a very lazy saturday today. couldnt fall asleep until 6am last night and woke up very tired. drank a couple energy drinks as a weekend treat. full throttle and nos. didnt do much today.
stopping here because typing without autocorrect on the phone is so fuxkibg ass
rare weather for me this time of year, it's in the low-mid 70s when normally it would be in the mid-high 80s. maybe I should take advantage of this and go finish messing with my car audio setup.
6 days until japan flight.
by the way, 2010s internet is back https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njkHZ3Q2VOY
mirror https://i.nyamo.xyz/shinji-goes-to-subway.webm
the last episode of yani neko came out yesterday. god i love this show, i actually hope they make a second season. this is the first new show I've seen in years that I actually care about. time to go read the manga and get caught up to the anime.
my once a week 10 minute work meeting got cancelled. hurray.
watched a japanese guy work on restoring his toyota mr2 literally all day yesterday. he actually goes somewhat into detail on what he's doing. is it just me, or does japan youtube still kind of feel like old youtube? https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRd4HSeRsmW5T_YpmDzH6qyd-kz3PSDuB
I think I'm going to try making a habit of watching japanese youtube videos like this where they actually talk a lot, I feel like this is good learning material for me.
i might want to archive that playlist, though I wil definitely never want to own or work on an mr2 as cool as the spyder is. man this series REALLY has my wanting to to get a place with a proper garage (I currently live in HOA hell and you're not allowed to have project cars outside). I'm getting the urge to restore an sn95 mustang or old miata with the popup lights. or a honda del sol. old first gen honda insight would be tempting too, maybe make a hyper miler out of it.
I'm still watching gundam zz, up to about episode 28. did this series popularize the onii-chan/imouto thing or what
god bless this water loving autistic girl
just a quick post tonight
I got my 3,000mah lipo batteries in the mail today. When I went to connect one to my lora node the jst header just popped right off the board like it was never soldered on. I quickly fixed it by soldering on a big blob of, well, solder, then cleaned the tip and just poked at it until the excess causing a bridge was gone. Did a quick sanity check with a multimeter to ensure it was not actually shorted still, got NC in one orientation and 2 mega ohms with the probes the other way around so I guess that's good. Apparently the charging circuity will show some resistance or something. Got the battery installed in the case and switched to my angled antenna instead of the straight flexible one. Node is ready for magfest now. Hopefully I am not the only freak walking around with a lora node, we'll see in January.
Oh right and I totally forgot that the last of my aliexpress haul arrived. So here is everything. (and my stupid fucking iphone has an explosive "other data" problem and I literally can't download a photo from icloud to it right now. great. I was going to wait a while before wiping and restoring this piece of shit, but I guess I'm doing this tonight. Sure hope my mobile game accounts don't get nuked)
I should play some video games, but I'm not really in the mood for anything more involved than some casual tetris while I have youtube on the second monitor. I just got Tetris Effect setup in Lutris yesterday. I still don't really understand how gaming on linux works, but I was able to stumble my way through setup with a little googling.
Still making progress with Gundam ZZ. I actually like this series more than Zeta. I didn't think I would like it but I think the fact that it is less serious feeling helps. Right now I'm at the Moon Moon part. Literally feels like an old episode of Star Trek. Also, the dub situation is weird with this series. There was apparently an English dub made for the asian market, but it's somehow not available anywhere as far as I can tell. The plan was to just watch all of Gundam in English, but I don't actually mind reading the subs for this series so far and actually paying attention.
motivation to type is low today, I just finished making waffles and bacon for everyone and cleaning up, let's see what I can remember that happened recently...
Yesterday i replaced the radiator fan on my moms car, took about an hour and I saved her $500 versus having a shop do it. Job was super easy. Charging 4x markup on parts and 2 hours of labor for what should take a mechanic 30 minutes with 1 pry tool and a screwdriver is criminal. what the fuck is actually wrong with shops these days?
