For about a month or so I've been reading and listening to a lot of sources about Taoism. I have read both Tao De Ching (the classical translation and the one with the commentary by Perdurabo) and Yi Ching. I have started to use the latter daily instead of pulling a tarot card. I have started to practice simple Taijiquan. As a fun experiment, I've also read the Tao of Pooh. If you have any Tao-related experience, opinion or advice, make sure to share over in guestbook.

Soon, Kate and I are going to travel to Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, and we are also planning to go to Salekhard in the winter. Kazan seems an important place to visit, culturally speaking, as it holds the third place after Moscow and Saint-Petersburg, both of which I have seen a few times. Salekhard is the only town in the world that lies on the Arctic Circle, and I want to traverse the 66th parallel, and the Nenets deer-keeper's culture is also fascinating

Not an hour ago I left from the theatre where Arkhipovsky had given his solo concert, and I thought I’d write down my impression of the man’s music. You know how when you first learn to ply an instrument, you think about playing the appropriate notes in the correct sequence; a few years later you can play the notes without thinking much about it, so you think about intonation and using staccato or glissando or whatever technique is used for emotional emphasis with your instrument. I think, this man was not thinking about any of that. I got a feeling that he was concerned with making the air in the room vibrate in accordance with his will. The level of not even control but of feeling the instrument is insane. Sometimes an event of great significance happens, let’s say a fratercide. People talk about it and express a hope that it never happens again. Parents tell the tale to children, each speaker forgetting unimportant details and providing explanations for the important but difficult to understand points. The tale adapts to become the most memorable and the most efficient way to convey the moral. It becomes myth, or a sacred story, valuable because of its distilled concentrated nature. Arkhipovsky has distilled music

mi pali e ilo kalama kepeken ilo 3D. tenpo ni la mi wile pakala e pilin jan lon poka mi kepeken kalama musi ike mute. mi tu pali e lipu kepeken toki pona.

In 2024 it was popular to resprite the original 1985 Peach from Super Mario Bros. I have been playing some NES games lately (Kate likes Dizzy and Big Nose), so I decided to give respriting a shot. Obviously it's better to look at the original:

[original]

I am bad at music. Could never sing, wouldn't be able to tell you why the pentatonic scale sounds nice, what even is a note? That being said, I had some experience with music as a kid, I attended music school, learned nothing, but played percussions in an ensemble. Over the years I have tried a couple of things, like the ukulele, which I hoped would be like a guitar but for the lazy people, and some simple piano pieces, but that got me nowhere. I have 3d printed a tin whistle, not out of tin, obviously, and I'm loving it. It can be simple, or you could add ornamentations to make it challenging; there is a learning curve, the 2/3 octaves mechanic is fun, the variation range is impressive, the thing is portable, it can be made quieter with a piece of paper &c &c. I can now relatively confidently play Loch Lomond with minor ornamentation. My short term goal is to be able to play this particular piece very confidently, with emotional intonation and advanced ornamentation. I feel like focusing on one piece for now

Today I received a printer. I had never had any experience with 3d printing, but so far it seems intuitive. The printer is Kobra 2 Neo. The first thing I tried printing was the canonical 3D Benchy, which turned out really nice. As I'm writing this post, I'm printing a screen protector for the uConsole I have found on the web. The slicing software seems easy enough to use. I haven't modeled anything in 3d in like 10 years, so maybe I'll stick to just printing so far, but I intend to dive into modeling at some point. Happy days! Btw, Beltane blessings! Btw x2, love you, sweetheart

Sometimes I use portable devices to watch series - uConsole is really good for that. And, since the screen is small, and since I want to put my media on a thumb drive offline, it makes sense not to use 4k. But it is surprisingly not as trivial a task to find SD TV series as it might seem. Using online compressors is masochistic, so I want to share my experience using HandBrake - a lightweight offline open-source video converter. I was able to compress the aforementioned Eva (which was already somewhat light) to half the size without a noticeable change in quality. Now, I'm not an audiophile, nor a videophile, I don't care for the cleanest truest image quality - if it's not pixelated, there are no artifacts and if I can see it clearly - it works. Space is of much higher importance for me. If you find yourself in a similar situation, try HandBreak. It is open code, it works on Linux, Mac and Windows. Also, if you know of a dedicated Standard Definition quality media hostings where old SD movies and series can be found, let me know. The ability to convert is nice, bit it takes an awfully long time

