I watch a lot of Youtube videos
While I love a good television series or movie, there's still something magical about having centuries worth of videos, submitted by ordinary people, just a few clicks away. I owe the wealth of my knowledge to the various netizens who have detailed their personal interests to the rest of the world through their uploads. While I will rail on and on about the ills of social media, I am weary about when Youtube is lumped in with the likes of Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, since it still provides a utility of hosting and sharing video, even with the social aspects stripped out. There's just one problem: it's owned by Google.
Of course, if it wasn't for one of the largest tech and advertising companies owning the site, Youtube would have gone under within a couple of years, but it's still something I wish weren't the case. Until the day that a decentralized video hosting site that rewards creators comes online and the masses flock to it, I will have to continue to fight with the beast that is Youtube data collection.
When I was younger, I used the Youtube in the way it was intended, signing in on the site or app, commenting, liking, and subscribing. As I grew older and became more concious (paranoid) about data collection, I merely exported my subscriptions to an opml feed (something that used to be a built in feature on the site) and collected all the videos that came through in my rss feed reader, watching them in MPV through their youtube-dl plugin. This worked great for years, but as time has continued, channels I followed stopped uploading, my own interests have changed, and the list got whittled down to fewer and fewer feeds. I would open up my feed reader and realize that none of the new videos were anything I wanted to watch. Every once in a while I would navigate back to the site and check out if anything caught my eye for a potential new feed to add, but it turns out when the algorithm has nothing to go off of, it will feed you the most generic and mind-numbing crap it has available for your recommendations, resulting in fruitless hunts.
Then I found Invidious, it was exactly what I wanted, a way to watch Youtube without all the tracking associated with it. Sure it was a little rough around the edges in places, but it worked. For a while I used the yewtu.be instance, but after getting fed up with the occasional outages, decided to host my own private one, which was sprung forward by finding Tailscale and not having to deal with port forwarding. It was heaven, for a time.
Then Google started cracking down. First it started blocking IPs that it detected were Invidious instances, which was solved by rotating your IPv6 address and forcing a connection with IPv6. Then every few weeks Invidious would break and you'd need to wait a couple of days for an update to come through to fix it. Then there was a day when it just stopped. Every video you'd click on would give you the same message: "This helps protect our community. Please sign in to confirm you’re not a bot". It didn't matter which instance you were on. After a few weeks I knew what it meant, Invidious was as good as dead in it's current iteration.
So I switched back to primarily using my feed reader, adding a few of the channels I had found, feeling defeated. As the weeks turned into months, any hope I still held for Invidious to return dwindled. At a certain point I accepted defeat, I just started using the main site, not signing in. Of course I knew this was a far cry from privacy with all the fingerprinting that I'm sure is going on behind the curtain, but they had won.
Wile using the site it was somewhat puzzling as to how they knew what I was watching. I rarely watched the video within the Youtube player, instead copying the link to the video and watching it in MPV. I became paranoid about every video I would watch, wondering just what little bit of data the Google overlords had gleaned from my activity on the site. I'd be cautious about every video my pointer would hover over.
It all got to be too much
I was tired of the paranoia eating away at me. I needed to do something. After some projects at work required me to script some browser automation, I learned about the Selenium project. If what did Invidious in was using the hidden API, maybe just scraping the actual site from what looks like a regular user will be the Trojan horse that can get past Youtube's increasingly strong defences! So that's exactly what I did:
Debloatube project page
This still provides more information to Google than what I would like, and is in a somewhat precarious position with Youtube's AI verification system potentially coming along, but it has eased some of my nerves. I discovered that almost every video link on Youtube comes with an extra part of the link (an '&' followed by some identifying string) which I presume is used for tracking watch history on a signed out session. There's also a huge preamble of recent search queries that comes along with the page. Debloatube strips all the links of any of this tracking information, just giving you the raw video link. It also allows you to leverage the work that has been put into the algorithm by allowing you to press the "feed algorithm" button on any video. in the background this opens the video in the background browser session so the algorithm sees that you clicked on it and thus hopefully will start putting similar videos in your feed. It also saves me the hassle of having to right-click and select "copy link" since clicking on the video card just copies the link to your clipboard. I have a keybinding for running "mpv $(xclip -o -selection clipboard)", a very useful one to have on the modern web.
