fLaMEd fury recently tagged me in his Blog Question Challenge post that has been circulating around the indieweb over the past month. I finally got into a headspace to write for my website a bit, so here are my answers!
Why did you start blogging in the first place?
I have a lot of thoughts which are, in my unbiased opinion, pretty great and other people’s lives will improve by reading them. Seriously, though, I mostly wanted to practice writing and expressing my thoughts, which also ends up serving as an archive of my opinions and thoughts as time goes on, for better or for worse.
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Madeline Miller recently wrote about motion sickness triggered by video games, potential causes, and potential fixes. I feel seen. As a child, I distinctly remember playing Shadow the Hedgehog of all things when I first discoved games could make me nauseous. I am able to build up a tolerance to games if I play daily, which is how I dumped many hours into Minecraft as a teenager and Cyberpunk 2077 more recently, but it wears off fast, and intentionally making myself sick every day for a few weeks is quite unpleasant. For that reason, I mostly stick to games that are 2D and/or are primarily played with a top-down view. Baldur’s Gate 3 was a godsend for this. It’s interesting because not all 3D games affect me. Almost all first-person games become unplayable after 15 minutes, but third-person games are hit-or-miss. I was able to play through Persona 4 Golden just fine. Final Fantasy 7 Remake wrecks me. This inconsistency makes the potential fixes that Madeline brings up interesting to me. I have never considered how FPS and field of view could affect my motion sickness. I am curious to experiment and see if I can make more games playable, because it’s kind of an isolating experience at times. I love video games, as do all of my friends, but I am limited to only a small subset of the games that they play. They recently got really into Marvel Rivals, and I could only play a game or two at a time with them before I have to go lay down for the rest of the night. I have only ever met one other person that is also affected by this, so coming across this post showed me that there are dozens of us. Dozens!
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A couple of weeks ago my brain suddenly got an itch. I was at the office listening to music on my old Sansa Clip+ player when it’s battery died halfway through the day again. Disappointed, I put it and my headphones away and continued my day in silence. But my brain would not be silent. This was a problem and it needed to be solved now (or at least as soon as the postal service allows). I started researching many different models of modern mp3 players (I guess we call them DAPs now?) and didn’t quite like what I found, until I eventually landed on fixing up an old iPod, partially due to “My iPod is better than my phone” by Veronica Explains🔗, which showed me that this was even possible.
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The results of last night’s election are disappointing, angering, and horrifying. But they are not shocking. I’ve seen lots of talk about how stupid and racist and sexist the general American populace is to be able to vote the way the did. I don’t think that is accurate. Of course, there is no doubt which candidate the racists and sexists voted for. However, in a society where we all feel forced to choose the lesser of two evils, I can’t be surprised that many felt differently than me as to which candidate that actually was. The federal government has failed working people over and over for decades and continues to do so to this day. In this situation, when one party tells you everything is going great, actually, but the other tells you you are right to be upset and presents a simple solution, no matter how ill-informed or hateful it is, this is the natural result. The Democratic party will not learn this lesson, though, just like they didn’t in 2016. We must take care of each other now, because no one will do it for us, especially not another establishment politician with a D next to their name.
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As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve been using LibreWolf as my daily driver browser. It’s been about two weeks since then, and I had some thoughts.
I originally tried to compile LibreWolf myself, which is how I found out 16GB of RAM is not enough to compile a web browser. I found this interesting since I was able to compile Floorp🔗 just fine a while back. Have browsers really gotten so complex over the past decade to require that much memory just to compile? Anyway, I just ended up installing the binary from the AUR and got up and running.
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Mozilla is seemingly allergic to making good decisions, as shown by two recent (anti-)features it has brought to Firefox. First, is an AccuWeather widget on the new tab screen, enabled by default. On the surface, this seems mundane, but in order for this to work, Firefox is sending your “approximate” location to AccuWeather servers periodically in the background, even if you disable the widget🔗. This is the browser that tries to market itself as the go-to browser for privacy control.
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I’ve been using Arch Linux (btw) since the beginning of this year. It is a barebones distro, meaning you have to install every package you are going to use yourself. While not the most fun exercise in the world, it made me think about what software I need to make my computer usable. Beyond the necessary stuff like wi-fi drivers, I was forced to choose what I wanted my computing experience to be like. Rather than being given a default desktop environment and a suite of software I could opt-out of if I cared to, I instead had to deliberately opt-in to the desktop experience, text editor, and web browser.
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Let’s say you’re running a web service where users can add other users as friends. How do you store each user’s friends list in the database? The simplest solution would be to use one large table called “friends” with each row being an entry on one user’s friends list. How well does that perform if you scale up to millions of users? Are indexes applicable to speed things up here? Is there a better way to represent this data in the database?
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I’ve been using vim (specifically neovim) for over a year, I really enjoy how customizable it is, though up until today, I’ve only customized it through plugins made by other people. Today I wrote two Lua functions to streamline my workflow. I’m not very familiar with Lua but it was quite easy to pick up.
First is a function to split my window so it would have two side by side, and a smaller one at the bottom, which gets turned into a terminal.
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When I first created my website just over two years ago, I spent a lot of time fretting over what exactly to put on it. The common answer of “anything you want!” wasn’t helpful because I didn’t actually know what I wanted.
Spending time browsing others’ personal sites and chatting with their webmasters gave me inspiration for new pages to build and new topics to blog about. After two years, I am learning what I want to put on my website. I enjoy blogging and sharing the things that I know and the things that I like. As a result, I’ve published more blog posts, created my links page, my /now page, and just yesterday, published a bunch of notes I’ve taken as I learn more about computers and web development. Coming soon will be a page to share music I’ve discovered recently.
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