Recently, I passed a ten-year streak of doing Duolingo every day. It's not like I do the bare minimum either; for the past three years, at least, my end-of-year Duo report records me in the 0.1% of learners on their application. My profile lists a rather impossible list of languages, many of which I looked in my early years and, I must admit, were handy whilst travelling through Europe. These days I'm concentrating on standard Chinese and French, whilst last year I completed the Spanish course as I was travelling to South America. In other words, over the years, my language learning has become more functionally-oriented rather than experimental.

Despite this regular use, I have mixed opinions about Duolingo. I will argue that Duolingo is the best language-learning application currently available. Nothing else comes to mind that has an extensive range of courses, that has a similar depth of content, that has regular updates, expansions of content and alignment to CEFR language competence. It continues to improve in areas such as spoken content, grammar, and conversational use of a language.

Recently, I had noticed that when I add an attachment (e.g. to email, via a web browser), GNOME's GTK file picker was only providing a list from recently opened items. Previously, it provided a PATH selection, which was a lot more useful for me. When the file picker opens, normally, there is a left-hand sidebar containing items like "Home", "Documents", "Downloads", etc. A normal workaround if this isn't available is to select Ctrl+L to open a location-based entry box, but this wasn't available either. The following question arises: How do I revert to the previous PATH-based menu?

Wuxi is home to China's National Supercomputing Centre and the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer. This system came to global attention in June 2016, when it topped the global Top500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers, far surpassing the second system (also Chinese, the Tianhe-2A) let alone the third (Titan, from the United States).

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to visit Guizhou, China's National Big Data Comprehensive Pilot Zone. At first blush, the choice of Guizhou seems to be an unusual one. With a population of 38 million, it ranks 17th in the list of administrative divisions and 18th in population density, and it is even further behind in terms of GDP (22nd).

This presentation covers the science of Earth's "energy budget" of heat inputs and losses, and describes the overall climate system. It continues with a description of the Industrial Age, the introduction of direct temperature measurement, and the resulting temperature rise from burning fossil fuels. This is followed by a description of how Greenhouse Gases operate on a molecular level, the increase since the pre-industrial period, and the carbon cycle.

With at least three disciplines of interest - energy and climatology, public economics, and high-performance computing - there is the issue of whether current trends in artificial intelligence are environmentally sustainable. The following is a basic sketch of electricity usage, needs, and costings.

Environment Modules allow users to dynamically modify the $PATHs in their shell environment. In particular, it provides the ability to switch between different software applications and versions. It is a very handy tool for developers who want to test against multiple versions or compilation options of an application and for users on a multi-user system (e.g., high performance computing) where both consistency and the opportunity to introduce newer features needs to exist for different research groups. The two major environment modules systems are the older, Tcl-based system, and the newer Lua-based system (Lmod). Both allow default versions of a software application to be set as in the $PATH when invoked. This can cause problems and should be disabled.

LAME (recursive acronym Lame ain't an MP3 encoder) has been an exceptional application for creating MP3 audio files from other formats (e.g., WAV, FLAC, MPEG-1, MPEG-2) or even for re-encoding existing MP3 files. Creating MP3 files is popular due to their extensive use in portable media players, as they combine an impressive reduction in file size with minimal loss from uncompressed audio.

The 2025 New Zealand Research Software Engineering Conference was held on September 23-24th. It has run for almost a decade, starting in 2016 as the CRI Coding Conference before becoming the Science Coding Conference, a title it kept until 2020, when it became the Research Software Engineering Conference. Throughout this time, it has focused on science and engineering, high-performance computing, and cloud computing and is aimed at various coders, sysadmins, software engineers, data analysts, and IT managers from public research institutions and has the endorsement of the RSE Association of Australia and New Zealand.

The following is an illustration of how to use xargs to conduct parallel operations on single-threaded applications, specifically wget.

GNU wget is a great tool for downloading content from websites. The wget command is a non-interactive network downloader; by "non-interactive" what is meant is that it can be run in the background. Some very hand options include -c (continue, for partially downloaded files), -m (mirror, for an entire website), -r --no-parent (recursive, no parent, to download part of a website and its subdirectories). The cURL application has a wider range of protocols and includes upload options, but is non-recursive.