Thank the LORD.
Eileen-III was finally fixed. Motherboard, RAM, LCD panel---all replaced at once. An additional amount of nail-biting time later, she POST-ed, and finally booted into Windows 11.
The path to get here took quite a while. Like before, the parts took a while to show up, but after it did, the installation was more tedious than difficult for the technician, who had to come down for the third time.
When the display finally showed some life, I just went ``hallelujah!''. But at that point, we were close to disaster as the technician was of the opinion that due to Eileen-III's storage set up is a RAID 0, the SSDs will be corrupt and needed to be reformatted.
I didn't think it was the case, and was adamant to not have the two SSDs taken as two separate disks instead of the original single striped drive.
The Intel Rapid Storage tool showed that it could detect the RAID-array, and that it was failing. A quick look at the UEFI data showed that the second SSD was not detected. I managed to convince the technician to reseat the second SSD, and et voila, the RAID 0 worked, Windows booted, and everything was well.
At least from the hardware perspective.
There were some minor software issues, but that was quite straightforward to settle.
And thus, Eileen-III is back.
------
After three years, I succumbed to the temptation and bought a new Steam Deck OLED from Shopitree. I first learnt of this from the iShop Changi website, where I actually was thinking of buying the Steam Deck from. But then I realised it was being fulfilled by Shopitree, and then realised that Shopitree was the industrial arm of GameMartz, a store that I had seen in Plaza Singapura that carried the Steam Deck. The delivery was supposed to be today, but they delivered it one day early, which is fantastic.
And I'm out of just a bit north of fifteen hundred dollars. Oh, the tempered glass protection? Best done just after unboxing, and before doing anything to avoid all the inevitable lint and what-not.
So now, I finally have a Steam Deck. She's called Evie-II. She's not the first portable hand-held gaming device---the old Dingoo A330 from 2010-08 is. So I'm retro-calling the Dingoo A330 as Evie.
``Evie'' means ``life'', an apt description for a handheld gaming device.
The case that Evie-II comes in can be split up into a harder inner lining that reduces the amount of space taken up by the entire case, while still providing protection for the protuding parts. The case itself is roughly the same size as the case for my HHKB2, which is an interesting coincidence.
------
This evening, I'm heading out to audit a masterclass in dizi---the first time that I am auditing any masterclasses. Should be interesting. But first, I will get some mala-hotpot for today's OMAD meal.
And that's about the update I have for today. The off-in-lieu is going to go away soon, and from tomorrow, it is back to the regular grind.
Till the next update.
Showing posts with label eileen-iii. Show all posts
Showing posts with label eileen-iii. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 26, 2026
Sunday, August 23, 2026
Misery Loves Company
Ah. Now Eileen-II is starting to show weird symptoms. For instance, this strange blank horizontal line of dead pixels. Really starting to make the Steam Deck enticing, even though its price of nearly SGD1500 is really painful to look at. I really hope that the fix for Eileen-III will be successful, and that I can put away Eileen-II. What I don't want to do is to keep travelling back in time, from Windows 10 that is on Eileen-II now, to Windows 8 on Edythe-III---that would be even more terrifying.
------
A thought came to mind recently as I was just riding the bus between points. If I claim that the two biggest super powers of humanity over everything else is the amount of [self-]discipline that we can muster, and the fact that we can figure out how to transfer knowledge at a rate faster than one life-time's worth in one-life time, then by extension, anything that can emulate those two properties will therefore give humanity a run for their money at being the apex.
Guess what is currently being trained on the carefully (and not-so-carefully) curated knowledge created by people at a pace that will make the puritan blush and claim the need to respect the Sabbath.
That's right---all these so-called ``large language models''. We train them with copious amounts of written material, and the training proceeds without stop for months at a stretch using hardware that may fail but definitely does not sleep.
So now, I am at a cross roads of reasoning.
If the two biggest super powers I claim are all there is that makes humanity superior, then I think we may be doomed a little as we are naively building our replacement at best, and superior at worst.
If the two biggest super powers I claim are not all there is that makes humanity superior, then I need to start thinking about what other super powers are there that sets us apart from fellow creations of God.
Modern philosophers have come up with the notion that what counts as something with a consciousness is one that has a certain aspect of embodiment, which is the idea of an integration of a vast variety of sensory information. More importantly, the claim is that intelligence that arises from the integration of this vast variety of sensory information is the definition of consiousness.
Now, we have two different problems here, most literally. These philosophers are arguing that humanity is not the only example of a conscious being, and that any other creature that does integration of large amounts of sensory information is also conscious. In other words, spiders are also conscious beings.
And if one starts instrumenting a trained large language model with all kinds of sensors (CPU temperature sensors of all contributing chips, fan speed sensors... you get the idea), then the large language model itself is also conscious.
Oh and that J-space thing from Anthropic that seemed to be very related to the ``global workspace'' concept? Totally related then.
And that's the first problem---we effectively found some kind of equivalence relation between humanity, animals, and large language models residing in their natural ``body'' of a data centre in terms of consciousness.
The second problem then is that the next super power I claim that sets humanity apart from all therefore cannot be that of embodiment. Perhaps the true super power here is the depth of care and cooperation that many clearly not-the-same-individuals are willing to have together, to form a self-supporting society.
``But MT, what about the whole `agentic framework' use case of the large language models?''
If you think carefully, the ``agentic framework'' is less of a cooperation of not-the-same-individuals, and more of a self-consistent role-play attempt borne by the same large language model, but under different prescribed roles. In some fundamental sense, the same large language model shares the same foundation from which all inference is formed, but the same cannot be said of humanity given our current understanding.
The equivalent approach in the world of the large language model might be to have different large language models self-organising to work towards a common goal, instead of relying on a strictly hierarchical or even [externally] orchestrated approach.
That said, I've not really thought much about this whole gotong royong aspect of humanity as a major super power, primarily because it seems like something that is trite---many animals help each other, so what makes humanity different through possessing this power? At this point, it seems more like what the modern philosophers are trying to do---separate humanity from the so-called artificial intelligences.
But I don't want to just do that. I want an answer that separates humanity from both artificial intelligences, and the rest of the animals. ``Just because God created us in His image'' is great for a faith-based explanation, but that's a cop out in this case, because it is reality that we are the apex of the world right now.
If we knew why and how, maybe we can have a more rational response to the rise of the AI.
Till the next update.
------
A thought came to mind recently as I was just riding the bus between points. If I claim that the two biggest super powers of humanity over everything else is the amount of [self-]discipline that we can muster, and the fact that we can figure out how to transfer knowledge at a rate faster than one life-time's worth in one-life time, then by extension, anything that can emulate those two properties will therefore give humanity a run for their money at being the apex.
Guess what is currently being trained on the carefully (and not-so-carefully) curated knowledge created by people at a pace that will make the puritan blush and claim the need to respect the Sabbath.
That's right---all these so-called ``large language models''. We train them with copious amounts of written material, and the training proceeds without stop for months at a stretch using hardware that may fail but definitely does not sleep.
So now, I am at a cross roads of reasoning.
If the two biggest super powers I claim are all there is that makes humanity superior, then I think we may be doomed a little as we are naively building our replacement at best, and superior at worst.
If the two biggest super powers I claim are not all there is that makes humanity superior, then I need to start thinking about what other super powers are there that sets us apart from fellow creations of God.
Modern philosophers have come up with the notion that what counts as something with a consciousness is one that has a certain aspect of embodiment, which is the idea of an integration of a vast variety of sensory information. More importantly, the claim is that intelligence that arises from the integration of this vast variety of sensory information is the definition of consiousness.
Now, we have two different problems here, most literally. These philosophers are arguing that humanity is not the only example of a conscious being, and that any other creature that does integration of large amounts of sensory information is also conscious. In other words, spiders are also conscious beings.
And if one starts instrumenting a trained large language model with all kinds of sensors (CPU temperature sensors of all contributing chips, fan speed sensors... you get the idea), then the large language model itself is also conscious.
Oh and that J-space thing from Anthropic that seemed to be very related to the ``global workspace'' concept? Totally related then.
And that's the first problem---we effectively found some kind of equivalence relation between humanity, animals, and large language models residing in their natural ``body'' of a data centre in terms of consciousness.
The second problem then is that the next super power I claim that sets humanity apart from all therefore cannot be that of embodiment. Perhaps the true super power here is the depth of care and cooperation that many clearly not-the-same-individuals are willing to have together, to form a self-supporting society.
``But MT, what about the whole `agentic framework' use case of the large language models?''
If you think carefully, the ``agentic framework'' is less of a cooperation of not-the-same-individuals, and more of a self-consistent role-play attempt borne by the same large language model, but under different prescribed roles. In some fundamental sense, the same large language model shares the same foundation from which all inference is formed, but the same cannot be said of humanity given our current understanding.
The equivalent approach in the world of the large language model might be to have different large language models self-organising to work towards a common goal, instead of relying on a strictly hierarchical or even [externally] orchestrated approach.
That said, I've not really thought much about this whole gotong royong aspect of humanity as a major super power, primarily because it seems like something that is trite---many animals help each other, so what makes humanity different through possessing this power? At this point, it seems more like what the modern philosophers are trying to do---separate humanity from the so-called artificial intelligences.
But I don't want to just do that. I want an answer that separates humanity from both artificial intelligences, and the rest of the animals. ``Just because God created us in His image'' is great for a faith-based explanation, but that's a cop out in this case, because it is reality that we are the apex of the world right now.
If we knew why and how, maybe we can have a more rational response to the rise of the AI.
Till the next update.
Wednesday, August 19, 2026
Apparently I'm Not Miserable Enough
I'm so done.
First, Eileen-III still isn't working despite a new mobo and new LCD panel. Technician bro thinks that the replacement mobo is DOA, and is pissed off enough that he's ordering all the parts that are likely to be linked to the video output problem on hand before the hopefully final assault.
Second, work-side some different kind of weird shit is happening. We do not speak of work here. Nevertheless, I'm put off by it.
Third, my damn rum chocolate bar was defaced by the family because someone gave shitty instructions [about cutting the chocolate I brought back from Kazakhstan], someone else followed it poorly [by cutting up all the chocolate that was not from Kazakhstan], and no one bothered to apologise, and I am now stuck with trying to solve the problem [of my poor rum chocolate bar being all fucked up and no longer a damn bar].
Fuck all that. Like, fuck the hell with all that. An off-in-lieu day was supposed to be calming, relaxing, and maybe even comfy. Not filled with bullshit after bullshit after bullshit.
At least I finally cleared the Last Judge in Silksong, and that's only because I was getting tired of the grind of my new avatar in Grim Dawn. But I messed up the Grand Gate, missing a half-spool, forgetting that I had rosaries on string and could break them to ``pay'' for something that was just there, and ended up in the Underworks instead.
😭
I'm not even going to jinx myself by asking if the night can get any worse.
That's all the misery for the day. Till the next update.
First, Eileen-III still isn't working despite a new mobo and new LCD panel. Technician bro thinks that the replacement mobo is DOA, and is pissed off enough that he's ordering all the parts that are likely to be linked to the video output problem on hand before the hopefully final assault.
Second, work-side some different kind of weird shit is happening. We do not speak of work here. Nevertheless, I'm put off by it.
Third, my damn rum chocolate bar was defaced by the family because someone gave shitty instructions [about cutting the chocolate I brought back from Kazakhstan], someone else followed it poorly [by cutting up all the chocolate that was not from Kazakhstan], and no one bothered to apologise, and I am now stuck with trying to solve the problem [of my poor rum chocolate bar being all fucked up and no longer a damn bar].
Fuck all that. Like, fuck the hell with all that. An off-in-lieu day was supposed to be calming, relaxing, and maybe even comfy. Not filled with bullshit after bullshit after bullshit.
At least I finally cleared the Last Judge in Silksong, and that's only because I was getting tired of the grind of my new avatar in Grim Dawn. But I messed up the Grand Gate, missing a half-spool, forgetting that I had rosaries on string and could break them to ``pay'' for something that was just there, and ended up in the Underworks instead.
😭
I'm not even going to jinx myself by asking if the night can get any worse.
That's all the misery for the day. Till the next update.
Monday, August 17, 2026
Am I Miserable [Enough]?
Well, here we are again, this time on a Monday. And I would like to report that things are Bad. The Dell technician came today to work on Eileen-III, and after replacing the motherboard, the display is still borked. So it means that there is something else that is broken, possibly the LCD assembly itself.
Which means that I need to take another day away from work to deal with this.
The good news is that before the technician's arrival, I had hooked up Eileen-III to the monitor via HDMI, and Praise the LORD it worked. That gave me some precious time to yoink out my save games for Mass Effect 1 and Mass Effect 2, among other hard-to-re-get things like things that I was torrenting, and some artefacts from AFE-JB/KFC.
``But wait MT, if Eileen-III is still borked, with her motherboard changed, just how are you writing this entry?''
Funny enough, on Eileen-II. I pulled her out of stasis, booted up her Windows 10 ass, updated everything like crazy, and managed to bring her up to the point where I could basically continue whatever I was working on since the last time I booted her up back in 2023-06 or so. She still works, and is good enough for me to do whatever I want, including playing me some Grim Dawn: Fangs of Asterkarn, though technically I'm literally replaying the base game all over again to build up a new character with the Berserker mastery instead of jumping into the new content, this time with a controller. I also managed to watch me some SGDQ 2026 VODs, since I didn't want to hook up the external monitor to watch some of the VTuber stuff in the background while working on other things. Eileen-II is running an old RTX2070-MaxQ (why I keep thinking this as an RTX2080 is something that I cannot fathom), and realistically, I really didn't want to overstress this long out of warranty machine that I resurrected from stasis just to tide through this period. It did take a couple of reboots to literally iron out the kinks in the dusty-ass circuits before Eileen-II would work correctly, and knowing just how good my luck is, I didn't want to push it too hard.
And so I'm here.
