Day 16 - Thursday, April 16th, 2026: Rough days (ahead?)

Today was quite rough! Tomorrow (and the day after) likely won't ease up either. But to combat that dread, I've made my favorite snack of all time: Peanut Butter Oats.

Just plain oats, uncooked. Some peanut butter. If you want something sweet, add some honey or agave syrup. I don't know why, but the taste and texture are so delightful to me! Dry and chewy, not unlike a pastry. Like those no-bake energy balls that were all the rage a while back, but lazier. 😆

I've also made some cold brew, which pairs great with the PB-oats. (It's steeping right now, and I'm so excited!)

I've also been really excited about spring lately. Everything's turning green and blooming, and it's made my commute feel like a whole different drive! I'd love to take a picture someday soon, but I hate pulling over, haha.

Speaking of commuting, I found this early-2010s Dubstep/Brostep playlist on Spotify that I've been jamming out to!

Oh, and I ate some "carrot patties" which were truly delightful. I've asked for the recipe, and I ought to post it soon! I know it had shredded carrot and garlic, but obviously much more was involved. Paired with my favorite hot sauce* though, these were incredible!

Currently it's the Yellowbird Blue Agave Sriracha. An amped-up sriracha, for sure. I adore their Ghost Pepper Hot Sauce, which is wonderfully garlicky, but just a tad too spicy for me to enjoy fully!

Beyond that, nothing too exciting has been going on.

So:

Notes:

- The Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus (what a name...) is apparently really good!

- Google released the Google app for desktop. A vague name, but it seems similar to Spotlight from macOS. I'll have to try this out for sure!

- Amazon released the Fire TV Stick HD. Notable for its price tag: $35! I'd like to pick one of these up, even though I don't watch a lot of TV, and I'm not particularly entrenched in the Amazon ecosystem.

- Nintendo added 3 new NES games to Nintendo Switch Online. PAC-MAN being the most noteworthy, in my opinion. (Although I'm not currently subscribed to NSO, so I'll be missing out either way.)

- Some Borderlands 4 (Nintendo Switch 2) copies are out there. They don't seem functional though. I've always said that the Switch was perfect for Borderlands! But given how poorly Borderlands 4 runs, I'm not surprised they needed more time. (And I am hoping they'll fully release the game for the Switch 2!)

- Hi-Fi Rush has been rated for the Nintendo Switch. It's a game I've been meaning to try (and I could play it on other platforms) and I've only heard good things about it!

- The Android kernel got a nice little (kernel) boost! (Gosh, how I wish I had a modern Android phone...) For the fancier name: MGLRU (Multi-Gen Least Recently Used). These might not give you a crazy performance improvement, but the developers do talk about increased speeds and improved battery life. So a win either way!

- On a more negative note; Sony is testing dynamic pricing. There's a lot to unpack there, and I'll let you form your own opinions. (Although I may or may not dislike this, personally.)

- But on a happier note: The Tomb Raider collection is out! Tomb Raider 1, 2, and 3: remastered. I never played the original(s), so this might be a good way to give them a try. It's also available on Steam! (As well as the Nintendo Switch.)

(But on a more negative note again, it looks like people really didn't like the most recent update!)

- The Clicks Communicator looks like a near-perfect phone for me. Supposedly releasing later this year. I'm excited for the release (if, from a distance, since I'm stuck on iOS for the time being.)

Thoughts:

- Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro sounds really intriguing. It's science fiction, but I believe I watched the movie years ago? I want to explain the plot and why it sounds so interesting, but I'm afraid I can't do that without spoiling the novel!

- Speaking of which, and hopefully spoiler-free: Dolly the sheep was an inspiration.

- I've been listening to The Rest Is Science, but apparently there's a show called The Rest Is History. I'm not much of a history buff, but I should give this podcast a listen!

- Speaking of the Fire Stick, I reckon it'd pair well with an Echo Dot Max (or 2). I wonder if this could be a way to replace our current Apple setup? (For ~$250.)

- Speaking of "games that are hard to run not being released on the Switch"; this brought back a faint memory of Genshin Impact coming to the Switch. Which apparently never happened! The trailer is still up, though.

- I wish there were a way for me to try HarmonyOS. The MateBook 14 looks like a ton of fun, but I don't believe it'll come to the US, and importing one seems... not smart. (And it'd be costly, too!)

- The 250K Plus sounds interesting, but my next build will likely be AMD-only (CPU & GPU). But that's so far off into the future, the landscape'll likely look very different by the time I get the parts for my build.

- This also led me to discover there's no desktop RX 8000 series. I just figured I must've missed the announcement or something, but no: there's a 7000 series and a 9000 series (which is the current one as of time of writing.)

