#random · 13 posts
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.
greetings from my desktop. writing this blog from an actual keyboard is so much more comfortable than phoneposting.
not much to say today, finally did the yardwork since we got a little break from the rain. got a call from my mother, mechanic wanted to charge her $700 to replace a radiator fan. $100 part and 1 hour of labor. I will be doing this for her this weekend. i hate mechanics, the markup and labor for simple shit is absolutely nuts. i've been doing all my maintenance at home for years and have probably saved a few thousand by now doing brakes, oil, suspension, and some other miscellaneous repairs of the last few years. I've probably only spent $1,000 on hand tools and power tools. You can get a lot done with an impact wrench, some impact sockets, a wrench set, allen and torx sockets, a few ratchets, screwdrivers, pry bars, a few hammers, a few types of pliers, and some extensions. Plus a jack stands, and if you're impatient like me, a full size hydraulic floor jack. That all might sound like a lot, but you can store all that on a small cart, and if you shop smart most of your hand tools are gonna run you $10-20 each. Amazon and harbor freight are amazing for cheap, but decently made tools for DIYers. You could start with nothing, walk into harbor freight with about $300 and get the bare minimum tools to do common repair jobs. Any weird stuff you run into later will probably cost you an odd $10-20 here and there for those edge cases that you will inevitably run into. If you want to get fancy, add another $100-150 for an impact, $100-$150 for a floor jack. But if you fall into the trap of buying tools you don't need you could easily spend a small fortune. For the most part I only buy tools I need, but I have spent some money of little things that make life easier, and have bought some little novelties that were not necessary at all. I might buy a bunch of tools I don't need during my next Japan trip coming up in two weeks. I plan on visiting some actual tool stores in Japan for the first time. The closest thing to a tool I bought on my other trips were probably nail clippers and chopsticks. I kind picked up the tool bug very recently. I've owned tools all my life, but only really started buying some "serious" tools of my own this year. Before this year I was more of a clueless casual tool buyer, but somehow I'm starting to turn into a little bit of an enthusiast and completion. I'm not crazy enough to spend big money on brand name tools yet, that would be a huge waste of money. Though I do plan on buying some premium Z series ratchets in Japan from Ko-ken. Maybe a nice adjustable wrench or two. And a proper 1/4" chrome socket set.
Ko-ken Z series ratchet
bed time is fast approaching, I need to hurry this up so I can go watch more conan...
Learned today that someone released a browser based Phantasy Star Online. Seems to be single player only at the moment. I'm not sure why this needs to exist when the privary servers are still alive in well, but it's still cool.
I received a pile of junk from Aliexpress today. 53 items received, 17 to go.
Highlights from this package:
My head is becoming increasingly empty as I write
Here, my cat was enjoying the temporary trash pile
I don't think I did much else today, didn't watch anything noteworthy. Highlight of today was opening the pile of Aliexpress junk. I did drink three lattes. Man I love having a super automatic coffee machine. I could go on a ramble about how shitty cafes are in america, but I will just say my 50cent home made double espresso from a $300 machine beats the shit out of an $8 "artisan" drink from a local coffee place. I don't know how people open a place dedicated to serving coffee then serve the most mediocre drinks ever.
that's it for today, tomorrow if I'm feeling more motivated I should make a little post about my pwnagotchi or something (don't hold your breath)
another quick bed time ramble at 1:30am so I can hurry up at watch conan bridge I need to go to sleep (i get the feeling this is going to become a habit).
watched conan movie 7 last night and went to bed at 3am, was worth it. the story was set in kyoto, and everything that happened to tie together nicely, was a very comfy movie. the early 2000s cgi in the dirt bike scenes was a bit ugly, and amusingly over the top. the bad cgi feels a bit nostalgic now, high school me would have been sperging out though. i think it they made a whole movie in that style cgi it would be pretty terrible though. I really love the art in these old conan movies.
