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This week in squirrels… ...

Sneaker Pimp’s “Becoming X” … Yep, that’s the whole post. The entire reason I buy almost every track of music I enjoy is because of Sneaker Pimp’s “Becoming X.” ...

This week in squirrels… Summary Streaming has been a mixed bag lately. Twitch changed the way they count viewers, so my views are much lower now. Now I show streaming to nobody for large swaths of time, which may be a reflection of my lack of popularity/discoverability. Still, I am trying to improve my speaking and presenting, so I will master the “being on” to nobody skill. Ironically, I had an excellent late-week stream. Having even a few people around can really change the tone and feel, but also, I am getting better at swerving and filling time. Working on my speaking skills is part of the point. UUUUUUUgh. My old friend amdgpu: ring gfx_0.0.0 timeout is back. I swore I was rid of this. It only happened once, but still, crashes and resets on the tower I work from are agonizing. New medications I am taking are working wonders. I am still experiencing some energy issues. However, things are significantly better overall, particularly regarding fluid retention and mobility. I don’t feel like an overstuffed sausage constantly anymore. During my monthly massage, I received comments about less intense fluid buildup and lymphatic draining going far more easily than usual. It’s shocking the amount of time I can burn just tweaking tech stuff, but I swear my blog has almost all of its annoyances out the window and done with. I even made a sharing profile. Mastodon was frustrating the heck out of me because I couldn’t get cards to work, and then four days later… it just worked! Not sure if my blog became more magical, or if I really needed to let Mastodon catch up. Either way, I have cards and more blog posts. I am sticking to my twice-weekly cadence and want to see if I can maintain this for three or four months to really make it a habit. More upgrades! This week, for the Apple stuff, macOS 26 Tahoe came out. Not all of my equipment is new enough to upgrade; I have a lot of equipment, but I don’t constantly replace most of it until it actually has issues. The Apple TV experience was fascinating. The moment it booted into a new OS, it was significantly faster. Much less typing and click lag, everything is moving faster. Obsidian is ultra buggy on iPad, constantly forcing itself into a phone-width screen with a large white bar at the side. Yet, Some apps are really doing the new UI well, I am looking at you infuse and overcast. The new UI is mostly fine, but I keep hitting text that is unreadable due to background showing through, especially in the Photos app. I do like now a lot of the design language evokes the early Mac OS X design language with the oval buttons, lots of frosted glass, and round lickable everything. They removed how sidebar apps and split screen apps worked on the iPad, and I really loathe the new way to do split screen. It’s far more clumsy and finicky. Exciting news! Well, the precursor to exciting news. A commission I have been waiting on for a very long time is out of the backlog and into work. I’m going to have a full-body Live2D model with some great toggles and outfits. My excitement can hardly be contained. It’s been raining most of the week, and while it’s brought tonnes of humidity, it’s also lowered temperatures into the low 30s. 30s are not quite window-open-all-day temps, but at least I can get some more airflow in the house. Sadly, I also struggle with humidity, which has been particularly challenging. I didn’t mention the murder last week, and honestly, I am even less interested in talking about it this week. Still, I also find it very difficult to avoid it or give it an excess of mental space due to the changes that are being pushed from it. Everything that is transpiring are things many of us knew deep down were going to happen the moment a big enough event could trigger it, but it makes it no less difficult for those being targeted. And for those people being targeted, listen to Black people. They have been through this before. Books Brewing Up Bedlam (Magic and Mishaps): Still In Progress Whisper me a Love Song, Vol 9: ⭐⭐⭐ I feel like, if not for the rough paneling and the fact that the ultra-rough anime already spoiled the end of this arc long ago, I could give this 4-5 stars, but for now, it’s pushed down to the weakest book in the series for me. I have high hopes for the next arc, though. Music HEALTH: I keep coming back to VOL4 and Rat Wars… I have this nagging feeling I should like this group more than I do, but I just haven’t given it a good enough listen… IDK. The pandemic collabs are still excellent. Clipping.: I think Clipping.’s latest album is their weakest work to date, but it doesn’t change Clipping. from being one of my favorite acts. Sewerslvt: Jvne re-posted the vent music session she did after her girlfriend committed suicide, “Tortvred Lesbians Ripped Apart.” I waxed and waned on buying the 22-minute-long track, but eventually caved and bought it. It’s excellent but also very intense, especially when you know the context that it is essentially one long building scream of pain and loss. Reads and Vids I know my links have been obnoxiously dark this week, but there are so many fascinating stories about various dark patterns and trends popping up. I offer some apology for how intense some of them are, and made sure to add some fun stuff too. ...