- We all know you should install 2 sticks of RAM (in the correct slots). But I'd be curious to see what happens (gaming and general use-wise) when you use a crazy server board with 8+ slots and populate them all! Now that'd be a weekend project if I were a billionaire! 😆

- I sort of... "forgot" about Kirby and the Forgotten Land. I remember watching the announcement and being really excited (which was over 4 years ago now...) but then... never got it or played it? It recently popped up on my radar though, and I might pick it up if it goes on sale. (<Insert joke about Nintendo's first-party pricing.>)

- And there are some rumors floating around about an Ocarina of Time remake. I never played the original, and I would be excited to play the remaster, but it might be Switch 2-only. (Perhaps I should get one of those N64 controllers for PC. To play my ROM-dumped copy, of course!)

- Android Bugly is such a funny name. I can't read Chinese so I don't have much of an input, but I didn't want to leave it unmentioned.

Quite a few notes today, still catching up from the past few days!

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Day 12 - April 12th, 2026: Causes and clearing out.

So first things first: I think I've figured out what makes me feel super nauseated sometimes! It'd happen occasionally in the mornings, and I always figured that maybe some leftovers I'd eaten had somehow gone bad.

Turns out: it's the Starbucks creamers I'd use occasionally in my morning coffees! Specifically, the Caramel Macchiato Inspired Creamer and Brown Sugar Shaken Espresso Inspired Creamer. And it was so difficult to figure out, because it doesn't kick in immediately. I'll have a tasty little coffee treat, and then an hour or two later I'll get these waves of nausea, incredibly bloating and cramps, and just a general feeling of malaise. (Plus some weird jitters, which I imagine is the caffeine making things worse.)

As for why... well, I'm not entirely sure. None of the ingredients stood out to me as "particularly bad". My best guess is that it's the very high amount of sugar. Roughly 1/3rd is sugar by volume. (5 grams of sugar per 15 milliliter/gram serving.) Considering I generally used 60 grams of creamer (with 100-120 milliliters of dairy-free milk and a 6-cup Moka Pot), that's 20 grams of sugar! I am known to have a sweet tooth, but generally those are foods. So the sudden (liquid) sugar rush must be triggering a "get out" response in my stomach. A shame, since I liked their taste, but wowee I feel bad right now!

Speaking of coffee: I'm finally reducing my intake, properly. No more morning and afternoon coffees. I'll save coffee as a special little treat. Perhaps the constant caffeine has left me feeling drained most days. It'll be a rough few weeks, but ultimately it'll be for the better! (Or so I hope.)

2 jars of oats standing atop and oven. The one on the left has a yellow lid, and the cocoa and peanut butter mixture looks quite brown. The jar on the right has a blue lid, and the mixture has a slight pastel blue hue to it.

And I did make two overnight oat jars. On the left is a cocoa & peanut butter one, and the blue-lidded one is simple blueberry! I don't yet know if they're any good. I'm a little worried about the cocoa & PB jar, since I think I put too much cocoa powder and made it too bitter, despite adding lots of honey. I'll have to report back, and post the recipes if they're good. I've been on a really bad "overnight oats" kick lately. Easy to make, satisfying to eat, and they help with the pastry cravings I get so often.

I've also finally gone through the tabs on my phone (60+) and will be adding them as notes and thoughts. Then, I'll be playing some Goat Simulator and try to get that BFF achievement!

Oh, and I did export my Steam wishlist (100+ games), and I'm going through them to find (and remove) games with broken achievements. I don't mind not getting 100% on some games, but I hate when games have broken/unfixed achievements! (Such as multiplayer-only achievements in a game whose servers have shut down. That's silly!)

Notes:

- Atuin. I've heard a lot of good things about this! A very straightforward install on Fedora, although it'll take a lot of using to get a good feel for it. If you're thinking of installing this too, make sure to read the installation guide! I'll be using ZSH and Alacritty. Perhaps I should write a simple blog post, too?

- Losing the Signal by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff. I was never a BlackBerry user, so getting some insight into their history seems valuable! Added to my To-Read list.

- Peter Pan Syndrome. Good to know there's a term for this.

- Yaupon tea. I'd never heard of this, but it sounds intriguing! I love teas, and have been a big fan of yerba mate for a while. I'll have to try this soon! (Despite wanting to reduce my caffeine intake, haha!)

- I found this awesome (pun intended) GitHub page called "Awesome Wayland", full of nifty Wayland(-related) resources! I've bookmarked it, and I reckon I'll reference it often. (Since my machines are all pretty much Wayland-exclusive at this point.)

- OpenAlternative: A site to help you find open source alternatives to the programs you might be using currently. Another indispensable resource! It'll take me a while to comb through this (and I don't use many proprietary applications), but this is incredibly useful to anyone in the F(L)OSS world!

- Nivs' Blog, and specifically this post. Recommend giving their posts a read, there's a lot of genuinely interesting stuff there!

