I just finished my last final of the semester!
This was an enjoyable one, with so many changes and formative moments of my life occurring in the background of it. I admittedly have fallen out of regularly writing on this blog, but I hope to change that and update my massive fan base of the edge-of-seat exciting moments of my deeply fascinating life. Throughout all this excitement I have thought about all the things I've wanted to do, if I only had the free time. Well now with the next three months being pretty much completely open, here they are:
Exercise regularly
Between work, school, and spending time with Maria, my fitness has fallen to the wayside. I'm hoping to get back into working out and doing more physical activities again. Maria wants to as well and I think it will be fun to share that with her. She makes me feel so confident which I think will take away a lot of the stress that exercising with others has in the past.
Work on Feedie++
Feedie++ is a rewrite of my original terminal feed reading app, Feedie, but in C++ instead of Python. I've learned a lot since I originally wrote Feedie, and want to build a more robust and performant program. I started the rewrite at the beginning of the year, but as coursework became more demanding, I haven't been working on it as much.
Build a new desk
My current desk is a bit larger than I really need and I think it would be a fun project to try. I haven't made any sort of furniture before but I think It will be a fun challenge.
Cook more meals
I've been eating home-cooked meals a bit more recently than I had been before, but I hope to do that even more. It really is so much better tasting and saves money.
Finish my mini-laptop
For the past eight years, one of my background projects I've worked on has been a hand-held mini laptop. I got my first semi-working design over spring break, but it was a bit to fragile to actually use and I never got wifi fully working on it. I think one more iteration will do the trick, but we will see.
Replace the motor mount on my car
It gets a bit too shaky for my liking above 90 MPH and you have to be very light on the accelerator when going up a gear. I got the part, but in all of Saab's great wisdom, it's pretty hard to access so I've been putting it off.
Continue working on my garden
Last summer after July, my garden sorta fell to the wayside, I'm hoping that doesn't happen again.
Go on a trip with Maria
We have been talking about doing so many things this summer, but I really want to go on a camping trip or something like that with her. Maybe to Oregon.
Write more
I've started so many posts only to get distracted and lose my train of thought. I really miss writing and want to get back in the swing of it. This is made easier with my new job too, since some nights there really isn't much to do.
Much Much More
I could keep going on and on about things I want to do, I don't want to waste away in my room all day, I want to live and be busy with things that fill me with joy.
I want this to be a summer to remember
Being a tech enthusiast, gaming is almost always a central part of coverage on new products
This makes it kinda annoying following a tech release, because almost half of the video will be showing how well it performs in the new hot game, talking about how much more FPS you will get, when none of this is at all applicable to me. Sure, games can be a great benchmark for performance and using them as such is a good way of comparing one piece of hardware to the other, but it seems like half of the actual coverage is just a screen recording and the host going "WOW WOULD YOU LOOK HOW FAST THIS GAME IS PLAYING". Now some of this certainly is just because I haven't made a concerted effort to actually find non-gaming tech content, with many of the channels I watch being holdovers from my teenage years, where I did have an interest in games.
I built my first PC for the soul purpose of being able to play games I couldn't on my dad's old Core2 Duo iMac. When I got it running, I was amazed by the sheer quantity of games I was able to play, spending countless hours scrolling through the free section of steam, downloading, and playing, only to delete them and never touch them again. Even then, I wasn't sitting on the edge of my seat for new releases, waiting for leaks about the next big release; it was very passive, just a way to spend my time, since I didn't have many friends to occupy that time. As I got older, games took up less and less of that time, being replaced with more fruitful hobbies.
Studying Computer Science, I find myself feeling like an outsider in my classroom. I hear my peers going on and on about the games they play and finding a form of kinship through them, while I hack away at my config files in the corner. I thought that maybe here I would find people who share my flavor of interest in technology, but I have yet to find one. Even outside of the classroom, trying to talk to males my age often ends up with them mentioning a hot new game like it's commonplace, and I've never heard of it. It makes me think that maybe I should try to get back into it, but I always get left with the same bad taste in my mouth whenever I try.
