Day 33: Always changing; like a rolling distro!

Writing this blog post on a chilly Sunday while listening to Lunatic Harness. Quite fitting, don't you think?

A screenshot from a blog post of mine, with the following text: "Day 32 5/02/2026 11:01:00 AM"

Most noticeable change: Titles. Shrinking them way down. "But Riley, how will I know when this was posted?" Fear not! Full dates will be displayed below the title, on every post. I'm opting to remove the day, since I've found out that searching the web will tell you what day it was. (No matter the search engine!)

I'll try to include the day in the opening sentences moving forward though. Because I do believe it adds useful context.

Today was interesting. I slept a lot, and felt pretty good after waking up! Then played Overcooked on the Nintendo Switch with some old friends of mine. It made me realize how much I've missed our game nights. In a lot of ways, I miss the small town we're from. But the grass is always greener on the other side, and undoubtedly I'd miss "all the nice places" from the city.

More changes ahead, however. I've decided to swap back from TickTick to Google Tasks. I love TickTick, but it's a bit too much for my needs. Sometimes, all you need is a simple hammer, not a whole toolbox. And on that note: Keep Notes. I've set up an extensive labeling system. It's still a work in progress, but I like the granularity it offers. Now I've got to move all my notes from iCloud into Keep. That'll be a chore!

Here's the list, feel free to use it as inspiration:

/ Inbox
/ Waiting
Dev/Code
Dev/Code/Bash
Dev/Code/Scripts
Dev/Config
Dev/Guides/Linux
Dev/Guides/macOS
Dev/Guides/Windows
Dev/Hardware
Dev/Tools
Home/Decor
Home/Food/Meals
Home/Garden
Home/Recipes/Baking
Home/Recipes/Meals
Home/Recipes/Try
Life/Chores
Life/Goals
Play/Gaming
Play/Gaming/Backlog
Play/Gaming/In-progress
Play/Gaming/Vault
Play/Music
Play/Reading
Play/Watchlist/Movies
Play/Watchlist/Shows
Shopping/Books
Shopping/Gear
Shopping/Grocery
Shopping/Wishlist
Social
Studio/Blog/Ideas
Studio/Social
Studio/Thoughts
Work/[REDACTED]
🗄️ Reference/Manuals
🗄️ Reference/Receipts
🗄️ Reference/Vault

I also ate some Little Caesars today. It upset my stomach (unsurprisingly), but I've learned that they apparently don't sell different sizes. Just 14-inch pizzas. Interesting, I thought. Must help a lot with logistics.

I also drank the La Colombe Triple Draft Latte. Delicious! That texture is truly divine, in my opinion. Oh, and I did forget to mention I got Cava yesterday! I quite like their pita wraps, specifically. Can't go wrong with their falafels!

A screenshot of the Gmail favicon, showing a "0" in the lower right hand corner, indicating I have zero unread emails.

Switching back to productivity: Gmail still has a ton of customization settings available on the website! I initially went looking for the ability to get desktop notifications, but I ended up enabling the reading pane, editing my labels, setting a theme, and turning on the favicon number. Truly unstoppable now!

I've also spent a lot of time messing with my Chromebook (Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3). I love this little thing! But I should mention: it's objectively not good. The MediaTek processor is slow, the 4 GB of RAM is insufficient, and that 64 GB of storage will fill up quickly. It's a true "single-tasking" device. But that's precisely why I love it. It forces you to slow down and prioritize your tasks. It won't let you get distracted. I picked mine up on sale for $139. And if it truly gets supported until June 2033, it'll have cost me just $20 per year. That's less than most subscriptions! I really wish it had a backlit keyboard, but it's so cheap I truly can't complain.

So, what's left for today? Cleaning up my notes, sorting through Google Drive, attempting to clean out Google Photos, and analog-ing my recipes. I think that'll fill the rest of my night. Some YouTube, maybe some dinner, and lots of music. I've been on a bit of a "retro" kick lately, listening to early techno and demoscene music.

And I'll leave you with one question (and answer) I had: How do lava lamps work for security?

CloudFlare has a magnificent write-up about this! LavaRand, how quirky.

Not exactly looking forward to tomorrow (technically speaking "tomorrow", but it'll be two days from now, for me.) Going back to work will be tough, I miss having free time!

And I do hope that my Discover Weekly will be fixed.

But, time for me to sort out my productivity programs, and then catch some zzzs!

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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!