Product Reviews on akos.ma

Goodbye, Cursor

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0200

Regular readers of this blog know that I’ve been quite a happy user of Cursor for the past year, but the recent news of its mother company being purchased by SpaceX has made me reconsider my decision, and cancel my current subscription altogether.

Neovim

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0200

Call me late to the party if you want, but I recently adopted Neovim as my new full-time text editor for work, and I have to say I’m very pleased of having done so.

Typst

Fri, 15 May 2026 00:00:00 +0200

Three years ago I wrote about a workflow to generate PDF files out of my Markdown content, both on this website and on De Programmatica Ipsum. That first setup involved Pandoc and TeX, and it was a solution that worked well, but was unfortunately slow as hell, particularly given the amount of articles I have in both sites. A faster solution was badly needed.

Keychron Q3 Max

Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 +0200

This year I decided to treat myself with a new keyboard, and I’ve chosen the Keychron Q3 Max; this post is a short summary of my impressions after a few weeks of use.

Kroki

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0100

Kroki is a wonderful tool I discovered during the time I worked as DevRel: it’s a small open source containerized application (compatible with OpenShift off-the-box) written in JavaScript, that encapsulates as many textual diagram formats as possible under a single unified API, offering a convenient way for users to generate diagrams, without needing to install separate libraries everywhere.

Uses and Abuses of Jira

Fri, 17 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0200

I’ve been using Atlassian Jira for more than 20 years already at this point, and I have seen a fair share of patterns and antipatterns (that’s Japanese for “fuckups”) and, being the new rambling old man, I feel entitled to spread my dystopian views on the pages of this publication you’re reading right now.

Vibe Coding with Cursor

Fri, 10 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0200

I work at a company that is truly invested into AI and LLMs, to the point that we can internally use (following some guidelines) quite a few tools in our day-to-day work: in particular, we have Gemini, Google NotebookLM, and Cursor available to all employees.

Zotero

Fri, 19 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0200

Writing articles for De Programmatica Ipsum made me adopt a workflow to read and annotate research papers. Most of the material that I use to write articles for DPI are papers, nearly all in PDF format, some with OCR’d text, some without (particularly older ones).

Calibre

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0200

I’ve already mentioned Calibre quite a few times in this blog in the past; for example when I talked about my sustainable ebook strategy, or when I gave some Flatpak tips and tricks. But Calibre has become such an important part of my workflow and daily computing habit, I feel I need to publish a product review about it.

Plugins for tmux

Fri, 25 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0200

I’m a big fan of tmux since I started using it back in 2010. I can’t conceive working on a terminal window without it, and I also use it in remote systems I access via SSH.