I don’t know why we love to collect all these knick-knacks, and small things and all the tables get occupied by stuff. Why all the dust gets all over the place, and we run out of all the freaking drawers to put our crap into.

The worst part is that whatever thing you decide to finally throw away, the very next day you will be like “oh shit, NOW I need that crap I just threw away”. Ain’t that a bitch!

But now my friends are coming over, and the house is clean. How clean will this place be AFTER the party is a different story ;)

And so the story goes…

IDK I’ll try a haiku about this:

Friends come to party. Wine and dine, open the bottle, clean my house again :)

Phew there we go. So artistic! Yea like I’ve been getting in touch with my artistic side again, playing the piano etc. IDK, there’s like so much more to life than just working. Ya know what I mean? I’ve been really been reconnecting with the stuff I liked to do, and I’m like why did I ever stop. I guess like I fell into the trap that I thought I don’t have the time to do it, and then I put it away, waiting for the perfect time.

The perfect time will never come haha. But the present will always be here :) Read less

A little taste of how I was feeling at bed, it’s a great song, but definitely NOT something that would help me sleep. This is probably my favorite music video fr, I’m a sucker for cute girls bullying fat dudes. Absolutely blessed concept, I never get tired of that.

I was hoping that listening to some dude yammering on about whatever would get my ass to sleep, but instead things got weird.

This video was pretty good, it’s about how computers can actually be kinda cool. And yeah, they totally can be cool. It’s the people and the deadlines that suck around it. I was like so close to quitting my job, but then all my office bullies either got demoted or fucking fired, and my new manager told me I’m doing a great job. That’s some real boss ass shit.

If there’s ONE career advice I will give, it’s that NEVER doubt yourself. Always bee yourself, no matter what they say.

This video was truly terrible. This guy takes like 30 minutes of using mega big philosophical words to say “slop games make you feel like you did something with all these flashy effects, when all you did was just hold down a button and open up your wallet”. But to be fair, I haven’t read a book for about a half a year now, and I am feeling quite atrophied in that regard. I used to be a writer y’know. The one idea I did get was that the button press becomes the action, and the observing you becomes the character. Like playing Sekiro, you can do a shit-ton of things with the controller, but all you are doing is just mashing the buttons. You aren’t jumping in the valley getting chased by the snake or whatever, you, the player, are on the couch pressing buttons. But you, the person observing, think that you are now the dude on the screen, doing all those things.

It’s what the Japanese call 人馬一体 , jinba-ittai, typically meaning the man and horse become one, but can also mean that you and whatever become one. Not in a sexual sense of course, but more in a way that your conciousness melds together with whatever outside your body. This word was also used during motorcycle classes, and it was a very important concept to get it. You could not ride a motorcycle without melding together with the motorcycle. You could not just operate the motorcycle like a car, where you just push and pull levers and spin the steering wheel. You had to FEEL the motorcycle, where to look when turning, when to lean to take the curve, when to accelerate and when to change gears. If you did not FEEL the motorcycle, you would fall over. Simple as that.

The fact the human conciousness can do that is exploited by companies trying to make a quick buck out of you. Since you can feel things that are not happening to you, imagine things that are not real, then with some fancy effects they’ll trap your attention and make you feel like you did something more substantial than staring at a LCD screen and holding your thumb against it.

The point I’m trying to say is that be wary of where you put your feelings into. It’s so easy to become misled, but it’s also easy to get back on track when you pay attention on what’s really going on.

a video about making documents… mmmmmm BOY this video would’ve saved my ass if I had seen it before I had started doing these fucking projects at work

Programming rabbit holes…

Some video about escaping web dev. I’m like yeah web dev is cool and all, but it’s so saturated with all the riff-raff. I really miss the 2020s when you could just get a big ass job by just having a pulse.

Anyway yeah I watched a bunch of videos, finally got my ass to sleep. Now it’s 22:32 here and it’s past my bedtime. Wish me luck!!

GOOD NIGHT Read less

Goodbye, Retropi! Hello, Pihole!

I had this Raspberry Pi with retropi set up, but recently I haven’t had much time to play video games through it. Usually when we’d go on a vacation, then we would play Panel de Pon on the SNES. Now we can do the same thing through the Switch, so my Retropi kinda started gathering dust.

Reddit has been introducing me to the homelab subreddit, where nerds set up their computers to do… pretty much whatever, it’s kinda hard to describe WHAT they’re doing, since I literally don’t know. Everybody’s just posting their home servers there. Anyway, there was a thread about what got you into homelabbing and 90% of the answers were just “pihole”.

Apparently a pihole is just a raspberry pi that will block ads for you. Quite nifty huh!

Man I can’t believe how many ADS I am seeing per day. Like I’m sure it has happened to you as well: you just wanna get a recipe for dinner, and instead the recipe site will start with a life story about their dog or whatever, then open up 4 different VIDEO ADS and start autoplaying them. God help you if you forgot to turn on the wifi, since your mobile data will be obliterated. Did you even get to the recipe before that? NOPE!

Well, with the Pihole, this problem will be gone, as long as you set it up all nicely.

The way it works is that you tell the router to get DNS info from the raspberry pi, and raspberry pi (the pihole) will then do it all.

The setup process is actually VERY easy

Things you need: Pi with an ethernet port (recommended), Memory card, card reader, ethernet cable, and Pi power supply (you can also use old phone chargers as long as the voltage/wattage is fine).

Or if you keep your PC on all the time then You can go the docker path. Idk how different it is. Here’s how I setup mine on a Pi4B:

Install Pi Imager from official website

Install RPi OS Lite on the memory card, set a username and password during installation alongside other settings like wifi, keyboard layout etc.