Finished Gundam Zeta the other day, I didn't quite like it as much as the first season. It had its moments, but the first season kept my attention better. Maybe I'm just too burnt out on Gundam to care as much, these seasons are like 15 fuckin hours long. I should probably have a few months in between seasons, but the person I'm watching Gundam with just wants to blast through them all as fast as possible, which might be miserable.
Oh yeah, I saw the Resident Evil movie Friday in the Dolby theater. I went into it knowing absolutely nothing about it. Didn't see a trailer or anything. I was more than pleasantly surprised. There were no actual resident evil characters, and the story was pretty much all original. I'm glad they took that approach. I feel like it's cringe seeing live actors trying to be a well established video game character. Like, I hate live action anime, I've never wanted to watch a single one of those because of how weird it is to see a random person pretend to a character they look almost nothing like. I'm not going to bother going into too much detail about the movie, but it was good if you ask me. I would recommend seeing it. I did hear that a lot of people online hated this person because it DOESN'T follow the actual story or have real characters. I can't even fathom how this a thing. Must be the normies whining, I feel like there's a lot of resident evil fans, and "fans" that aren't nerds. Am I a fan? I don't know, I wouldn't describe myself as a fan really but I did really enjoy RE4-9. Well, 6 was absolute クソゲー and not in a good way. RE4 is my favorite (shocker). It's definitely a childhood nostalgia thing, but I would say that it is genuinely a good game.
Ah yes, and as I look around my desk trying to think of what else to type here, I see my launch day nintendo switch. I had lent it to my mother so she could play mario kart and animal crossing. It's hacked and just has the games installed on it. A few weeks ago, I find out it's not working due to an eMMC error. I don't know what happened, maybe she dropped it or maybe over time the connection between the eMMC module somehow degraded, but when I opened the console to reseat and clean the connector there was nothing wrong. I reassembled it and it immediately booted without issue. I checked the eMMC health in hekate and it's perfect now. Before it was not connected at all / not readable. Though confusingly the prior error just said bus speed degraded or something. I'm not complaining though, looks like this thing should be good for at least a few more years of service.
There may be more stuff I'm forgetting, but it's probably nothing too important. I think it's only been a couple days since my last post. I'm a bit anxious right now as I wait for work to approve my PTO for my two week Japan trip this October. It really shouldn't matter at all when I take PTO, I guess whoever needs to look at it hasn't seen it. In hindsight I should have submitted it more than three weeks before the trip starts, but again it really shouldn't matter. I'm sure someone will review the request, eventually..
Apologies also for not posting pictures, I haven't really been thinking to take them. It's hard to remember. Maybe as time goes on I will get better about remembering to take pictures for the blog. I will for sure have a few good ones from the Japan trip.
Well it's time to endure Gundam ZZ. This series only has a 6.73 on MAL. I am definitely going to just play on steam deck while this shit is on. I did actually watch and pay attention to the first several episodes yesterday and I didn't hate it, but I'm sure it won't take long before I stop caring. These 12+ remaining hours of the show will probably be better spent on KH2.5FM or the Higurashi console arcs. I thought I was done with Higurashi a while back after spending like a year getting through the 80-90 hours of reading. But I just learned that you can play a bunch of other stories via 07th mod. I guess there's quite a bit left for side stories that never got PC releases. I am kind of looking forward to the Hanyuu lore from the DS game. I don't even know what the other 10 arcs are about.
P.S. Fuck stupid fucking Samsung making their TVs shitty with automatic firmware updates. I regret giving this fucking thing internet access. There was a recent update that makes it default to launching Samsung TV when you turn on the TV, which doesn't even load correctly it's just all fucking corrupted. Eventually found a setting that was poorly worded that fixed it so it starts up on the last input like it fucking should in the first place. And on top of this shit, the HDMI-ARC got worse and now it's a fucking struggle to get it to send audio to my receiver. Half the fucking time it doesn't work when I turn the TV on. God I fucking love companies in this late stage capitalist era. Why can't we just have simple shit that works and is repairable and doesn't spy on you 24/7. I don't know if I will ever buy a new TV again. I might end up buying a handful of old fashioned dumb TVs at this rate.