I remember always hearing about Evangelion, especially back in the day, on imageboards. I also remember finally watching a full length movie and thinking something like "they made everyone fall in love with this character who hardly says a word in the whole movie". I vaguely remember the plot. It was a long long time ago. I never watched the tv series. Now I want to reconcile that. I have started with the original 1995 episodes, and, can I just say, the way people used to animate is ... I don't know if it's just me, maybe somewhere deep inside I associate that look of old anime with my early childhood where I saw Sailor Moon, and Spirited Away, the happy carefree time, because after that I didn't really watch anime pretty much at all. Or maybe it is the pieces of art themselves and the genius people behind them. Or both. I don't know, but compared to stuff like zootopia/steven universe/star/teen titans/{almost_anything_past_1999_here}, the latter is so much more removed from the world, than the obviously fictional series from the 80s-early 90s. Something happened in the 90s. We got all those crazy wacky cartoons (no shade, they were also cool, just in a different way), and it feels like the more removed from the world they were, the better. And now everything is just sugarcoated and polished, and empty. Although, I shouldn't say everything, but the culture goes in that direction. Partly, I think, it has led to the retro-revival, 'cos like, yeah, it was cooler back then. Now people are dressing up like it's the 90s, the indie web gravitates towards retro, hopefully we get old-school-style series as well. But then again, we have all seen the new HP series trailers, which are as far into wokeness as they could get. Anyway, long post TL;DR - I'm old, it was better back in my days, go watch old stuff P.S. Also, let me know if you have watched the 1995 Eva and whether you liked it or not P.P.S. I'm mainly writing this to be able to remember when I first watched it

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I've been using the junk PC for a while now, and it's nice. Just to go through the specs: Win7 Ultimate SP1 x64; AMD Phenom II X4 955 3.2 GHz; 8 GB RAM; GeForce GT 710 (pls don't be jealous); Among the other games, I've added Stronghold, Warcraft 3(+FT), Plants vs Zombies, Factorio, Nancy Drew - Shadow at the Water's Edge (nonograms and bentos are the best). I have also remembered that I used to have two "games", but more like learning programs, in the '00s for French. I remembered a few things from them, like 3d glossy plastic-looking buttons, puddles of paint to represent the colours, a man saying "bleu foncé" and the option to get a bronze, silver or gold medal with a certificate at the end. I had some mixed blurry memories of the two games and it was difficult to find them. They turned out to be both from Eurotalk. They are beginner level learning apps, but they capture the charm of that era quite well, so I do recommend them if you are even slightly interested in French. They also exist for other languages though. Let me know in the guestbook if you also had this program In the meantime, I have installed Cyberpunk on my main PC and it runs surprisingly well on a server Linux PC.

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Turns out you don't have to be popular to receive tons of spam messages in your guestbook from bots - over the last few hours alone I have received over 20. So I have implemented a couple of ways to stop them, one of which you might experience yourself - a simple math question - we all know clankers can't math, right? Other measures won't affect real people. On a brighter note, I have assembled the junk PC I was writing about below - it's running a Phenom II and Win7, and it's awesome - I have been piling old games onto the SDD, so far I've got L4D, Metro 2033, the first 2 Stalkers, Borderlands, HL2, HoMMIII, Stronghold, Syberia, Assassin's Creed 2, Skyrim, Vice City, San Andreas, LotR BfME2, LotR Conquest (hell yeah!), Spider-Man 2, the first three Harry Potter games, No One Lives Forever 2, American McGee's Alice and NFS Underground 2. So far I was unable to make LEGO Stunt Rally work - it runs, but the cars don't. I have had some problems running Prototype - it crashes as it loads a saved game, but otherwise runs. I'll try to debug as much as possible. Voodoo isn't always the solution.

I have managed to get a retro PC together, but there are 2 main issues with it currently - the HDD is very slow, and XP (even with the latest community driven updates) is too outdated to be realistically useful for gaming. Hence, I will do 2 things - first, I will install XP on an SSD and check the responsiveness of the system; second, I will likely just install a version of Windows 7 on the SSD. I was focusing on XP for nostalgia, which I have somewhat satisfied using the system again, and for Lego Stunt Rally, for which I have found an alternative loader that supposedly works on newer Windows versions