Insert card in Pi and connect it to your router and check what IP was assigned to. Also set that IP as static so that it never changes.

SSH using that IP by opening cmd.exe (Windows machine) and typing “username@ip” (replace username with the one you set and IP with the one your router assigned it.

run “sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y” command once you login to your Pi. This will update and apply all the settings.

Install Pi-hole using the command on their website.

Keep pressing yes/continue. If you’re asked to select DNS upstream, select Cloudflare (recommended) but you’re free to use Google or anything else. In the end you will be greeted with installation complete and a password for yout Pi-Hole interface. Change it if you want to by running “sudo pihole -a -p” command

Login to your router and go to something similar to DHCP settings (It is different for different routers, never used Sagemcom).

Assign “Primary DNS” as your Pi-Hole’s IP.

Reconnect all the devices.

This is just a TL;DR version that should get you up and running. Things like keeping piOS and pihole updated, the blocklists updated, adding more, using other features are covered in the docs.

Unbelievably, once I had it all set up, I would no longer see any ads on the recipe sites. Amazing!

I really don’t feel it’s made my browsing that much faster, but I’ve only had it up for about an hour. Already I have blocked about 800 queries, with 23% block rate. Hmm. I’ll think about making it more strict and set up all the automation later.

Hugo beats Wordpress every single day

It’s like so easy to just type in the

hugopost my-cool-new-post

and bam I got it all going! I can literally do all the crap I wanna do as long as I have the time and willing to put in the effort lol.

I used to have a bunch of blogs, I’m sure my old blogspot is still up somewhere, but idk, it kinda hits different when you got your markdown files and you can just push them straight into github and it’ll do all the posting for you automatically. Right now my Github Actions will publish straight to neocities and the github pages.

I don’t know man, at work I let AI do all the coding for me, but these days I’m reconnecting to computing by making things more physically tangiable. The Pihole was one thing, but this blog is also more “mine” than my code at work will ever be.

I don’t even care if this crap will look good on the CV or not - like who cares! As long as I’m getting paid, it’s all good.

How to have fun with your computer

• idk just go for it man. I’ve been playing Transport Tycoon Deluxe (well, OpenTTD) and it sure scratched some itches I didn’t even know I had.
• I finally played that Theme Hospital game I really wanted as a kid. It’s p cool but idk, I’m not getting how to play it “properly”. All my doctors end up having melties and quit their jobs. Maybe it’s a part of the simulation haha
• set up servers, connect to them through ssh or whatever lol
• set up blogs and screw around github actions.
• just bee yourself. :bee: (oh man this would be dope af if I could figure out how to get emoticons working on my blog dude, somebody write it down for me LOL)

I’ll put up some stuff I learned today, such as

How to set up your hugo to instantly post!!

alias hugopost='f() { hugo new posts/$(date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S)-$1.md; }; f'

this will allow you to create a post mega quick by just going like “hugopost my-cool-post” and it’ll just do the rest. Amazing!

neopost github is great, but you needa understand what’s going on

Then what else I found: the neopost github repo is real good, but the basic_info.md is wrongly named in the sidebar folder. it should be basic-info.md !

There are a bunch of other problems with that repo as well, such as you need to have a posts.md archetype. Plus it’s like using the YAML settings while files are in TOML etc. It’s kinda nuts, if I feel like it, I’ll maybe open a PR but not day lol it’s been a day.

imagemagick ROCKS

Also I got a new PFP here. Imagemagick came in CRACKED yo with all the dithering. In order to install imagemagick in WSL it was a bit bullshit:

echo "=== 1. Updating system and installing dependencies ==="
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y
sudo apt install -y build-essential pkg-config libtool git \
  libwebp-dev libheif-dev libde265-dev libx265-dev \
  libjpeg-dev libpng-dev libtiff-dev libopenjp2-7-dev \
  libdjvulibre-dev libwmf-dev libraw-dev libjxl-dev \
  libfreetype6-dev libfontconfig1-dev libxml2-dev \
  libgs-dev liblqr-1-0-dev libglib2.0-dev libgomp1

echo "=== 2. Cloning ImageMagick source code ==="
cd ~/
if [ -d "ImageMagick" ]; then
    rm -rf ImageMagick
fi
git clone https://github.com/ImageMagick/ImageMagick.git
cd ImageMagick

echo "=== 3. Configuring the build with full feature modules ==="
./configure --with-modules --with-gomp --with-lqr --with-security-policy=open

echo "=== 4. Compiling and installing (using all CPU cores) ==="
make -j$(nproc)
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig

echo "=== 5. Verification ==="
magick -version

cuz apparently you need to get “““dependencies””” and “““delegates””” installed properly BEFORE even thinking about getting imagemagick

But then you can do shit like

magick pfp2.png -resize 500x500\> -ordered-dither o4x4 -level 10%,70% -colors 16 pfp3.gif

and it’ll crunch up your files REAL good. If I find any cool crunchers I’ll do it more.

Anyway I hope you enjoyed this cool post! Did a whole bunch of coding instead of browsing Reddit or 4chan like a dweeb! Plus this is like the longest I have written before I let AI take the wheel. Man, work SUCKS but thank god machines will do it all FOR me so I can STAY IN MEETINGS more! Read less

Anyway the point of this blog is like we’ll do some things, write down things and we can update it easily in both the neocities and the whatever page we have.

I have 0 talent for design but gosh damn it I will prevail LOL. I’ll try to make this shit less “pink” or whatever and just go for whatever we got right now. Read less