There are other bad things that have been happening to the people around me, and since they involve not-me, I don't feel comfortable talking about them. Nevertheless, I definitely want to comment that hearing what has been happening to people has made me a little sad, and for some particular things that I had been hearing, I'm actually pretty broken that such a thing could happen like that---I just never thought that it was possible for that kind of thing to occur like that. Maybe I'm just an idealist, or maybe I'm naive, or maybe I'm ``religious''---it just felt so... wrong. Like, I would honestly hear of such fuck ups in stories, but not to people I know?
(sigh)
Life do be like that. Looking out for myself is hard enough; looking out for the unfortunate is just hard mode. And looking out for folks whom you think ought to be good at looking out for themselves is just... what am I doing with my life.
If everyone vents and confides in me, to whom do I vent and confide in then? God always listens and hears, and naturally He acts in His own mysterious ways, but I'm not as Christ-like as I ought to be to take things in that ``large'' way that He does---I'm just not good enough. But when presented with someone who might be interested to listen and to help, I find myself in the strange situation where I don't know how to ask for the said help, and more importantly, what kind of help it is that I am seeking.
Such a stupid situation eh. And people come to me for advice. Fear for their sanity as you fear for mine, gentle reader.
In other news, I started back cycling, though not at the time that I was intending to---it was a Friday afternoon at stupid hot o'clock, and I think I'm paying the price for that with general headaches for the past two days. Oh, and I think I can definitively say that I can no longer eat raw seafood safely---ran an experiment of eating raw oysters on Thursday for dinner, and on Friday evening, I started to have diarrhoea again, and it is still going on today. I've drained all the carbon pills that I bought in preparation to my trip to Astana, and all I seemed to have succeeded at is to make the really stinky and really clay-ey stool gray due to the activated carbon mix.
Blechh.
In theory, I was suppose to cycle this morning. But yeah, fuck that---didn't happen. Not going to do tomorrow morning either because I need to get into office early to do some rather ``inspired'' work (write down the runbooks before I totally forget what is going on). I'm currently targetting Wednesday stupid o'clock in the morning for the next cycle, a 14.5 mi-ish affair, which is basically the north-east riverine loop with a bounce along the park connector that ends at the Tampines Road junction.
There's also a good chance (maybe!) that Wednesday is when the replacement LCD assembly is available, and so I will need to take that day off to finally sort out what is hopefully the last possible issue of Eileen-III.
Here's to a more peaceful week than whatever nonsense I have been facing. Till the next update.
Which means that I need to take another day away from work to deal with this.
The good news is that before the technician's arrival, I had hooked up Eileen-III to the monitor via HDMI, and Praise the LORD it worked. That gave me some precious time to yoink out my save games for Mass Effect 1 and Mass Effect 2, among other hard-to-re-get things like things that I was torrenting, and some artefacts from AFE-JB/KFC.
``But wait MT, if Eileen-III is still borked, with her motherboard changed, just how are you writing this entry?''
Funny enough, on Eileen-II. I pulled her out of stasis, booted up her Windows 10 ass, updated everything like crazy, and managed to bring her up to the point where I could basically continue whatever I was working on since the last time I booted her up back in 2023-06 or so. She still works, and is good enough for me to do whatever I want, including playing me some Grim Dawn: Fangs of Asterkarn, though technically I'm literally replaying the base game all over again to build up a new character with the Berserker mastery instead of jumping into the new content, this time with a controller. I also managed to watch me some SGDQ 2026 VODs, since I didn't want to hook up the external monitor to watch some of the VTuber stuff in the background while working on other things. Eileen-II is running an old RTX2070-MaxQ (why I keep thinking this as an RTX2080 is something that I cannot fathom), and realistically, I really didn't want to overstress this long out of warranty machine that I resurrected from stasis just to tide through this period. It did take a couple of reboots to literally iron out the kinks in the dusty-ass circuits before Eileen-II would work correctly, and knowing just how good my luck is, I didn't want to push it too hard.
And so I'm here.
There are other bad things that have been happening to the people around me, and since they involve not-me, I don't feel comfortable talking about them. Nevertheless, I definitely want to comment that hearing what has been happening to people has made me a little sad, and for some particular things that I had been hearing, I'm actually pretty broken that such a thing could happen like that---I just never thought that it was possible for that kind of thing to occur like that. Maybe I'm just an idealist, or maybe I'm naive, or maybe I'm ``religious''---it just felt so... wrong. Like, I would honestly hear of such fuck ups in stories, but not to people I know?
(sigh)
Life do be like that. Looking out for myself is hard enough; looking out for the unfortunate is just hard mode. And looking out for folks whom you think ought to be good at looking out for themselves is just... what am I doing with my life.
If everyone vents and confides in me, to whom do I vent and confide in then? God always listens and hears, and naturally He acts in His own mysterious ways, but I'm not as Christ-like as I ought to be to take things in that ``large'' way that He does---I'm just not good enough. But when presented with someone who might be interested to listen and to help, I find myself in the strange situation where I don't know how to ask for the said help, and more importantly, what kind of help it is that I am seeking.
Such a stupid situation eh. And people come to me for advice. Fear for their sanity as you fear for mine, gentle reader.
In other news, I started back cycling, though not at the time that I was intending to---it was a Friday afternoon at stupid hot o'clock, and I think I'm paying the price for that with general headaches for the past two days. Oh, and I think I can definitively say that I can no longer eat raw seafood safely---ran an experiment of eating raw oysters on Thursday for dinner, and on Friday evening, I started to have diarrhoea again, and it is still going on today. I've drained all the carbon pills that I bought in preparation to my trip to Astana, and all I seemed to have succeeded at is to make the really stinky and really clay-ey stool gray due to the activated carbon mix.
Blechh.
In theory, I was suppose to cycle this morning. But yeah, fuck that---didn't happen. Not going to do tomorrow morning either because I need to get into office early to do some rather ``inspired'' work (write down the runbooks before I totally forget what is going on). I'm currently targetting Wednesday stupid o'clock in the morning for the next cycle, a 14.5 mi-ish affair, which is basically the north-east riverine loop with a bounce along the park connector that ends at the Tampines Road junction.
There's also a good chance (maybe!) that Wednesday is when the replacement LCD assembly is available, and so I will need to take that day off to finally sort out what is hopefully the last possible issue of Eileen-III.
Here's to a more peaceful week than whatever nonsense I have been facing. Till the next update.
Monday, August 10, 2026
Back from Land of Quality Potassium
Ah... it's good to be back home. I was in Astana, Kazakhstan last week for the International Olympiads in Artificial Intelligence (IOAI), doing observation duty for work purposes. It was summer there; the weather was warmer than in SIN city, but thanks to the lower humidity, it was actually overall cooler than out here.
I won't talk about work stuff---there's a lot to be processed, and I really don't want to have to do that more than the necessary amount of times. Besides, this blog isn't really meant to talk about work stuff, but whatever I want to talk about in general that isn't work related.
So I got back home. And Eileen-III has a blown out screen---two red flashes on the alien-head power switch, followed by eight blue flashes, cycled indefinitely. When I first saw this yesterday, I was fuming; I had come home from a week of hard work overseas, and wanting to play either Mass Effect 3 or Grim Dawn: Fangs of Asterkarn and being unable to do either was annoying. I had to power Eileen-III down for the week due to some additional [electrical] works that Pa wanted to do during the week I was away---I had that weird feeling that I should've said no to him, but I gave in, and this was the end result. Thankfully, I had ordered the extra on-site servicing along with Eileen-III all those years ago, figuring that if I was plonking big bucks for the hardware, I might as well pony up the extra amount that would be needed to repair it in the five years ahead. I think they are going to replace the motherboard, but that isn't coming for a few weeks.
Thank God for that.
As mentioned, I only got back home yesterday, just on the evening of National Day itself. Didn't watch the parade, went straight to getting kway chap at the nearby duck rice stall, then spent the rest of the evening frustrated over the non-working Eileen-III.
The more astute might find a contradiction. If Eileen-III were down, why/how can I enter this entry? Did I mis-use work hardware to post what is definitely a personal blog entry?
Nah... when I was following the instructions of troubleshooting from technical support this early afternoon, I found that the external monitor was showing the original wallpaper that I had set for my log in screen, before going blank. On a hunch, I did a blind log in (i.e. just hitting ``enter'' then typing my password, and then ``enter'' again). I managed to log in, and then a few keyboard shortcuts later, I was effectively duplicating whatever was supposed to be on Eileen-III's screen onto the monitor. I had to turn down the resolution from 2650×1600 to 1920×1080, and physically re-rotate my external monitor back to landscape, but other than that, everything else seemed to work fine.
And so here I am, significantly less unhappy than before. I caught up on some of the fun YouTubers, leaving the stuff that I would normally watch in the background aside for another time when I had two working screens.
I got some dizi practise in earlier in the morning too, while I was waiting for technical support to finally contact me after filing that service request (this one, I did use the virtual machine on my work machine to file because it was infinitely less painful than trying to do so with a stupid-ass potato of a phone).
Now I'm just wondering if I want to start my cycling tomorrow morning again, or defer it till after I have done the staff appraisals as reporting manager. Part of me thinks that I should not delay the start, since it is as good a [workout] system as any to get back into to avoid myself going more nuts. But then there's that laziness that lurks in the background...
...I'll probably just muscle it up and go cycle. Time zone difference between Astana and SIN city is about 3 hours earlier, so it really makes no difference either way.
And that's all I have to share for now. Till the next update then.
I won't talk about work stuff---there's a lot to be processed, and I really don't want to have to do that more than the necessary amount of times. Besides, this blog isn't really meant to talk about work stuff, but whatever I want to talk about in general that isn't work related.
So I got back home. And Eileen-III has a blown out screen---two red flashes on the alien-head power switch, followed by eight blue flashes, cycled indefinitely. When I first saw this yesterday, I was fuming; I had come home from a week of hard work overseas, and wanting to play either Mass Effect 3 or Grim Dawn: Fangs of Asterkarn and being unable to do either was annoying. I had to power Eileen-III down for the week due to some additional [electrical] works that Pa wanted to do during the week I was away---I had that weird feeling that I should've said no to him, but I gave in, and this was the end result. Thankfully, I had ordered the extra on-site servicing along with Eileen-III all those years ago, figuring that if I was plonking big bucks for the hardware, I might as well pony up the extra amount that would be needed to repair it in the five years ahead. I think they are going to replace the motherboard, but that isn't coming for a few weeks.
Thank God for that.
As mentioned, I only got back home yesterday, just on the evening of National Day itself. Didn't watch the parade, went straight to getting kway chap at the nearby duck rice stall, then spent the rest of the evening frustrated over the non-working Eileen-III.
The more astute might find a contradiction. If Eileen-III were down, why/how can I enter this entry? Did I mis-use work hardware to post what is definitely a personal blog entry?
Nah... when I was following the instructions of troubleshooting from technical support this early afternoon, I found that the external monitor was showing the original wallpaper that I had set for my log in screen, before going blank. On a hunch, I did a blind log in (i.e. just hitting ``enter'' then typing my password, and then ``enter'' again). I managed to log in, and then a few keyboard shortcuts later, I was effectively duplicating whatever was supposed to be on Eileen-III's screen onto the monitor. I had to turn down the resolution from 2650×1600 to 1920×1080, and physically re-rotate my external monitor back to landscape, but other than that, everything else seemed to work fine.
And so here I am, significantly less unhappy than before. I caught up on some of the fun YouTubers, leaving the stuff that I would normally watch in the background aside for another time when I had two working screens.
I got some dizi practise in earlier in the morning too, while I was waiting for technical support to finally contact me after filing that service request (this one, I did use the virtual machine on my work machine to file because it was infinitely less painful than trying to do so with a stupid-ass potato of a phone).
Now I'm just wondering if I want to start my cycling tomorrow morning again, or defer it till after I have done the staff appraisals as reporting manager. Part of me thinks that I should not delay the start, since it is as good a [workout] system as any to get back into to avoid myself going more nuts. But then there's that laziness that lurks in the background...
...I'll probably just muscle it up and go cycle. Time zone difference between Astana and SIN city is about 3 hours earlier, so it really makes no difference either way.
And that's all I have to share for now. Till the next update then.
Saturday, May 02, 2026
Yet Another Labour Day Weekend
So it's the Labour Day weekend.
I've always found it very strange that for SIN City, the union leaders are unabashedly the same folks who sit in parliament, which already has a reputation of being more corpo-friendly, whether or not it is justified. And somehow, that doesn't count as a form of conflict of interest.
But that's not the purpose of today---the whys and the hows of this funny situation can be found through the historical archives.
What I want to talk about today is the arrival of Pan's Musical Companion for Alto (Treble) Recorder and Other Melody Instruments: Medieval by Robin Alexander Lucas. Just a small note: if you are clicking on the URL to go to where I bought it (i.e. Waterstones), do note that they are very aggressive about stopping ``bots'' to the point that it can affect the UX pretty drastically.
Anyway, I learnt about this tome from this video from Sarah Jeffery. I figured that I probably should get some ``appropriate'' music for the recorder just so that I can do a bit more proper practice on that instrument, instead of trying to mangle my way through all the other types of music that I'm playing.
There is a problem with the book though---it opens landscape, and is sewn-bound. This means that having the book opened wide and stable enough to actually play from it [on a music stand] is just... not possible.
And so here I am, trying to re-typeset all 105 pieces so that I can shove the compendium into a clear folder and therefore actually be able to play them. Naturally, these are done in LilyPond.
But as I might have mentioned before, Eileen-III's keyboard is kind of sucky. Stuff on the right hand side don't operate in ways that are consistent---the numbers from 6 to 0 either don't show up, or end up being doubled, while the braces are almost always doubled, and the | and / are inconsistent.
I probably should trigger the warranty to replace the keyboard. But that means more downtime and other rather things...
That said, this meant that if I were to typeset all 105 pieces using Eileen-III's existing set up, I'd probably stab myself in my face repeatedly with a rusted pencil. And this is where it is time to bring out my favourite keyboard: HHKB Pro 2.
I had always wanted to use this keyboard with all my various laptops, but the ``normal'' way of putting the keyboard on top of the existing laptop keyboard doesn't work by virtue of the 60% size---the base plate is literally small enough to not span across the non-key parts of the keyboard.
