Day 30 - Thursday, April 30th, 2026: One month!

Thirty whole days, I almost can't believe it! Quite a few ups, definitely some downs. April 1st feels both so long ago and almost as if it were yesterday. It's quite hard to articulate. Words seem to be failing me, so I'll try to put it concisely: I'm proud!

Aiming for 12 months next! 😄

I won't be throwing a party, though, as I've been feeling under the weather. And by "under the weather" I mean "I feel like I got run over by a truck".

Since I'm feeling a little off, I figured I'd switch things up. Notes & Thoughts from going through my old phone tabs, instead of the usual (podcast) news stories.

Notes:

- The Raspberry Pi & Retro Gaming Book Bundle by Humble Bundle seems like a great deal. $15 for 14 11 books. I'm particularly interested in C & GUI Programming and The Computers That Made Britain.

- Nate Graham posted a very insightful article about how he manages his email. I'll finally get around to setting up Thunderbird on this machine!

- Valve uploaded an unboxing of the new Steam Controller. $99 is a little steep, but I'm super tempted to get this when it launches!

- Another Humble Bundle set: Shells and scripting for seasoned admins. $25 for 17 books is very reasonable, but it's unreasonable to think I'd get through these in a reasonable amount of time. Quite tempted, but unsure I'll get this one.

- The Trinity Desktop Environment got a new release, the first one in 2026! The screenshots are a genuine trip down memory lane. (And for those unaware, it's a fork of KDE 3.5, maintained since 2010.)

- Speaking of nostalgic software: Microsoft released the source code for the 86-DOS 1.00 kernel, as well as some other software. They've even published a very nice article about it!

- There's a TestFlight for Thunderbird on iOS. I've joined, and wanted to highlight this for anyone else interested!

- Vine is back: DiVine. With iOS and Android apps! There's a waitlist though, keep that in mind. Their main hook is that they're not allowing AI content, focusing on the "human" aspect of video creation.

- The ROG Zephyrus Duo (2026) GX651 is a (frankly) insane laptop that deserves a highlight. Two screens and a detachable keyboard! Alas, I don't have an extra $4,500 to spend.

Thoughts:

- Alienware's $350 OLED monitor is calling my name... I shouldn't upgrade anything until after the move, but it's so hard to resist! My current main monitor is a TUF Gaming VG24VQE, and the ghosting is quite bad. (Cheap VA panel, so that checks out.)

A yellow icon representing a zipped file titled "DaVinci_Resolve_20.3.2_Linux.zip" can be seen in this screenshot.

- I finally downloaded DaVinci Resolve. Haven't yet installed it though, the .zip is sitting patiently in my Downloads folder!

- Mentioning Alienware: the 16 Area-51 looks really cool, though I can't succinctly state why. It's not as flashy as some of the other gaming laptops on the market, but it has an interesting "retro" factor to it that I can't shake. It reminds me of those early 2010s gaming laptops, but "modded". Remember those modded PSPs with LED buttons? It reminds me of that aesthetic specifically!

- Arc, Dia, Comet. What do all of these have in common? AI No Linux support! 🙃

- My ThinkPad keeps hibernating despite Windows being set to Sleep. It's been a nightmare to find a solution, given that the terminology is often incorrectly used. If I find a solution, I'll post about it for sure!

- And on the topic of retro-futuristic tech: this clear, boxy iPhone case looks insanely cool! Shout-out to Aether OS on Bluesky for sharing this piece of art!

A screenshot of several tabs, three out of six being suspended.

- Google Chrome seems to (finally) be suspending tabs properly on Linux! Not sure if it was just an issue on my machine (as I haven't had any time to troubleshoot), but the most recent update has been suspending my tabs! And yes, I've been loving the vertical tabs!

- The delicious peach ice cream I mentioned in a previous post is called Tao Qi (TQ)/Hong Qi Peach Flavored Ice Cream. It's super tasty, highly recommended! Make sure to let it sit out for a little, so it's nice and soft. A true delight to bite into!

- I've subsequently also fallen in love with lotus root, and can't wait to try some new recipes with it.

- Have you ever played Rack-O? It's a very simple but fun card game. To me, it's both surprising and not surprising that the game has been around since 1956.

- Remember the water-cooled PS4 Pro video that LTT released almost a decade ago? So silly, oddly nostalgic. This two-decade-old DS Lite review is still by far my favorite nostalgic YouTube video though.

- Google's Spring Sunny Mug is really cute, and I'd get one if I weren't moving so soon. So vibrant! 🌻

- I've become Nostr-curious. There's a huge list of Nostr apps that I'd like to look into more. Seems far more involved than just creating an account!

- I've been thinking about redoing my iOS home screen layout. It's been rather messy (despite aiming to be minimalistic, ironically enough).

A fresh start, tabs-wise. And hopefully some better days ahead! ☀️

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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!