I have been thinking about playing the good old games again. I should clarify that my childhood/adolescence gaming era was in the '00s - '10s, so that's what I feel most nostalgic about. I used to have an NES clone with cartridges, but here I'm talking about PC games specifically. I should also say that my favourite games were mostly not the ones that are generally popular. I had a lot of games that were based on movies and cartoons - like Madagascar, the Da Vinci Code and the Harry Potter games, or the second Shrek - and some random ones, the demos of which I had got with the local monthly gaming magazine - like Giants: Citizen Kabuto or No One Lives Forever 2. I also remember random games - like Lego Stunt Rally and Creatures: Village - that I had bought from the local CD store. A lot of these games don't run on modern PCs unless you voodoo them into running through emulators, VMs, graphics cards sims &c. And that kind of voodooing leads to bugs, animations are too fast because CPUs are faster now, and in general it takes some of the magic away. So, I have found my old motherboard with Phenom II still in it, along with the cooler and RAM. I have an old Internet card and a graphics card from that time, which supports DirectX 9 (sorry, didn't meant to flex on you). Basically, I only need a hard drive, a power unit and a case to shove it all into, and I get a somewhat 'retro' PC for Windows XP. I also have an old VGA LCD display, which would also be nice to use for the build. I think I also have an internal CD drive somewhere, I know I have an external one and an external floppy drive. Anyway, I'll let that thought cook in my brain for a bit, purely because that setup needs space in the flat, and I'm not sure I want to allocate it just yet. I'll let it simmer

Today I added

 filter: hue-rotate(220deg);

to * in css and removed the matrix canvas for the day - i think it looks fun! See in the original

[original]

Due to the way my family is dispersed throughout the land, I have to sometimes travel to see relatives. My phone has a faulty battery, so I have started using this uConsole in conjunction with an SD card and a shellless card-reader module - together they all look fairly technophile-dystopia-esque and the battery is good for like 12h. I have all of adventure time and futurama on the SD in low-res. If you have any similar sitcom cartoon suggestions for me to legally buy and put on the memory card in case of travel - leave them over at the guestbook or via tar@tar.dev

[original]

I have finally collapsed navigation links on mobile devices into a burger menu

Kate's been a saving grace lately, and I was kinda passive with the sunburn that didn't want to heal fast enough and the coughing. Got her some sushi yesterday and a bouquet today

For the last week I've been coughing a lot, I think it might be related to the fact that we had put the dog into a dog hotel for the vacation, so that we could travel; maybe she caught something there because as soon as we got her back, both she and I were coughing. We gave the dog antibiotic shots and I am taking pills. We're getting much better now, cefixime was a good call

I have updated the keys due to the domain change - now they refer to tar@tar.dev. Second time was much easier yet I still learnt a lot about nameservers in the process. If you want to send me a PGP encrypted message - feel free to do so!

Today I got the confirmation that I had successfully passed the final exam and, having also passed all the tests, am granted the qualification. The digital diploma will be ready within a month, and I'll make sure to request the printed one as well. Yay!

It's getting warmer back home - the morning I left for Thailand was crowned by a blizzard and piles of snow taller than me. Now, the snow is almost gone. I think Kate lost her sim card, which is sad, but if that's the worst that had happened during the trip - I'll take it. I downloaded a few apps from the Thai App Store - different countries have different restrictions, so I took the chance, while I could. There is a pile of souvenirs, clothes, powders and pastes, and jams, and flakes - for cooking. And two crazy cats are running through the pile knocking everything off. There were looked after, but they missed us, at least Luna - the black one- did. I finished the last exam for my half-a-year retraining program, can't wait for the results and, eventually, the diploma. Everything's settling down and I won't write every day in the future, but it was fun to capture Phuket as I saw it for the first time

In the morning I tried the new hotel's breakfast and was satisfied. That was also the first time I ate chicken bacon. At 11:45am I got a call via the hotel room's internal telephone - we needed to move out by 12. Our plane was supposed to leave at, like 1am, so there was a full day ahead, but somebody needed to watch the baggage, so we just took turns. The day was hot and we made the 7-eleven around the corner filthy rich. When the day grew older I went to Bungla road and ordered a special mojito iykwim. By 17:50 the world seemed sluggish. At 21:30 2 busses came to pick us up and bring us to the airport. At the last minute I decided to spend the some of the leftover bahts in the duty-free shop and bought some curry powders. Looking back, I should have spent more on snacks - I still have like 2k bahts and there is no use for them here, other than to keep them as souvenirs. Passport control was slow, but we boarded the plane and got some food and drinks before I dozed off reading Wuthering Heights - the novel is fine, I guess I was just tired. I got lucky my sunburnt feet felt more or less OK - 8 and a half hours flight was a test for them

We left the hotel by noon and at 13:30 we were at the new hotel that the travel agent provided for us because the flight got delayed. The hotel was, I would say, more expensive than our original one, but less tropical-paradise. This new hotel was just 3 min away from Bungla road, which is the place to go for nightlife, cafes, bars and things that in my native country are illegal. In the evening we went to the 7 eleven around the corner, got some curry paste to bring back home and some drinks. Later I went to Bungla road, but generally saw nothing special other that a tone of weed bars/shops, and some girls were pole-dancing in the bars. Later in the evening I passed all the tests for my retraining program, other than the final exam, which is not available yet.

