Day 27 - Monday, April 27th, 2026: A little late, for good reason!

This is my first late post! It was bound to happen; I'm not perfect. (And I'm not a machine either.)

The reason: getting my blood drawn. Being tired before was nothing compared to how I'm feeling now. Tired, lethargic, and queasy. It's been well over 12 hours, yet I can't help feeling under the weather.

Despite feeling awful, I did manage to eat some interesting food. I've also (mostly) caught up on chores, and tended to the aquarium.

The 27th and 28th did end up blending together, due to how much I slept over these two days. So I'll try to separate them, but keep in mind they're more like one continuous day.

I'll present the Notes & Thoughts first, with some food pictures and thoughts at the bottom.

Notes:

- Yahoo is selling Engadget. I hope this'll benefit both of them, but I'm skeptical, to be honest.

- Y2Q/Q-Day/Quantum Day: harvest now, decrypt later. Hadn't heard of that term, but it's beginning to circulate the tech-y spheres.

- Vicinae, a Raycast-like program for Linux. Given I've recently fallen in love with Raycast, this program is next up on the testing bench. Curious to see if it'll beat KRunner.

- The Holocene calendar sounds interesting, and I figured I'd highlight this. These solutions always fascinate me, and in this case it's particularly straightforward: just add 10,000 to the current year. Hope you're enjoying the year 12,026. 🎉

- NASA offers a vast collection of e-books for free, available in both PDF and ePub formats. I've heard good things about 50 Years of Solar System Exploration in particular. (Of course, added to my Reading List!)

Thoughts:

- I've never had JNCO jeans. If they weren't so expensive, I'd get a pair.

- Speaking of buying things, the Miyoo Mini Flip seems to be calling my name... On sale for $59.99 currently.

- I was curious about Level1Techs' KVM switch. But at $520, I'll have to pass!

- It's on You: How They Rig the Rules and We Get the Blame for Society's Problems by George Loewenstein and Nick Chater. Immediately on my reading list! The subtitle should be enough to grab your interest.

- Remember the GeForce 3 Ti Chameleon tech demo? The future of gaming was so exciting. 25 years later though, the landscape is... different, shall we say.

- In a similar vein: this 2004 LAN party video. It's hard not to feel nostalgic. Although I wasn't there; I wish I could've been!

- Minority Report is now on my Watchlist! I keep hearing this movie referenced, but I've never watched it. Time to change that.

- The Best of Google I/O 2016, but the whole 2016 I/O, was jam-packed. Again on the theme of "the future looked so bright". Google Assistant, Allo & Duo, Daydream, Project Ara... (🪦)

Starting off with dessert, because this was genuinely a big surprise. The Asian store listed it as "TikTok Ice Cream", so why not, right? It's genuinely really good! Or rather, I really liked it. This was the peach version, and it might be my new favorite ice cream. The outside is beautiful; either white chocolate or something similar. The inside is a very sweet, soft serve-type ice cream. The peach flavor is pronounced, but not painfully so. Every bite was a delight, and I can't wait to try the mango variant. (Even though I have no idea what this is actually called. I've seen it being called "Tao Qi", but I'm not sure. 美味しい either way!)

A close up shot of the peach-shaped ice cream resting on its bright green plastic square base. The dessert is textured and matte, with a vibrant orange and pink gradient color. A small indentation is visible at the top. The base sits on a light colored wooden tray. The background is slightly out of focus, showing a grey wooden deck.

Another picture of the near-perfect outer layer. Slightly melted on the inside, it was absolutely amazing!

Also, the green box it sits on has a fake bottom you can pop out, which'll reveal the popsicle stick inside. I didn't know this until I ate nearly the entire thing! Would've been good to know, so I'm sharing my findings.

Alt Text Two toasted flour tortilla wraps sit on blue and white checkered wax paper. One half shows a golden brown, toasted exterior of the tortilla. The other one is open, revealing a filling of fried tofu cubes coated in teriyaki sauce and shredded green cabbage. They are both half-eaten. The wax paper is wrinkled and shows some grease spots.

A large chicken katsu roll is wrapped in dark green, shiny nori seaweed and sits in a yellow plastic tray with a textured, rectangular pattern. White sushi rice is visible at both ends of the roll. Some green lettuce leaves and a fried golden brown chicken tender peek out from one end. A few stray grains of white rice are stuck to the outside of the seaweed.

One of these is supposed to be a Tofu Taco, the other a Quesadilla. But yes, they look the same! Both were very tasty. The one that's open and visible is the Tofu Taco, which had tofu cubes, some cabbage, Yum Yum sauce, and some noodles on the bottom. The quesadilla was similar, but different enough to remain interesting. It had the same tofu cubes, but was doused in teriyaki sauce, and had shredded cheese (possibly mozzarella) in the bottom. They were really cheap; just about what you'd expect for $1.99.

The chicken katsu roll was fun. Heavy on the rice, but the little pickle(d radish) was a tangy little treat. It was listed as a "chicken burrito", but that was too far, in my opinion. Tasty, yes. But a burrito? Not even close!

A close-up shot shows the internal layers of the chicken katsu roll. The outer layer is white sushi rice. Inside, there is a layer of vibrant green lettuce leaves. The center contains a fried chicken tender with a golden crust and a light, creamy sauce. A thin piece of yellow pickled vegetable is also visible among the fillings, as well as some avocado.

A top down view shows a serving of sliced lotus root and white rice in a black container. The lotus root slices are round with a characteristic pattern of holes and are coated in a dark, glossy brown sauce. (I don't know what sauce it was, but I believe it was soy-sauce based.) They are garnished with small rings of bright green onion. A large mound of fluffy white rice occupies the left side of the frame.

And then the final part: sliced and fried lotus root. If you like water chestnuts, you'll love lotus root! And I absolutely do love water chestnuts.

Crunchy texture, salty soy sauce, and fantastically fluffy rice. These will serve as my leftover dinners for the next few nights.

Lots of scrumptious foods, that I'm quite glad I got.

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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!