P.P.S. that bit of rage just now reminded me to say, fuck mario kart world. 8 deluxe online play was rough enough, but world is a total fucking chaotic shit storm. I think I actually need to stop playing it online before I do something I regret. Game is so fucking bullshit. If magfest has a mario kart world tournament there is no way I am entering it. I probably won't enter the 8 deluxe tournament either since it's so poorly run. The Double Dash tournament was somehow the best. I am definitely doing that and the Magical Drop III tournament again. If there's Tetris I might enter that too.
Speaking on Tetris, I need to figure out how to install the Windows version of Tetris Effect I downloaded. I'm still learning how to use Lutris on here.
Okay end rant'n'ramble for real nowy
edit: Forgot to mention I watched some of the Hellraiser game demo. That was boring as shit, nearly put me to sleep. Its just mindless torture porn and gore. They tried to go for shock but it just does not land at all. Maybe a middle schooler would find this scary. But to me it just feels like lame, soulless slop.
Today was a rare day, I actually had some motivation at work. I don't know why my motivation comes and goes so often. Will I do anything else productive today or this week? Probably not, we'll see. I feel like I've been drained of my motivation already from just a few hours of proper work. It's not even that hard of a job, it just requires some critical thinking for diagnosing problems and resolving them. Very little communication involved. something something ADHD burnout something something.
Not much else going on today. I had KFC for lunch. Probably overpaid on the "deal" I ordered. I got a sandwich with wings, side, and drink. Came out to almost $13, and I was expecting 6 wings, not 3. My mistake there. Food was good, but hardly worth the price. The wings in particular are surprisingly good when they're fresh. I like them much better than the tenders here. The tenders always seem very mediocre, especially compared to wing stop. The KFC tenders aren't cheap either.
The radiator assembly I ordered for my moms car arrived already, that was quick. Took just 2 days to get here. Glad I ordered from a local ebay seller instead of taking a gamble on a cheaper, 3rd party part from amazon that had up to ten day shipping. Planning on installing this thing Saturday, hopefully it doesn't put up a fight.
I hate HOAs. The one where I live is full of morons that cannot think rationally. I've got some stupid stories I could tell, but those will have to wait for another day. What brought this to mind just now is that I need to pressure wash my driveway before they stick a vaguely threatening letter to my door. Yes reader, I need to wash the ground outside. Lovely use of water and my time. And no, pressure washing in real life is not very fun.
Since we're on this topic I may as well mentioned some related HOA stories on my driveway. First off, there was one time they made me pressure wash my massive driveway in the middle of a drought, and city even sent out letters telling people to conserve water here. HOA did not care. They didn't like that my driveway, which is outside, was slightly dirty. They gave me a week to pressure wash it before that start with the fines, and by the way, if you don't resolve issues like these in a timely manner, they will illegally send you a fake eviction letter. I'll explain how I learned about that first hand another time.
And there is a second little driveway story. So my driveway was originally painted by some dumbass many years ago (who the hell think painting the floor, outside, is a good idea?), and the paint was faded badly when the bought this place. Fast forward a few years, and it's more faded. It didn't look bad if you asked me, but the HOA decided it needs repainting. They gave me 1 week to do it. My giant, 6 car driveway. Plus a little bit of painted side walk. One week. I asked about that, and they said they would give me an extension. Why on earth they default to 1 week for a huge job like this, I don't know. It's not even possible to paint the entire driveway at once since there are cars in it, and the paint takes days to cure. It's been a while so I don't remember the square footage, or exact number of cans of paint. But I believe it was 7-8 cans of paint, costing almost $300.