This is still very work in progress, but has been working great for what I need it to be and has given me a bit more peace of mind.
I believe in Bigfoot
It's something I'm rather ashamed of, being lumped in with flat earth, faked moon landings, and lizard-people occupied government by the average person. I find it laughable to put it on the same level as those obviously false theories, but I'm sure there are flat earthers who would say the same about me.
The fascination with the subject started from a young age. When I was four or five I would have reoccurring nightmares about being chased down by a 50 foot tall ape, destroying everything in it's path, eventually reaching me, where I would awake in a panic. By the end of elementary school I saw an ad for Animal Planet's Finding Bigfoot and almost immediately got hooked on the show, staying up late every Sunday night to watch the new episode as soon as it came out. This time meeting the subject with intrigue instead of fear as I did in early childhood. Of course the apatite of a fanatical prepubescent was unable to be satiated by a low-rate network TV show and I explored anything I could find on the subject during the show's off season, renting out any book at the library about sasquatch and watching all the videos I could during the dawn of online video streaming. Years passed and I found other things to be interested in, slowly letting that passion dwindle. That was until finding a Bob Gymlan video pop up in my recommended feed while I was in high school. I hadn't thought about the subject much during the time in between the fall off in interest before I was 10 and the time I found the video in my mid teens, but after watching it the interest flared up again, albeit slightly less fanatical and with a bit more skepticism towards reports.
From everything I have ingested on the subject over the years, my thesis could be summed up as: There exists a species of large bipedal apes that inhabit forested regions of North America. They share many characteristics with known apes. Their footprints are similar to human prints, though are larger, do not have a notable arch, and appear to have a flexible mid-foot. They walk with an interesting gait where the leg rises to almost a 90 degree angle with each step and have arms that extend past their knees. While growing in popularity within the zeitgeist after the 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film, there are descriptions of similar creatures from westerners since their arrival in North America and before that from Native American cultures. Most of the details on foot structure come from the research of Jeff Meldrum of Idaho State University and the gait and arm details come from analysis of the PGF and other recorded sightings.
I could make this a whole collection of my favorite pieces of evidence, but that would be long and I'd much rather answer the problem that most non-believers raise as reason for the non-existence of Bigfoot.
If they exist why haven't we found any (good) evidence
If we ignore the parenthetical, I would answer that we do. The previously mentioned Patterson-Gimlin Film (PGF) is probably our best existing video evidence, but other relevant videos would be The Brown Footage, and The Freeman Footage. There are hundreds of plaster casts showing detailed characteristics that could not be replicated with stamping, like dermatoglyphics and evidence of injury as seen in the cripplefoot footprints. There have been hair samples which appear to be very similar to human hair, except thicker and without any signs of every being cut, also notably lacking a medulla so no DNA sampling can be done on it. There are recordings of possible sasquatch vocalizations, The Sierra Sounds. All in all, there is a large amount of evidence, but most of it is not taken seriously by non-believers. Why that is? Who really knows? I lean more on the side of the band-wagon effect over the more conspiratorial theories. Even many "believers" are mostly unaware of the evidence and are just more in it for the eye-witness testimony or worse, vibes.