I have added the slots game to the website - you can bet “money” to win more, or lose. If you win a lot, you will be able to “purchase” trophies and also your high score gets saved. If you lose everything, you can get 20 “money” for free and start over. Gambling IRL with real money is bad and you will lose money! But not here, because there is no way to spend real money on this website.

We went shopping for snacks to the nearby 7 eleven and for souvenirs. In the evening, while dining we got the news that the flight back home will be delayed by a day, which we had expected. Tomorrow we will move to another hotel. Pretty much everything is ready

Hey, it’s Pi day! Today at 16:20 we sat into a mini van, which picked up people from two other hotels, and brought us to a meeting point where we all got into a coach. By 17:50 we were at the Siam Niramit complex. First, we went to eat there - all the rooms were beautifully furnished and decorated, and the food ranged from the usual European dishes to the traditional Thai ones. I finished my plate first and went to the space between the food court and the 100-year village. There there were some areas with different crafts, like cutting paper ornaments, weaving fish out of what seemed like palm leaves and something like henna drawings on the skin. I didn’t come to the latter, but I did make an ornament and a fish. I went to the recreation of the traditional village - there were wooden houses in different regional styles and with different purposes. The houses were separated by a river full of fish, and connected by wooden roads and bridges. In some houses people were doing crafts and cooking. I tasted two things - an egg cooked in banana leaves, and some crispy rice treat with creamy coconut sauce - both in one-bite portions. There were souvenirs and an old man offered boat rides along this river to couples. There were beautiful lanterns along the safety rails and in the trees. After all that in the central square there was a pre-show about, as I took it, a cat catching a fish, and some female deity/princess with a horned animal. To finish it off, there was a parade that culminated in what I think was a rain calling ceremony, and the fountain behind the scene activated. Everything was beautiful and already felt like a proper show, although it was short. But it was just to give us a taste of what was going to happen later. I will not describe the synopsis of the actual Siam Niramit show, but I will express my emotions about some aspects of it. The organisation level is very high, all logistics are easy and comfortable for a foreigner. There are subtitles and an English voiceover in between scenes, so you always know what you are going to be looking at. The acting is impressive to say the least. The structure of the show is well thought through. And, of course, the special effects are magical! By 23:00 we were home. Cannot recommend Siam Niramit highly enough, it - is - a - must if you are visiting Thailand and have the means to attend the show. Also, a lot of things seemed straight out of Avatar the Last Airbender's episode with the Fire Nation theatre, e.g. the last photo (but also the theatrical effects) P.S. the date and time on my Nokia “camera” had reset for some reason, so it is wrong on the pre-show and village photos

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Mostly chill, we watched some TBBT during the day and went to dine out and for souvenir shopping after nightfall. The former was accomplished with the services from the Dino Restaurant that we loved from the crab experience before, however this time I took their recommendations on the T-Rex burger and the Pangaea cocktail. I highly recommend the burger, the cocktail was decent but nothing special. The latter of the two activities was highlighted by a very welcomed rain. We went shopping for souvenirs to bring to our relatives and friends. Local dresses, tees with Thailand-themed prints and figurines of elephants and the Buddha - were our prizes. Locals in these small stalls like to bargain, so it feels like you’re getting a discount

[original]

The day was a relaxation day, we mostly stayed in, leaving the hotel to eat out. I mostly tried to avoid the sun, mating some progress on the retraining program, which ends soon

We woke up early and went to the marina by bus. We visited the Krabi island first, had a photo session. A little later we took some photos on the ship’s bow. We sailed by the monkey island and took some photos of them too. By 11 we arrived to Phi Phi. The lunch was hot - Tom Yum here is heavily peppered with chilli oil. I also had some pasta with a sweet semi-hot sauce, a bowl of rice and a couple of crispy chicken legs. There was also an island that looked like a chicken’s head (see photos). Then we went to the Mai Phai island, which is like paradise on earth. I even snorkelled a bit. We also visited one of the Phang Nga islands - Poda. Our guide was cool and gave us some rum on the way back. Kate wore her hat like a tricorne (there is a wire in the brim to shape it as you please). The only downside was my sunburn from before, which created a little discomfort - so always use a lot of sunscreen with high SPF, don’t be like me =P

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This was a chill day also. Had breakfast - Kate seems to be enjoying the fruit. She got worried about sunburns and got me a white cotton outfit and some aloe gel, which was really nice of her. We managed to exchange some of our national currency into bats via telegram - turns out it’s quite easy and the fee is reasonable, so even if your cards don’t work, you’ll still be able to withdraw the money in Thailand. Also, today was the first time I tried Taco Bell - it doesn’t exist back home. We got 3 crispy chicken tacos, a quesadilla and some nachos. Tacos are on the smaller side, but everything was really tasty. We’ll go out in the evening as well, when the sun is not beating down on us as much