- The Death Clock: a clock that has a countdown timer with the (estimated) seconds you've got left to live. So incredibly morbid, but I love it! It can also be a regular clock. It's a $79.90 pre-order right now (ouch!), but this is too cool to pass up or not share.

- The SmartCard Ghost (Gen 3). A thin, card-shaped tracker that works with both Apple's Find My and Google's Find Hub. What's neat is that it charges wirelessly! It's a little pricey at $39.99 for one, but the 3-pack seems like a decent value (and would make for a good gift!) I don't use any trackers right now, and while I'm not known to lose my stuff, I'd like the extra insurance this would/could add!

This shows the terminal output of fastfetch piped into lolcat. It's rainbowy text.

- Dotacat, a Rust reimplementation of Lolcat. It makes your terminal output all rainbow-y. I love lolcat, since it makes things so much more fun! (And it's probably why I set up my blog to look similarly, haha!) Also, I adore the answer to "Why the name?"; "Because Dota is better than LoL (According to people - I play neither)"

- Taskwarrior-TUI is a super cool terminal program that allows you to manage to-dos and tasks from the terminal!

A screenshot of the terminal showing cbonsai output, which looks like a little 2D bonsai tree, in ASCII.

- And another cool terminal program: cbonsai. Perhaps less productive than the previously-mentioned program. But computing is supposed to be fun, right?

- And speaking of having fun: Chiaki-ng. It's a program that allows PlayStation Remote Play on devices that aren't a PS Portal or a smartphone. Think a laptop, so you can play PlayStation games in another room. Or more importantly; on a Steam Deck! My Wi-Fi might be too slow, but I can't wait to give this a try!

- The Reversal Icon Theme looks incredibly good. I want to install it, but it requires running a script which I'm not a big fan of. I prefer manually placing the files in the .icons folder (such as in the case of Bibata Rainbow, my current cursor!)

Thoughts:

- Attie, despite its controversy, sounded pretty interesting. I'm on the waitlist, and curious to see how it shakes out if/when I get accepted. Attie seems very much hated by the Bluesky community, and is one of the most-blocked accounts on the platform... Ouch!

- Randomly remembered PushBullet from my long-gone Android days. Seems like it's still around, but in maintenance mode. I suppose between LocalSend, KDE Connect, Edge Drop, and Blip, there hasn't been much reason to stick to PushBullet.

- I should get the CCNP certification. Not having any certifications (or code) is severely hurting my ability to get into IT. And I have to start somewhere, right? (If you're looking for a junior sysadmin with Linux experience, let me know!)

- I seriously need to get a YubiKey! For both added security and convenience. Despite using 2FA everywhere I can (and have done so for ages), I've never gotten a key like this before. Perhaps this'd make a good Christmas gift? (Wink wink, nudge nudge!)

- I ran across BB, which from what I understand, is a program that visualizes audio output. (Yes, yes, I'll mention Cava shortly!) What caught me off-guard was the "Requirements" section: "This demo requires computer at least as fast as 486/33 with coprocesor [sic]. But speed of 486/66 or pentium is highly recomended [sic] (especially for hight [sic] resolution SVGA modes). " Can I make this run on a modern machine? Sounds like a fun project!

A screenshot of Cava, an audio visualizer. It displays orange bars (corresponding to the frequencies). In this case, the background is dark grey, and the bars themselves are orange.

- Naturally this requires a shout-out to Cava!

- And speaking of audio, I'm swapping back to Spotify for a while. Two main reasons:

1) My YouTube Premium trial is running out. The individual cost was raised to $15.99, and that's more than I'm willing to spend at this time. I'll likely set up a Family plan, since that'll help alleviate the cost a bit.

2) YouTube Music can be oddly buggy when it has no access to internet. On my 1-hour long commute, I drive through several areas with no cell service. YouTube Music will often "forget" my like/thumbs-up when disconnecting and reconnecting, or not save it at all when the connection is too spotty. I've "lost" some songs this way, unfortunately. And despite playing from the "Downloads" section, it seems like it prefers to phone home when it can. I had no such issues on Spotify when I used it. (Although Spotify will show/hide the "Start Radio" button when connecting/disconnecting, causing the UI [and more critically, the Like/+ Button] to jump around wildly.)

- Speaking of Taskwarrior-TUI, a challenge I've been wanting to try for ages: GUI-less computing! I want to try running a terminal-only setup for a month or so. Relying only on the command line!

- I need to join Ubuntu Pro and, essentially, "figure out what it's about." I know Ubuntu is massive in the server/commercial space, and while I've used Ubuntu a lot over the years, I've never used Ubuntu Pro.

- And lastly, I should probably also join Coursera. If anything, just to hone my skills.

As always, none of these links/programs are sponsored! I like to highlight things I find interesting. And no affiliate links, either. Just clean, direct-to-item links.

Phew, another huge post. On to Goat Simulator!