Welcome to the Great British Bake-Off, I mean Forgejo migration! I intended this post to be the whole story of how I took a week to migrate nearly 60 repositories to my own forge and set up CI/CD and dependency automation over it. The moment I started writing, I realized it’s going to be a long series. Hopefully you will stick along though. The Background I have always been a fan of self-hosting. Since the days of Debian Potato1, I have been fixated on the idea of setting up and managing my own servers and services. There is no surprise in my career choices after thinking about this. While that original server’s hard drive ate itself a long, long time ago, and I was forced to rebuild it all by hand over the weekend (tequila was involved somehow), I eventually learned how to automate everything. In general, version control was always at the center of my automations and scripts. ...

🎊 I hope you like the new theme! 🎨 I only just barely got this new look ready in time for the weekly update. This brings the look and flow of my blog back to its minimal roots while improving readability imo. Please let me know what you think, good, bad, or indifferent. This week in squirrels… Summary I cannot believe I woke up so early after such a late night of streaming. My Sunday AM Chaos stream quickly went into Terraria, turned into an epic-sized stream in time, and viewership again. However, Terraria was fun until it wasn’t, and then I was angry and frustrated, an event over spawned and stuck me in 10 10-minute death loop, so I bailed. I had a good conversation with Pixel during the stream about the struggle of newbies playing the game with veterans, because there is a big rush to get the game to a point for somebody who has done this enough times, while the newbie wants to explore and learn. I felt that at maximum volume by the end of the stream. Days later, somebody brought to my attention that Journey mode has a “god mode” button; in retrospect, that could have solved a lot of frustration. Ended the week with a second good Terreria stream, after Sunday’s torrent of frustration, I was handed a redic sword and basically melted anything and everything that could annoy me. It was a bit much that the game had no challenge anymore, but still, we got to play with all the bosses. The week of Debian upgrades continues. With both 12 and 13 receiving a point release, I have many boxes to patch. Mark my words, though. I believe Michiru’s (RaspberryPi) SD card is going. It’s so slow to do work on it. However, the system requires very little disk I/O, so I will let it run until it dies and then rebuild it. I lost a good bit of time to something the Debian 13 upgrade broke for me. NVENC and NVDEC were not working in Jellyfin and Plex. Plex silently switched to software, but Jellyfin started throwing errors. It took me a bit to realize it wasn’t something with nvidia-container-toolkit. The upgrade + auto-remove cleaned out libnvcuvid1 and libnvidia-encode1. 😆 Kinda need those. Did overhauls on my blog this week as planned. Feels nice to get things working better, but I don’t love how much time I spend fiddling with things. Getting things into a flow state takes work, and blogging is not something I always want to fiddle with. I hope all my week’s posts are not as big as last week’s. Luckily, hyperfocus and feedback put me in a huge blogging mood. I am stacking up drafts I can edit and post when I am not feeling like writing as much later. I really miss my old Hugo theme. It broke with a newer version of Hugo, and I switched to a more “off the shelf” one that looks amazing at a glance, but has a lot of things that bother me. I spent a whole evening tweaking my current theme to make it a touch more readable and fit better with how I want After all the modifications, I realized the theme wasn’t working for me, and I found one that fits what I wanted more. I worked on it extensively in PR, and even though it took a few days of on-and-off tuning and some feedback, I achieved the clean and stark look with PaperMod and a healthy dose of my own CSS. It might be too minimal, but let’s go with it. It is fascinating to me in some of the worst ways that people are trying to bring back the R-slur. I have been seeing