This week in squirrels… From Sun Jul 26th to Sat Aug 1st

Summary

  • Fixing up more DNSControl
    • That project is going through some major refactors and updates, and it’s great to see.
  • Doing stream work for the sake of nobody
    • I spent some time adding vertical mode to my stream and also trying to set up closed captioning, and it didn’t work well at all. Honestly, it made nobody happy, so I had to undo all of that.
  • Streams
    • Sunday was a slow-start stream. I opened up and had nobody around for hours. I know how to make the chat and fill the time with or without people, but it’s a lot harder when you are talking to yourself. Then we played Curse of the Moon 2, which doesn’t feel nearly as good as Curse of the Moon 1. A huge bummer really. It feels like they ramped up the difficulty in every way to the detriment of the game.
    • Then I didn’t manage to stream any more during the week. This annoyed me a lot. Without a schedule, I laze off of it in my evenings and settle into excuses, so I have to commit to a schedule.
  • Linux Hardening
    • I am going through and cleaning up some of my bad habits, like being in the docker group and even using root docker on workstations, also some smaller Linux hardening tasks to just be smarter about things.
    • I am not quite to the kernel hardening level of all of this, but there are plenty of ways to plug holes.
  • Work.
    • I had some great pairing sessions for setting up our new CI, and I found and resolved some pretty major bugs. I sure don’t love the quality of code that AI tosses out, especially when it causes us to get locked out of boxes. But now I am in a position where I am cleaning up after this.
  • This week’s gas tank was 48$ even though I filled up a bit early (appx 1/4 tank left) due to wanting to get ahead of sticker shock from the war and expiring fuel.
  • Health
    • The immunotherapy by itself makes me incredibly tired. I am asleep within a few hours of the infusion, and the next two days it’s too risky to sit on a couch, or anywhere I can close my eyes. It also makes me a touch feverish.
    • It also dries me out immensely, killing my voice.
    • This week I have a lot of prep work for Utah. I’m not loving it.
  • Stylus & UserStyles blew up.
    • A bug caused my Stylus to be filled with nearly two thousand corrupted style entries with no size. Since there is no bulk delete, I was upset having to clear it out manually.
    • I decided to go back to having a git repo with all of my styles and scripts and then syncing them into Stylus & ViolentMonkey. This was something I experimented with before I had a publicly accessible forge, and it didn’t work well. Now that I have Forgejo, it works great without other sync.
  • Fridge Died
    • FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK
    • Monday I noticed the side of my fridge door was hot. The edge between the doors was venting a tonne of heat. I wrote this off as fridge doing fridge things for the day since I had infusions to get to, but then that evening I went to grab something from the freezer, and everything inside was completely melted. That’s when I noticed all my frozen fruit was lightly chilled, gross liquid fruit. Again with the long drawn out fuck.
    • Sadly, the freezer just kept getting warmer, so it was time to do the research and look at fridges asap. I spent way more than I have to get it, but it’s a very nice ranked “not smart” model and I was able to play with it at a store to explore it and make sure it will spark joy.
    • The new fridge definitely has a smaller freezer, but not problematically so for my needs, and it’s so much easier to access things in all sections. The vegetable drawer is the best though. All my veggies cold and crisp, the ethylene absorbers, the humidity. That extremely sparks joy for me.
    • I was tempted to try and stall such a major purchase, but I don’t have the immune system to play with maybe spoiled food.
  • Making Caddy and Anubis play nice
    • After a bit of fiddling, I was able to make the two play nice again and no more error pages. For me it came down to updating my local subnets and then turning off a h3 feature. It’s funny that this makes accessing forgejo even faster now.
  • I bought brave-origin
    • Buy software, especially if there is somebody else giving it to you for free.
    • I used Kagi’s Orion on Mac and missed it, but now I have Brave Origin. I want people to see foundational products we were getting for free for too long as a viable production. Plus they are doing perpetual, which I doubt is the most viable these days, but it’s good for me.
    • Now to try and actually use it full-time 😆