Games leave me feeling really stressed out. The only thing I could think about while playing is "I could be doing something productive with this time". The main exception to this is social games that I'll occasionally play with my friends, but with that the reason I'm playing is really because it's the only option that allows us to talk while doing something. The other exception to this rule is Minecraft, which I find scratches that same creative itch that working on other hobbies has, though this only lasts for a couple weeks until it too gives me that uneasy feeling that I'm wasting my time.
I struggle to find how I really feel about games. Part of me knows that they don't do anything productive and makes me view them negatively. Another part recognizes that they aren't really a social-ill and are a way for people to connect who otherwise wouldn't have. Not to mention their great entry-point for people to get into technology, like it did for me all those years ago.
But the one thing I know is that I am not a gamer
My first 3D printer was a Monoprice Select Mini
It was a Christmas gift from a family friend and one of the greatest gifts I have ever received, that being said it was fairly limited in capability. The build plate was fairly small, the bed was a pain to level, requiring an alan key to adjust, and was prone to issues. Nevertheless, it sparked off my interest in printing and got the job done. Me and a couple buddies ran an underground fidget-spinner black market at our school in 2017 back when they had become the hot new item. I had to have printed at least 50 before we could tell teachers were catching onto us and we decided to close up shop before we got into any trouble. We raked in about $100 net profit and had a blast running our little hustle. Those were good times.
For the rest of high school I barely touched the thing, besides the odd job here and there, mostly due to the pain it was getting everything set up and troubleshooted after being left to collect dust for months or years on end.
Then one day, shortly after moving to Sacramento, I was scouring craigslist when I found a lightly used Creality Ender 3 v1 for sale at the decent price of $100. I thought of all the things I had wanted to print in years past that I couldn't because of the limitations of the mini and quickly jumped on the listing.
This was a huge step up, significantly faster with a larger build plate, with plenty of good information online to support it. I loved the thing, but was still pained every time I needed to manually level the bed, though the adjustment knobs were a welcome addition.
I certainly used it more than the Monoprice, but every time I thought about printing, I again remembered the frustrating process of sliding the paper round and round, trying to get it just right so I didn't carve grooves all over my build plate and damage the extruder nozzle. Then I wanted to start printing in stronger materials besides PLA, in my case PETG, and was really disappointed in its performance. Anything but the simplest of shapes would come out with massive stringing and what felt like a quarter of the time the print would fail. Besides a few bursts where I would pick up interest in printing again, it too just collected dust for the past couple years.
Earlier this month, I was staring at it next to my desk, thinking about how if it just had auto bed-leveling, how much more I would use it. Then an impulsive thought filled my head, I checked my bank account, and justified it to myself to get a new 3D printer.
After a little research, I settled on the Creality Ender 3 KE.
Although there's a bit of hate for Creality online, I really enjoyed my original Ender 3 and for the relatively low price of < $300, I thought it was a worthy investment. The hurdle that always turned me away from printing was the leveling process, so auto-leveling was mandatory for my upgrade. Assembly was a fairly simple, albeit nerve-wracking process.
When I started my first print, I was amazed at how fast it was able to do it. It shipped with the gcode for "Benchie" and a little over 20 minutes later, there was a perfect little plastic boat. The process was so hands-off once I pressed print, no need to babysit the first few layers to ensure proper adhesion, no need to grab any little bits of filament stuck to the nozzle, it just worked. Hell if you slapped an Apple logo on it and painted it white, I would've believed it was from them.
I've done a number of more prints since then, including a euphonium mouthpiece for Roomie's horn and still get blown away at how fast it prints and precise the end product comes out as. I feel that spark for printing I once had again, and I'm eager to keep using this amazing machine.
Kudos to Creality on this amazing product! Highly recommend!