That said, I find that having the HHKB Pro 2 sitting on my lap as I type, is just the perfect comfort level. Combining this position with having the ability to place the open book just in front of me and between Eileen-III meant that it was just that easy to look at the source material and touch-typeset the pieces straight into Frescobaldi.
I may just decide to lug my HHKB Pro 2 to the office just to flex against those who are showing off their ``fancy'' keyboards---mine is smaller, and has the Control key in the right place without any fancy mapping. That said, it's probably as dumb as I make it sound---I don't have any issues with the work laptop keyboard, and despite it being 60%, the HHKB Pro 2 is still sizeable enough that to lug it to and fro daily is just a non-starter, unless I upgrade my backpack to be even larger again.
In the old days, when my work machine was a desktop machine, and when I had a cubicle with enough storage, I could just leave my HHKB Pro 2 in the office. But with all the new space reduction nonsense that is in vogue, it becomes increasingly harder to do things like that.
Ah well.
I think that's all I want to talk about for now. Work is... tiring in all sorts of ways, and I really don't want to be thinking/talking about it unless absolutely necessary.
I suppose that this mini-rant is just an exercise in the use of the HHKB Pro 2, just to remember/enjoy the wonders of the keyboard layout and the Topre keys.
Relative to the Keychron stuff, the keys feel heavier, but without that crazy weird actuating ``click'' sound that comes from the Keychron.
Alright, that's about it for now. Happy Labour Day weekend I suppose, and till the next update.
I've always found it very strange that for SIN City, the union leaders are unabashedly the same folks who sit in parliament, which already has a reputation of being more corpo-friendly, whether or not it is justified. And somehow, that doesn't count as a form of conflict of interest.
But that's not the purpose of today---the whys and the hows of this funny situation can be found through the historical archives.
What I want to talk about today is the arrival of Pan's Musical Companion for Alto (Treble) Recorder and Other Melody Instruments: Medieval by Robin Alexander Lucas. Just a small note: if you are clicking on the URL to go to where I bought it (i.e. Waterstones), do note that they are very aggressive about stopping ``bots'' to the point that it can affect the UX pretty drastically.
Anyway, I learnt about this tome from this video from Sarah Jeffery. I figured that I probably should get some ``appropriate'' music for the recorder just so that I can do a bit more proper practice on that instrument, instead of trying to mangle my way through all the other types of music that I'm playing.
There is a problem with the book though---it opens landscape, and is sewn-bound. This means that having the book opened wide and stable enough to actually play from it [on a music stand] is just... not possible.
And so here I am, trying to re-typeset all 105 pieces so that I can shove the compendium into a clear folder and therefore actually be able to play them. Naturally, these are done in LilyPond.
But as I might have mentioned before, Eileen-III's keyboard is kind of sucky. Stuff on the right hand side don't operate in ways that are consistent---the numbers from 6 to 0 either don't show up, or end up being doubled, while the braces are almost always doubled, and the | and / are inconsistent.
I probably should trigger the warranty to replace the keyboard. But that means more downtime and other rather things...
That said, this meant that if I were to typeset all 105 pieces using Eileen-III's existing set up, I'd probably stab myself in my face repeatedly with a rusted pencil. And this is where it is time to bring out my favourite keyboard: HHKB Pro 2.
I had always wanted to use this keyboard with all my various laptops, but the ``normal'' way of putting the keyboard on top of the existing laptop keyboard doesn't work by virtue of the 60% size---the base plate is literally small enough to not span across the non-key parts of the keyboard.
That said, I find that having the HHKB Pro 2 sitting on my lap as I type, is just the perfect comfort level. Combining this position with having the ability to place the open book just in front of me and between Eileen-III meant that it was just that easy to look at the source material and touch-typeset the pieces straight into Frescobaldi.
I may just decide to lug my HHKB Pro 2 to the office just to flex against those who are showing off their ``fancy'' keyboards---mine is smaller, and has the Control key in the right place without any fancy mapping. That said, it's probably as dumb as I make it sound---I don't have any issues with the work laptop keyboard, and despite it being 60%, the HHKB Pro 2 is still sizeable enough that to lug it to and fro daily is just a non-starter, unless I upgrade my backpack to be even larger again.
In the old days, when my work machine was a desktop machine, and when I had a cubicle with enough storage, I could just leave my HHKB Pro 2 in the office. But with all the new space reduction nonsense that is in vogue, it becomes increasingly harder to do things like that.
Ah well.
I think that's all I want to talk about for now. Work is... tiring in all sorts of ways, and I really don't want to be thinking/talking about it unless absolutely necessary.
I suppose that this mini-rant is just an exercise in the use of the HHKB Pro 2, just to remember/enjoy the wonders of the keyboard layout and the Topre keys.
Relative to the Keychron stuff, the keys feel heavier, but without that crazy weird actuating ``click'' sound that comes from the Keychron.
Alright, that's about it for now. Happy Labour Day weekend I suppose, and till the next update.
Thursday, December 25, 2025
Welcome to Stupid O'Clock
Oh hey, check it out---it's stupid o'clock. It feels like it has been quite a while since I had an entry out at stupid o'clock. These things, you know, you've got to have just the right mood before things will fall in place, and the words that befit stupid o'clock will show up.
So the day just passed was a long one. It's the last official day of work for this year (I've broken my usual rule, and have decided to actually take a bloody big block of leave at the end of the year), and since I was playing at the Christmas Eve service out at PPCC, it just made more sence logistically to wake up at the usual nonsensical hour, spend half a day in the office working, and then chilling there for another few hours before hopping on a short bus ride down to church.
What happened during service is not important---I brought Stella instead of Aurelia, and managed to flub the soaring bits of Joy to the World because I didn't write the bloody part down.
The important part was that it was the last day of work for the year. And now I'm sitting here, nursing a 18-year Glenfiddich after showering and having listened once more to End of a Life by Mori Calliope, and having all these weird feelings that I need to expunge.
Of course it doesn't help that I was reconstructing my original ``Loved.m3u8'' play list after having reconfigured my entire [offline] music collection, and ended up listening to quite a few of the songs that were unironically pretty damn emo.
Oh, and I finished reading Komi Can't Communicate the manga, where Shoko and Hitohito were getting all lovey dovey here and there, with all the other usual childhood stuff from high school gloriously drawn and drawn out over the 500 chapters.
Now that the setting is made, let's proceed with stupid o'clock.
------
It's funny. There was a time where I made the realisation that with the effective excommunication that my family made with their various factions of families, I was a man without a history, which meant that I could choose how to shape my own future. I was back from my second scholarship run (left it because I finally realised the I didn't want a PhD that badly enough to want to sacrifice everything, and that for what I truly wanted to do, I didn't really need a PhD), and was serving out my bond. I thought of an old friend whom I sort of lost contact, reconnected, and one thing led to another, and we dated for a while.
And I thought I was going to have a future with her. I thought we had aligned our values well, and communicated our expectations, I thought we approached the relationship with the level of maturity that was to be expected.
That day, a part of me died utterly. And today, some donkey years later (I'm not going to ``do research'' to figure this shit out precisely for obvious reasons), I still maintain that that part of me has stayed dead.
I kinda lost interest in creating a future for myself. And I definitely lost interest in creating a future for myself where there's a spouse involved, though that took a few more years after that to figure it out a bit more. Turns out that the kind of woman whom I am attracted to, are precisely the kind of women that I should never start a life together with.
``MT, is it because they are smart?''
No, it's because they... are different kinds of weird. I like weird---it's interesting. Weird has a way of building up that kind of synergistic passion that is usually lacking in most prosaic conversations with the normies. Unfortunately, if they come in the package of ``woman'', then the subsidiary sub-system that doesn't usually trigger called ``libido'' turns up eventually and starts to mess with my brain, and then I get all attracted, and have weird thoughts of ``maybe this person is dateable?''
Spoiler: they are not dateable. Good for conversation, great for doing random shit with, just don't fucking date them.
You know, just treat them as friends. But whether one is actually friends with them is a whole 'nother philosophical question. Because to weird people, other weird people are just blips in the sea of noise---they don't necessarily register as ``people'', let alone ``people one tries to build a relationship with'', i.e. befriend. Weird people are weird because they are weird (i.e. not normies).
Took me forty years to figure this shit out. But at least I managed to figure it out.
Can I stand normies? Of course I can stand normies; I just don't see myself dating them.
Anyway, the point isn't about whom I'm intending to date, but more on that ``future'' part of things. I didn't really have big ambitions to begin with, always being the people pleaser that I was when I was a child (pleasing adults seemed like a better idea than trying to out-argue them at times where they are clearly in the wrong---no adult will ever acknowledge that a child makes a better point than they have). I wasn't born/living in a hyper-competitive environment---even my secondary school was more of a phase of life than something that I was trying my best to ``beat'' and turn out champion. Do enough to get paid enough to pay off the bills that are needed for existence and to serve my hobbies---that's about it. Still stand by that.
But it is funny, isn't it? I was having chicken chop, and I was looking at the hawker stalls. We're talking about stalls that have been there from anywhere between one month and thirty years. The people who serve at the stalls have been there for almost as long as the stall has been---day in, day out, doing the same work, reproducing the same services, producing the same goods, all day, every day.
Is that their ambition then? Do they even ``have'' ambition? And no, ``winning the lottery'' is not the kind of ``ambition'' that I am referring to here.
I examined myself. I don't think I can run the same thing day in, day out. In other words, I cannot see myself running operations. To put it bluntly, it is boring as fuck [to me]. I like trying out new things, challenging myself to new things. As part of doing these new things, some ``short period, high intensity'' type operations are probably fine, but running operations for a whole year and beyond like in the IT department or data centre operations or anything that is primarily structured around the routine... just sounds like death to me.
So, is this inner urge to do something new and challenging is ambition then? If not, then in many ways I should find commonality with the folks who are still at the hawker stall, cutting up chilli padi in the evening to mise en place for the next day's cycle of the very same.
But I don't. And not because I'm working in an office and not at a hawker stall---it's about the routine-ness.
Yes, I sound like a snob, but there was never an intention of being a snob.
Like I said, it has taken me nearly forty years to figure these things out for myself, and even then, I'm unconvinced that I have the full answer on what it is that I am. And frankly, I think that for most people who need to figure out what it is that I am, they might have similar issues.
But future. Funny thing that is. If today, I were to just keel over, dead, everything still goes on the way it does. There will be a slight pause as the information of my death propagates, but once the waves start travelling far out enough to decay to irrelevance, the world reconfigures itself quickly, and then everyone moves on, even as I ash up from the cremation and lose all corporeal form.
So in some sick sense, perhaps ``ambition'' and ``future'' are both overrated as things to have/possess. It may just be better to do whatever we want/can, now.
``MT, what's the point you are making here?''
No point---it's stupid o'clock. Think of it as a trite observation and nothing more. As I mentioned, I just wanted to dump out some thoughts that have been floating in my head, just so that I don't have to think about them when I officially chill out during the upcoming week and change from the block leave at the end of the year.
------
Recently, I went out to Decathlon out at City Square Mall to get one of those foldable safari chairs. Considering that I recently fucked up my ability to download videos from YouTube for offline viewing without having to log in, I decided to lie low during this period, and just use the logged-in download mechanism only for things that I cared about, like music releases, or some of the Let's Play series from my favourite VTubers (like Pavolia Reine), or even Karaoke (looking at you, Alpha Betta and Elizabeth Rose Bloodflame).
So in the meantime, I'd replace background YouTube offline viewing with some new Steam games I bought, and the ridiculous backlog of books to read, of which not all are of the e-book variety.
Which is where this foldable safari chair comes into place. It unfolds into a low chair with arm rests that I can put in the middle of my room so that I can sit there like a Boss and read.
``MT, what about reading it on-screen on Eileen-III?''
Sometimes, it is just not the same. Part of the reason is that there are physical books that I want to read, and reading that on-screen is impossible while reading them on a table is annoying considering that the angles are all wrong. ``Book in lap'' is a really comfortable position in comparison.
So I got the foldable chair. Nothing funny there.
But while walking about, I learnt of a new shop: Puzzletopia. This is opposite my favourite shop in City Square Mall: Super Dario Lasagne---the best damn lasagne in SIN City. I've known about Super Dario Lasagne, and it was one of the places that I had gone with her when we were still dating. I cannot remember if I went there alone after that and before the recent outing just to create new memories and therefore associations of the place, but I severely digress.
Puzzletopia. Dangerous place. Lots of fun puzzles, and there were some that was in their retail. I went in, looking for a portable tangram set. Their small ones were still 3 inches across (while being out of stock), while the one that they had stock on was still 5 inches across.
I wanted something smaller.
I already have a nice 6 inch set that came with this Tangram puzzle book that I recently sanded down more properly. The problem is that when the packing square is around 6 inches a side, some of the puzzles will end up taking linear dimensions of nearly a foot, which is... bad. Earlier this year while doing my ``I'm forty bitches'' week, I tried to play some tangrams while having a nice lunch... and it didn't work out well because of the lack of space.
I was looking for a much more compact version of tangram. And I couldn't find it. And Puzzletopia didn't have a small enough one.
That is, until I stumbled upon this little gem from Shire Post Mint. The damn thing is downright perfect. Naturally, I placed an order for it, and it's making its way to me through the mail even as we speak.
``MT, thought you could find this easily.''
Nope. This was only released in 2025-08, so the search during the months immediately after ``I'm forty bitches'' week would turn out nothing.
Praise the Lord!
In theory, I could make it out of thick cardboard, or even leather pieces, or heavy felt, but the sharp-ish 45° corners from the parallelogram and triangles are likely to fray under heavy use. This little gadget? It's copper---solid metal. It has enough mass to not fly away, and enough stiffness to not fray. And at 1.8 inches (with container), it is small!
And so, instead of debating what fancy-pants flute to get for my upcoming birthday gift to myself, it will be this. And there's also this other tangram book that I have, which will further increase the amount of fun I'm going to get with manipulating these tangram pieces while doing pattern matching/decomposition.