it around a lot more and even heard some commentary about it. I wonder about the motivation and goals behind the attempt to make it socially acceptable again. It’s a weird cycle. Back in my day, we’d say it and get a wooping, then the Family Guy era hit, and it was everywhere, and then we realized that was a colossal mistake… now it is back? Now I am pondering “Words as fences” or how we define a space with words. Another random social issue I will spend too much time thinking about and writing about Renovate is only weeks old in my setup. I am already looking at the number of Renovate PRs I receive daily and considering how to set up auto-merging on passing tests, as well as how to test some crucial aspects, such as Hugo builds, since themes often break with new Hugo versions. However, it’s already caught some breaking versions, which is excellent. Coming back to work after two weeks off is a lot, a lot, a lot. But Pomodoro’s have been keeping me on and honest, which is excellent. Uuuuuuugh, Plex is having more issues with security. Last month, it was a critical client patch, and now it’s a service breach. Resetting my password and sessions has compromised my server to the point where I needed to delete my Preferences.xml and set it up as new to get it to authenticate again. I need to stop pre-ordering every last manga and book that looks like a half-decent queer romance. Over the previous two weeks, I have read two manga that I didn’t particularly enjoy. The first book was not to my liking, and the second was even less appealing. OMGOSH, the weather y’all. Towards the end of the week, temperatures started diving down to almost 20 °C by 6am, and I am so giddy. It’s cool enough to open windows at night and in the morning. AIR! FRESH AIR through my house. I received an absolutely hilarious piece of spam from Grammarly introducing their new feature. In short, “By now you are amazing at using AI to write for you, but it all sounds too stiff and like AI doesn’t, it? Introducing humanizer! The AI to make your AI sound less AI.” I am in stitches. My first major Jellyfin bug hit me. Trying to delete a massive music library broke library scans for everything and failed to clean up anything. I ended up having to add it back, remove it, and then perform an unfortunate amount of manual cleanup. At least Jellyfin’s file layouts and setups are mostly human parseable. My motivation has been a bit hard to come by, which isn’t too shocking, but I really felt my energy drop off at the end of the week, and the big depression swing came hard. I hate blaming hormones, but yanno what. I am staring at the calendar like… I know what this is. I have slipped back into a bad YouTube habit where I am spending too much time opening it and looking for something to watch to my taste. This eats into my reading time, and it shows by how much I have and haven’t read. Books Brewing Up Bedlam in Progress It’s all Your Fault Vol 2 ⭐ Music Yesss new Tierra Wack Björk: I am crawling her catalog this week. Although I liked Post a lot, I feel I never gave her enough of a chance. I appreciate and enjoy her work even more than I remember, and while it’s a bit disjointed, her latest album has fantastic sounds and tracks. Sophie: A co-worker mentioned Sophie, and now I am completely derailed and needed to drop everything and listen to her solo work—the founder of hyperpop who bore so many amazing artists in her wake. Sigh, rest in peace, and probably a lot of hype. Oh wow, one of my fave albums. Well, we’re listening to Spahn Ranch for the end of the week. I am not even mad at how old this is. Oh, that old muddy Cleopatra industrial metal sound hits me just right. Today is the 30th anniversary of the Spahn Ranch album “The Coiled One,” which was released on September 12, 1995, by Cleopatra Records. ...

[!NOTE] This blog post is from my drafts archive. I was initially researching leaving my Kindle in Quarter 1 of 2025 when Amazon removed the ability to download your purchases from their website. I never ended up pulling the trigger for this and as of this posting, I still use my Kindle and the Amazon Kindle store heavily. That said, I think my reflections and research are still valuable enough to others to share. ...