In the Clouds
8 January 2021
HAPPY NEW YEAR! Well 2020 was a long, and equally short, one wasn’t it? It’s amazing how just by staying inside all day everyday, not seeing anyone and doing practically the same few things that won’t potentially expose you to a deadly virus can make time feel like it’s standing still while also keeping you in a constant state of “wow it’s that time/day again already!?!?”.
Well it’s been a couple of months since the last post and a lot has changed! I’ve started work at an engineering consultancy that deals in computer aided engineering software (including writing software, selling it, training other companies and working with them by using the software themselves to help clients reach their targets) which has been really cool, but weird that I’ve been there almost 2 months now and never physically met any of them! We’ve mainly been just doing training courses so far but it has actually been really good; the software we’ve been training on so far is just about tolerancing parts in an assembly and even that has been cool, plus the company is really open to hearing our thoughts and ideas and I’ve already been able to give some recommendations that they’ve taken on.
Other than that, the shared house I was living at got renovated so we were moved into another property of the same landlord that was literally around the corner and had just been renovated itself. A few weeks later I moved out of there too and all the way up to Manchester! One of my close friends from uni is from Manchester and two of my final year flatmates who I also got on really well with recently moved in together here too and I’ve been wanting to move for a while anyway. I’d only visited the city once before for a weekend but do really like it here and I’m only about an hours walk from the city centre. There are 2 other guys in the house and they’re both my age and met each other at uni where they also did mechanical engineering! Obviously there’s a rampaging virus out there so we haven’t been mingling other than if we’re in the kitchen at the same time but they both seem really nice too so it really has all worked out amazingly!
Due to how tragically old and slow my laptop is I was able to get some funding for a new laptop, but unfortunately this funding was only £250 and came with the condition that I wasn’t allowed to add anything to that, so I have a nifty little Asus Cloudbook which has actually been pretty good! As you’d expect though, it does not come with the hardware requirements for high power engineering software and, due to being a Cloudbook, barely has any memory storage. One of the side projects we’ve been encouraged to look into at work is one of their systems that uses machine learning to predict problems for one of our clients, I was excited to get started looking into some machine learning but quickly filled up the laptop storage just while downloading the requirements for PyTorch! I was looking into buying an external hard drive that I could install everything onto to get around this, but then thought this would be a great time to put my cloud training to use! Not too long later (after following some pretty simple instructions online) and I have a virtual machine set up on Azure and connected via SSH to VS Code on my laptop, working just like the WSL I was using before. I went with Azure simply because the first walkthrough I found about connecting VS Code to a virtual machine started with setting up a VM on Azure, and it provides a free month so I figured why not? I’ll see how it goes for the month and what I actually end up needing and, as I back up my files on GitHub, I can easily terminate one machine, start a new one with a different company for whatever reason and clone the repos I want to it.
I will eventually get a new laptop with the specs I actually need to do everything I want to do in all areas, but for now I’m very happy with how easy it turned out to be to set up this VM and am going to set up a Windows one too to install and run the engineering software on and use it via remote desktop. This should mean I have no issues running any software as I can just edit the VM specifications if I need to, but there are still many hardware aspects that only a better laptop can provide (such as screen size and resolution), so a new laptop will definitely be worthwhile when I can comfortably afford one.
Stay safe and stay indoors,
¡JaBlog!