So I needed to use Windows for some of my classes this semester
I haven't regularly used Windows since 2016. Here and there I would spin up a VM to run a piece of software, or struggle to get something semi-functional in WINE, but for the most part I have been able to keep the OS off any of my computers, using open source software to do pretty much everything I needed or finding workarounds wherever possible. However, that changed this semester; for one of my programming classes a professor is using his own graphics API which I couldn't get working on Linux for the life of me and settled for doing it in a VM, which, although clunky and slow, got the job done. This solution was short lived, with my Biology class requiring us to use Respondus Lockdown Browser for our exams, which doesn't have a Linux build, excluding Chrome OS.
The worst part is that the exams are in person, making the requirement nearly pointless. It's all multiple choice, so someone typing away at a search would stick out like a sore thumb. Lockdown Browsers are easily the most idiotic solution to the problem of cheating, since a second device easily curtails any of the attempts of thwarting academic dishonesty and smartphones are ubiquitous. My prior solution of running it in VM wouldn't suffice, since the browser checks for that. As the first exam date crept ever closer I began searching for a solution.
First I tried renting a computer from the school, thinking it was going to be an easy process of going to the IT desk and checking one out. It turns out you have to get a professor to Email them first or can only rent it out for four hours at a time from the library, and I didn't want interact with this professor (who I particularly dislike) for any more than the bare minimum and the library opens at the same time the class starts, disqualifying that option. Not to mention the mountain of spare laptops I have and the desire not to take a laptop from someone who actually needs one for daily use.
So I scoured for that old Windows 10 install ISO I had lying around in a long forgotten ISOs folder I had on an old hard drive, burned it to a USB and plugged it into the laptop I intended to use, only for it to respond "No bootable medium found, please insert a disk and try again".
No bootable medium found, please insert a disk and try again
Remove USB and plug it into a USB 2.0 Port (I've heard computers of this generation sometimes only boot from USB 2.0)
No bootable medium found, please insert a disk and try again
Re-burn disk on a different computer, plug it back into the USB 2.0 port
No bootable medium found, please insert a disk and try again
Re-burn disk on a different drive, plug it back into the USB 2.0 port
No bootable medium found, please insert a disk and try again
Rinse and repeat what felt like 100 times with various other combinations
I wanted to verify it booted on my daily laptop and sure enough it started without issue, so I plugged in my USB to sata and tried installing it that way, only to find out Windows won't let you install to a USB! WHY?!?! Please Microsoft! Then I remembered a number of years ago I was able to create a Windows USB using a Rufus, problem was the software is only available on Windows. So I tried starting it in WINE, where it couldn't see any of the drives. Then I found out I accidentally deleted the Windows VM I had made the week prior for the programming class so I needed to make another one. Finally after what had been about three hours, I had a disk with Windows installed. I plugged it into the spare laptop and after 30 minutes of loading screens, I was staring at a years-out-of-date bare Windows desktop. I go to connect to the internet only to find the wifi card drivers weren't installed, nor the ethernet. I copied over one driver after another using yet another USB drive, with no luck. So I finally caved and plugged it into my daily. Finally wifi!
I ran the updates while I was at work and installed Respondus when I got home. I ran it and crossed my fingers only for it to notify me I couldn't start it because Skype was running in the background. Why Skype is an autostarted program in a bare Windows install escapes me, but after I closed it I finally got it started and called it a day.
That takes us to today, where about a fifth of the class, running their computers on the OS that was shipped with them, were unable to start Lockdown Browser and have to take it at a later date. This is why you don't require overly paranoid cheating counter-measures, it stops people from actually completing the task at hand, but that would be too reasonable for Professor I. I pray this issue discourages her from using it in future exams.
But I know that's not going to be the case
I find it harder to start new software projects than to actually program them.