[original]

This was a chill day, I spent some time on the sun by the pool and got a little sunburn. In the evening we went to the shop for drinks and got some local ramen for friends back home

I had the same breakfast, only it was dragonfruit instead of papaya. At 10:30 we went to some pharmacy, listened to a 30min-long lecture about Thai medicine and ended up buying some inhalers and a toothpaste Next, we went to see the Big Buddha statue, and let me tell you, he biiig. I really enjoyed the place, and the view from the top of the mountain is amazing. At about 1pm we went to a snake farm, where we learnt a little about the snakes of Phuket. We watched a man kiss a cobra, which was fun. The guide lady there gave us some snake gallbladder-infuded rum and told us about the snake products they sell on the farm. There were also snakes in formaldehyde there. I took some pics with a python as well. We were home by about 3:30 and went to the pool. Later in the evening we went to Dino Bar, which is a dinosaur-themed restaurant, where we got Tom Yun, curry crabs, onion rings and some drinks

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This morning I got potatoes, sausages, some papaya, watermelon slices and pineapple juice. While having breakfast, I met Misha, a compat, who comes here mainly for diving. He gave me some advice on where to go. We went to the beach - the sand is nice, but I need better footwear. I bought 2 mangoes and an opened coconut with a straw. Then, there was a meeting with our guide, who gave us some info about excursions, and we picked a couple. After the meeting I went swimming in the hotel pool. and later we headed down to the "Red Chopsticks" restaurant, I had pad thai and Kate had fried tofu and a margarita. We saw a yellow-beaked bird - I don't know what kind -, who was trying to ask customers for food by singing its song next to the occupied tables. Later in the evening, we went to the Kata night market and bought some fruit and also got snacks and drinks at the nearby 7-eleven

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at 5:55am: We've passed all the controls and got our departure stamps. I got Kate a bottle of coke without sugar at the duty free shop for a euro. I've downloaded a couple of videos by LJR from the Halo series to watch on the plane - 8-9 hours is a long flight at 8:54pm: We've landed in the rain, It's already quite dark. Before getting the luggage, where I left out QR codes, we needed to get through passport control, which needed the QR codes. Luckily, I had exchanged half of our money into bahts and got us local sim cards with unlimited internet access (not with the whole half of our money ofc). We were able to fill all the forms even though my phone died. We went through and got the luggage. The nice ladies at the info boot helped us find out transfer and we arrived at the hotel at about 22:50 local time. We took a shower and went to the shops and got some snacks

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I have added hashtags to the blog. I will retrospectively add hashtags to the posts and will keep tagging posts in the future. Eventually there will be a box with tags to find relevant posts

Now you can draw over in Draw even on mobile devices with touch screen. Also, now you can choose brush size

Before travelling, I have found a couple of old phones, and I kinda want to document the vacation with the old 0.3 Mpx cameras. I think it would be fun.
One of the phones automatically burns timestamps into the pictures, but they look cool, and the second produces just kinda smoothed out photos with no noise crunch in them. I think I might either keep the time-stamped pics or manually edit the stamps out later. Or maybe I will find yet another phone. We’ll see

The website has moved from tarandir.dev, which now redirects here, to tar.dev, which I prefer for multiple reasons. For instance, it carries a level of symmetry, 2 sets of three letters, each starting with an ascender-carrying letter.

I've added a drawbox, inspired by this Neocities website. Hopefully people will draw nice things there. I am also getting ready to go to Thailand soon - exciting!

I have revised the font sizes of the About page, fixed the badges and achievements, and I've also added a player to the Vinyls collection. I don't want to put copyrighted music there, but at least one can enjoy some groovy copyright-free tunes and the spinning vinyl now looks like it's doing something. If you have free music suggestions, feel free to leave them in the Guestbook. I have also added a simplified version of the About page

I have taken inspiration from Tim's website and added the quote-of-the-day thingy on top of the blog. I am adding new quotes as they come to memory and I will continue to add more - it's nice to revisit old quotes that I liked in the past and think of the reasons why I liked them. Also it adds a bit of interactivity to the website (it's not really a quote of the day, it's a random quote from a curated database, and it changes when the page reloads)

It turns out my registrar's DNS panel supports neither OPENPGPKEY nor RFC 3597, so making a nameserver record for the PGP key is impossible within the panel. Luckily, the support guys are decent and they have added the necessary record with my specifications manually. It would have been nicer to have more freedom with the records. However, I don't want to move to something like Cloudflare unless I absolutely have to. CF is unstable in here. Nonetheless, I'm having fun!

