Blog
2025-05-28: So, I spent most of this evening installing and configuring Linux Mint Cinnamon onto every computer I own. And I own too many cheap computers. I've been running Debian on everything but my gaming rig for a bit, but I decided to give this another swing with the next minor version, 22.2, coming out shortly. I spent long enough using GNOME to start figuring out what I like most about that desktop environemnt, and how to implement some of my favorite things into Cinnamon.
The #1 thing I like about GNOME is its clean desktop setup. It's very MacOS in its simplicity, with a minimal top bar displaying the date and system tray. You can add a dock for your favorite apps and programs too. I usually add a dock to the side, with a transparency feature that looks really clean and nice.
Mint follows more traditional desktop design though. By default, it has a tray at the bottom of the screen, with a start menu on one side, system try on the other, and a clock at the very end. I have shifted that up to the top, moved the clock to the middle of the screen, added the day/month/year to it, and still have pinned programs by the start menu. It now looks like a hybrid between MacOS and Windows 7, kinda taking the best of both setups.
Anyways, all that to say, I like doing this stuff even if it's a little consuming. Since starting to use Linux in Spring 2024, I have learned an awful lot about what I like, want, and need from my computer! It's been such a neat journey.
Oh, also, I discovered that the Umamusume: Pretty Derby Steam release works on Linux using Steam's Proton compatibility settings. I kinda imagined it might have some random anti-cheat stuff that'd get in the way, but nope! I'll probably finish up a spin-off from the anime series and give a brief review of the game in a follow-up. These outrageous horse girls have taken over my life.
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2025-08-25: Spent a lot of the weekend doing chores and stuff around the house, testing Microsoft Flight Sim more thoroughly on my new-to-me CPU and upgraded RAM, and detailed my car a bit. Not a whole lot else to report. Which, frankly, is good sometimes.
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2025-08-18
It's gonna be an insanely busy few weeks for me coming up, so I am not sure how often I'll be on here. I am onboarding three (!!!) new interns in the coming weeks. I usually have a rotation with some continuity, but things didn't shake out that way this time around. And they all have wildly different skill sets, areas of interest, and personalities. These last few months have really pushed me to get better at directing others, and I'll be putting that to the test.
I'm also trying to convince one intern who is leaving to get on the indie web. If you happen to see this, howdy! [waves]
Boy, I was out of it with that last post. I somehow assigned it a May date instead of August. Chalk that up to an overtired, emotionally exhausted brain. I was also getting over being sick, so that didn't help matters.
Here's hoping this week goes better.
OH! Also, I am building a second page now! It'll be a more professional outing, meant to highlight my past and present career projects, blogging in greater detail about work stuff, and providing resources and a point of contact for colleagues. I won't be linking it here, keeping spheres separated and all, but my experience with this thing has me building a "LinkedIn without the Lunatics" site for myself! With significantly fewer geese!
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2025-08-17: This is gonna be a long one, and a bit of a rambling mess:
Late night is transitioning to early morning, and I had no intention of staying up so late. I was up a little later tonight playing a game, set it aside, and realized I had not really had dinner. (I was sick to close out the week so my appetite, sleep schedule, and meal times are all out of whack)
I had a quesadilla and a bit too much margarita to finish off a bottle, and found myself reflecting on someone from my past, a high school summit relationship and someone for whom I had stayed attached for way too long. It was one of those situations where you feel that, if you stick it out, you'll end up together when it's all said and done. Truth be told, self-esteem was so cavernously low during that whole phase that I felt I would never find that love again.
Nearly an entire lifetime later, I find myself in a much different place. Though I am single now, I have found all kinds of love, romantic and platonic, and I have loved others thoroughly in a wide range of ways. I was deserving of love, care and attention then, and the same is true of myself today.
