Day 5 - April 5th, 2026: Me and my GPU...

What a wonderful day! One of my favorite days in a while. I ate lots of delicious food, and I found a new obsession: Oreo Cakesters!

They're so soft and incredibly sweet! More similar to a cupcake than an Oreo, but I'm not complaining!

Which reminds me of that old "cupcake hack" from several years ago, where you'd rip the cupcake in half, and put the bottom on the top so the icing is in the middle. Like a burger, of sorts.

Enjoy this humongous screenshot of my insane display setup:

(I've been wanting to upgrade to an ultra-wide monitor, but between the cost and lack of space, I just... haven't.)

I've spent some time setting up my old no-longer-server into a gaming box. It's still very much a work in progress, but I'm typing this blog post from that machine! I initially went with LXQt, until the (lack of) monitor management drove me up a wall. Turns out that X11 doesn't like 3 differently sized monitors with different refresh rates. And getting Wayland to work was far more finicky than I'd like. So I settled on KDE. Fedora & KDE... Feels like home, in a way. I need to finish theming it, changing a bunch of settings, and moving over some files. Unfortunately, this machine uses a USB wireless adapter, and it's SLOW! It caps out ~40 Mbps, and Vintage Story is currently downloading at 115.1 KB/s... (💀)

One of my next purchases will be a PCIe WiFi adapter. It's not so slow as to be unusable, but it's not ideal either. (And it didn't help I had to download & upload a bunch of images!) I'm thinking of getting a TP-Link WiFi 6 PCIe WiFi card. (Not an affiliate link! Open to other suggestions if anyone has any.) Convincing myself to spend $30 for mere convenience is... tough. I can be quite stingy at times, haha!

The rest of the machine is quite speedy though, despite its age and constraints!

Obligatory Fastfetch, of course! 3 displays, 2 powered by the Radeon RX 6400 (DisplayPort and HDMI), and the VGA monitor being driven by the Intel HD 530. With an i5-6500, it's not exactly a powerhouse, but it's plenty fast for everything I'm doing (Chrome with a bunch of tabs, Discord, Steam, writing/blogging, music playback, downloading Vintage Story at painfully slow speeds, and more.) And the 32 GB of RAM gives me some nice "breathing room" over the 16 GB in my main machine. (Although this is DDR4, and what's in my main machine is DDR5.) I think I might use this extensively for a few weeks, and see if I like it more than the other one, and switch to this one as my ~~new~~ main machine. It's able to drive 3 displays comfortably, while the other can only output to 2*. It's a bit slower, but I'll sacrifice some frames for an extra screen, double the RAM, and quiet operation! Plus, I can add in more storage as wanted/needed. (Well, not with these prices, but theoretically speaking...) Modularity is such a nice thing to have!

* I could get some sort of adapter/splitter, but that just sounds like an absolute nightmare...

And I've been playing so much Astro's Playroom! What a delightful game. I did post a bunch of screenshots on my Bluesky:

- The "LocoBot", from LocoRoco.

- A cute little penguin!

- PSPs showing LocoRoco and Patapon, two of my favorite games of all time!

- The singing mountain.

- And (some of) the lyrics to my favorite song in that soundtrack.

So it's been both busy, yet relaxing. No notes, as I haven't listened to any podcasts today. Oh, and I'm taking Monday off, so I've got an extra long weekend! I'm quite happy, actually. ☺️

Update: I finished Astro's Playroom! 100%, all trophies including the Platinum and DLCs. And naturally, I posted a screenshot. Astro Bot (the game) next. Although I might play some Borderlands 2, I've been really wanting to go back to that game! (Which is quite possibly my favorite game of all time...)

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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!