Now let's not ignore the parenthetical. With every new piece of evidence, it is deemed by the non-believers as unsatisfactory in some manner, or if it is good evidence, the fact it is good proves it is a hoax. A common issue raised is that with the explosion of widely available HD cameras, why is it that we don't get better quality photos. I think the best explanation is that the creatures inhabit areas that make it harder for photography in combination with a misunderstanding of the capabilities of smartphone cameras. They tend to remain in areas with dense tree-cover and in shadows which they can blend into with their dark fur (though lighter color fur has been reported). Secondly the amount of post processing that occurs from trained data models on smartphone photos is why a relatively weak camera can produce stunning images in daily scenarios. With my Iphone 14 Pro I have taken some of the worst photographs known to man due to being outside the operating window of the camera and post-processor capabilities by taking photos durring dimly lit nighttime walks. This is only compounded by rural poverty, in isolated regions where these animals frequent, the people who live there probably don't have the latest and greatest technology. As for hoaxes, they are plentiful and mostly laughable, yet often get the most media coverage such as the 2023 Colorado Bigfoot. The PGF has been "debunked" dozens of times, yet most go by somebody claiming to be the guy in the monkey suit, where the person claiming also has no evidence of that being the case. Bob Heronimus is the only believable one, but parts of his narrative are discrediting such as the suit being made of horse hide, something that would have made the suit 300 pounds, while also lacking an explanation for the elongated upper arms and inability to recreate the gait shown in the video. Most rely purely on ad-hominem attacks on Robert Patterson. While the psychology of the hoaxer escapes me, why put in so much effort when a sub-hundred dollar monkey suit and a shaky cam can get you just as much attention.
I understand that there are definitely some holes in the existing theories of sasquatch existence, something that likely won't be solved until someone manages to down one or a dead body washes up somewhere, but can we not pretend everything is just hogwash.
And for the love of God can the "Woo" people just stop getting TV shows with Discovery
I recently purchased a 2007 Mazda 3
It wasn't too long ago I was posting about getting back behind the wheel of my old Saab 9-5. While I loved that car, it was a bucket of bolts, and needed more money to be put into it than the car was worth. A non-exhaustive list of issues were:
- No AC
- Bumper was being held on by zip-ties
- The trunk wouldn't stay open on it's own, and also wouldn't latch
- Power steering was well on it's way out
- Mysterious coolant leak (presumably not the head gasket as the oil never milkshaked)
- Increasingly worsening exhaust leak
- Bad rear motor mount
- Consistently throwing a few check engine light codes
The first on the list was the real killer, the first 100 degree day here in Sac left me drenched in sweat and feeling the oncoming effects of heat exhaustion, all from a 45 minute drive to work with the windows down. A lot of the fixes could have been done myself, but others really needed an experienced hand, one which is harder to find by the day for a Saab. Not to mention the difficulties and/or cost of finding parts
So I started a hunt for a new car, needing to meet these criteria:
- Wagon or hatchback (I like being able to haul stuff, but don't regularly need a truck)
- Naturally aspirated (turbos are fun but boost comes with a cost to reliability)
- NO TOUCH SCREENS, PUSH TO START, OR ANNOYING "SMARTS"
- Has to be fun to drive
- Can't be a gas guzzler
- Can't be a unicorn (I want to be able to find parts at my local salvage yard)
I ended up selecting a 2007 Mazda 3 hatch with the larger 2.3L. While there were some Mazda 6 wagons I also considered, and a few VW Passats and Jettas, I think I made the right choice. VW is a mixed bag when it comes to reliability and all the Mazda 6s I could find came with issues of their own; mostly having to do with the non-drivetrain components.
I think I got a lot of car for the $3.5K I spent. Sure, it has some issues, but any car worth driving at that price will. The brake booster isn't working, the neutral safety switch acts up, the passenger side window won't roll down, and the rear shocks are due for replacement, but fixing all this is very doable from my driveway and I was able to find the parts without the sticker shock. Replacing the neutral safety switch was an easy enough job, but my forgetful ass didn't remember to put the parking brake back on after testing it out, causing it to roll off the ramps and taking the drivers side door and fender as a price. Fortunately for me, there were three matching cars at the closest salvage yard (more if I drove a few extra miles) and within 2 days I was able to get the car put back together with a working, albeit scratched, door.
It's interior is simple and that's how I like it. No big touchscreens, 3 dials, 1 info display, about a dozen buttons, and all the meters you need right on the dash. That being said there are a few things that are not user-friendly, such as the combination of buttons you need to press in order to turn on the trip computer which required me to search in the manual to activate.