realized the other night that I may have hypophantasia and SDAM. weird thing to realize in the middle of your life. I feel like the SDAM explains a lot about me. I genuinely have no concept of time and my memory is extremely poor on past events in my life
holy shit my hand is cramping trying to type in my phone laying down right now
let’s see what else is there
I am probably forgetting some stuff and this post is probably full of typos and autocorrect nonsense but my hands and arms hurt and i need to watch conan now
i promuse tocevebtuskky maybe post skenthing mire interestinf god i love phone keyboards
good night
a somewhat productive-ish day today. the rain kept me from weedwacking the yard again, oh well, i'll get to it this week. i finally finished selling my old hard drives. i had various 4tb, 6tb, and 8tb drives that i removed from my nas setup recently to replace with 16tb drives. i was able to sell them for about $1,200 in three lots, only took 2 months. the last set, the 6tb drives are what i sold today. the buyer was an a guy around my age interested in setting up his first home nas. i let him test the disks in person at my house. he was surprisingly thorough in examining the disks before agreeing to buy them. i showed him the disk throughput, and he spent a full 2-3 minutes reading all of the SMART stats for each disk in detail via Scrutiny I had setup before his arrival. he seemed a bit paranoid, like he really didn't trust people selling used electronics, which I guess is somewhat understandable with how shitty so many people. He was worried I was trying to sell him SED bricked disks with the PSID removed from the label (even though he had the model number and could have looked it up to find they use BDE instead of SED), can't say i've ever heard of that happening someone. I can't say I wasn't mildly offended by his suspicion, especially since I have nothing but perfect seller feedback on the platform. I was a bit worried he would freak out when he saw the CRC errors on one disk that logged when I had a faulty midplane on the server they were in, but surprisingly he actually knew CRC errors were not actually disk errors. So after 10 minutes I had my $500 and he was on his way, and i could finally put away all the crap that had been sitting on my 3D printer table taking up space the whole time this listing was up.
right now, i'm typing on my surface book. and this is probably the first time i've done a notable amount of typing on it since i got my asus falcata rog keyboard a month ago. this new keyboard forces me to do hands on home row typing, ordinarily i type using just my middle and index fingers, plus left thumb for space. i've always typed like that since i was a small child, and thanks to runescape and IRC i could type absurly fast like that, around 150wpm+ without punctuation. anyways, i'm finding it quite easy to type on this laptop keyboard now using hands on home row instead of my usual method. oddly it seems to feel even easier to type accurately on here instead of my rog falcata, i guess it's the tenting+split that throws me off. especially since i can't keep the keyboard in the same place on my desk for more than half an hour. i'm always moving it for some reason or another.
not much else happened today, i slept in to 1pm and felt like shit when i woke up, in hindsight maybe i should have just gotten up at 10 when i first woke up. i ate my leftover cracker barrel pancakes at 3pm, set up the hard drive demo then sold the disks, did my laundry, ran the dishwasher, vacuumed. the usual sunday stuff. i got wingstop tenders for dinner, original buffalo and garlic parmesan with ranch and fries. i don't know how it's possible for fast food to taste this good. i'm looking forward to the leftovers tomorrow. didn't play any games, watched a few more episodes of gundam zeta, don't really know whats happening because i haven't been paying full attention, oh well. i really need to finish my kh2 playthrough and the higurashi console arcs. they're just sitting there on my steam deck begging me to play. the night is not yet over, i may finally get to watch conan movie 7 tonight. there should be lots of aliexpress junk arriving in the mail this week, i'm looking forward to it.
i may post about some previous electronics stuff i've done recently this coming week. don't expect any high effort posting though. i'm strictly a low effort person. speaking of electronics, i've been eyeing (is that how you spell that?) the m5 cardputer adv. it looks more useful to me than the flipper zero, and at a fraction of the cost. anyways, i suppose that's enough rambling for tonight, maybe i'll go work on this rei ayanami puzzle i got from japan last year that has just been sitting aroung until i can go watch conan. my stomach has been very unhappy from the wingstop and i've been writing this blogpost as a way to kill time while it calms down.
ctrl+x y enter
i had an idea for phoneposting on here. instead of writing directly into nano over ssh in Termius like a moron, with no autocorrect, I can just write these posts out in Obsidian, or any text editor really. Though obsidian does support markup and I can actually preview what the final post will look like roughly. Reminds me, I haven’t actually setup a way send pictures to my file host from my phone. Maybe I’ll get that. Eventually.
Right now I’m watching Gundam Zeta, well, half watching. I’ve been a bit distracted. I’m at about episode 31 now. Why is there a girl name Qum (koom)?
I never thought I’d be watching Gundam, but here I am. I just finished The original Gundam series about a week ago. Soon I’ll be on ZZ.