    • My first gripe is that manifest v3 upsets me because I can’t have uBlock Origin’s Blocking mode: hard mode anymore. I got completely used to taking the time to control all assets that load and experimenting to make most pages work. I think it is odd that “make the internet broken and manually fix all the pages I use” is the part I miss and want back the most.
  • Experimenting with voxtype
    • My eyes have not been doing great, though all the chemo, which has led me to start enjoying more assistive things on my phone, including having it read messages and dictating things to it.
    • Now I am trying to bring it to my Linux boxes with voxtype. Once I got it typing automatically and using the correct graphics card per machine, it’s a great experience. I can’t say it’s faster than dictating on my phone, but it’s great.
  • Refunds?
    • I just got a 1000 refund from the hospital. Not sure how or why or what is going on yet, so I consider it frozen funds, but it’s always great to see some of this come back to me.
  • Art commissions
    • I haven’t commissioned any art since the whole deal, so it’s time to give my favorite way to spend money a go again.
  • Miniflux experiment
    • I have been using a struggling FreshRSS instance hosted by a friend since I left NewsBlur, and I decided to strike out and run my own Miniflux.
    • My first opinion is that it is fast, fast, fast, fast. It’s also very pretty in that less-is-more way. I joked it looks like 2010s-era AdSense ads. But it has delightful little touches like the entries have a quick fade as you navigate through them.
    • The app looks great and navigates well on mobile. It doesn’t navigate as well on mobile as it does on desktop for me since the whole thing is designed to be navigated with vim keys, another huge win for me personally.
    • I made a few small CSS tweaks to it to improve the typeface choices, but those are highly personal and were made easy by having a full set of CSS variables set up.
    • It has some annoying UX problems that I am not sure how to resolve. One is that you can’t go back when reading unread articles, since it instantly marks them as read and the queue is live-updated in the background.
    • The documentation goes on large tirades about how opinionated it is. Since all software is opinionated, this usually means the dev only cares about their use case, and therefore PRs are not welcome. This doesn’t bother me really; not all software that is a gift to the commons also has to cater to the many random whims of the commons.
  • All the upgrades this week.
    • Immich
    • OPNSense
    • New music player
    • HomeAssistant
  • Feelings about tech
    • I frequently ask myself: Is it me or has tech become less focused on consumer hype? I am naturally more resistant to hype marketing due to age, but who’s still hype over the 18th gen of “slab of glass” phones? And now most tech is a massive ethical nightmare or ripped from the opening of a dystopian novel.
    • Yet as devices now bore me, I am more excited than ever by new music, and software, and various other DevOps/GitOps/SysAdmin projects.
    • Stuff like this makes me wonder if it really is me or it’s hardware and a lot of tech in general.
  • Getting more annoyed by AI, but not AI itself.
    • I’m approaching my tipping point on reading rage about AI. I want to read about how mad people are about AI approximately as much as I actually want to look at AI output at this point; The choir tires of the last six months of the same rage.
    • This is a weirdly meta post, but frfr, got any real praxis here or we just eternally angry? Do we got any joy or at least something new to be mad at?
    • This post is partially fueled by my masto ratio and majorly fueled by how over-indexed my rss feeder is on news sources reporting “AI is still the worst for the same reasons we had in November.”
  • What the heck happened to my Reads and Video Section?
    • Last week I cut back my links section because I was tired of posting about AI, and people being angry at it. I had reached a saturation point…
    • And then this week I was inundated with articles and videos I wanted to talk about and share that are on all sorts of other things. So… Welcome to “Way too many links edition” of my journal
  • Bad intrusive thots time
    • Yea… it’s not been a good mental health week at all.

Books

  • I’ve been spending more time with my intrusive thoughts than books this week.

Music

  • Ennaria’s MANIFESTO
    • This is now my frontrunner for Album of the Year 2026.
    • I was a little afraid that hyperpop was gonna fall off in 2026, but then this happened, and I know it’s still blowing up hype.

Reads and Videos

Quote of the Week

Should I rot in bed all day or push myself to get out of the house and inevitably spend $135?

- Twitter