Boy is it fun to drive! Where the Saab was happiest between 2K and 3.5K RPMs, the Mazda loves to rev, getting peak torque around 4.5K RPM. Although a bit sluggish in the lower rev ranges, as soon as VVT kicks in, it shoots off like a rocket (or at least feels that way). It's extremely planted when taking sharp turns, thanks to it's independent rear suspension. It's comfortable on the highway, but shines best on surface streets and back roads. I've been averaging about 22.5 MPG, while still having fun with the car and running out the gears. Not a massive improvement over the 19.5 MPG I averaged on the Saab, but taking regular instead of premium gas has been making me feel a lot more content when leaving the pump.
I'm happy with this car, expect to hear about my journey on fixing it up!
China made a smart move in the 80s
Deng Xiaoping inherited a tumultuous country. The Cultural Revolution, the death of Mao, and the reign of the Gang of Four did not leave China in a good place. China had attempted to move towards industrialism during the years before, but it was not particularly productive. Backyard furnaces created low quality steel which did little to actually benefit the economy of China. Deng was not as ideologically rigid as his predecessors, he was willing to work with the West in order to boost the economy of China, even if it meant implementing market reforms. They needed an influx of capital, and they had one of the largest labour supplies in the world. Within 30 years China became the second largest economy in the world and the largest hub of manufacturing.
Let's draw our focus to the US during the period after this opening up. In 1980 about a quarter of all jobs in the US were in non-farm manufacturing, today it is bellow 10% and shrinking (Bureau of Labor Statistics). Over the course of this 40 year period, manufacturing jobs were offshored to developing countries, largely China, for their lower labour cost. This was sold as a beneficial pivot, entering a new era where everyone will be able to enter cushy service-sector jobs and enjoy the flood of cheap products that were enabled by this slash in labour costs. This is, of course, a fantasy.
We did get this fantasy for some time, and depending on how much money is being printed, still get tastes of it. However, we're chasing the dragon at this point and we're feeling he down-sides of the drug more and more. Having a service heavy economy is great when people are flush with cash to purchase services, but when they aren't, they don't spend as much, the company has to (chooses to) cut wages, they then have less money that they cannot use to purchase other services and the whole thing goes belly-up. In manufacturing heavy economies, there are always things that need to be made, there's an inherent security that comes with these jobs. You may not always need a stylist, or a clothing sales associate, but you will always need clothes. Inversely these service jobs are far easier to offshore, lacking the same degree of required dedicated infrastructure.
Now we're a sitting duck. The massive growth of the tech sector that brought us through the 2010s has largely hit a lull (except for in the case of AI). We've offshored the vast majority of manufacturing, the real driver of economic growth, and attempts to build it back up are met with unforseen challenges. We simply lack the knowledgable personnel to even come close to competing with the likes of our Chinese counterparts, not aided by the burden of our stricter regulations that inflates the cost of doing anything in the US. This can be seen with our failure to get semiconductor manufacturing operational in the US despite the hundreds of billions of funding poured into it.
Though I don't agree with the conclusion that trying to bringing back manufacturing to the US is a pipe-dream, PJ Vogt's search engine has a pretty good episode on this subject: The Puzzle of the All-American BBQ Scrubber
Trump's tariffs are (were?) too late, the flight has already left the runway, putting up hurdles at the gate isn't going to do anything but hurt us.
Our bed has been made, chasing to minimize labour cost by capitalists have left us in an economically perilous position, and there's little that we can do about it.
I attended Linuxfest NorthWest
I've been a fan of Jupiter Broadcasting's Linux Unplugged for the greater half of the past decade. Since COVID, JB has been taking a bigger role in organizing LFNW, something they frequently have mentioned across their shows since it happened. When I heard it was the 25th anniversary this year, I knew it was the right time to attend.
