This week in squirrels… From Sun Aug 23rd to Sat Aug 29th

Summary

  • Starting the week with a failed hard drive
    • My Sunday stream was ended abruptly by a disk blowing out. It’s a bummer, but something I can recover from pretty quickly with how I have my stack set up.
    • NixOS+dotfiles for rapid system & configuration deployment, plus data sync and 3-2-1 backups w/ vetted restores all came together to have my back. It took longer to swap the disk than to deal with the fallout.
    • The reason swapping took so long was a comedy of errors, all of my own making. I hadn’t marked the disk as optional in fstab so that the system wouldn’t boot without it. However, my systems are locked down and inaccessible on boot failure. I completely locked out the root user and emergency boot for security reasons, so I had to scramble for another computer to build an emergency boot disk so I could format the new disk, label the partition, and then boot into my system normally.
  • OBS tweaks
    • I figured out more PipeWire tricks. This one allows me to null-sink audio I only want to hear through OBS. WirePlumber and PipeWire are pretty awesome for audio routing. I don’t miss ALSA or Pulse at all.
  • The pains of open source sometimes
    • An app I use was “a release away” from fixing most of my issues. But the maintenance and work on it have gone dead as of June. Noooooo. Forktime.
  • Week 3 of being back on GLP-1
    • I don’t love the side effects of the GLP-1, but I can’t deny its value to me. I was taking enough insulin every day that I was having issues from it. And now that I am back on my GLP-1, I take no insulin at all, and my glucose is even lower. It’s a great diabetes manager.
  • The Remission Times
    • Since I shared the news last Friday (when I got the news officially), suddenly all my friends are crawling out of the woodwork and wanting to chat and hang out.
    • Sadly, my mental health is still low AF, and my energy level is worse. Like I am hypothetically excited for this, and glad everybody else is too, but I am also just so tired.
  • Surprise Chemo!
    • You’d think I am in remission so that I would have less hospital time, but nooooooooooo. Four this week. MWThF for me, I guess. Daymn
    • And another surprise IT Chemo! Oh yay! This one really sucked because they had to give me double lumbar punctures since the first one wasn’t getting pressure.
    • Then on the way home from all that chemo, I got a call from doctors letting me know I’m moving up CAR-T fast and chemos back off… after chemo. Sigh
    • I keep forgetting how hard the chemo to the spine hits. I had a 9am clinic visit the next day, and it was brutal. Now I am down hard with just that chemo kicking my butt.
  • Planning for Utah Part 2
    • It has begun
  • The end of the brave-origin experiment
    • It was fun, but not for me. I will probably keep it around, but Manifest v2 is kinda a deal breaker. I miss uBlockOrigin and others too much, and honestly I didn’t notice a performance difference.
  • The Shell Wars, Noctalia vs DankMaterialShell
    • MOAR CHANGES
    • Honestly, while I like a lot of the tooling I have set up, waybar has been a big struggle to get it the way I like; something where I am constantly tweaking this, that, or the other. Over and over, and it’s never quite right.
    • I figured a way of switching into DMS without overhauling everything. By not running the setup, I can keep my normal launcher and setup and then walk myself back into using more and more of it. My previous experience was a bit painful because the “start from their defaults” didn’t fly for me at all. However, since I last touched it, they have improved performance a lot, and honestly it’s pretty nice to click to configure a bunch of things.
    • I still ended up struggling a bit with DMS. It didn’t click with me, so I installed a few others and gave them a try.
    • The one that really stuck with me is Noctalia Shell v5. It’s really fast and has amazing TOML configuration layering so that I can keep all my defaults in my dotfiles. Still, each system has its own overrides that are “click to undo”; this alone was super appealing so I could mess it all up and then undo a bunch of stuff. The bar has all the little swag and integrations I’ve wanted.
    • SO YES. Still tweaking my shell bunches. But this should cut down on a lot of that
  • The death of a fan
    • It’s amusing that a single fan failure can deactivate all of my systems. I mean, it was the CPU fan after all. Still, it required a replacement. I put a temporary BIOS override in and replaced the 95mm 12v DC fan with a 381mm 120v AC one while waiting for another new one to show up.
    • This was another test of how helpful having my KVM and ATX power control was. No way I could have troubleshot this from any distance otherwise.
  • Social hang
    • The first friends’ social hangout I have had since February this year. My persistent post-lumbar puncture headache marred it; small children and excited dogs are a lot.
    • Overall, it was still the best to get to hang out with people I haven’t seen in most of a year, catch up a little, and play the silliest games we could find.
  • Out of my “system”
    • I really took this week off. I did a lot of fixing up nerd things and typing, but I didn’t address any of my to-do lists. After I got smashed by surprise chemo, I just lost it all. I think this chemo hit harder than many previous ones.

Books

  • No

Music

  • Ashnikko
    • One of my favorite 2020s-era pop stars. She is demented in all the best ways for me.
  • Meat Beat Manifesto
    • Taking a trip through the beats and samples
  • Lyra Pramuk’s Fountain
    • This was such a random find when it first came out. It’s very Björk-level of eclectic, which is how I found it. The whole album is done in her voice, and it’s super powerful and haunting.
  • King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard
    • I am still plucking through their FREE discography to see what I like
  • Spahn Ranch
    • Somebody mentioned Heratic’s Fork, and now I have to listen to their entire discography for a day.
  • Ninajirachi’s I Love My Computer
    • I wanted to jump back to some pop from last year I hadn’t given enough time to, and this one is fantastic

Reads and Videos

Quote of the Week

> We as a society lived so long without AI; why does everybody act like they can’t brush my teeth without it now?

You forgot the time when smartphones dropped, and we hooked our toothbrushes up to them for some reason.

- Me