Part of it comes from not knowing what to write it in. I'll think of a utility I want to build and think how simple it would be to just string together a few shell commands. Then I'll want more, think of a new feature to add, and remember I don't really like writing more than a dozen lines in bash, and so I'll switch to python. Then I'll feel that urge to write it in something else, something with a better type system, something compiled. I'll think "maybe it's time to finally learn Rust", get a few lines in, and realize I have no clue where to go from there and it would be better to learn it on a smaller project. Then I'll think of doing it in C, but then think of all the high-level things I'd want to be doing a realize a different language would be better for that, bringing me back to python. This circle will go on for days before I finally settle on something.
This time it was C++
We are building an anti-human world
Every time a utility that was not automated in the past fails, I think to myself: "Bot-World". Bot-World is growing ever wide ranging, whether it be card-readers failing at the store or needing to wave your hands around automatic faucets, only for them to activate for a microsecond, barely rinsing them off. There seems to be a computer chip in just about everything now and it's inconvenient for human life. The amount of times I was unable to wash my hands because a touch-free soap dispenser failed to sense my hand far surpasses any benefit of not spreading surface-contact germs that would be found in a traditional human-operated soap dispenser. In almost every instance, these automated alternatives work worse than their human-operated counterparts.
From an engineering perspective, it's comical that these took off in the first place. A traditional sink is made up of a few valves which are operated by a simple pair of handles, sometimes a single handle if you want to be fancy. These mechanisms have been iterated upon for hundreds of years, if a part breaks just about any hardware store would carry something to fix it. By automating them it adds a whole layer of complexity that was not present before. With the automated system you require electrical lines to be run, a sensor, a chip to activate the valve, and a solenoid valve. All of these can fail and result in an unusable sink, one that likely requires proprietary parts to repair. Simple systems are robust, complex ones are fragile.
There's also a sense of control that comes along with these systems. The sink only turns on for a second so you can't "waste" water, they deny your humanity, your capability to reason how much water is really too much; They know better than you after all. The elevator at my friend's apartment requires you scan a key card to use it and will only let you go to the floor you live on. You can't be trusted to go anywhere else in the building after all, you can't be trusted because you're lesser. You can't be trusted to make copies of the keys, we have ultimate authority on who can enter your place of residence, not you. You are lesser, you cannot be trusted, you are the rabble.
What sort of world do we want to build? One of science fiction, controlled by sparking circuits and flimsy light-sensors, that create more problems than they solve? Or one for humans, that have hands that can turn handles, feet that can press peddles, and legs that can move miles. Do we want to build a world for us or for the bots?
I choose us.
A little tree I drew in inskscape, being composed of a series of splits like a binary tree
I never really surfed the web before.
Of course, I have been alive over the past two decades, I have used the internet for practically all my life, but I've never really "surfed". When I would search, I'd already have pictured what I had in mind that I was trying to find specifically that. Sure, occasionally I would stumble upon a cool page and crawl around a bit, but that was an exception and I rarely came back to it.
Over the past few days I've been looking for more independent websites and I find myself getting an interesting excitement while doing so. There's just so much out there with so many creative people hosting their own sites. The web is really an active and exciting place if you just go searching. I find myself scrolling through lists of blogs and web-rings and selecting random names and urls, scrolling through in amazement, reading through posts. The web feels so exciting!
For so long I only accessed the web through social media, links always circling back from X, to Reddit, to Facebook, to Youtube, all making comments on a given piece of content. Occasionally something from a blog would be linked and you'd step into this bizarre world that wasn't begging to have you interact, that was well-formulated and cared for, with that little spark of human inspiration behind it. I would always think to myself "I wish every website was like this". Little did I know there's a plethora.
There's gold on the web, you just have to look for it.
This is my first post originally hosted on my website
For a couple years now I've been writing on Gemini, using a few aliases. I don't regret this time, it really allowed me to find my voice as a writer. However, for the past number of months I've been doubting the usefulness of Gemini as a protocol.