Since I joined the Linux community, the idea of going to a convention/conference/meet-up was intriguing, yet nonetheless intimidating. Since I was so young I worried I'd be the one kid that shows up and be the odd one out. It didn't help that, despite being less than a two hours drive from Silicon Valley, it seemed like there was a shortage of Linux events in my area, at least not that weren't primarily for active developers. After now attending one, I realize this worry was nonsensical, people of all ages were happily welcomed there.
I opted to drive. Flying has gotten so expensive these days and the added hassle of the airlines was too much for such a (relatively) short trip. I loaded up my gear in the back of my mom's Prius and set forth up the I-5 corridor. It's about a 13 hour trip between Sacramento and Bellingham, not including gas and bathroom breaks. Fortunately, there's a plethora of long form content out there nowadays and I was thoroughly entertained the whole trip up.
After a refreshing night's rest at a cheap hotel, it was time for the event to begin. I have to say, this was far from a spectacle, to layman passerby it was little more than a group of booths, banners, and every permutation of the stereotypical nerd. However, once the barrier of social awkwardness was broken, the cafeteria that was our home erupted into a cacophony of conversation. I found myself bouncing around each booth talking to their organizers - some old guard veterans from the FSF, some young movers and shakers at the Framework table, college computer club members - all united in their love for free software. I ended up missing a couple of talks due to being sucked into conversations about our favorite distributions. Lunch rolled around and I got the privilege of talking with Chris Fisher, and to a lesser extent Brent and Wes of JB. One of the members of the small huddle which surrounded them asked for a tour of Chris's RV to which the rest of our party attended. It's a nice little rig he has, wired up with all the creature comforts of a modern smart home.
I got to show off the step to the proper audience. There were plenty of interesting little devices that their owners had spent hours configuring to suit their needs perfectly. There's something special about a convention, gathering a group of otherwise strangers, united by a shared passion that breaks down barriers. I had an amazing time and this surely will not be the last event of this kind that I will attend!
Hope to see you there next year!
Sometimes a change in scenery makes all the difference
A few summers ago I had a panic attack. There was no singular cause for it, a few things had been eating away at me, and a minor spat escalated into one of those self-reinforcing spirals of self-hatred. Something deep in my heart told me to go, get out of the house for a couple days until I felt a bit more stable. So that's exactly what I did. I drove deep into the mountains and spent the night under the stars, disconnected from the rest of the world, feeling all the more content by the passing hour. By the time I was ready for bed, I knew I'd be returning to my normal life the next day.
The sun's rays cast a watercolor of amber, red, and gold across the neighboring cliff-face, greeting my new day with its beauty. The cool, crisp air filled my lungs, filling my sleep-deprived body with an unfounded sense of power. I drove back into my life refreshed, my demons all but silenced, as I rounded the crest, letting me see my home, the Sacramento valley, once again. I came out of the excursion with a deeper appreciation for the beauty of day-to-day life.
Two weeks ago, on a mundane Sunday afternoon, I was scrolling through my work's Slack. I stumbled upon an invite for the following weekend to go to Atlanta to run some cabling for the new office. I instinctually started typing out my response of "Sorry, I've got school, can't make it", before I caught myself. Too often have I let that homebody win out. I watched the message change to "As long as I'm back in Sac by noon on Monday, I can come". It almost felt like someone else wrote it; any trip I go on requires a few days of contemplating the details, but there I was pressing send. Within 24 hours, I had a flight booked. Everything came together so quickly it almost didn't feel real.
It had been seven years since last the last time I had flown, and it was the first time as an adult that I was flying on my own. I was a bit of a nervous wreck, but the staff and TSA agents at SMF were nothing but kind, even when I forgot to take off my belt. I took the red-eye flight thinking that I was going to be able to sleep on the plane, boy was that a mistake. Fortunately some bad weather in Atlanta kept my connection grounded for a little over an hour, allowing me to lay down across the aisle of chairs and rest.