One thing that stands out to me though; If they were to reach out, I would have to contend with the fact that I wouldn't know the person across the table from me anymore. The last time we knew each other, we were emotionally troubled and socially stunted teens, and it would be wildly unfair for me to gauge them today by that metric. Likewise, I wonder what version of myself exists in their head whenever I come to mind, if I come to mind. I spent several years kind of hating the version of me that they knew, trying to bury my past self in favor of who I am trying to become. I have softened a bit though, recognizing that the pissed off teen in my past had enough people give up on them and leave them, and that's not what I needed. Instead, I've been trying to show that side of myself a bit of grace, care and attention. This whole website, in part, is a continuation of that.
Last autumn, a local music shop hosted a singer-songwriter event, where local musicians showed folks what they'd been working on. I found the whole experience moving, so much so that I cried on the drive home and wrote some trite poetry. It was basically a conversation between myself of today, and myself from my teen years. It was a reminder that it's one of the facets of who I am, and instead of running from my past, I would probably benefit from trying to care for myself the way that past me needed to be cared for. So, since then, I have been trying to give myself move space to feel things fully and find a space to express myself.
For better or worse, it took me a while to find a good outlet. I determined early this year that my pre-existingsocial media was not where I wanted to experiment with self-expression, opting instead to close those accounts entirely. I then spent several months with only a Reddit account, then trying out Tumblr, before stumbling into the indie web. I've found that this little blog, and the fun interactions I've had with others through it, has been really good for me. I'm glad that I haven't had to completely abandon online spaces, instead finding the ones better suited to how I really want to engage.
Back to the point though, I have been trying to work on aspects of myself that I have struggled with since the time this person from my past first entered my life. The version of myself they knew had a lot of healing that needed to be done, and I am still finding areas that need TLC to this day. I hope they have had the opportunity to care for themselves too, both their current and past selves. I learned from a mutual friend that they've recently gone through a family tragedy, so I hope they have folks in their life who can show them the care and grace and kindness they need.
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2025-08-13: I'm up later than intended. Cyberpunk 2077 drew me in. Turned around twice and it was midnight.
I fixed a couple typos and spelling errors in the last post. I spent most of my time getting a sense of the feel of that 2011-era craptop, at the expense of typing accuracy. I think I have an addiction to terrible, tiny laptops because now I want to get the closest modern analogue to that thing: an Asus Vivobook Go, which is a modern 11.6 inch laptop. It's one of very, very few laptops with that form factor, which also ships with a regular SSD instead of a terrible little eMMC chip. Another laptop for another day.
If I'm totally honest though, I get why ~14 inch slim laptops have basically taken over the market for the smallest computers though. They're kind of a happy medium, not as unwieldy as a big laptop, but still big enough to not feel cramped to type on. I'm not sure there's actually that much of a space gain on the new one, since it has much larger bezels. In any case, I'll probably use the tiny potato for testing the practical limits of modern Linux on an old machine. Its RAM and storage expansions, alongside the worst CPU for that model, is a fun hardware combo for investigation. I just wish the touchpad worked normally ;-;
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2025-08-11: I'm writing this on one of the most anemic little computers I have ever seen!
I won this thing on an ebay auction a week or so ago. I placed the minimum bid and figured others would chime in. Lo and behold, nobody else bit. Turns out, these specs were plenty of reason to stay away. Despite the decent amount of ram, that i3 processor is very, very, very slow, and that drags down virtually everything you could possibly do on it.
On the plus side, it seems to be in good working order. The battery still holds a charge and everything mostly seems to work as expected. One annoying thing is that the trackpad struggles to register multi-touch, which made GNOME a no-go. Xfce is working great though! It has an edge scrolling bar that requires a bit of adjusting to, but I'm getting the hang of it. I'd like to hold onto this thing as a disposable travel machine, something where I wouldn't be too heartbroken if I broke it.
I had one of those Asus Transformer Books around 2014 and I absolutely loved the smaller form factor for research and web browsing. It feels like 14 inch laptops are typically the smallest you regularly see nowadays, but I have a soft spot for little 11.6 inch netbook/ultrabook sized machines. I really wish this form factor was still popular outside the school-issued chromebook market.
