Blog

2026-01-27: I've ventured out from home for the first time in nearly a week. I have family driving to the city to come to a basketball game, so I decided to make a day of it, getting some mediterranian food for lunch and spending some time at a coffee shop before we meet up.

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2026-01-25: The Linux guide is more-or-less finished! I added the last pictures and gifs to break up the text a bit. Unless I think of something specific to add or need to correct something, I will leave it alone. I think it should be enough to help demystify things for those that seek it out.

It's basically the only thing I have done the last couple days, so I am gonna step away from the site for a couple days. I'll get some new buttons added to my homepage when I come back.

Edit: I kickflipped from one tech project to another and installed LineageOS, a stripped-down Android build, on an older Samsung tablet. The stock OS is so choked with bloatware that the thing hardly worked, so I basically never used it. It appears to be much snappier now!

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2026-01-24: Back at it with the Linux guide. Another friend asked to see the guide when it's ready, since he's looking at converting his gaming rig as a testbed. Windows' degrading user experience and surveillance were the main motivating factors. With current events unfolding as they are, any semblance of control over one's own data is a bit of comfort.

I sent a gif of some covered wagons, saying I am glad to have been the pioneer going out ahead of my friends by being a bit of a privacy weirdo early. But it stops being "a privacy weirdo" when you start seeing neighbors get whisked away to parts unknown. Linux is not a magic silver bullet that can fix the current state of affairs, but it's a step towards putting some barriers between yourself and the sorts of data collecting that is getting used against people.

Here's hoping that the work I am putting into this thing grants some of my friends and loved ones, and anyone else who looks to it, a bit of calm in the storm. Knowing that there are things you can control can be a salve when you're overwhelmed by the things you can't.

Quick update:

Getting screenshots from Windows, demonstrating how to get Windows and Linux isos, was a bit of a nightmare. Turns out, Windows's snipping tool doesn't have an option to save to My Pictures! So they were just overwriting each other in my clipboard! I audibly said "oh, how neat is that 😒." when I realized I wasted 20-odd minutes with nothing to show for it. I got 'em now though.

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2026-01-23: We are getting our first bit of snowfall now. Thankfully, the freezing rain never came, so hopefully our power lines will hold out just fine! I have some basic preparations made in case things get bad. Hopefully that all comes to naught.

It is brutally cold. Just getting the trash can from the curb and bringing it around to the back of my townhome was awful. Despite bundling up and wearing a good pair of gloves, my hands were freezing by the time I got inside. It's definitely not something you wanna get caught out in.

I am also very glad to have gotten a day off work. Apparently I was operating over-tired, because I ended up sleeping over 12 hours. This is the first evening that I've felt decent in a while.

I have my little knockoff roomba sweeping my living room and kitchen, and I plan on hanging out in a bedroom and working on my site for a couple hours tonight. I'll try and get the text finished up on the Linux guide, and capture some screenshots for it too. I need to set some VMs up on my desktop so I can screencap a few different desktop environments and distros!

Oh! Also!

nice.

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2026-01-22: Wow, it's been almost two weeks.

I spent a good chunk of time feeling sickly and having no energy. When I was on the mend, I did not feel like doing much of anything. I have also been in an endless game of catch-up with housekeeping after letting it get out of hand while I was out of commission. Thankfully I am doing better now.

My region is hunkering down in preparation for some pretty extreme winter weather. Neither our infrastructure nor city services are accustomed to heavy snow and ice, so there has been an unease in the air. Schools are pre-emptively planning on staying closed through the beginning of next week, which is highly unusual for us. Here's hoping we don't get a thick layer of ice and the mass electrical outages that come with it.

If our utilities hold up, I will hopefully make use of the down-time to finish up my Linux guide! I also plan on playing either a racing sim or truck sim, just to give my brain the impression of driving or a road trip. I may also spend some time reorganizing some cabinets. I kinda hit a point recently where things got out of whack, and the work of getting it in order was more than I could do, so I have just kinda lived with it. Maybe this will be a good time to reestablish some order.