There's plenty to like about Gemini. I've never run into a bad-looking Gemini site, since formatting is handled by the browser and not the document, which has its upsides. The amount of viable tools and places to post make the barrier to entry pretty low and there's a lot of fun things done by the community on there. People are mostly friendly and I feel much of the discussion that goes on there is healthier than traditional internet discourse.
That being said, it is not without it's faults. There seems to be a bit of a clash between stated and actual goals of the project. Gemini says it's not looking to replace the web, yet many of the tools created are clones of web utilities. This is somewhat to be expected, implementing good ideas on a separate platform shouldn't be discouraged, but when there aren't then new, unique utilities, or new protocols like Spartan have to be created to make new utilities, what's the point? Why use the Gemini version when it's worse and unable to have feature parity?
There's also a subject shortage on Gemini. Everybody on there is interested in FOSS software and digital minimalism, and of course Gemini. That's not a problem, but there have been only a few times where I click on a post and have it be completely disconnected from these subjects. I like these things but I want to hear about other subjects too, and that doesn't really have a home on Gemini.
The last issue I have is at its core: plain text. Sometimes you want to emphasize a word in bold or italics, and I'm sure there's some unicode hackery that I could do to use that on Gemini, but when I'm writing, it's not what I want to be doing. Likewise posting anything besides text is a pain since it can't be embedded. Including photos and videos is a hassle for the reader since they have to be downloaded and viewed separately. There have been posts I've wanted to read through and look at photos and watch, only to be frustrated by the clunkiness of it all, being redirected to another page opening the file, navigating back, scrolling to where I was. The embedded images and video of the web make that simple.
The web is not the problem, the corporations that fill it with drivel are. Plain html+css can give you a lot of functionality, a lot more than Gemini. The people are already here, give someone a link and they can follow it without needing to install an alternative browser. We can choose to hide away in our own pockets of the internet, or we can be a good example for how the web should be.
I'd choose the latter.
I was required to take a civics class this semester.
The professor is a nice guy, but he would harp on and on about those cynics who had no faith in the government. I never felt targeted or anything since I never made much of a stink in class, but his undying faith in the system would make me roll my eyes. One time a person in class alluded to the media having an agenda on certain topics and he corrected him saying "well don't say they have an agenda, that makes it sound like there's some sort of collusion between them and government". Yes. That is exactly right. The fact he as a professor doesn't have more knowledge about the well documented history (and soon to be history) of the intelligence community and other parts of our government working with the media to push stories that are beneficial to their narrative made me lose any remaining faith in the facade of self-criticality within academia.
I've always been privy to anti-establishment rhetoric. Bernie being my first introduction to politics certainly shaped this, which makes it sad seeing what he has become today, being a whipping boy for the Democratic party. The online communist communities I became immersed in firmly cemented those radical feelings, that it wasn't just the people in government that were bad but that the whole bloody system was rotten to the core. Over the years as communism has lost that golden glimmer of hope that I once thought it had, that disdain for the system remains and grows stronger.
A common line I heard within these communities to counter the growing anti-establishment rhetoric of American conservatism was "the government plays a minor role in your life when compared to your boss. He controls eight hours of your day and your paycheck". I'm finding that to be less and less of the case. Though I don't have a "real" job, working in retail, if I have an issue with how things are being done, I can at least tell my boss about it. The government seems to be reaching its fingers into everything now. Our light bulb section had to be completely reworked with the restriction on incandescent bulbs and I have to regularly turn away people because an LED equivalent hasn't worked in their ancient fixture. It just boils my blood to see that decision being made for them by the powers at be, that a person can't choose to use a less efficient form of lighting in their own damn home. I like LEDs, nice soft white bulbs have existed for many years now and I often try to steer customers towards them for their numerous advantages over incandescents, but I still think someone ought to be able to choose "wrong". Not to mention all the meddling that has been revealed through the so called "twitter files" and the "disinformation experts" that seek to tamper down any information the system deems too dangerous. Even the required expiration dates on foods that, when in the right environment, would last for months if not years after what is printed.