So anyways, I start painting the ground outside myself, like a totally normal, sane person. It took hours and hours just to do half of the drive way. Oh and I forgot, I had to pressure wash the entire thing first and use a strong acidic cleaner. That took a long time too because I had to be fairly thorough. Fast forward a few days now after painting, actually, I think I let it cure closer to a week, then I painted the remaining half and the bit of sidewalk. Wait a week, and boom, a few hundred dollars and several hours later, the floor is now blue-ish grey outside my house. Wonderful. The best part is, the paint I bought, which was the only one I could find with good reviews, did not actually bond that well to the cement driveway. Despite giving it around twice as long to cure before parking on it, lots of the paint is coming off where the car wheels were. Lovely. But as long as the morons in the HOA don't complain, I literally could not care less what my driveway looks like.
Music this week
Maybe one day I will post about the time I flew to Seattle to Goreshit and DJ Sharpnel. That was a good weekend.
I don't think I have much else to ramble about here. I really should get up now and go pressure wash my driveway before I get too distracted.
I can distract myself a little more here right now though. Good a time as any to talk about my current youtube habits. I've been watching some car youtubers for a bit now. I watched all of the Chris Fix videos way back when. But I never really had any regular car channels I watched until recently. Well I've been watching Noriyaro for a while, but whatever.
So this last year or so I've gotten rather interested in watching mid westerners fix up old abandoned cars. I'm not sure what the first channel I got into was, but I think it might have been Junkyard Digs. Next up is Vice Grip Garage I think, took a little bit for this channel to grow on me. That guy is the reason why I became a Leatherman autist, I might a post about leathermans one day. Next up is Low-Buck Garage. Bit of a different style from those other two channels. I love this guy, I hope I'm at least 1/10th as smart as he is when I'm his age. And last, but not least, I discovered Haters Garage a few months back. This guy seems like he's barely 24 but is very knowledgeable. I don't know how he's so patient with this builds he works on. He barely used power tools in a lot of his older videos. Oh, and I guess you can count Big Time, though lately they haven't been posting much of interest.
Leatherman, my friend
Sort of related to cars, I've been watching Whistlin Diesel since last year, feels like redneck viva la bam for the modern era honestly, I really enjoy this channel more than I should probably.
Today's motivation helper
well would you look at this, i'm actually posting something I made. too bad it's something dumb. though i guess nothing build is not dumb now that i think about it.
anyways, here is today's quick build. an old 24v psu, repurposed to be a 5v/12 power supply.
I've had this 24v PSU from my older ender 3 just sitting around for ages. i upgraded to a meanwell PSU way back in 2020 as soon as i got the think. in hindsight, this was probably very unnecessary. i don't really have any need for an industrial 24v psu, and if i ever a new psu for my arcade cabinet this thing is definitely not going in there, i'd be getting proper psus that are the right voltage in the first place, and also a name brand like meanwell.
the build list:
I did plan on adding a 3.3v power output, but that would mean more wires on this already psychotic looking device.
assembly is simple. crimp, screw, twist, and lever your way through all the connections. all the grounds can link together however you want. i probably could have done this more efficiently, but i have a small brain so i didn't really want to put more thought into the wiring. i just kind of winged it as i went instead of building a solid plan. too many wires. i also was very lazy attaching the volt meters. they have a lot of exposed pins on the back of the pcb, which makes me a bit uncomfortable, i did not plan for this so i just use mounting tape on them. let's hope they stay in place.
after all the garbage is stuck together, here is the end result. not very glamorous, kind of looks like an autistic man child made it. (probably because one did)
as you can see if works by using the wagos as distribution blocks. 5v on the left, 12v in the middle, grounds on the right. fuses are connected in between the buck converters and psu. i probably should have added more
is it safe? nope. does it work? yep. could I have bought a real bench psu with variable voltage output and much safer design for like 40 bucks on aliexpress instead of spending $10 on buck converters? also yes. but where's the fun in that?