Now I'm debating whether I want to drop by next week (that's when the Puzzletopia staff said their new stock of the smaller tangrams will arrive) to show my discovery so that they can stock those up should anyone else want something that tiny.
It is at times like this that I wish I had enough space/resources to have a small workshop. Nothing much I suppose---a work table, hand tools, maybe a lathe and a press drill. Should allow me to mess about with making headjoints, simple flutes, and do other crafty work like making my own tangrams out of aluminium/brass.
------
And as I reach this part of the post, I find that my shot glass of Glenfiddich is done, and that I more or less have run out of things that I want to talk about during this stupid o'clock. Tomorrow (eh, you know what I mean) is going to be a new day, and I would like to start it by sleeping well, and then doing whatever the fuck I want.
Like maybe beating Last Judge in Silk Song.
Till the next update.
So the day just passed was a long one. It's the last official day of work for this year (I've broken my usual rule, and have decided to actually take a bloody big block of leave at the end of the year), and since I was playing at the Christmas Eve service out at PPCC, it just made more sence logistically to wake up at the usual nonsensical hour, spend half a day in the office working, and then chilling there for another few hours before hopping on a short bus ride down to church.
What happened during service is not important---I brought Stella instead of Aurelia, and managed to flub the soaring bits of Joy to the World because I didn't write the bloody part down.
The important part was that it was the last day of work for the year. And now I'm sitting here, nursing a 18-year Glenfiddich after showering and having listened once more to End of a Life by Mori Calliope, and having all these weird feelings that I need to expunge.
Of course it doesn't help that I was reconstructing my original ``Loved.m3u8'' play list after having reconfigured my entire [offline] music collection, and ended up listening to quite a few of the songs that were unironically pretty damn emo.
Oh, and I finished reading Komi Can't Communicate the manga, where Shoko and Hitohito were getting all lovey dovey here and there, with all the other usual childhood stuff from high school gloriously drawn and drawn out over the 500 chapters.
Now that the setting is made, let's proceed with stupid o'clock.
------
It's funny. There was a time where I made the realisation that with the effective excommunication that my family made with their various factions of families, I was a man without a history, which meant that I could choose how to shape my own future. I was back from my second scholarship run (left it because I finally realised the I didn't want a PhD that badly enough to want to sacrifice everything, and that for what I truly wanted to do, I didn't really need a PhD), and was serving out my bond. I thought of an old friend whom I sort of lost contact, reconnected, and one thing led to another, and we dated for a while.
And I thought I was going to have a future with her. I thought we had aligned our values well, and communicated our expectations, I thought we approached the relationship with the level of maturity that was to be expected.
I thought, you think, who confirmed?Long time readers of this blog will know what happened eventually. Spoilers: we're not together anymore. I think that I can converse with her normally by now, but I am not strong enough to try for a whole tea-break of chatting, and have no reason why I would want to test that out.
---Every Encik in SAF
That day, a part of me died utterly. And today, some donkey years later (I'm not going to ``do research'' to figure this shit out precisely for obvious reasons), I still maintain that that part of me has stayed dead.
I kinda lost interest in creating a future for myself. And I definitely lost interest in creating a future for myself where there's a spouse involved, though that took a few more years after that to figure it out a bit more. Turns out that the kind of woman whom I am attracted to, are precisely the kind of women that I should never start a life together with.
``MT, is it because they are smart?''
No, it's because they... are different kinds of weird. I like weird---it's interesting. Weird has a way of building up that kind of synergistic passion that is usually lacking in most prosaic conversations with the normies. Unfortunately, if they come in the package of ``woman'', then the subsidiary sub-system that doesn't usually trigger called ``libido'' turns up eventually and starts to mess with my brain, and then I get all attracted, and have weird thoughts of ``maybe this person is dateable?''
Spoiler: they are not dateable. Good for conversation, great for doing random shit with, just don't fucking date them.
You know, just treat them as friends. But whether one is actually friends with them is a whole 'nother philosophical question. Because to weird people, other weird people are just blips in the sea of noise---they don't necessarily register as ``people'', let alone ``people one tries to build a relationship with'', i.e. befriend. Weird people are weird because they are weird (i.e. not normies).
Took me forty years to figure this shit out. But at least I managed to figure it out.
Can I stand normies? Of course I can stand normies; I just don't see myself dating them.
Anyway, the point isn't about whom I'm intending to date, but more on that ``future'' part of things. I didn't really have big ambitions to begin with, always being the people pleaser that I was when I was a child (pleasing adults seemed like a better idea than trying to out-argue them at times where they are clearly in the wrong---no adult will ever acknowledge that a child makes a better point than they have). I wasn't born/living in a hyper-competitive environment---even my secondary school was more of a phase of life than something that I was trying my best to ``beat'' and turn out champion. Do enough to get paid enough to pay off the bills that are needed for existence and to serve my hobbies---that's about it. Still stand by that.
But it is funny, isn't it? I was having chicken chop, and I was looking at the hawker stalls. We're talking about stalls that have been there from anywhere between one month and thirty years. The people who serve at the stalls have been there for almost as long as the stall has been---day in, day out, doing the same work, reproducing the same services, producing the same goods, all day, every day.
Is that their ambition then? Do they even ``have'' ambition? And no, ``winning the lottery'' is not the kind of ``ambition'' that I am referring to here.
I examined myself. I don't think I can run the same thing day in, day out. In other words, I cannot see myself running operations. To put it bluntly, it is boring as fuck [to me]. I like trying out new things, challenging myself to new things. As part of doing these new things, some ``short period, high intensity'' type operations are probably fine, but running operations for a whole year and beyond like in the IT department or data centre operations or anything that is primarily structured around the routine... just sounds like death to me.
So, is this inner urge to do something new and challenging is ambition then? If not, then in many ways I should find commonality with the folks who are still at the hawker stall, cutting up chilli padi in the evening to mise en place for the next day's cycle of the very same.
But I don't. And not because I'm working in an office and not at a hawker stall---it's about the routine-ness.
Yes, I sound like a snob, but there was never an intention of being a snob.
Like I said, it has taken me nearly forty years to figure these things out for myself, and even then, I'm unconvinced that I have the full answer on what it is that I am. And frankly, I think that for most people who need to figure out what it is that I am, they might have similar issues.
But future. Funny thing that is. If today, I were to just keel over, dead, everything still goes on the way it does. There will be a slight pause as the information of my death propagates, but once the waves start travelling far out enough to decay to irrelevance, the world reconfigures itself quickly, and then everyone moves on, even as I ash up from the cremation and lose all corporeal form.
So in some sick sense, perhaps ``ambition'' and ``future'' are both overrated as things to have/possess. It may just be better to do whatever we want/can, now.
``MT, what's the point you are making here?''
No point---it's stupid o'clock. Think of it as a trite observation and nothing more. As I mentioned, I just wanted to dump out some thoughts that have been floating in my head, just so that I don't have to think about them when I officially chill out during the upcoming week and change from the block leave at the end of the year.
------
Recently, I went out to Decathlon out at City Square Mall to get one of those foldable safari chairs. Considering that I recently fucked up my ability to download videos from YouTube for offline viewing without having to log in, I decided to lie low during this period, and just use the logged-in download mechanism only for things that I cared about, like music releases, or some of the Let's Play series from my favourite VTubers (like Pavolia Reine), or even Karaoke (looking at you, Alpha Betta and Elizabeth Rose Bloodflame).
So in the meantime, I'd replace background YouTube offline viewing with some new Steam games I bought, and the ridiculous backlog of books to read, of which not all are of the e-book variety.
Which is where this foldable safari chair comes into place. It unfolds into a low chair with arm rests that I can put in the middle of my room so that I can sit there like a Boss and read.
``MT, what about reading it on-screen on Eileen-III?''
Sometimes, it is just not the same. Part of the reason is that there are physical books that I want to read, and reading that on-screen is impossible while reading them on a table is annoying considering that the angles are all wrong. ``Book in lap'' is a really comfortable position in comparison.
So I got the foldable chair. Nothing funny there.
But while walking about, I learnt of a new shop: Puzzletopia. This is opposite my favourite shop in City Square Mall: Super Dario Lasagne---the best damn lasagne in SIN City. I've known about Super Dario Lasagne, and it was one of the places that I had gone with her when we were still dating. I cannot remember if I went there alone after that and before the recent outing just to create new memories and therefore associations of the place, but I severely digress.
Puzzletopia. Dangerous place. Lots of fun puzzles, and there were some that was in their retail. I went in, looking for a portable tangram set. Their small ones were still 3 inches across (while being out of stock), while the one that they had stock on was still 5 inches across.
I wanted something smaller.
I already have a nice 6 inch set that came with this Tangram puzzle book that I recently sanded down more properly. The problem is that when the packing square is around 6 inches a side, some of the puzzles will end up taking linear dimensions of nearly a foot, which is... bad. Earlier this year while doing my ``I'm forty bitches'' week, I tried to play some tangrams while having a nice lunch... and it didn't work out well because of the lack of space.
I was looking for a much more compact version of tangram. And I couldn't find it. And Puzzletopia didn't have a small enough one.
That is, until I stumbled upon this little gem from Shire Post Mint. The damn thing is downright perfect. Naturally, I placed an order for it, and it's making its way to me through the mail even as we speak.
``MT, thought you could find this easily.''
Nope. This was only released in 2025-08, so the search during the months immediately after ``I'm forty bitches'' week would turn out nothing.
Praise the Lord!
In theory, I could make it out of thick cardboard, or even leather pieces, or heavy felt, but the sharp-ish 45° corners from the parallelogram and triangles are likely to fray under heavy use. This little gadget? It's copper---solid metal. It has enough mass to not fly away, and enough stiffness to not fray. And at 1.8 inches (with container), it is small!
And so, instead of debating what fancy-pants flute to get for my upcoming birthday gift to myself, it will be this. And there's also this other tangram book that I have, which will further increase the amount of fun I'm going to get with manipulating these tangram pieces while doing pattern matching/decomposition.
Now I'm debating whether I want to drop by next week (that's when the Puzzletopia staff said their new stock of the smaller tangrams will arrive) to show my discovery so that they can stock those up should anyone else want something that tiny.
It is at times like this that I wish I had enough space/resources to have a small workshop. Nothing much I suppose---a work table, hand tools, maybe a lathe and a press drill. Should allow me to mess about with making headjoints, simple flutes, and do other crafty work like making my own tangrams out of aluminium/brass.
------
And as I reach this part of the post, I find that my shot glass of Glenfiddich is done, and that I more or less have run out of things that I want to talk about during this stupid o'clock. Tomorrow (eh, you know what I mean) is going to be a new day, and I would like to start it by sleeping well, and then doing whatever the fuck I want.
Like maybe beating Last Judge in Silk Song.
Till the next update.
Sunday, June 22, 2025
Week Made Me Weak
Man, that was rough. Be prepared---this is going to be the theme for the foreseeable future.
I mentioned that I was on observation duty. The good news is that the ophthalmologist agrees, and wanted to see me again in three weeks. I counter-offered with two instead, and so that will be it. The neutral news is that I'm still on observation duty, but at least I'm out of the most dangerous period for now, and it ought to be a nothingburger soon enough.
Two other things happened as well; one of them is work-related, the other is family-related. For the work-related, just know that it is bureaucracy-related, and is just plain annoying. For the family-related, it involves not-me, and it's more tiring with some light uncooperativeness with not-me, and the doctors calling at odd hours to the apartment for updates on status. I am not directly handling this bit, but I am getting exhausted being the brains of the outfit, keeping track of information from the doctors, and making sense of the technical terms they are saying in order to provide the necessary reassurances and advice to the rest of the family.
I'm tired from both, and that's all I want to talk about them.
I've also finally done the final processing needed to return my personal equipment from the SAF due to my reaching my statutary age. That... took a while. The alibaba bag of stuff is heavy, and had to be extracted from the deeper part of my storage area. At the same time, I took the opportunity to clean out the dust that had accumulated on the exhaust fan and grill, as well as to get rid of the three music instrument-like objects (one guitar that I never use that has unknown provenance, and two saxophones that could never be re-sold). The bin out at SAFRA Punggol for the disposal was another bugbear, like a final challenge to see if one was truly a former NSMan---the hopper was high up, and opened up to a height that was higher than my shoulders, necessitating an over-the-shoulder lift of the heavy alibaba bag in order to feed it in. But it was dealt with without any new injuries, which means that this part of my life is now truly over.
Time to segue to other things.
------
Juufuutei Raden's Guide for Pixel Museum is a very fun official Picross game by Jupiter Corporation with hololive Production's Juufuutei Raden voice-acting in it. The premise uses Raden's museum curator background to provide nonogram puzzles around various museum-related art themes. The puzzles are fun, Raden's explanations of the significance of the art that the puzzles are based on are instructive (she voice acts in Japanese, with subtitles in English), and for about SGD20.00, it's a fair price.
Love it.
------
I'm back in playthrough three of Cyberpunk 2077, this time opting for a Male-Streetkid V and going for a Netrunner-esque build. Like the other two playthroughs, the tech-tree has drastically changed, and eventually I'll be in the DLC space of Phantom Liberty. Clothes are primarily for looks, with very modest statistics improvements, with the bulk of such things (like reload speed, armour, and the like) being provided for by Cyberware instead. Night City feels a bit different from before, and with the new transformer-architecture DLSS, the frames are smoother still even though I haven't really moved on from Eileen-III just yet.
------
Microsoft recently released their homage to the venerable edit.com from the MS-DOS era with the Rust-rewritten version of Edit. I tried the first version, and it sucked hard with very broken dialogue box semantics (it was clear the author did not live through that era of Text-based UI elements). The current version as at writing, 1.2, isn't too bad, and is quite an upgrade from old school edit.com. With Notepad getting fitted with increasingly useless amounts of unwanted and uncalled for features (like seriously, who asked for ``copilot'' and formatting?!), and the removal of the under-used Wordpad (most people just go straight for MSWord, or LibreOffice Writer on a new machine anyway), the new homage version of Edit seems like a much better replacement.