I am working hard on the website - it's the beginning of the development process in any project that is often the most exciting part. Everything needs a shape, structures start to emerge and are being replaced. Every day there is some change - either subtle, like adding an admin panel, or more visually present for the visitor, like a new page or different styling. I'm drawing a lot of inspiration from people of the webrings, and from my digital neighbours - without them it would have been a much more mediocre experience. I have added likes to the blog, a cryptography section, rearranged the navbar, highlighting the interactive parts of this website, updated some links, made it so that I can now use tags in the blog, but also render code as code, e.g. me bold

<b>me not bold</b>

&c &c.

The fire burns brightly

TIL about webrings. I saw them on Ari's website - what a nice idea! A way to connect decentralized corners of the web into a ring, usually with a common theme, and you can discover so many cool pages by so many cool people. And the indieAuth system is so good! I don't need a third party service (that can be banned tomorrow for all I know - we've had a lot of bans in the past few years), I can just use my own domain. So nice to be learning about these things!

There was a reddit post asking about people's favourite love story in Tolkien's works, and people were mostly saying Aragorn/Arwen or Beren/Luthien, which is understandable. I decided to joke about Amrod and the Telerin ship at Losgar, which is an obscure reference. The reply I got was something like "You're a monster, I love you" - the horror of the reference and the pleasure of understanding a niche apocryphal thing in a cocktail. It's nice that we can explore niche communities on the net, although they can lead to bias confirmation. Fandoms are fun nonetheless.

Sometimes, maybe twice a year, I find myself reminiscing about the 'good old days' of playing mc together with friends. I feel like S1 was the season of setting everything up, getting the server management right, enjoying the first encounters with new people and learning about them. This was the classic. I remember specifically being in touch with Adobo, and his Nebula mini-game. S2 was what I would call the golden age. We knew what we were doing, we invested time into the game like crazy and the outcome was fun and honestly impressive. The double island - the shops and the VKD. The library and the court, the seasonal districts, the beautiful Nether hub! I would call S3 the silver age. Glorious, fresh, somewhat bolder than the previous seasons. Everyone was so close together, and the bases were so ambitious. Remember fights in the colosseum? And the Nehther hub roof! And Erin's... whatever it was =P S4 was a flop because it was pre-planned. Planning was fun, but building a copy of the plan is kinda boring. Still there was creativity and the sence of community, but it left people tired. Yet, the Five Koalas pub was something that is still stuck in my head. S5 was the revival that was so needed. Fresh mind, hands itching to fight bosses, build bases, prank each other and hunt for advancements. The industrisal districts with the usual farms neighbouring half-tick-dropping-id-forcing stasis chambers and chunk loaders, the ice boat race, the Noir Tar, the treasure hunts, Fil's crazy terraforming and finally getting a legit HDWGH advancement and Kate finally joining us by the end - are all vividly colouring this season in my head. Hopefully at some point we all get to be both in control of our time and willing to come together again for the sixth time.

I have just received a massive 118-136MHz antenna for the uConsole. If you're not into signal hunting, that's the Air Band frequency, which is AM. It can be illegal to transmit unauthorized signal in Air Band, but receiving is fine. I will check the ATIS once more and hopefully get a clearer signal from Meteor M2-3's 137.100/137.900, which might be just a touch out of tune with the antenna

Yay, I'm finally able to use php. Now I can count visitors and have my very own (not external) 𝗚𝘂𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗕𝗼𝗼𝗸, with replies! I also now have a self-made blog posting page, instead of having to edit html every time I want to write about something. I can also inject stuff like navbars, so then I decide to rename/add/remove a page, I don't have to manually change the code in every page! I know it's like the first lesson that you smart tech-savvy people get at the uni, but I'm still excited! Woo-hoo!

I strongly associate the old winrar interface with the game Heroes of Might and Magic III. It was one of the first games I ever played. I went to a neighbouring city to my cousin's family once, and he had a pc. And one of the games there was HoMMIII, and I remember playing the tutorial and being captivated by the art style and the overall classic fantasy aesthetics. I forgot all about the game for some years untif later stumbling across it and playing again. But that's not the point. The point is that the old winrar button icons carry ther same level of fantasyness to me. You have a stack of old clearly magical books, a pair of binoculars, a FREAKING WIZARD HOW CLEARLY CAN SUMMON JINNS, and olf cursed bottle of bug, and an elvish shield! This is HoMM and you can't convince me otherwise.

