Personal on Gaveen Prabhasara

About Me

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’m Gaveen Prabhasara de Silva, a sysadmin, programming language tourist, and petty dabbler of the written word. Some people know me as a technologist, some as a poet/writer, some as an artist, and some as a tinkerer—all valid aspects of my life. I am also neurodivergent and a father.

My areas of interest include systems engineering, writing, music, craftsmanship/DIY, open source, science/technology, anime, mycology, and cooking—among other things. It doesn’t necessarily mean I’m good at them, just that I’m interested in them. It also doesn’t mean my interest in something is for its conventional usage. For instance, I’m fascinated by all sorts of polearms, even though I’m a pacifist. I like making all kinds of mechanical keyboards but only like using ergonomic builds. But I digress.

Welcome, Again

Thu, 04 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Guess who’s back, back again? Sorry to dissapoint you. It’s just me.

I just posted an update on my side project, Asura Linux:

What happened

Despite my claims not to, due to my eagerness to have a functional desktop UX sooner, I ended up trying to build a usable distro. I could have gone the Atomic/Universal Blue approach, but that wasn’t exactly what I wanted. Since I wasn’t trying to adjust an existing flavor to taste or attempt to write my own full-featured Wayland compositor, I was trying to do too much too early. For example, building packages from source and generating custom ISOs was a lot of work—even without spending any real innovation tokens yet. This quickly became a bottleneck due to two personal reasons.

Neurodiversity

Sun, 04 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We, humanity, have come a long way to celebrate the diversity in our world. While it’s not all great—some people still like to use differences to “other” people and cause pain, harm, and even death—we’ve generally progressed to a point where such intentions don’t go unchallenged. We have taken a long time to understand that we are better together, not the same. While dragging our feet all that way, we are still making progress.

It's been a while

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Hey, it’s been a while. How have you been? Four years is a long time.

In my defense, a lot happened in those four years. There are already a million posts and podcasts about what the world went through during that time. There are at least a few about what people in Sri Lanka had to deal with. So, I won’t go there. At least not now.

At the moment, all I want to say is, here I am now. I want to write more often. Scratch that. I certainly want to post more often. I do write often. Just not the kind of thing I feel most would find interesting enough to read. In my past blog configuration, I had to complete several manual steps to publish a post after I was done writing. While it wasn’t particularly taxing, it usually became the straw that broke the back of the camel that was a new blog post. I can’t recall how many posts I left as drafts and eventually discarded.

My Setup: ErgoMech Keyboard

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

One of my hobbies/special interests is Ergonomic Mechanical Keyboards and Keyboard Layouts that go with them. I’ll use this page (soon) as an up-to-date place to explain how I have configured my custom ergonomic keyboard setup.

ID75

Until this page is ready, I’ll link the GitHub repo with my custom keyboard configuration.

My Setup: Text Editor

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In the future, I might keep an up-to-date page here explaining my text editor configuration (including plugin selection), both for posterity and as a hopefully helpful source of information.

Vim

Vim has been my preferred text editor for a long time. Since there is already a reasonably detailed blog post, I’ll point to it until there is a significant change.

Neovim

Neovim is a more modernized variation of Vim (kind of like how Vim was an upgrade to Vi). I use Neovim (nvim) as my preferred coding editor since is has everything Vim has and much more. For example, better syntax handling, better Language Server Protocol (LSP) and Debug Adapter Protocol (DAP) client integration, better code completion, etc.

My vim story

Fri, 14 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Once you have used ’notepad.exe,’ you have used all text editors—they said. A text editor is a text editor is a text editor—they said. After the first few years of running Linux/Unix professionally, I had subconsciously almost agreed with this idea, even though I knew Vim—more accurately, I thought I knew Vim. But when other people who actually knew how to use Vim used it, Vim still looked like magic.

If you have worked in a command line at some point, I am sure you can appreciate the wisdom of learning how to use a text editing program properly. On Unix/Linux command lines, text is king. Therefore, learning how to manipulate text effectively goes a long way for your productivity. If you can open a file and edit its content, it enables you to configure your system.

I thought I knew

Sat, 20 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I thought I knew how being a father would be. I have a father, a good one. I understood that much. I have nephews and nieces, and I love them to bits. I understood that much. So, when we became pregnant, I thought I knew how being a parent felt.

I knew I wasn’t nearly as ready as I wanted, but I didn’t think I had a vast gap in understanding how a father felt about their child. I had experienced a large swath of the human emotion spectrum and gathered a lifetime of experiences. So, I thought I knew how being a father would feel.

Whatever happened to that book?

Sun, 14 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Edit: This post has been slightly updated at the end of 2023 to reflect a more recent status of the writing projects.

Today is the Sinhala (and Tamil) New Year day. As I sit in front of the computer to partake in my trade—as one does according to tradition—I want to try and answer a question.

Whatever happened to that book I was writing? If—for whatever unfathomable reason—you wish to know more about what has been happening with these, you might like this update. Let me start with what is closest to being complete.

What is the meaning of that poem?

Mon, 07 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I am a poet, and that much I can say without the uncertainty I allude to in my public bio sections that read “SysAdmin, Programming Language Tourist, and Petty Dabbler of the Written Word”, or my first post here.

My work as a poet or a writer is mainly to write. But, I write mainly for the sheer joy of reading it back in every way I can. Let me explain that a little bit.

Here we go

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Where should I begin? Is this on?

Hello there! Welcome, fellow human beings, and any others reading. This is presumably Gaveen, and—despite all my efforts—you have found my blog. If this is the choice of Steins;Gate, who am I to complain.

There are no grand introductions here nor any roadmaps to unveil—just a realization to be had. The realization that I may have moved my blog again. There is, however, a simple promise to write when I can and enjoy the promise of writing.