[OFF] Essex Team Blitz and Lightning 2024

It was the 31st of June, 2024, the last day before the first half of the year is officially over. It was a Sunday and was remarkably sunny, in what is supposed to be the wettest summer in over a century in England.

For those of you who are aware of my shudderingly preposterous skills in chess, let me warn you that this post is about a chess tournament titled "Essex Team Blitz and Lightning 2024" which was hosted by the Ilford Chess Club which has unwittingly accepted me as a player over the past couple of years, during my stay, here in Essex, England.

This year the event had a with a time-control of 7 minutes per-player with no increments, I'm not sure about it's past but in 2023 it had the same time controls as well. It has been organised since 1993 and we are in the 28th edition (there we no events in 2020-2022) in 2024. The winners list (pre-COVID) can be found here: https://www.essexchess.org.uk/archive/team-blitz/ and the winners in 2023 were "Barking A", referenced from "https://www.essexchess.org.uk/activities-archive/activities-2022-23/essex-team-blitz-2023/".

Barking A won it this time around too, but it was a close fight between them and Wanstead Dynamos with tie-breaks deciding the championship. The team standings for this year follows.

Share mouse keyboard between Mac and Windows without KVM

Here's a problem that really got me flustered for some time. I was using a Mac OSX Ventura (13.x) from work and also a personal Windows 11 but I wanted to use them at the same time - when I'm taking a break from work - for example. However I wasn't aware of how to get my input streamed to both of them and switch between then whenever I like. After a lot of research I was able to find something that worked and that was free and open source!

I could have bought a KVM switch, but why spend money when technology and FOSS can solve my problem.

[OFF] Settling down in the UK (England) from India

It was quite a whirlwind ride for me to get settled finally in the UK after being offered to do so around in late November 2021. My employer, Apple, helped me a lot and frankly it has been so smooth for me so far since the 4 months that I landed here. The VISA process took around 1 month and after coming here I was able to get a rented apartment, bought a car on finance, got a credit card, setup my apartment and got my booster COVID-19 shot!

Some of the absolute essentials that folks who have moved to the UK with a job must have and are different from how it works in India -

1. Renting an apartment. The process of renting here is very transparent and the deposit is held with a Deposit Protection Service, so it's never a unilateral decision of not paying back the deposit held. I'm looking at you Bangalore land-lords!

2. SIM card - Of course, one of the first things you need to survive in the UK is phone number. You can get one from the airport, unlike in India, you don't need to provide your Adhaar or Voter ID card for this (or any form of ID, you can get it in a vending machine)! Any provider is fine, do check if they have 5G.

share keyboard mouse across 2 or more laptops

 In my last work place - ClearedIn, I had a strange problem of having too many laptops. Initially I started off working on a beautiful Acer Laptop (Aspire 5) with Windows 10 installed but then soon realized the laptop is of no use when doing a lot of computation tasks, i.e., joining a video call on teams when chatting on slack and simultaneously working on code. So I got another laptop - hp Pavilion this time, which was way better than the Acer one. However now I had a problem, I had 2 laptops and I wanted to use both at the same time.

I was using 2 keyboards and 2 mice. It was a pretty messy situation, but I did feel very important! Now when I had to take a break on my personal laptop, which is by the way a Lenovo Thinkpad p52 running Windows, I had another set of keyboard and mouse. Now don't forget the monitors too. I was in a mess.