For any other folks in the crossfire of winter weather: Stay warm, stay safe, and stay sane. Have some soup or hot chocolate or tea, hide out in your blankies, take time to rest if you are able to, and we can ride this out.

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2026-01-11: I made a ton of progress on my Linux guide this weekend, but I have a couple more things to add. I also need to go back through and proofread it, and add some bold/italic/underline tags and images to illustrate some things.

I initially planned on finishing it up tonight, but it'll have to wait. I got invited to a friend's house to have dinner and watch football. I'll go enjoy my evening, then try and have that done by the end of next week.

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2026-01-09: The aformentioned friend has expressed an interest in stepping away from social media. I am encouraging her to give the indie web a try. In the meantime, I'm moving with all due haste to get my linux guide ready. I also had another friend express interest in trying Linux today, to give an old laptop a bit longer to keep working. Here's hoping this effort is helpful!

In other news: Cygames, the company behind the horse girl anime and video game franchise Umamusume, announced a new AI studio yesterday. They intend on leveraging their game development experience in the AI bubble, and are hiring for roles relating to both image generation and gameplay/balancing AI tools. I'm beyond disappointed to see a franchise with such a crazy premise and fun fanbase going this direction. I'd been casually playing the game for a few months, but I'm taking this opportunity to step away. I submitted feedback saying that I oppose this move, that I am uninstalling, and plan to give my time, money, and attention to non-AI projects until they reverse course.

Will that feedback, alone, do anything? Probably not.

Would a surge of negative attention make a difference? Possibly.

Would they reconsider if it impacts their bottom line? I am sure of it.

2026-01-08: After promising a couple months ago to look into it, I just took a big step towards helping a friend try Linux out! She's a digital artist who has been cynical about Microsoft's AI ethics, but also leans on Affinity, the creative suite by Canva, for a lot of her work. Thanks to some helpful folks on Github, I was able to find a couple different ways to get it working, both on Kubuntu and Linux Mint! I will probably try it out on Debian for my own sake later. I might also try it on Fedora and OpenSUSE just to cover my bases?

I have no idea how to use Affinity, so I can't exactly stress test the program to see how stable it is. However, I produced the two pictures above as a proof of concept, to show you can edit and export images with it! I've recommended she try Linux Mint to start out, and I am keeping Mint on one of my systems to help with troubleshooting when she's ready to give it a try

I will also be making a "Layperson's Linux Quick-start Guide" to try and demystify the process. From setting up a USB to boot Linux (and Windows,) to accessing your UEFI/BIOS and setting it to boot from the USB, to some basic information about the filesystem and how things generally work, to some videos and other guides, I hope to make something that makes trying Linux not so intimidating. It'll be for that friend first and foremost, but if you're reading this, I hope to introduce you to it too!

Linux users have gotten a negative reputation for gatekeeping and being a bit unfriendly to new users, but I want to welcome folks in my life to try something new and take a bit of control of their computing. I've said before, but the Linux Mint community has been especially good when it comes to this mindset, and I try to contribute to their subreddit when I can. This stuff can be really scary if you're not computer-savvy, and elitist weirdos treating you like an idiot for taking your first baby steps and falling is really unpleasant. Thankfully, I had help from nice people in my life, and I hope to pay it forward.

I am certain that I will get some stuff a bit wrong. In some cases it may be a little reductive (either because I don't fully understand, or to keep from letting newcomers get bogged down in the details.) If you know better and catch something egregiously wrong, please let me know!

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2026-01-06: I ended up spending a good chunk of the holiday season resting and getting some alone time. I think I needed that opportunity to hit the reset button. I didn't make any progress on the things I considered doing on my site, but it's not like I'm up against a deadline or anything.

Starting back at work after an extended break has robbed me of spoons, and it may take a bit to get back into the normal rhythm of things. Here's hoping I hit my stride soon.

I'll probably get a little list of things I wanna try and do on here, like the one I have for my day job. I'm in that headspace where I set everything down for a while and I am trying to figure out where/when/how to pick things back up.