I debated getting an old Chromebook, but those things came with eMMC storage, which is notorious about aging poorly. By comparison, the SSD and ram expansion on this thing seems to be the best performance I can expect for a little potato like this.
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2025-08-10 I was zonked after work on Friday, between the trip to get the car stuff taken care of, and interviewing an intern candidate yesterday. I had dinner and conked out early, then woke up just after midnight. I ended up staying up for a while, then going back to sleep sometime after the sun came up. One of those days, ya know?
On the plus side, I managed to get a lot of house work done today, then when to a local festival with a friend this evening! I'm up later than I should be since my sleep schedule is borked, but I'll be turning in shortly.
Also, I managed to get some new RAM installed in my decade-old gaming rig. This thing is now rocking an i5-4790K, an AMD RX 6650 XT, and 32 GB of RAM. Which, frankly, is overkill for most of what I play. I'm sure that GPU is somewhat bottlenecked by my motherboard but it's perfectly fine for everything I play. I'm basically keeping this thing alive until some critical components fail. The lovely thing about the Linux ecosystem is that hardware support sticks around far, far longer than Windows! I'll probably turn this into a home media server or something down the road. Heck, I may try getting some cheap components on ebay and building one from my old i5 and a GTX 1660 I have sitting around.
Also also, I decided to install Debian 13 on my gaming rig, despite past experience telling me that Debian is usually a poor fit for gaming PCs and that Fedora is obviously the better fit. Why do this? Because! Really though, I have this preoccupation for finding a Silver Bullet distro, one that meets my wants and needs at every level. When Debian 13 was still in testing, it was wonky to try to game with. Too many packages were getting removed/updated to keep things consistent for how I set things up. Now, however, it looks like things are setting up nicely. Since 13 got its stable release today, I'm hoping it will do the trick! I am letting Retroarch import my classic game library overnight and I'll test Steam/Lutris/Retroarch sometime tomorrow. IF all else fails, Fedora will be ezpz to reinstall.
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2025-08-07: Got the car sold. My feelings are kinda all-over-the-place about it. I'll be writing something more extensive about it in a little while. I have found that a lot of my cars have been representative of where I am in my life, so this feels like closing a chapter. One that's as much of a mixed bag as the car itself. I'll put a link to it here, and under the Writing section on the navigation panel. I gotta get this out of my system while it's fresh.
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2025-08-06: Two big things!
#1: I succeeded at installing a new CPU into my gaming rig! I got the top-of-the-line CPU from this chipset. Jumping from a mid-tier i5 to a really good i7. It's still a decade or so old so it can't hold a candle to new machines, but it'll extend the life of my machine. I also have more ram coming, to bump it up to a ridiculous 32 gb.
The vast majority of games in my library are pre-2020, so I'm not exactly pushing the cutting edge for my games. However, Microsoft Flight Simulator was an awful lot to ask for my little i5. Good thing I didn't ask it to play it too much, just a cool 1,800 hours D: (I'll definitely be putting a review or something out. It's far and away the software I have used more than anything else during my downtime this last half-decade.
#2: I am selling a car! I've got someone in my family who's been needing a car after some financial setbacks. I've had an old, low mileage honda as a "getting through this chapter" car after a natural disaster. It has some quirks because of an accident history, but I spent like, a year getting a lot of its issues sorted out. Here's hoping this lil thing gets them through the chapter they're in.
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2025-08-02: After fighting uphill for a bit, I have GrapheneOS working on my phone. I tried this a few months ago, but was not 100% sure if it would affect the rebate I was getting for my phone. Now that it's paid off, we should be good though!
I also just started Cyberpunk 2077. It's. . . interesting? The controls feel a little clunky to me. It and The Witcher 3 both feel like triple-A euro-jank. I've been wanting to check out the anime, Cyberpunk Edgerunners. It's apparently a tear jerker.
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2025-08-01: It's officially the dog days of summer. We climbed well over 100 degrees this week. It's been miserable. Blehh.