It works well in the terminal, handling UTF-8 like a champ, and works with terminals of various geometries. My only true complaint is the waste of space on the left margin for the line numbers (in my arrogant opinion, a simple integer on the status bar to indicate what line number one is on is a better use of screen real estate), and perhaps a trifling coent on the inability to customise the colours. Other than that, Edit is a solid recommendation now.
Does this mean that I abandon Vim? Nah... Vim is still my workhorse text editor---hjkl navigation is still unbeatable from a muscle memory perspective.
------
As a result of what happened throughout the week, I find myself utterly drained. I try to get sleep, and usually got enough of it in hours, but the quality is quite suspicious. Combining that with the inability to get enough sunlight/sweat from cycling due to having to avoid jarring my eyeballs, I just ran out of spoons.
And so, tomorrow is yet another ``mental well-being day'' type leave that I take, just to go out there and sweat it out through walking in the sun for a long distance, to get the heart pumping, the muscles moving, and the sweat pouring.
Hopefully that will give some life back into me. There are other [dark] thoughts flowing through me, but I don't think I'm ready to face them now, let alone talk about them publicly here.
Till the next update.
I mentioned that I was on observation duty. The good news is that the ophthalmologist agrees, and wanted to see me again in three weeks. I counter-offered with two instead, and so that will be it. The neutral news is that I'm still on observation duty, but at least I'm out of the most dangerous period for now, and it ought to be a nothingburger soon enough.
Two other things happened as well; one of them is work-related, the other is family-related. For the work-related, just know that it is bureaucracy-related, and is just plain annoying. For the family-related, it involves not-me, and it's more tiring with some light uncooperativeness with not-me, and the doctors calling at odd hours to the apartment for updates on status. I am not directly handling this bit, but I am getting exhausted being the brains of the outfit, keeping track of information from the doctors, and making sense of the technical terms they are saying in order to provide the necessary reassurances and advice to the rest of the family.
I'm tired from both, and that's all I want to talk about them.
I've also finally done the final processing needed to return my personal equipment from the SAF due to my reaching my statutary age. That... took a while. The alibaba bag of stuff is heavy, and had to be extracted from the deeper part of my storage area. At the same time, I took the opportunity to clean out the dust that had accumulated on the exhaust fan and grill, as well as to get rid of the three music instrument-like objects (one guitar that I never use that has unknown provenance, and two saxophones that could never be re-sold). The bin out at SAFRA Punggol for the disposal was another bugbear, like a final challenge to see if one was truly a former NSMan---the hopper was high up, and opened up to a height that was higher than my shoulders, necessitating an over-the-shoulder lift of the heavy alibaba bag in order to feed it in. But it was dealt with without any new injuries, which means that this part of my life is now truly over.
Time to segue to other things.
------
Juufuutei Raden's Guide for Pixel Museum is a very fun official Picross game by Jupiter Corporation with hololive Production's Juufuutei Raden voice-acting in it. The premise uses Raden's museum curator background to provide nonogram puzzles around various museum-related art themes. The puzzles are fun, Raden's explanations of the significance of the art that the puzzles are based on are instructive (she voice acts in Japanese, with subtitles in English), and for about SGD20.00, it's a fair price.
Love it.
------
I'm back in playthrough three of Cyberpunk 2077, this time opting for a Male-Streetkid V and going for a Netrunner-esque build. Like the other two playthroughs, the tech-tree has drastically changed, and eventually I'll be in the DLC space of Phantom Liberty. Clothes are primarily for looks, with very modest statistics improvements, with the bulk of such things (like reload speed, armour, and the like) being provided for by Cyberware instead. Night City feels a bit different from before, and with the new transformer-architecture DLSS, the frames are smoother still even though I haven't really moved on from Eileen-III just yet.
------
Microsoft recently released their homage to the venerable edit.com from the MS-DOS era with the Rust-rewritten version of Edit. I tried the first version, and it sucked hard with very broken dialogue box semantics (it was clear the author did not live through that era of Text-based UI elements). The current version as at writing, 1.2, isn't too bad, and is quite an upgrade from old school edit.com. With Notepad getting fitted with increasingly useless amounts of unwanted and uncalled for features (like seriously, who asked for ``copilot'' and formatting?!), and the removal of the under-used Wordpad (most people just go straight for MSWord, or LibreOffice Writer on a new machine anyway), the new homage version of Edit seems like a much better replacement.
It works well in the terminal, handling UTF-8 like a champ, and works with terminals of various geometries. My only true complaint is the waste of space on the left margin for the line numbers (in my arrogant opinion, a simple integer on the status bar to indicate what line number one is on is a better use of screen real estate), and perhaps a trifling coent on the inability to customise the colours. Other than that, Edit is a solid recommendation now.
Does this mean that I abandon Vim? Nah... Vim is still my workhorse text editor---hjkl navigation is still unbeatable from a muscle memory perspective.
------
As a result of what happened throughout the week, I find myself utterly drained. I try to get sleep, and usually got enough of it in hours, but the quality is quite suspicious. Combining that with the inability to get enough sunlight/sweat from cycling due to having to avoid jarring my eyeballs, I just ran out of spoons.
And so, tomorrow is yet another ``mental well-being day'' type leave that I take, just to go out there and sweat it out through walking in the sun for a long distance, to get the heart pumping, the muscles moving, and the sweat pouring.
Hopefully that will give some life back into me. There are other [dark] thoughts flowing through me, but I don't think I'm ready to face them now, let alone talk about them publicly here.
Till the next update.
Monday, June 09, 2025
I am on Observation Duty
(sigh)
It's official---I am on observation duty.
It was supposed to be a day where I would laze about, figuring out what to do on this off-in-lieu that I took on a whim because I didn't want to have too many leaves to clear. I woke up, and when I moved my eyes, I saw flashes of light at the peripheries of the lower left quadrant and upper right quadrant of my left eye.
Uh-oh.
See, I've been a high myope (defined as having <−6.00 dioptres of refraction error), which is a high risk factor for retinal detachment, a non-lethal but sure-as-hell-will-fuck-up-your-quality-of-life condition. Combine that with age and the symptoms (not going to link to it directly---just read off the Wikipedia page), I was suitably concerned.
I dallied a little, wondering if it was something intermittent. I chilled out in front of Eileen-III, thinking about what to have for dinner, and when it was nearer the middle of the day, decided to do a quick check on the light flashing situation---I could replicate it, easily.
Uh-oh.
I knew something was up, and brain kicked into overdrive. I was told before to seek immediate medical attention when I saw these symptoms (and was ready for it), but never quite worked out where to head to for this.
General Practitioners would be useless since they don't have the slit lamp that was necessary to accurately see what was going on at the back of my eyeball, and the Emergency Department felt a little too overkill for what I deemed to be Urgent Care at most (I was not actively going blind in the eye, and was thus not an emergency). Calling SNEC put me on hold for too long, and HealthHub told me that they'd get back to me with an appointment in two working days---mind you, it wasn't an appointment in two working days, but the notice of an appointment in two working days.
(sigh)
I ended up back to where I last went more than a decade ago for eye issues---Eastern Hougang Eye Specialist. I went as a walk-in, had my basic eye performance measured out, pupils dilated, and waited for more than an hour (out of the projected three) before I was looked at by the doctor.
Age-related posterior virtreous detachment. Apparently, apart from the increased risk of being a high myope, that I had shitty skin contributed to an increase in risk too, leading to today's episode and eventual diagnosis. Lattice degeneration was not sighted, and prognosis is good.
Generally, we're on official observation duty for the next six to eight weeks to watch out for any retinal tears that come from the shrinking of the vitreous humour due to age-related degeneration, so that we can fix them up pronto before it gets into retinal detachment territory.
The risk of any nonsense happening is highest in this first week, and thus my vigilance for anything novel beyond the new baseline set this morning. More importantly, I know where to head to when things go south---back to the doctor at Eastern Hougang Eye Specialist.
There is nothing else to be done other than observing if any repairs to retinal tears are needed---the general idea is that after the six to eight weeks, the vitreous humour would have stabilised to its new shape/size, thus reducing the amount of mechanical stimulation it is doing to the retina when it jiggles in the loosened up space.
Am I afraid? Not really. As I said, this is something that I had been told would happen a long time ago, and so, I'm quite prepared for it from most fronts, except for the ``how the hell do I kickstart the process'' bit that has since been resolved. That bit on eczema raising the risk factor was the only new thing that didn't know about, but it does make some sense---the origin cells for the retina are similar to that of the epidermis, the very same layer [of cells] that I am having shit-tier inflammation control over.
Meanwhile, nothing that involves knocking the vitreous humour about within my eyeball during this period for me.
And I need to find a new day to clear that off-in-lieu, now that I have a medical certificate to cover for today. 🤦♂️
Hopefully, the next visit is next week as planned, and not earlier because something stupid has happened in between.
Till the next update.
It's official---I am on observation duty.
It was supposed to be a day where I would laze about, figuring out what to do on this off-in-lieu that I took on a whim because I didn't want to have too many leaves to clear. I woke up, and when I moved my eyes, I saw flashes of light at the peripheries of the lower left quadrant and upper right quadrant of my left eye.
Uh-oh.
See, I've been a high myope (defined as having <−6.00 dioptres of refraction error), which is a high risk factor for retinal detachment, a non-lethal but sure-as-hell-will-fuck-up-your-quality-of-life condition. Combine that with age and the symptoms (not going to link to it directly---just read off the Wikipedia page), I was suitably concerned.
I dallied a little, wondering if it was something intermittent. I chilled out in front of Eileen-III, thinking about what to have for dinner, and when it was nearer the middle of the day, decided to do a quick check on the light flashing situation---I could replicate it, easily.
Uh-oh.
I knew something was up, and brain kicked into overdrive. I was told before to seek immediate medical attention when I saw these symptoms (and was ready for it), but never quite worked out where to head to for this.
General Practitioners would be useless since they don't have the slit lamp that was necessary to accurately see what was going on at the back of my eyeball, and the Emergency Department felt a little too overkill for what I deemed to be Urgent Care at most (I was not actively going blind in the eye, and was thus not an emergency). Calling SNEC put me on hold for too long, and HealthHub told me that they'd get back to me with an appointment in two working days---mind you, it wasn't an appointment in two working days, but the notice of an appointment in two working days.
(sigh)
I ended up back to where I last went more than a decade ago for eye issues---Eastern Hougang Eye Specialist. I went as a walk-in, had my basic eye performance measured out, pupils dilated, and waited for more than an hour (out of the projected three) before I was looked at by the doctor.
Age-related posterior virtreous detachment. Apparently, apart from the increased risk of being a high myope, that I had shitty skin contributed to an increase in risk too, leading to today's episode and eventual diagnosis. Lattice degeneration was not sighted, and prognosis is good.
Generally, we're on official observation duty for the next six to eight weeks to watch out for any retinal tears that come from the shrinking of the vitreous humour due to age-related degeneration, so that we can fix them up pronto before it gets into retinal detachment territory.
The risk of any nonsense happening is highest in this first week, and thus my vigilance for anything novel beyond the new baseline set this morning. More importantly, I know where to head to when things go south---back to the doctor at Eastern Hougang Eye Specialist.
There is nothing else to be done other than observing if any repairs to retinal tears are needed---the general idea is that after the six to eight weeks, the vitreous humour would have stabilised to its new shape/size, thus reducing the amount of mechanical stimulation it is doing to the retina when it jiggles in the loosened up space.
Am I afraid? Not really. As I said, this is something that I had been told would happen a long time ago, and so, I'm quite prepared for it from most fronts, except for the ``how the hell do I kickstart the process'' bit that has since been resolved. That bit on eczema raising the risk factor was the only new thing that didn't know about, but it does make some sense---the origin cells for the retina are similar to that of the epidermis, the very same layer [of cells] that I am having shit-tier inflammation control over.
Meanwhile, nothing that involves knocking the vitreous humour about within my eyeball during this period for me.
And I need to find a new day to clear that off-in-lieu, now that I have a medical certificate to cover for today. 🤦♂️
Hopefully, the next visit is next week as planned, and not earlier because something stupid has happened in between.
Till the next update.
Saturday, May 31, 2025
Big Badda Bang of Words
Ah... end of the week. Final-fucking-ly. The week has been long, for a variety of reasons that I will not go into, because it is (1) boring for most people; and (2) involves too any ``other people'' that it really isn't about me any more.
Instead, let's talk about some accumulated things that I had done.
Not too long ago, I learnt about some new HTTP headers needed for security, along with an online tool to test them. The idea behind these ``security headers'' is to provide server-centric instructions to the client browser to ``know'' what kinds of content (static or executable) are to be considered legitimate from the perspective of the server that the client is connecting to. This is the missing information link that is needed to prevent the class of exploits that starts with a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack, which includes drive-by malware downloads, page hijacking to siphon off user input (and therefore information). It is an explicit white-list to the client on what the server knows as resources/actions that it needs that the client should pay attention to, ignoring/stopping any that do not follow that whitelist.
Intrigued, I tried setting it up on my personal domain. The HTTP headers were created in a no-brainer way, but the behaviours that they created... broke lots of things.
For starters, there is now a strict segregation of the presentation layer (i.e. the HTML and CSS stuff) from the controller layer (i.e. any executable code, often in the form of JavaScript). One can no longer use the
That broke enough stuff that I had to rewrite my website to do that, and boy did that take a while.
Also, even in the presentation layer, there was a strict enforcement of splitting out the semi-structured layer from the styling layer (i.e. HTML files cannot have embedded CSS styles, no matter how small, nor when they were inserted (like in original HTML file, or as part of some DOM-tree shenanigans)). It wasn't difficult; it was more annoying than anything else.
But after all that effort, my website works well now, and you can verify the Security Headers with the link.
The eagle-eyed will notice that the new pages no longer have referrals to the CSS/HTML validation links. That's because one of the security headers basically blocks the passing of the forwarding page's URL to the forwarded to URL, which made such validation links impossible to operate in the client browser.
