified by the round design that plagued my omnibar. Who came up with that idea? I’d like to let them know that the current design trend is still rectangular, please do not put circles into my otherwise square-cornered UI.

However, today was not an uncommon occurrence for me, there have been multiple changes made to the Chrome defaults that I’ve disagreed with.

Luckily, most of these changes have Chrome Flags associated with them, so I’m not moving browsers quite yet.

Let’s go over those flags: