This week in squirrels…

Summary

  • Just sick
    • New meds, seasonal slick, and cranky are making this a hard start to the week.
    • I was just looking up, and things got a lot worse.
  • New Music Player, the HiBy M300
    • It’s been a mixed bag. It feels so nice and sounds lovely… SOMETIMES.
    • Plugging a powered speaker into it adds noticeable clicks and hissing. The amp audibly clicks on and off fairly loudly when not playing something, and this will be the end of me, I swear
    • It DOES drive my old 250 ohm studio headphones, which is cool.
    • Setting it up was a touch more painful than it should have been. Life lesson: Don’t encode all your music to Opus to save space while preserving quality. HiBy Player and Poweramp both HATE opus files, and it will kill your battery, and all file loads will take forever.
    • Once I loaded my flac files onto the device, it operated smoothly and almost flawlessly.
    • Now that it is all set up it is working really well. I was really hoping we had at least maintained the usability and ease of use as the iPod, which oddly, we have not.
  • Lil bit of a streaming breakout
    • I somehow overnight tripled my viewers? Not sure how. But somehow I had 13 whole viewers! Weeeeeee.
  • What happened to wish fulfillment?
    • I have been noticing a lot more manga and anime obsessed with the idea of being so work-pilled and ground into death marches that even when isekai’d, the fantasy fulfillment here is to continue being a work slave, but being the best work slave a New World has ever seen.
    • I am pro-work, but this feels like some sort of propaganda-level narrative about how the fantasies that children and young adults should have are being the best worker drone. And that’s kind of weird and depressing.
  • Speaking of Isakai…
    • Is it me, or is a lot of Isakai is used solely as a cheap and easy way to introduce massive amounts of exposition and world-building upfront? I’m not saying all stories do this, but I tend to find there are a lot of them that could’ve been plenty fine, bog-standard fantasy, but they chose Isakai so that they could spend multiple chapters or episodes exposition-dumping on the person who just showed up in their world.
    • There is one this season that feels even less subtle.
  • NixOS
    • How do you see what changed? Today, my Flake update and Nix build did this.1 I know things changed, but it tells me nothing.
    • I think I am ready to compile several of my complaints over the past many months, find out solutions, and then write a blog post on how I overcame questions, hopefully to help other people’s on boarding
  • DankMaterialShell
    • I’ve decided to try and give DMS a shot since it’s so well integrated with Niri, and they seem to be starting to move together.
    • I have been doing the “piecemeal desktop” for so long, it was actually kinda jarring to disable and remove so many little apps that I use. Still, I wanted to try using it all in, since all my configurations are in Git, a rollback is fairly trivial.
    • My initial impression is that it’s extremely impressive and well done, giving that full DE experience with a window manager.
    • I am a little nervous since it’s another single dev project, but it’s not like so many tools I lived by were not single dev. It was just easy to replace rofi when I went to Wayland without uprooting my entire system. Once I get settled into this, it will be harder to switch.
    • Of course, day one, I find a bug and have a bug report to submit after experimenting the next day. I am so… o v e r j o y e d ???? to be that person. haha. At least I am good at debugging and reports
    • It has been a little frustrating moving over to it, lots of theme fiddling to make things work, even needing to switch off my rose pine for now. I prefer a pink hue over a blue hue any day.
    • I think my least favorite part of this is how slow it is. Now, I want to be clear. It’s not SUPER slow or anything. But I am used to firing off some keybinds so fast that I am almost rolling keys. Yet when I hit the keyboard command for the launcher, there is a half-second delay where keystrokes fall into the app below, and everything has that with it
  • Back on fish… AGAIN
    • Every three to four years, I switch back to fish to try it out, get annoyed by scripting syntax, and then bounce back to ZSH.
    • but here I am again, now with fish 4.x. I really wanted to try it out since it seems to be back on a good roll since they finished the Rust transition.
    • It seems a good bit faster, and the fact that I did a full replication of my zsh settings in fish doesn’t feel different yet; I just need to get used to the fishisms again.
  • Scammers and Solicitors as an Economic Indicator
    • Have we studied the number of scam calls and solicitors, and how it corresponds to how we are doing?
    • Because I get a minimum of two calls a day now from scammers, and I have to filter all my calls.
    • And I am up from a solicitor a month or so to multiple a week. I finally broke down and bought and installed a " No Solicitors " sign. I personally find those things off-putting and unwelcoming, and I also expect people to respect my time. Just because you paid somebody to carpet my neighborhood doesn’t mean you get to interrupt my day.
  • How about no Ring
    • Ring sent me an email reminding me that they are DOUBLING the cost of their plans, which really feels obscene for a security + monitoring already being $100. But taking it to $200? Honestly, mind-boggling.
    • Inflation is one thing, but that’s not an increase I can imagine most people want to eat.
    • Are we getting any new features for this price hike? Absolutely not.

Books

  • Lilies Blooming in 100 Days ⭐
    • Starts strong but repetitive and shallow. The art is completely mangled into very low-res JPEGs, to the point where the text is almost unreadable, so it’s not great as an art book either.

Music

  • Ashnikko’s “Smoochies”
    • Not my favorite of her albums, but it’s still really good. I appreciate her living out her horny phase. Also, the phrase “mermaids with hole” is forever burned into my brain.
  • Oklou’s “choke enough”
    • This has been a great end-of-year find, and I have been spending more and more time with it.
  • Vylet Pony’s “Monarch of Monsters”
    • This is my new fave, one I will come back to a lot. If I end up getting into prog rock, it’s this album’s fault.
  • usedcvnt’s “ultraviolet”
    • A random craving came up for that 2020’s era jungle, and this is one of my favorite finds.

Reads and Videos

Quote of the Week

TikTok is possibly the worst way of learning your news

  • D’Angelo
  1. <<< /run/current-system
>>> /nix/store/ilh3yhjmkwcplmln01a6bncmi9rjj28f-nixos-system-Morgan-25.11.20260105.3c9db02
   
CHANGED
[U.] nixos-system-Morgan 25.11.20260103.30a3c51 -> 25.11.20260105.3c9db02
   
SIZE: 35.6 GiB -> 35.6 GiB
DIFF: 5.65 KiB
     ↩︎