My chief constraint is that I have very little control over how to configure the website server program, so I had to do what I had to do just to keep the 'net gatekeepers happy. Like how I ended up creating a damn sitemap, and having to do up an entire toolchain that minifies and GZips individual pages, all because the damn gatekeeprs of the 'net these days state that all websites are clearly meant for machine-to-machine communication, so the sources of the pages themselves should be mangled for efficient machine-to-machine communication, as opposed to something that is human readable (and therefore learnable from).
Man, the ways of the 'net have changed drastically over the past 25 years.
------
I have the ESV Study Bible in hard copy for a few years now, and have wanted to grind through it slowly but surely as part of my own education on my faith. It's not my first time through the Bible (according to my own loose tracking, I've covered the Bible end-to-end two full times by now). But one of the biggest problems was that the book was an inch thick, and has terrible portability, despite it being the ``personal edition'' and having the general dimensions (not counting the thickness) of an A5 sheet of paper.
An e-book version would work wonders on the portability front.
Crossway has it. Unfortunately, it is terrible to use.
You see, unlike the deadtree version where the ESV text sits in the upper half of the page, and the extensive study notes sit as end notes in the bottom half, the official e-book version treats it like a hypertext document with oversized text, where the footnotes are replaced with links that jump to a completely different part of the binary file, and after a few such jumps, being lost becomes the regular state of things, made worse by being on an e-reader like the Kindle [Colorsoft].
In short, the official e-book sucks.
I had been patiently looking to see if there was a version of the ESV Study Bible that was just a straightforward digitisation of the printed version, with all the information where they are, without having to jump all over the place like a punch drunk monkey.
Let's just say my patience paid off and I got ahold of such a version. There was a problem with the images that made up each scanned page---there was a very strong unsaturated red tinge that made the text contrast terrible.
Ignoring lots of [necessary] intermediate steps, I managed to fix the contrast problem at the image level with the following ImageMagick miniscript/command:
I had tried ImageMagick's
And the results were dramatic (I'm not showing them here for obvious reasons), and after running the images through an older version of KCC (I used 7.2.0 instead of whatever is there now because the 7.3.x series broke many things), I had something that worked wonderfully on Eirian-VI, my Kindle Colorsoft. In this case, I needed the colour ability of Eirian-VI since colour is used quite extensively as highlights, and for specific diagrams/illustrations within the ESV Study Bible to explain core concepts.
I said that I left out some necessary intermediate steps. They weren't the focus of this discovery, but were needed because
------
The stupid thing I bought finally showed up yesterday. It was, as they say in Chinese, 又贵又重. Shipping was a bitch, and product delivery took a while.
But it finally arrived.
First impressions: yep, it is as it says on the box---a fucking heavy cup. To ensure that it could have the 10 kg mass, the cup's diameter was large enough to quality as a mug, but its depth was shallow enough that the total volume was still cup-sized. In essence, it was like a bowl with a really extended and heavy-afbassbase. I currently cannot lift it one-handed, and am not expected to do this any time soon. I can also see a litany of overuse injuries in the near future as my deltoids and parts of my pectorals get continually hurt from moving this even as they are healing from their own weakness.
It was as stupid as it gets, and I love it.
I also got the 0.5 lb stainless steel shotglasses (are they still considered shotglasses despite being made of not-glass?), originally three (one for me, two for CP/Elain), but they upped it to four when my order was delayed enough that they graciously upgraded it to their 4-for-3 promotion.
That shotglass(?) felt nice to hold and drink from. There was no ``metallic'' flavour that one might think something like this would have, but then again, after having eaten out of stainless steel plates and cutlery, there was never a real ``metallic'' flavour to begin with.
For both, I would suggest scrubbing the interior a little more thoroughly before using them as a matter of course.
------
I watch lots of VTubers, so many to the point that 8 regular hours a day cannot be enough. So I watch them at 2.5× speed, which is a speed that the observant will realise to be impossible from both the network bandwidth, and web-client viewer perspective.
The answer is yt-dlp. That's all I'll say about this part.
The other parts start with the statement that for the sake of my network, I don't usually need to watch things at 1080+p, for the reason that the video often runs on the vertically aligned screen.
This means that the maximum width of the video that I will be watching, tends to be limited by 1080 px horizontally.
Mathing it with the usual 16:9 ratio of today, this works out to something like 608 px vertically.
YouTube doesn't have anything at 608p, but they do have 480p, which is the resolution that I often watch my videos in. Automatically upscaling it in VLC media player has some blurriness, but throwing in small amount of sharpen filter, it works well enough.
That is, until the game that the VTuber is playing has lots of words (not a secret: am referring to Blue Prince). The encoding at 480p from YouTube tends not to do well with text, and it was getting a little... more frustrating to follow.
The magic is to recode it to 480p using better settings than whatever was used when YouTube was transcoding the source to the different bitrates.
The incantation used looks like:
``Why not just use the source resolution/bit rate and downsample?''
Well... it's slow and doesn't do as good a job as re-encoding. There's also the side issue of avoiding the integrated graphics card [doing the decoding when I'm watching it] from grinding through too many pixels only to discard more than two thirds of them to fit into 1080×608, and end up with a blurry mess due to the lack of access to the kinds of advanced filters that re-encoding can provide.
------
The last thing tobitchtalk about is the trend of ``oh if you see em-dashes in a text, it is 100% AI generated''. Related to that is ``if the AI detector detects that a paragraph of text is AI generated, it is 100% correct''.
On item 1, that's just a lazy way of looking at things. I mean, come on---if you look at this blog, almost all my posts have em-dashes rendered in. I use them extensively, though to be fair, I don't actually type the emdash as is---I type it out LaTeX style as
Which segues into item 2. It seems that ``AI detectors'' these days seem better at estimating the quality of a piece of writing with respect to grammar and diction than to truly ``detect'' the use of [generative] AI.
What I am trying to get at is, just because ``you'' suck at writing doesn't mean that any piece of writing that doesn't suck is ``generative AI'' just because ``you'' cannot write well enough. And if life in the modern world is anything to live by, is that anyone who points fingers and claims that someone else is displaying the qualities consistent with some thing of meta-variable-X, it is more likely than not a projection of the accuser who actually is the thing of meta-variable-X.
And that's about it for this update. Till the next one.
Instead, let's talk about some accumulated things that I had done.
Not too long ago, I learnt about some new HTTP headers needed for security, along with an online tool to test them. The idea behind these ``security headers'' is to provide server-centric instructions to the client browser to ``know'' what kinds of content (static or executable) are to be considered legitimate from the perspective of the server that the client is connecting to. This is the missing information link that is needed to prevent the class of exploits that starts with a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack, which includes drive-by malware downloads, page hijacking to siphon off user input (and therefore information). It is an explicit white-list to the client on what the server knows as resources/actions that it needs that the client should pay attention to, ignoring/stopping any that do not follow that whitelist.
Intrigued, I tried setting it up on my personal domain. The HTTP headers were created in a no-brainer way, but the behaviours that they created... broke lots of things.
For starters, there is now a strict segregation of the presentation layer (i.e. the HTML and CSS stuff) from the controller layer (i.e. any executable code, often in the form of JavaScript). One can no longer use the
on* family of attributes within the HTML tags to create callbacks for specific actions (notably in my case, the onClick, onChange, and onLoad actions).That broke enough stuff that I had to rewrite my website to do that, and boy did that take a while.
Also, even in the presentation layer, there was a strict enforcement of splitting out the semi-structured layer from the styling layer (i.e. HTML files cannot have embedded CSS styles, no matter how small, nor when they were inserted (like in original HTML file, or as part of some DOM-tree shenanigans)). It wasn't difficult; it was more annoying than anything else.
But after all that effort, my website works well now, and you can verify the Security Headers with the link.
The eagle-eyed will notice that the new pages no longer have referrals to the CSS/HTML validation links. That's because one of the security headers basically blocks the passing of the forwarding page's URL to the forwarded to URL, which made such validation links impossible to operate in the client browser.
My chief constraint is that I have very little control over how to configure the website server program, so I had to do what I had to do just to keep the 'net gatekeepers happy. Like how I ended up creating a damn sitemap, and having to do up an entire toolchain that minifies and GZips individual pages, all because the damn gatekeeprs of the 'net these days state that all websites are clearly meant for machine-to-machine communication, so the sources of the pages themselves should be mangled for efficient machine-to-machine communication, as opposed to something that is human readable (and therefore learnable from).
Man, the ways of the 'net have changed drastically over the past 25 years.
------
I have the ESV Study Bible in hard copy for a few years now, and have wanted to grind through it slowly but surely as part of my own education on my faith. It's not my first time through the Bible (according to my own loose tracking, I've covered the Bible end-to-end two full times by now). But one of the biggest problems was that the book was an inch thick, and has terrible portability, despite it being the ``personal edition'' and having the general dimensions (not counting the thickness) of an A5 sheet of paper.
An e-book version would work wonders on the portability front.
Crossway has it. Unfortunately, it is terrible to use.
You see, unlike the deadtree version where the ESV text sits in the upper half of the page, and the extensive study notes sit as end notes in the bottom half, the official e-book version treats it like a hypertext document with oversized text, where the footnotes are replaced with links that jump to a completely different part of the binary file, and after a few such jumps, being lost becomes the regular state of things, made worse by being on an e-reader like the Kindle [Colorsoft].
In short, the official e-book sucks.
I had been patiently looking to see if there was a version of the ESV Study Bible that was just a straightforward digitisation of the printed version, with all the information where they are, without having to jump all over the place like a punch drunk monkey.
Let's just say my patience paid off and I got ahold of such a version. There was a problem with the images that made up each scanned page---there was a very strong unsaturated red tinge that made the text contrast terrible.
Ignoring lots of [necessary] intermediate steps, I managed to fix the contrast problem at the image level with the following ImageMagick miniscript/command:
find -type f -iname '*.jpg' \
-exec magick {} -separate -contrast-stretch 0.5%x66% \
-combine {}_out.jpg \;So what this does is that it uses the find command to locate all the image files, and then apply the ``auto-leveller'' on each channel separately, allowing up to 0.5% of the pixels to go ``black'', and up to 66% of the pixels to go ``white''. The 66% is empirically determined through checking the output---the idea is that we want the ``background'' colour of the page to have its unsaturated red plus bleedthrough from the other side's text to ``go away'' (the actual paper is thin enough that there is some bleedthrough in real-life, which of course meant that the scan would yield the same problem, decreasing legibility).I had tried ImageMagick's
-auto-level option before, but it did nothing to the contrast. Using the alternative ofmagick {} -colorspace Lab -channel 0 \
-auto-level +channel -colorspace sRGB {}_out.jpg brightened the contrast, but did not remove the unsaturated red tinge much. It was only after applying the final incantation I specified in the beginning that I saw results.And the results were dramatic (I'm not showing them here for obvious reasons), and after running the images through an older version of KCC (I used 7.2.0 instead of whatever is there now because the 7.3.x series broke many things), I had something that worked wonderfully on Eirian-VI, my Kindle Colorsoft. In this case, I needed the colour ability of Eirian-VI since colour is used quite extensively as highlights, and for specific diagrams/illustrations within the ESV Study Bible to explain core concepts.
I said that I left out some necessary intermediate steps. They weren't the focus of this discovery, but were needed because
magick could not work on the source file directly to generate the type of output needed. I used an updated version of pypdf that needed pillow, which demanded that one does not update one's Cygwin Python3 installation to 3.12, because it messes the hell out of the dependency availability from the mish-mash of libraries under the default 3.9 and newer 3.12.------
The stupid thing I bought finally showed up yesterday. It was, as they say in Chinese, 又贵又重. Shipping was a bitch, and product delivery took a while.
But it finally arrived.
First impressions: yep, it is as it says on the box---a fucking heavy cup. To ensure that it could have the 10 kg mass, the cup's diameter was large enough to quality as a mug, but its depth was shallow enough that the total volume was still cup-sized. In essence, it was like a bowl with a really extended and heavy-af
It was as stupid as it gets, and I love it.
I also got the 0.5 lb stainless steel shotglasses (are they still considered shotglasses despite being made of not-glass?), originally three (one for me, two for CP/Elain), but they upped it to four when my order was delayed enough that they graciously upgraded it to their 4-for-3 promotion.
That shotglass(?) felt nice to hold and drink from. There was no ``metallic'' flavour that one might think something like this would have, but then again, after having eaten out of stainless steel plates and cutlery, there was never a real ``metallic'' flavour to begin with.
For both, I would suggest scrubbing the interior a little more thoroughly before using them as a matter of course.
------
I watch lots of VTubers, so many to the point that 8 regular hours a day cannot be enough. So I watch them at 2.5× speed, which is a speed that the observant will realise to be impossible from both the network bandwidth, and web-client viewer perspective.
The answer is yt-dlp. That's all I'll say about this part.
The other parts start with the statement that for the sake of my network, I don't usually need to watch things at 1080+p, for the reason that the video often runs on the vertically aligned screen.
This means that the maximum width of the video that I will be watching, tends to be limited by 1080 px horizontally.
Mathing it with the usual 16:9 ratio of today, this works out to something like 608 px vertically.
YouTube doesn't have anything at 608p, but they do have 480p, which is the resolution that I often watch my videos in. Automatically upscaling it in VLC media player has some blurriness, but throwing in small amount of sharpen filter, it works well enough.
That is, until the game that the VTuber is playing has lots of words (not a secret: am referring to Blue Prince). The encoding at 480p from YouTube tends not to do well with text, and it was getting a little... more frustrating to follow.
The magic is to recode it to 480p using better settings than whatever was used when YouTube was transcoding the source to the different bitrates.
The incantation used looks like:
ffmpeg -i inputfile \ -vf "scale=-1:480" -c:v h264_nvenc -crf 23 \ -c:a copy \ outputfile_480p.mp4The only reason why I thought this was viable was that the encoder could make use of the NVIDIA graphics card that Eileen-III had (RTX 4090). I didn't try to encode without the
h264_nvenc option, seeing that using it meant that it still took time to re-encode the video part.``Why not just use the source resolution/bit rate and downsample?''
