Ryan's World of Nonsense

Myself at Exmouth, Devon As 2024 is coming to an end, I find myself reflecting on this incredible journey that 2024 has been. It was a year filled with challenges, explorations and constant suffering in the lab.  Here’s a recap of some of the highlights that made my 2024 truly unforgettable. January: Visiting St Austell and riding the HST Charlestown Harbour In the start of January, while everybody else is either partying or holidaying in the most touristy spots in the world, I hopped on a two-hour train ride down to the Cornish town of St Austell, a town famous for its brewery and one of the top 5 most dangerous small towns in Cornwall according to CrimeRate. Some of the locals even called it "St Awful". With that in mind, I hopped off the train and engaged in a lovely conversation with one of the locals, with his thick Cornish accent (I presume), the conversation didn't last very long until I just nod yes to everything he says. (I think at some point he asked me if I ea...

The Great Topsham March It's a sunny Saturday with scattered clouds and gorgeous blue skies. What a perfect day for a walk.  I made my way from Exeter's city centre to the quay, where I start my walk along the River Exe down to Topsham and I've decided to name this walk "The Great Topsham March". Sounds cool, doesn't it?     The quay is pretty busy, with people drinking and relaxing under the sunlight. I stroll past the fish market, where a band is performing (Didn't understand a word of what they're singing.) and make my way down to Trews Weir.  Trews Weir Trews Weir was built to raise the water level for the Exeter ship canal, which is built by John Trew of Glamorgan (Hence the name Trews Weir). The weir was also used to provide water for a fulling mill, a cotton mill and a paper mill. You can learn more about the weir's history here .  I then made my way across Belle Isle Park, walking past runners, dog walkers and the elderly, and end up in Du...

This post contains strong language. Viewer discretion is advised. Hi. Let me tell you a story. It's my first year in university and as an international student I'm required to live on campus resident halls until my second year. In each "house" within the halls, there's around 2 cleaners (at least for my house). The cleaners in charge of my "house" include one British 66-year-old bloke (Which I'll just refer to as "cleaner" below) and a Women.  Cleaner is in charge of cleaning mine and my roommate's room for 90% of the time. We always had a chat when he comes in and cleans my room, my kitchen and toilet etc. He normally comes on Wednesdays or Thursdays, which in normal school period, I'm probably away in a lecture. But during holidays or exam periods (when I'm writing this blog), I'm more likely to be in my room and this morning was no exception.  I was talking with cleaner this morning while he's cleaning my room, and he...

Ryan in Wales - Part 1 Wales. A country that nobody seemed to care about. When we talk about the UK, we instantly think of England, Scotland, Northen Ireland (Not so much) but not Wales... Well, unless you're from there.  Since I'm studying in the "partially beautiful" city of Exeter, I'm able to hop on a 2hr and 30m train ride to the capital of Wales: Cardiff. Now why would I want to visit Wales? It all started from January, when I was in my dorm, bored and doesn't want to do any schoolwork. I started a course on Duolingo, and I went for the most popular language of them all... Welsh. Yep. I'm learning Welsh on Duolingo.  Why? Why not?  Anyway, I hopped on the train on a cloudy afternoon on the 1st of April and embarked on my 2-and-a-half-hour journey to Cardiff, Wales. (There are faster options if you change at Bristol, but my train is cheaper and it's a direct train.) The train was pretty busy. A lovely woman was sitting on my reserved seat, asleep....

             Recently a laptop called 'Pinebook' has caught my attention. This laptop costs only $99 USD and It's running Linux. A laptop this cheap usually won't be 'user-friendly' because many corners were cut for lowering the expenses. But $99 dollars? This is really unheard of. So let's take a look of this $99 dollar laptop's specs.  This is the Pinebook's specs shown in Pine64's website. As you can see, It's armed with an 1.2 GHz Allwinner A64 quad core processor. This processor might not be familiar with some of you so let me tell you a little bit about it. The Allwinner A64 is a 64-bit tablet processor developed by Allwinner which is a Chinese company. It's got Quad core Arm Cortex-A53 processors and a Mali-400 GPU. No wonder it's running Linux. I'm not sure it'll got enough power to run Windows.  So the specs isn't the best, in fact it's pretty poor. But again, It's $99 dollars. What do you expect? This pro...