I touched down at 10:00 in the morning, and after a quick stop for breakfast at the hotel, we got to work. I was a fetch-boy for most of the first day, Ubering back and forth to Home Depot to pick up the tools we didn't know we needed. This was a great gift, letting me talk to the various drivers, cashiers, and passersby, getting to know the culture of the city. I was enamored by the friendliness of everyone I met.
After we returned to the hotel for the night, I found myself with an unshakable smile. Even though the hours of restless travel and the countless trips back and forth to the new office left me completely exhausted, it made me feel electric. I was filled with a eudaimonic bliss.
The second day, I was left with setting up some access control doors, which was quite rewarding. All those years of messing with building simple circuits with spare wires and salvaged PCBs was finally paying off. My hands made quick work of stripping the cable ends and wiring the system together, though terminating the ethernet runs will always be a little tricky for me.
Before I knew it, it was time to go home. After another delay, I missed my connection and was left to spend the night in the DFW airport. It was cold, but at least it left me with a story, and a deeper gratitude for real beds.
One thing that has stuck with me since I've returned is that lasting appreciation for every day life. Seeing how exciting it can be when you put yourself out there and explore has reignited that inner flame. I feel that drive to go out and seize the day, even if it's only in a minor way.
Last Friday I woke up early and could not return to sleep. But instead of laying in bed, wasting my time in one way or another, I decided to go on a walk. As soon as I felt the warmth of the sun's rays kissing my cheek, I felt my lips curve into that unshakable smile yet again. I greeted everyone who crossed my path with a joyful "Good morning!". With each step, a new painting unveiled itself before me. It was like the whole world had been putting on a symphony this whole time, and I had finally plucked the plugs from my ears to hear it. I was happy. I had found my peace.
There is beauty everywhere, you just have to look for it
Nobody likes exams
Having a major part of your grade resting on a series of unknown questions, picked from subject matter that has taken weeks to cover, is a recipe for stress. Over the course of my academic career I have developed a method that has all but guaranteed a score in the 85%-100% range, with the majority being on the higher end of that scale. The best feature of this method is that it minimizes the amount of time that you spend actively studying, leaving you with plenty of time to waste doing something less productive! The method has four guiding rules:
1. Engage with the material in class
Ok this is sort of a cop-out rule, the equivalent to the chastity method to preventing pregnancy, but it is a lot easier to do well on a test when you actually know the material. I know how easy it is to "multitask" in class, especially when you have a screen in front of you, but avoid it. Take notes when it makes sense, ask and answer questions, and participate, you'll thank yourself later.
That being said, if your teacher/professor sucks at teaching and you can't engage for the life of you, just make sure to know what subjects you have talked about so you are able to go back and somewhat learn them before the test.
2. Do a reverse all-nighter
Staying up late into the morning the night before the big test, reading and rereading sections of your textbook, while contemplating switching to being a business major is a sure-fire way to do poorly on the test. Studies have shown how much worse you will perform when you are tired, something which I'm sure has been beaten over your head enough to be trite at this point. The thing is, cramming is not in and of itself a bad method, it's just practiced wrong. You need to invert it.
Don't stay up late the night before, go to bed a little early. I know this is easier said than done with the stress of the exam keeping you awake, but you're gonna want to be well rested, so just do your best. When you wake up, try to get moving as soon as possible, have your coffee and start studying. You're wanting to have everything fresh in your mind before your test.
This works because our brains do some housecleaning while we are asleep. More important things go into long term memory, where unimportant things get forgotten. You can probably remember what you had for breakfast this morning, but probably won't remember what you had a few days ago. Likewise, it's going to be easier to remember that one paragraph explaining the answer to problem 27 if you read it a couple hours ago, instead of the night before.
In high school I would go to bed around 21:00 at night and wake up around 03:00, which proved to be excessive, even for the earliest of early morning tests. I recommend studying for at least 2.5 hours before the test for finals, and about an hour for smaller tests like midterms.
Also, give yourself a 30 minute break before the test so that you aren't burned out before you start. Use the time to make sure you have everything you need, use the restroom, get water, etc.