Well... it's slow and doesn't do as good a job as re-encoding. There's also the side issue of avoiding the integrated graphics card [doing the decoding when I'm watching it] from grinding through too many pixels only to discard more than two thirds of them to fit into 1080×608, and end up with a blurry mess due to the lack of access to the kinds of advanced filters that re-encoding can provide.
------
The last thing to
On item 1, that's just a lazy way of looking at things. I mean, come on---if you look at this blog, almost all my posts have em-dashes rendered in. I use them extensively, though to be fair, I don't actually type the emdash as is---I type it out LaTeX style as
---, and rely on my pretty-printer to render it as an em-dash.Which segues into item 2. It seems that ``AI detectors'' these days seem better at estimating the quality of a piece of writing with respect to grammar and diction than to truly ``detect'' the use of [generative] AI.
What I am trying to get at is, just because ``you'' suck at writing doesn't mean that any piece of writing that doesn't suck is ``generative AI'' just because ``you'' cannot write well enough. And if life in the modern world is anything to live by, is that anyone who points fingers and claims that someone else is displaying the qualities consistent with some thing of meta-variable-X, it is more likely than not a projection of the accuser who actually is the thing of meta-variable-X.
And that's about it for this update. Till the next one.
Sunday, March 30, 2025
Flow
And so, the end is near---
Wait, this is not a lyric post. Anyway, I just completed yet another performance with the King's Flute Choir today, this time as a guest player on The Big Flute for a concert under the Emerging Flutists programme. And now, after everything is over, I sit in front of Eileen-III, contemplating about how I'm intending to spend my day for tomorrow's public holiday, and hitting upon a rather simple question.
Why is it that we perform music in front of a live audience?
I mean, for many (not necessarily of the King's Flute Choir), it's their livelihood as entertainers/musicians. But what about us hobbyists, the kind who spend lots of money on gear, lessons, travel, just so that we can perform in front of a live audience?
I think I might have found an answer: the addiction to the feeling of being in a flow state.
For those who are unfamiliar, the ``flow state'' is a moment where one is simultaneously hyper-focused yet hyper-relaxed, with information coming in fast and furious, yet without any form of chaos, as though one is, at that moment, literally One With The Universe, with near omnipotence, capable of handling anything and everything that is coming in, and to deliver the necessary actions/activities/outcomes that go out, all without falling into fear, uncertainty and doubt. One is ``in the moment'', yet with enough cognizance to have an objective perspective on all that is happening, and thus keeping the ability to make quick and accurate decisions even as the rest of the self continues on with the actions that are needed within the flow state itself.
``MT, you sound like you're high.''
No, I'm not; it's hard to explain without using metaphors. It is one of those things that one must experience at least once in their lives, and hopefully be able to regain that feeling in the future when the stakes are high enough, just so that the outward outcomes are not jeopardise by fear, uncertainty, or doubt.
More concretely, I find that when I am playing on my musical instrument on stage and in front of a live audience, I tend to be in the flow state, which leads to outcomes that are better than what I might expect.
And I felt that today, with some verbal confirmation from a third party too. There are a couple of pieces in the setlist that required one to do flute beatboxing, something that I had (1) never done before, and (2) found it quite hard to pull off on The Big Flute due to the need for even more breath to cover for the larger inner diameter. Throughout all the rehearsals, and even during my own practices, I just couldn't do it well enough to sound, let alone be ``correct''. It was to the point that I had to work something out with one of the other players to help with the percussive beatboxing sounds on the regular concert flute.
Yet at the actual concert, somehow I managed to scrabble through, as was the other bass flute player. That player who was helping us with the additional beatboxing support was the one who pointed out that it was the first time that he had managed to hear the beatboxing stuff from the bass-line flutes.
And I know that it was due to being the flow state because if you asked me to replicate it right now, just after the concert, I would likely fail.
Now that we have ``flow state'' defined and understood, let me explain why it is an addictive feeling.
To paraphrase from 《巨婴国》 again, all of us have an innate omnipotent narcissism that some of us eventually learn to acknowledge and tame, bringing us the kind of psychological stability that makes us appear the more matured one. Many of us don't really learn about this, and end up being the kind of self-entitled jerk that everyone loves to hate on the 'net.
But who can blame the for not wanting to acknowledge and tame this innate omnipotent narcissism? It's seductive, it makes one feel powerful. But it is also very unhealthy in the long run, since it becomes the default state of being, which can contradict what the real world may have to offer in return.
Conversely, acknowledging that omnipotent narcissism, and then correcting one's behaviour to avoid triggering that means that one is more comfortable with the world's non-determinism. But acknowledgement and taming is not the same as complete nullification---latent remnants still exist, and as something from the Id, it has a tendency to continuously lurk in the parts of the mind that we aren't paying too much attention to.
Which is why when one is in the flow state, it becomes addictive. Because it is a safe way to satisfy that latent omnipotent narcissism without the negative effects. It is a type of power that is summoned only on occasion, and is therefore considered superior in terms of reactions compared to just living out the omnipotent narcissism fantasy.
But that said, being in flow state from performing on stage and in front of a live audience is not the same as being attention-seeking---the flow state describes an internal state of being of the person, which does not deal with the externalities directly. Thus, when one is in a flow state, one might not even notice the audience, especially if they are the passive sort and are therefore irrelevant anyway. By nature, attention-seeking demands an active audience, and with that, the need to use feedback loops to control one's behaviour to control that of the audience.
And I think that's about it for now. I'm tired---playing The Big Flute ``seriously'' has a tendency of knocking me out because of the need for deep belly-level breathing, which causes too much relaxation despite the obvious efforts needed to actually perform on the music instruments.
Till the next update then.
Wait, this is not a lyric post. Anyway, I just completed yet another performance with the King's Flute Choir today, this time as a guest player on The Big Flute for a concert under the Emerging Flutists programme. And now, after everything is over, I sit in front of Eileen-III, contemplating about how I'm intending to spend my day for tomorrow's public holiday, and hitting upon a rather simple question.
Why is it that we perform music in front of a live audience?
I mean, for many (not necessarily of the King's Flute Choir), it's their livelihood as entertainers/musicians. But what about us hobbyists, the kind who spend lots of money on gear, lessons, travel, just so that we can perform in front of a live audience?
I think I might have found an answer: the addiction to the feeling of being in a flow state.
For those who are unfamiliar, the ``flow state'' is a moment where one is simultaneously hyper-focused yet hyper-relaxed, with information coming in fast and furious, yet without any form of chaos, as though one is, at that moment, literally One With The Universe, with near omnipotence, capable of handling anything and everything that is coming in, and to deliver the necessary actions/activities/outcomes that go out, all without falling into fear, uncertainty and doubt. One is ``in the moment'', yet with enough cognizance to have an objective perspective on all that is happening, and thus keeping the ability to make quick and accurate decisions even as the rest of the self continues on with the actions that are needed within the flow state itself.
``MT, you sound like you're high.''
No, I'm not; it's hard to explain without using metaphors. It is one of those things that one must experience at least once in their lives, and hopefully be able to regain that feeling in the future when the stakes are high enough, just so that the outward outcomes are not jeopardise by fear, uncertainty, or doubt.
More concretely, I find that when I am playing on my musical instrument on stage and in front of a live audience, I tend to be in the flow state, which leads to outcomes that are better than what I might expect.
And I felt that today, with some verbal confirmation from a third party too. There are a couple of pieces in the setlist that required one to do flute beatboxing, something that I had (1) never done before, and (2) found it quite hard to pull off on The Big Flute due to the need for even more breath to cover for the larger inner diameter. Throughout all the rehearsals, and even during my own practices, I just couldn't do it well enough to sound, let alone be ``correct''. It was to the point that I had to work something out with one of the other players to help with the percussive beatboxing sounds on the regular concert flute.
Yet at the actual concert, somehow I managed to scrabble through, as was the other bass flute player. That player who was helping us with the additional beatboxing support was the one who pointed out that it was the first time that he had managed to hear the beatboxing stuff from the bass-line flutes.
And I know that it was due to being the flow state because if you asked me to replicate it right now, just after the concert, I would likely fail.
Now that we have ``flow state'' defined and understood, let me explain why it is an addictive feeling.
To paraphrase from 《巨婴国》 again, all of us have an innate omnipotent narcissism that some of us eventually learn to acknowledge and tame, bringing us the kind of psychological stability that makes us appear the more matured one. Many of us don't really learn about this, and end up being the kind of self-entitled jerk that everyone loves to hate on the 'net.
But who can blame the for not wanting to acknowledge and tame this innate omnipotent narcissism? It's seductive, it makes one feel powerful. But it is also very unhealthy in the long run, since it becomes the default state of being, which can contradict what the real world may have to offer in return.
Conversely, acknowledging that omnipotent narcissism, and then correcting one's behaviour to avoid triggering that means that one is more comfortable with the world's non-determinism. But acknowledgement and taming is not the same as complete nullification---latent remnants still exist, and as something from the Id, it has a tendency to continuously lurk in the parts of the mind that we aren't paying too much attention to.
Which is why when one is in the flow state, it becomes addictive. Because it is a safe way to satisfy that latent omnipotent narcissism without the negative effects. It is a type of power that is summoned only on occasion, and is therefore considered superior in terms of reactions compared to just living out the omnipotent narcissism fantasy.
But that said, being in flow state from performing on stage and in front of a live audience is not the same as being attention-seeking---the flow state describes an internal state of being of the person, which does not deal with the externalities directly. Thus, when one is in a flow state, one might not even notice the audience, especially if they are the passive sort and are therefore irrelevant anyway. By nature, attention-seeking demands an active audience, and with that, the need to use feedback loops to control one's behaviour to control that of the audience.
And I think that's about it for now. I'm tired---playing The Big Flute ``seriously'' has a tendency of knocking me out because of the need for deep belly-level breathing, which causes too much relaxation despite the obvious efforts needed to actually perform on the music instruments.
Till the next update then.
Thursday, January 23, 2025
The Last Two Days were Nice
When one was younger, and was involved in some humanities class that is teaching history, one had the tendency to be downright indignant at the people of the time for ``not standing up against the obvious bad thing that is happening'' which eventually led into the story arc that made its way into the history books as a lesson to learn.
Sadly, now, no matter where we are, these same young people are experiencing first hand why they could not stand up against the obvious bad thing that is happening.
And this is also where I must admit that even though I say that I do not fear death, it turns out that I do after all. For if I truly do not fear death, and have that sense of commitment that I claimed, then truly nothing will stop me from ever doing the right thing, be it standing up against the injustices, fighting the hypocrites, or spreading the Lord's Word in literal godforsaken places.
Yet here I am still, in SIN city, sitting in front of Eileen-III, typing out this entry.
So we've established that the phrase ``I do not fear death'' is one conditioned upon ``within my current circumstances and not universally''. While sounding hypocritical, I think the ordinary person would not find it problematic as it has some resonance with the human condition---hardly anyone expects anybody to literally abandon their own lives to take radical actions.
God's standards are higher, so in view of that, I shall refrain from making such a claim any more. I fear death in a universal perspective, but within the context of where I am existing right now, I am unafraid, because there really isn't much chance for me to just die ``for no good reason''.
Anyway, whatever happens wherever we are, we will be judged by the young of the future for ``not standing up against the obvious bad thing that is happening'', despite having all the lessons that we ought to have learnt by now from the past that had already occurred.
May God have mercy on our souls.
------
In other news, I had a very lovely two days for yesterday and the day before. I'll try to go chronologically from memory.
The plan for Tuesday was to head out to somewhere a bit frou-frou like The BOOK Cafe to read Aaron A. Reed's 50 Years of Text Games: From Oregon Trail to AI Dungeon in its full hardcover glory (I do have the soft copy as part of the original Kickstarter(?) support---but reading the hardcover version is definitely a treat)). But it required me to make my way downtown, into a location that Google was suggesting to be rather busy at the time that I was intending to be there (around 11 o'clock).
What actually happened then was that I made my way to Great World instead. It was on the TEL, and was formerly ``Great World City'', and used to be the least likely to be visited mall by me in forever just due to how inaccessible it was before the TEL was a thing.
``MT, why Great World? It doesn't fit that frou-frou concept you had in mind!''
So this is where I reveal the ``i'm-forty-bitches'' checklist:
Spoiler: I had to switch out ``high tea'' when I realised that most of the high tea places were for two people (I was only one), and the one that could handle one (from Pan Pacific Hotel) had a hard time limit of 2 hours per session, which wasn't quite what I was expecting for a leisurely read.
And so Great World I went! I had Grasshopper Mint Chocolate instead of Pecan just for variety, knowing that I would be getting at least one for this year's π-day. Brunch was aptly consumed at the Collin's there, and that was also where I cracked open the hardcover 50 Years of Text Games. After that, I roamed about the mall itself, just to soak in the environment, including a stop-and-gape moment at ``The Whisky Distillery'' just to see the four-digit and five-digit whiskys that were there.
After all that, I decided to head out to Somerset station, partly because I wanted to check off ``long walk'', and partly because I wanted to get to a much more accessible location to head towards MusicGear in the late afternoon/evening to hang out with the crew there. There was an inconsequential drizzle as I walked the kilometre or so distance, and stopped by a genuine frou-frou coffee place called Lucine by LUNA, where I got a cup of ``dirty coffee''.
The barista explained it to me, I cannot remember what she said, but I think it's primarily a coffee floating on top of some milk. Don't ask too many questions.
I sat there and read more 50 Years of Text Games even as the trio of salarymen sitting at the table over were talking this and that about markets, marketing strategy, women, working in other countries, and other sundry that a techie like me didn't care too much about. The coffee was nice, the ceiling was high, the room was spacious, but the damn place where it was located in (111 Somerset) was pretty dead by my reckoning.
Aaaaaaaaaanyway, I eventually made my way to 313@Somerset to have some fancy Premium Char Siu Truffle Shoyu Soba from Tsuta.