My parents built a house on their property which became a 3+ year process due to all the permitting that was required. First they needed to build a solar array if they didn't want their roof to be covered in solar panels, a solar array which has yet to be hooked up to the grid despite being finished for the past 2+ years, simply because the house hasn't received an "occupancy permit" despite the solar array being completely separate from the building. Tens of thousands of dollars were required to build the array, and it can't even be used because of moronic red tape. I haven't even started on all the requirements of the house, like the full sprinkler system that needed to be installed and now litters the ceiling with ugly white circles. Now the city is requiring them to put thousands of dollars more into expanding the already massive gravel driveway because the grade is too steep for a firetruck to turn around, despite the fact we've had massive construction vehicles do so, albeit with some difficulty. The state of California is looking for any little bit of money it can take from my parents. Now in order to even get an occupancy permit my parents have to move stuff out so it doesn't look like they have been living in the house for the past six months so they won't be fined during their inspection.
And when I do actually want to interact with the system it spits in my face. After filing a police report regarding my stolen bike, which was a needlessly complex process in and of itself, it took them two months to even acknowledge that they had received it! Roomie has been in and out of having healthcare because MediCal keeps saying that he is still living in Contra Costa County despite living in Sacramento for almost four years now! Crime is rampant on the streets and we are regularly robbed at the store AND THERE'S NOTHING WE CAN DO ABOUT IT.
It just makes me so mad, it makes me want to do things like....
My lawyer has advised me not to finish that statement.
But yeah I hope somebody does something about this rotten mess soon.
I awake from my daily prayer sitting in my garden, the sun hitting my skin and covering me with its radiant warmth before it is pushed away by a passing breeze.
The finches chirp overhead before the greedy jay bird chases them off, wanting all the riches of my feeder to herself. I tend to my plants, filling their cups until they can drink no more, plucking any sickly leaves, and ensuring their health.
I turn to my compost pile, once a mound of dry clay, laid hard and barren for as long as I had known it, now growing darker and richer in color by the day. The lawn clippings and thistle I had buried in it the week prior have now become mere fibers, being soaked back into the soil they had once grown from. A sizable pile had accumulated in my food-scraps bin and today is the day they shall join the earth once again. As I turn over the pile, I pour in the bin's contents and see remnants of the past weeks: onion skins, banana peels, cabbage leaves, and coffee grounds. Before my eyes I watch as the foul-odored scraps become less and less distinct from one another, being coated in a fine layer of mud, being chopped with my shovel like I had done so with my knife prior. Some day this soil will too feed my plants, who in turn will feed me. With each passing day I see my children grow more and more, their leaves widening, their stems hardening, their flowers blooming, and their vines climbing ever higher towards the sky.
I sit down once more in the clover patch of the lawn and watch the honeybees jump from flower to flower, each performing her part in a centuries-long tradition. How am I so different than her? sewing my crops, tending to them, like my many-greats grandfather did before me all those years ago in the fertile crescent.
I arise once more for some weeding. As I am pulling out the thistle I notice that the morning glory has grown itself around my spiny victim. I imagine for a moment a great battle between the two, one ensnaring itself around the other before delivering a finishing blow. However, I look again and see that there is no quarrel between the two neighbors, the vine may weave its way around the spikes, but it is not harmed, nor does this embrace halt the thistle from growing ever higher. I laugh at myself for being so foolish, we are not all warring apes in this life.
As I drag my bundle of thistle to the compost pile, I see a stalk of pokeweed peeking out behind the fence post, the perfect height for harvesting. Although he is considered a weed, his leaves hold many vital nutrients, though only once stripped of his toxins. Then my attention is drawn to another "weed", the humble dandelion, so rich in nutrients and hearty enough to grow through even the toughest of pavements, only for us apes to go to war with it with toxins of our own.