3. Don't read from the book
Textbooks are bad in the age of the internet. If you're having issues grasping a subject, look it up online or watch a video on it. It's going to be a lot more refined than the walls of text and puzzling figures that you'll find in the book.
Furthermore, practice problems are the best thing to prepare you, do them. They will tell you more about your understanding of the subject than reading through resources. Even if you may not fully understand the "why" behind each step of a problem, it will familiarize you with the process. Additionally there have been multiple times where my teacher/professor has directly pulled test questions from practice problems in the homework or study guide, basically giving you a free question since you'll have already solved it an hour ago.
4. If it is allowed, make a comprehensive cheat-sheet
This one is especially useful for comprehensive finals. Go through all the homework, in-class materials, and extra resources and jot down anything useful, whether it be definitions or equations. Try to keep it organized and put some care into it. Treat it as your masterpiece. Now throw it away.
Ok don't actually throw it away, bring it with you to the test, but you're barely going to use it. You basically just did all the studying you will need to do by making it and it's firmly planted in your brain, at least for a little while. You may end up glancing at it from time to time during the test, but really it is just a good studying tool.
5. Profit
So now you've finished the test, you got an A. You're not likely to ever use any of what you just learned ever again, but it's ok. You didn't spend every waking moment for the past week memorizing the textbook by heart, you just got up a little early and gave up your morning to doing a handful of practice problems and making a pretty looking study guide. Now you have the rest of the day to do whatever you want.
A worthy trade if you ask me
Just 15 more minutes, which turns into an hour
I find my internal monologue too often saying: "At XX:(00, 15, 30, 45), I will start doing Y". Then I get lost in my procrastination and by the time I notice the previously selected time had passed, so too have a handful more minutes. Even though I said at 9:30 I would take a shower, it's no longer 9:30, it's 9:37, and that's almost 9:45. If it's almost 9:45 then really I could should just keep procrastinating until then, since it's a nice, round number, and who lives by ugly, non-round numbers? Sickos!
This is worse for very undesirable tasks. I remember once in high school where a whole night had been wasted by this ceiling-rounding, because I desperately did not want to make those slides for that presentation I wanted to do even less. I've gotten better over the years, but still find myself falling into this trap.
Wasting the day 15 minutes at a time
Or should I say Saable?
No I probably shouldn't.
I've switched back to my old car, a Saab 9-5, after borrowing my mom's Prius V for the past 6 months. My folks only really use one car and so have been using the 9-5 at most once a week for those few times they both leave the house. I did a long overdue oil change on it and fell back in love with the car.
Sure it's not the most fuel efficient, or the fastest, but it just feels nice to drive. I took it for a test-spin after the oil change and the way the seat held me as I took turns and the nice rumble of the tubrocharged inline 4 made me feel alive. Something I never felt in the Prius.
So I gave my mom back her keys and drove home my old bucket of bolts last Sunday. It was exhilarating feeling the turbo spool up going up the on-ramp. Driving a very slow car for 6 months makes you appreciate having some power again. It also got better gas mileage with the new tire, which previously had been leaking air.
It was all fun until Wednesday of last week when I got a puff of steam come out from under the hood. There's been a minor coolant leak for some time, which I was treating with a top off of the reservoir every few weeks. Well, the leak got bigger, not aided by the sudden rise in use after sitting in the hot sun for the majority of the Summer. At first I thought one of the hoses may have slipped off, but no, the plastic connection to the radiator had snapped off. I jerry-rigged a new connection using a lot of epoxy and a plumbing reducer, but the leak was still there. It turns out this crack was a lot larger than I thought.
I've been trying to patch it up with epoxy, but with how cramped it is, I keep failing to fully cover it. It's gotten better, but I still need to refill the reservoir every time I drive it, not good. Right now I'm just using distilled water since I don't want to be spilling tons of toxins every time I drive, and it is a lot cheaper than coolant. I've ordered a replacement radiator, but I'm hoping to patch it up so I can still drive it in the meantime.