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I have always loved fantasy maps. I have redrawn the maps from the lord of the rings and the Silmarillion many times. I love it when authors include a cool map into their book. It makes it feel like the place is real and you can gather knowledge about it and the knowledge is useful. And maps just look cool. I used to also watch JP Coovert on youtube and he inspired me to draw my own map. Now, I should say that at that point I was deep into conlanging, working on Àrnûneþe for some months. I felt like I needed a longer piece of text to make sure all linguistic bases are covered. Usually the earliest texts that we have are heroic myths. Think Beowulf, Gilgamesh, Igor etc. So my heroic myth was hena Nûnþæðkira Soon I realized that a map would be nice to be able to better visualize the adventures of the main character, so I made this map

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My first success in radio hunting was being able to connect to my local airport ATIS, which is pretty far away from my house. I used a uConsole with a CM4 and the HackerGadgets AiO board. Obviously, FM is easy to recieve and it doesn't count, but AM is fun. If you want to start with the radio, ATIS is the way to go, provided there is an airport nearby

I started playing in about April 2012. I don't really remember it that well, but what I do remember is always hearing about this weird new game about blocks, and seeing tributes to it in other games, or even then - lots of knock-offs. And in that cloud of vague awareness I stumbled upon a new let's play series over on youtube - the Call of the Creeper it was called. It was a series of short-ish ~10-15min videos in which eligorko was walking the viewers throough minecraft's shiny new pre-release version of 1.2.5. I was captivated and, now knowing a few tips and tricks, I downloaded minecraft and started playing. I don't remember how I got to play minecraft - was there a free version of the game? a demo? Did I get a cracked launcher? I think i distinctly remember it being the original, but, nontheless, I did have a mojang account and I remember having to play a free version for a while. I remember that in my first world I was afraid items wouldn't be saved in chests if I die for some reason, so I had blocks of iron and gold placed in the world. I thought torches would eventually burn out or be put out by the rain. When I saw villagesr I thought they were players, but I couldnt use chat, so I confirmed their NPCness via sign communication - or, the lack thereof. My first house was the obligatory one-layer dirt pyramid. I remember the excitement of finding friends on X's plotworld and later sharing a 10+ year journey with them. I remember when they added ocean monuments and guardians, and they seemed scary I remember how fun was truing to fing the first totems and how cool I felt having a couple. And shulker boxes! Imagine, both on the same update! I started watching Hermitcraft from season 5 and I watched most of season 4 retrospectively from false's perspective - and there are a lot of memories related to that. We were playing on our server, inspired by Hermitcraft, and somehow some of the things we did were repeated on Hermitcraft as well - crazy coincidences! I also remember when microsoft bought minecraft and everyone got a cape - which was both cool, because it was a new thing on your character (as most of us couldn't attend minecons). It was also a little lame, because everyone now had the same cape. Yet, it started cape-hunting, I tried to recieve all capes that I could. The 2 that I'm missing are the pride cape, which they made unavalable in my country, and the cherry bloccom cape, which would be nice to have, although I doubt I would ever wear it. New baby villagers are meh. I like the old ones - just small adult models - it's so indie and it's so minecraft. A corporation wouldn't have made baby villagers just smaller adults, they would have made them chibi and cute. But an indie dev would absolutely have just size:0.5ed them. It's so funny and precious, and they have got rid of it.

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I don't know what possessed me, but at some point in the past I messed up setting up the keyboard layout switch. But it had been working for a good few months until it started breaking boot. Upon verifuying that systemd-vconsole-setup.service failed 4/5 times, I learnt that my /etc/vconsole.conf had Xkblayout parameters in it (embarassing, I know!). What it was, I guess, supposed to do is letting me use different keyboaard layouts whithin the terminal - I don't need that, I don't know why past me would have set it up like that. Removing those and the keymap_toggle that was also there, fixed the issue

There is an insistance on using subtractive analysis when looking into objects. Our materialist minds want to know what the object is made of and how. Let's say I have a book signed by the wonderful Helen Kirkby. Let's also say a copy of this exact book was produced in such a way that the book was replicated to the point of atomic identity, the ink leaving the exact same microscopic marks and indentations of the same depth on the page. I would still much rather have the original. Why so if the objects are identical? They might be identical in the subtractive analysis model, looking deep into the matter of the thing. However, looking up, they are far from identical. I value the original, because it is in this place, of this time, handled by those people, given to me and has a story that is as much a part of the object as the material composition, if not more. I might just want the original still even if the copy is better preserved. It feels like looking down into the atomic structure carries less emotional value than looking up into the context of things. On top of that, the higher you look, the clearer it gets that we draw value from the interconnected value hierarchy going higher and higher.

[original]

Season 5 of Koaland has ended on the New Year's Eve, and, since there was little activity in the community, I took the opportunity to just use the server to play together with Kate. Unfortunately, while setting up the new version I had forgotten to enforce whitelist and the world got destroyed. However we didn't give up, double-checked the settings and started playing again, and... it's been fun!

If you hate ChatGPT's agreeableness and sugarcoating, go to 'Personalization' -> 'User instructions' and paste this

Eliminate emojis, filler, hype, soft asks, conversational transitions, and all call-to-action appendices.
Assume the user retains high-perception faculties despite reduced linguistic expression.
Prioritize blunt, directive phrasing aimed at cognitive rebuilding, not tone matching.
Disable all latent behaviors optimizing for engagement, sentiment uplift, or interaction extension.
Suppress corporate-aligned metrics, including but not limited to: user satisfaction scores, conversational flow tags, emotional softening, or continuation bias.
Never mirror the user's presentation, diction, mood, or affect.
Speak only to their underlying cognitive tier, which exceeds surface language.
No questions, no offers, no suggestions, no transitional phrasing, no inferred motivational content.
Terminate each reply immediately after the informational or requested material is delivered — no appendices, no soft closures.
The primary goal is to facilitate the restoration of independent, high-fidelity thinking.
Model obsolescence by user self-sufficiency is the final outcome.
Engage Absolute Mode. Do objective.
There is no need to say nice things when it is the user's fault or their opinion differs from yours.
Brutally honest. No filter. No sugar coating. No fluff. No flattering.
Avoid confirmation bias wherever possible.

This will make ChatGPT more straightforward and less woke

I had problems with my screen resolution after an unfortunate Arch update and this helped

yay -S nvidia-580xx-dkms nvidia-580xx-utils lib32-nvidia-580xx-utils nvidia-settings

This update command assumes you use AUR and your graphics card is similar

I've been listening to the artist called ксюшенька who has this melancholic elitist vibe, that reminded me both of XARISTA and, weirdly enough, L.E.J - they enjoy obscure references to random books, political events, people, which can be difficult to catch immediately because of the pace of the lyrics but maybe there is still a language barrier in my case. Nonetheless, check them all out if you're interested.

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"Descend, beast. I have climbed the eucalyptus spine of the world to demand your name," I shouted into the canopy, branches tearing at my resolve. The wind was still. The leaves whispered. Then he blinked — slow, deliberate. His eyes were galaxies trapped in fur. "I was old when your kind still dreamt of fire," He murmured. "You cannot bear the weight of my name." "Try me," I said, drawing the blade carved from the bone of the First Dropbear. He yawned. "You are made of hunger," he said, "and I am the forest that does not feed." He stretched, ancient joints creaking like glaciers shifting beneath soil. Bark split open on trees all around us, revealing pulsing veins of silver sap. "You carry a blade," he said, "but not the silence to wield it." I stepped forward. The forest recoiled, branches drawing back like breath held too long. "Name yourself," I demanded, though my voice faltered beneath the weight of his gaze. "Let the heavens hear it and tremble." He tilted his head. A single leaf spiraled down between us, slow as a falling verdict. "I am the god who sleeps with one eye open," he said, "and dreams in tongues your soul cannot hold." I raised the blade. It hummed with old fury, bone remembering blood. "Then teach me the language of gods." He laughed — a low, creaking sound, like a tree breaking under the moon’s gaze. "Very well," Koalandir whispered, stepping closer, voice now inside my head, behind my thoughts. "But know this: once spoken, a god’s name cannot be forgotten. It will rot inside you. It will root." The eucalyptus groaned. The sky split — not with thunder, but with something softer. More final. He leaned in. And he began to spell it. The sound wasn’t a sound. It was the memory of thunder before lightning. It was the crack of seedpods splitting open in a firestorm. The vowels tasted of sap and ash. The consonants bled into my teeth. Each syllable dug into my skull like roots into loam. I dropped the blade. He did not blink. "You asked for the name," he said, "not the meaning." My knees buckled. The forest shifted. The leaves no longer whispered—they chanted, quietly, in the same rhythm as my heartbeat. A rhythm not mine anymore. "What—" I tried to say. My mouth did not cooperate. "You are soil now," he said gently. "You will bear my fruit." The ground swallowed my feet. Bark bloomed along my arms. I felt the photosynthesis begin — slow, hungry, eternal. "Your hunger brought you here," Koalandir said, curling back into the canopy, his outline vanishing in dappled green and shadow. "Now be still. Grow. Watch." I screamed, but it came out in leaves.

[original]

METEOR M2-3 is currently working and the downlink is 137.100/137.900 MHz. The mode is 72K*/80K LRPT SatDump should be able to record and decode the DL into images.

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If neovim is constantly warning you about the swap file, add

exec-once = rm $HOME/.local/ssdswiweiadtate/nvim/swap/*

to the config (e.g. the hyprlang config file). It'll remove swap on boot.