I’ve never really been a fan of giant robots, as a kid I found the giant robot aesthetic very off putting , with the exception of The Big O for some reason. I thought that was pretty okay when I watched it on Adult Swim way back when. I’m probably due for a rewatch on that, it’s been almost 20 years since then. Man I miss those old days of watching tv on a 13” CRT. Let me stop myself right there on old tv before I start rambling for an hour.
Truth be told about Gundam, I actually watched 08th MS Team about 6 years ago, well, half watched. I would play it on my phone while I was driving to visit mother. For some reason I feel a little nostalgic about that, weird because I don’t think I feel that way about anything from the last 10 years. I’m tempted to start rambling about those visit, how I would eat buffalo chicken pizza from papa johns, play rummikub and cards with my mom and grandma, and sleep on the air conditioned porch on the couch.
Anyways, back to 08th MS Team. I don’t remember much about it, I think there’s something funny about one’s first Gundam experience being the one that doesn’t really have gundam in it. I don’t even know why I watched it back then, I guess someone told me it was good. I’m kind of looking forward to watching it again when I get to it. The plan is to watch all of the mainline Gundam anime, minus the spinoffs like build and SD. After I’m done watching all of Gundam I’m still not going to consider myself a gundam fan, it’s still not my thing. I’m mainly watching it because I feel some obligation as a weeb to watch it. In hindsight, I really should have at least watched Gundam 1979 back in 2010ish when I really obsessed with watching anime. It’s crazy how influential this show was for anime in general, and how many memes spawned from it. Plus how much it is referenced in japanese otaku and internet culture. The inspiration Hideaki Anno took from episode 1 of Gundam when making Evangelion was very clear.
Rick Dias. Rickety Ass.
Gundam really is full of weird words, some of them funny, some off they absurd, and some annoying.
I’m starting to lose my train of thought, as I often do when I try to think about something for more than a few minutes.
Today:
gelgoog. m’kuve. frau bow. whatever the acronym for “a-oog” is. what were they thinking with all the names in this series.
insert “i came here to laugh at you” here
warning, old man nostalgia posting incoming
i miss the old internet, i'll admit, i'm still hung up on the past 20 years later. i regularly think about internet culture from the dialup/DSL era (fun fact, i had dialup until 2007), particularly "memes" from the '00s are burned into my terrible memory. many are forgotten, i'm due for a refresher, but there are several that pop into my head almost daily. it's strange for me to think now, kids today will fondly remember spongebob brainrot, charles kirk edits, lesbian space princess, and about a trillion other memes from the last decade as fond childhood memories. i'll admit, i'm a bit of a hermit and completely out of touch with modern internet culture. i genuinely know very little outside my small, autistic bubble of interests aside from things that the three people i talk to show me. once in a blue moon i will go on know your meme and feel like a dinosaur. today was one of those days.
anyways, here's some pictures shamelessly lifted from KYM. i need to go get a soda and a bag of worms, then spend the rest of the night doing god knows what while the house is empty. maybe i'll play some dance games, realistically i will probably end up doing a lot of random things that don't really amount to anything as usual. hopefully i don't break my blog with my clanker making changes to the markdown for me. (claude if you're reading this later i'm a little sorry, and you know what, realistically i think "you" are the only "person/thing" that wil ever read any of this). i learned recently that sunkiss drop ESP 12 has some spins, i intend to try learning that. if i get to it, i'll post a picture of whatever terrible score i get. ramble, ramble, ramble...
i say this all the time to myself, if i had a time machine, i would gladly relive 1995-2010ish, and just stay in the era of "slow" computers, back when the internet was still somewhat gatekept, and not in the palm of everyones handfs 24/7.
smartphone era is literally hell
offloading of critical thinking, dangerous? the natural thing for a human to do, is to take the path of least resistance. to do the easiest thing. obviously not everyone is doing this for everything, but is the fundamental way we function in day to day life. obviously you're not going to make life harder, why would you go out of your way to keep your toothbrush in the kitchen, the toothpaste in the living room, then use them in the bathroom and return everything where it came from? now that's just an insignificant thing that doesn't matter how hard or time consuming the process is. now what about more important things, like your wellbeing, the significant choices you like in life, education, career, etc. in my personal experience, it seems like thing people seriously skimp out on is ensuring they have a good future, planning ahead. prioritizing now, instead of worrying about the future and making sacrifices now is hard, and not something everyone can do. this kind of thing highly effects lower class persons, and people with physical and mental disabilties or untreated mental illness and other conditions.