One thing that has shocked me is how fine I am with the issue. Sure it's a little stressful whenever that low coolant warning splashes on the display, but the problem excites me more than it demoralizes. Part of the fun of having the car is fixing the problems, something I never had to deal with in the Prius. It's odd but I missed having them, because problems created opportunities to learn, opportunities to be creative.
It's also spiritually fulfilling. I grew into myself in that car. 6 months ago I tried to be someone else, someone I thought was me, but ultimately proved not to be. I enjoyed how cheap the Prius was to drive, how cheap it was to go places, but at the end of the day, driving the Prius felt hollow. The Saab has soul. I feel more like myself again, holding onto the steering wheel, tapping the gear shift levers, and keeping my eye pinned on the temperature gauge.
It feels good to be back
There are those days where you wake up and the only thing you wish for is for it to end, where everything gets on your nerves, and where you wish you could just blend into the background. It was one of those days that I wrote Loud.
Loud
Pounding ripples of sound shake,
a deafening murmur of clinks and clanks
Stuffy recirculated air bakes
The convection oven of the classroom
Loose fitting garments tie me to the chair
No matter how it's done, I don't like my hair
Every momentary glance, I'm aware
I try not to, but I care
Hustle and bustle, crammed into corridors
A thousand footsteps echo across the floors
The blinding pale light of compact fluorescence
Somehow it all makes me lose my essence
Why do I feel most alone in a crowd?
I'm tired of it all being so loud
At least solitude has its silence.
I built a Linux-powered handheld PC
Shortly after getting into Linux, I gained the desire to have the ability to use it and the suite of programs I found on the go. I wanted to be able to control which applications I used, the background processes that ran, and the way windows were managed. For many years I tried to accomplish this by various means, but now I have made a major step forward in achieving this goal.
Introducing: The Step
click here for project page
Ok, let me be frank, this falls short of the mark of what I imagined. I originally wanted to build a mini-laptop around a Raspberry Pi and a display like this, but after spending countless hours and hundreds of dollars over the years trying and failing to accomplish this, I needed to make a pivot. Realistically, second hand smart phones are cheap, come with everything I need (shy a keyboard), and can cram it all in a much smaller footprint than I ever could. It's the logical solution to all the problems I was having with my former approach. Thanks to all of the hard work of the people around PostmarketOS, booting Linux on a smartphone is only a matter of running a few commands. Without all their work this wouldn't be possible.
For the past couple of weeks I have been using the Step as my primary device and I intend to do so for the foreseeable future. Tiling window managers and tui/cli programs pair amazingly with this form factor. Everything is only a few keystrokes away; a pleasant change from the countless menus and submenus of touch-friendly mobile interfaces. I've been able to read blogs, watch videos, and listen to podcasts the way I want to, no longer needing to deal with restrictive apps or kludgey mobile sites. I've also noticed a positive change in how I spend my time using the device: I don't doomscroll. When the next hit of dopamine requires more than a swipe of the finger, it's easier to break out of the cycle. I'm spending more time enjoying the world around me and less time staring at a screen.
While I wouldn't write a novel on it, the physical keyboard is a joy to use. No longer do I have to go sifting through layers of a software keyboard to find non-alphanumeric keys, or have to deal with the unpredictability of attempting to copy and paste text with the sole input of a touchscreen. Where I'd be painfully frustrated trying to accomplish basic tasks in a mobile browser, the Step handles them with ease.
Additionally, The Step has given me the motivation to tinker again. Unlike the world of monolithic apps with little to no inter-app communication found in Android and IOS, I get to harness the openness of Linux. I don't have to reinvent the wheel of a UI, I can just write a script that does exactly what I need, nothing more, nothing less, and take advantage of tools like rofi or fzf to provide user-interaction.
But most of all, it just gives me ease to know I am the one in control. I don't have to be victim to the decisions being made in board rooms in Silicon Valley. If I don't like the way something works, I can change it. The only limit is my knowledge, something that I have control over.
Give it a try!
All required files and materials are listed on the project page. I'd be happy to help anyone, just send me an email!