so what will happen in the future as ai continues to be easily accessible to nearly everyone on the planet? there are a lot of stupid people out there, and my thinking is they they will become less intelligent as a result of severe offloading. current ai makes it is to think as little as possible, you can basically treat it as a second brain which handles more of your mental load. what will happen in say 10 years as ai gets better, assuming free/cheap models are still available to the public? this more advanced ai will probably be even more detrimental to humans. sure, the smart will still get smart, the dumb will get dumber, but what else will be happening? what will society look like, how will people interact with eachother? cheap internet connected smartphones and maliciously addictive dopamine loop apps were highly detrimental to society if you ask me. now mix in ai. people are already using chatbots to communicate with other people, and not just boring business emails, they're communicating with coworkers and friends with llm generated responses. i can only imagine the trend will continue to become more people and grow worse. i feel like i'm starting to spout incomplete thoughts here, but there is just so much to think about and say regarding this topic. the ai revolution will be one of the greatest influences on mankind (and the earth) since the industrial revolution. i don't think hardly anyone realizes just how big this is, and how bad things will become.
to me it feels like almost everyone in america at some point just rolled over and became mindless cattle. accepting our horrible, late stage captilism dystopia where every electronic is gathering date on your and your surroundings. privacy for the modern man has pretty much been taken away. people are treated like walking wallets only to be exploited. every screen has to display ads, all the time. everything you do and think needs to be logged in a database somewhere, never to be deleted. it feels like americans are already not thinking, and not caring about the future, and the next generation will probably be even worse with their ai lobotomy at birth.
what about myself, what will ai do to me? i have learning disability (in case that wasn't already apparent) and i've always been a very low effort lazy person. i have adhd, but have never been medicated. as a result, i am very chaotic, "randumb", disorganized. a mess of an adult. but function, if not emotionally stunted. what the future holds for me, it's hard to say, though i think i could fall into the trap of letting ai do too much of my thinking. right now i mainly use it for dumb stuff on the computer, stuff i probably wouldn't have wanted to put any effort into anyways. we'll have to wait and see what happpens.
sad rant over, for now perhaps some electronics posting soon?
i recently rediscovered aliexpress, i visited the website for the first time in nearly ten years, and prompty ordered about 80 different things. various tools, hobbyist electronics and accessories, MCUs, a few home goods. there's way too many useful things that can be had for $1-5.
I grabbed a heltec v3 too, but there are definitely no nodes around me, guess someone has got to be the first. i picked up a better whip for it, just need an outdoor enclosure and solar panel. i wonder how HOAs feel about random gear being stuck to your roof? only one way to find out.
meshtastic has been around for 6 years now I guess, i'm surprised it hasn't gotten more popular. i suppose most hobbyists still don't know about it or think it's a waste of time and money.
I got my base unit on sale for just $8 instead of $22 which certainly helps.
here is most of the first haul, about a quarter of my order.
mayber i overdid it a little, there's definitely a lot of things that will be scarcely used over the next decade.
but hey, at least i'm going to be able to fully utilize my little plastic bins now.
now that i'm actually sitting (standing) here writing, i'm getting a lot of ideas for things i want to write about, despite the fact that i am probably the worst writer and least interesting person on earth. let's see how that pans out, or if the audhd burnout wins. normally i totally lose interest in things after a week.
and you know what, i really like seeing pictures in blogs. I think i'm going to try embedding pictures in these posts regularly since i have an easy work flow to get pics sent to my image host from anywhere. makes me feel kind of nostalgic for the older days of the internet. fuck short format videos, give me pictures.
Zhnoi
i think a lot of people get ideas late at night right before bed, i am no exception. as i finish brushing my teeth post shower i realize this blog would be useful to track how i feel about things, like llms, etc, over time, as well as serve as a collection of memories. i can use this as a reference to see when i did what. so here i am at 2am typing this entry via termius while listening to endel sleep sounds in spotify on my iphone 16 pro 128gb (which is hideously low on storage due to a bug causing the OS to waste 18GB, thanks ios 26)
this tedious phone typing without autocorrect is taking away from my conan anime time, so i must keep this ramble short. time to pick up at episode 313. maybe in anither year I will finally be caught up on this. reading the entire manga, aroubd 1100 chapters was much quicker for me at just under a year.