It tasted fucking amazing. I had a Kirin beer there too, and read even more of 50 Years of Text Games (seeing a theme yet?). The only thing that marred the moment was the leg-shaking bugger in the booth diagonally from me---the benches are coupled, so when the idiot shook her legs, it vibrated the shit out of the bench. I was annoyed enough at some point when I just violently rocked it in retaliation.
Of course they won't give a shit---idiots rarely do. But I got my venting, so that was perhaps fine?
After that, I headed out to MusicGear to hang out with the crew, but learnt that apart from Hanwei and Kristin(?), everyone else was out supporting an event, and wouldn't be around for the week.
Ah well.
------
Yesterday started off bright and early enough for me; it was the day proper after all! I headed off to [REDACTED] for my fancy sushi, and after that, headed out to Marina Square for a look-see.
I then headed out to Suntec City for more walking, and found that Victorinox had a branch there. That got me excited---ever since the old Planet Traveller(?) place closed down, I couldn't find any official Victorinox spare parts dealer any more (not springs---I personally have a kit that had the replacements for the entire Victorinox line, complete with jig and tools to do the replacement; thank you past-MT for spending the nearly USD150 on it). I am down to my last Manager (now renamed to Rambler, which doesn't have a pen (important note to future-MT)), and am looking to see what the next replacement might be when this one gets sufficiently damaged to take out of circulation. The Midnite Manager looks good, but I didn't buy it because I don't trust the batteries of the LED---electronics don't really keep long, even with the best of care, due to the shitty humidity that exists out here in SIN city.
There really isn't much else to talk about for this leg in terms of what I saw/do, since it was just a near aimless ramble walking intermixed with reading more 50 Years of Text Games, before finally returning home to watch VODs of AGDQ 2025.
What I didn't say was how during the last two days, I was never without my slim hipflask that was filled with Glenfiddich 15 years whisky. I was swigging it every now and then, even as I was making my way around.
I refuse to go through this entire week completely sober, and it was glorious.
The other thing I didn't say was how my care group folks dropped me notes of birthday wishes, as well as the music ministry coordinator, and also Chara. That last one was unexpected, but it was nice to be remembered, I suppose.
And I think I've rambled on enough. My other-sister has planned a dinner celebration today, and I have to make some other plans to finish up Ma's computer build (I bought a cheap 32 GB thumbdrive and successfully configured it in Rufus), as well as to finish up the last couple of items in my ``i'm-forty-bitches'' list, among other things.
``Oi, MT, what about that long cycle?''
We'll see. It's just a list---if I can complete it, hallelujah! Otherwise, it's still fine.
I still had a nice few days. (=
Sadly, now, no matter where we are, these same young people are experiencing first hand why they could not stand up against the obvious bad thing that is happening.
And this is also where I must admit that even though I say that I do not fear death, it turns out that I do after all. For if I truly do not fear death, and have that sense of commitment that I claimed, then truly nothing will stop me from ever doing the right thing, be it standing up against the injustices, fighting the hypocrites, or spreading the Lord's Word in literal godforsaken places.
Yet here I am still, in SIN city, sitting in front of Eileen-III, typing out this entry.
So we've established that the phrase ``I do not fear death'' is one conditioned upon ``within my current circumstances and not universally''. While sounding hypocritical, I think the ordinary person would not find it problematic as it has some resonance with the human condition---hardly anyone expects anybody to literally abandon their own lives to take radical actions.
God's standards are higher, so in view of that, I shall refrain from making such a claim any more. I fear death in a universal perspective, but within the context of where I am existing right now, I am unafraid, because there really isn't much chance for me to just die ``for no good reason''.
Anyway, whatever happens wherever we are, we will be judged by the young of the future for ``not standing up against the obvious bad thing that is happening'', despite having all the lessons that we ought to have learnt by now from the past that had already occurred.
May God have mercy on our souls.
------
In other news, I had a very lovely two days for yesterday and the day before. I'll try to go chronologically from memory.
The plan for Tuesday was to head out to somewhere a bit frou-frou like The BOOK Cafe to read Aaron A. Reed's 50 Years of Text Games: From Oregon Trail to AI Dungeon in its full hardcover glory (I do have the soft copy as part of the original Kickstarter(?) support---but reading the hardcover version is definitely a treat)). But it required me to make my way downtown, into a location that Google was suggesting to be rather busy at the time that I was intending to be there (around 11 o'clock).
What actually happened then was that I made my way to Great World instead. It was on the TEL, and was formerly ``Great World City'', and used to be the least likely to be visited mall by me in forever just due to how inaccessible it was before the TEL was a thing.
``MT, why Great World? It doesn't fit that frou-frou concept you had in mind!''
So this is where I reveal the ``i'm-forty-bitches'' checklist:
Read/high tea with 50 Years of Text Games;Long walk;- Long cycle;
Pecan pie from Windowsill [pies];- Cat and the Fiddle cheesecake;
Buy mobo and CPU for Ma's computer; andFancy sushi at [REDACTED].
Spoiler: I had to switch out ``high tea'' when I realised that most of the high tea places were for two people (I was only one), and the one that could handle one (from Pan Pacific Hotel) had a hard time limit of 2 hours per session, which wasn't quite what I was expecting for a leisurely read.
And so Great World I went! I had Grasshopper Mint Chocolate instead of Pecan just for variety, knowing that I would be getting at least one for this year's π-day. Brunch was aptly consumed at the Collin's there, and that was also where I cracked open the hardcover 50 Years of Text Games. After that, I roamed about the mall itself, just to soak in the environment, including a stop-and-gape moment at ``The Whisky Distillery'' just to see the four-digit and five-digit whiskys that were there.
After all that, I decided to head out to Somerset station, partly because I wanted to check off ``long walk'', and partly because I wanted to get to a much more accessible location to head towards MusicGear in the late afternoon/evening to hang out with the crew there. There was an inconsequential drizzle as I walked the kilometre or so distance, and stopped by a genuine frou-frou coffee place called Lucine by LUNA, where I got a cup of ``dirty coffee''.
The barista explained it to me, I cannot remember what she said, but I think it's primarily a coffee floating on top of some milk. Don't ask too many questions.
I sat there and read more 50 Years of Text Games even as the trio of salarymen sitting at the table over were talking this and that about markets, marketing strategy, women, working in other countries, and other sundry that a techie like me didn't care too much about. The coffee was nice, the ceiling was high, the room was spacious, but the damn place where it was located in (111 Somerset) was pretty dead by my reckoning.
Aaaaaaaaaanyway, I eventually made my way to 313@Somerset to have some fancy Premium Char Siu Truffle Shoyu Soba from Tsuta.
It tasted fucking amazing. I had a Kirin beer there too, and read even more of 50 Years of Text Games (seeing a theme yet?). The only thing that marred the moment was the leg-shaking bugger in the booth diagonally from me---the benches are coupled, so when the idiot shook her legs, it vibrated the shit out of the bench. I was annoyed enough at some point when I just violently rocked it in retaliation.
Of course they won't give a shit---idiots rarely do. But I got my venting, so that was perhaps fine?
After that, I headed out to MusicGear to hang out with the crew, but learnt that apart from Hanwei and Kristin(?), everyone else was out supporting an event, and wouldn't be around for the week.
Ah well.
------
Yesterday started off bright and early enough for me; it was the day proper after all! I headed off to [REDACTED] for my fancy sushi, and after that, headed out to Marina Square for a look-see.
I then headed out to Suntec City for more walking, and found that Victorinox had a branch there. That got me excited---ever since the old Planet Traveller(?) place closed down, I couldn't find any official Victorinox spare parts dealer any more (not springs---I personally have a kit that had the replacements for the entire Victorinox line, complete with jig and tools to do the replacement; thank you past-MT for spending the nearly USD150 on it). I am down to my last Manager (now renamed to Rambler, which doesn't have a pen (important note to future-MT)), and am looking to see what the next replacement might be when this one gets sufficiently damaged to take out of circulation. The Midnite Manager looks good, but I didn't buy it because I don't trust the batteries of the LED---electronics don't really keep long, even with the best of care, due to the shitty humidity that exists out here in SIN city.
There really isn't much else to talk about for this leg in terms of what I saw/do, since it was just a near aimless ramble walking intermixed with reading more 50 Years of Text Games, before finally returning home to watch VODs of AGDQ 2025.
What I didn't say was how during the last two days, I was never without my slim hipflask that was filled with Glenfiddich 15 years whisky. I was swigging it every now and then, even as I was making my way around.
I refuse to go through this entire week completely sober, and it was glorious.
The other thing I didn't say was how my care group folks dropped me notes of birthday wishes, as well as the music ministry coordinator, and also Chara. That last one was unexpected, but it was nice to be remembered, I suppose.
And I think I've rambled on enough. My other-sister has planned a dinner celebration today, and I have to make some other plans to finish up Ma's computer build (I bought a cheap 32 GB thumbdrive and successfully configured it in Rufus), as well as to finish up the last couple of items in my ``i'm-forty-bitches'' list, among other things.
``Oi, MT, what about that long cycle?''
We'll see. It's just a list---if I can complete it, hallelujah! Otherwise, it's still fine.
I still had a nice few days. (=
Friday, November 01, 2024
No-vem-ber?
It is now November. The astute among yinz would ask me what is this year's NaNoWriMo entry title/topic.
And my answer is simply: I'm not taking part in NaNoWriMo this year.
I mean, check it out: 15 NaNoWriMo entries says something. I'm not burnt out on writing, but rather, a couple of things come to mind as to why I am not participating this year.
Firstly, I just have too many other things to do this time round. I'm playing with the King's Flute Choir again, this time for the flute choir concert at the Autumn Flute Fair 2024. I'm playing on my recently acquired contrabass flute in C called ``The Big Flute'' (yeah yeah... imaginative name). The Big Flute is unlike any other flutes that I have played so far---it is by far, the largest flute with a total length of about 2.73 m shaped like a 4, with an inner diameter that tapers off from 49.62 mm. In short, I needed time to both rehearse the contrabass flute parts, as well as to get used to the different embouchure, breathing, and fingering positions over the large vertically oriented flute.
Secondly, the organisation running NaNoWriMo itself was getting too damn weird and offputting. NaNoWrio's AI policy was controversial, and the next most recent not-so-nothingburger was the aftermath of some serious child grooming scandal. Something of an older vintage was the messed up web design update that happened a few years ago that broke many things, among which was the loss of almost all of one's writing buddies.
It also probably did not help that the municipal liaisons for SIN city have stepped down for their own reasons.
I say that NaNoWriMo was getting too damn weird due to the slow and steady evolution of what was a very clear [but dumb] idea of ``here's thirty days of November, here's a word count goal of fifty thousand words---go!'' into some general writing programme for young writers in the US while still maintaining some kind of international presence, with some rather vocal self-declared leftists turfing out their own fiefdoms of safe-spaces within the forums themselves. I'm all for being inclusive, but I do not necessarily subscribe to the metaphorical carving of feudal lands in what was essentially an open agora in the first place. I resent the hypocrisy of alleged inclusion through the use of identity politics---if you want some safe space for your kind of people, maybe do it elsewhere, and not carve up the public space and practise the hypocrisy of accusing others of being discriminative while practising discrimination on their own.
Thankfully I was never in a position in NaNoWriMo where I had to worry about that---I stick primarily to the regional forum and stay far, far away from the places where the hypocrites lurk---but I cannot help but notice that their sheer vocal loudness was definitely shifting the overall tone of NaNoWriMo itself.
NaNoWriMo was always about reaching the fifty thousand words within the month of November---it was never about what was written. Even the word count tool, when it was still around, did nothing about reading the contents except to count the literal number of words through counting the number of whitespace segments in between the words. So why would anyone care if someone's NaNoWriMo story was some racist diatribe, or if someone wanted a white male as their protagonist with nary a female in sight, or if their writing of the behaviour of the woman in the story was close to some messed up erotica than what a ``real and normal woman'' is?
So yeah, NaNoWriMo was getting weird and offputting.
Will I get back to it next year? Who knows---let me survive my upcoming birthday first, then we talk.
------
In other news, Cookie Clicker. This has been running almost continuously in the background of Eileen-III for the past two or three weeks. Big numbers with big names for big numbers are always fun.
And then, there's Persona 5 Royal that I have been playing after work. It... reminds me too much of the time when I was still studying. Cleared three Palaces, and there are more to go.
I'd keep writing more, but then I realised we're past stupid o'clock. I'm on leave tomorrow (or rather, today), so it's not that big a deal, even though I really want to catch up on sleep.
And thus, adieu.
And my answer is simply: I'm not taking part in NaNoWriMo this year.
I mean, check it out: 15 NaNoWriMo entries says something. I'm not burnt out on writing, but rather, a couple of things come to mind as to why I am not participating this year.
Firstly, I just have too many other things to do this time round. I'm playing with the King's Flute Choir again, this time for the flute choir concert at the Autumn Flute Fair 2024. I'm playing on my recently acquired contrabass flute in C called ``The Big Flute'' (yeah yeah... imaginative name). The Big Flute is unlike any other flutes that I have played so far---it is by far, the largest flute with a total length of about 2.73 m shaped like a 4, with an inner diameter that tapers off from 49.62 mm. In short, I needed time to both rehearse the contrabass flute parts, as well as to get used to the different embouchure, breathing, and fingering positions over the large vertically oriented flute.
Secondly, the organisation running NaNoWriMo itself was getting too damn weird and offputting. NaNoWrio's AI policy was controversial, and the next most recent not-so-nothingburger was the aftermath of some serious child grooming scandal. Something of an older vintage was the messed up web design update that happened a few years ago that broke many things, among which was the loss of almost all of one's writing buddies.
It also probably did not help that the municipal liaisons for SIN city have stepped down for their own reasons.
I say that NaNoWriMo was getting too damn weird due to the slow and steady evolution of what was a very clear [but dumb] idea of ``here's thirty days of November, here's a word count goal of fifty thousand words---go!'' into some general writing programme for young writers in the US while still maintaining some kind of international presence, with some rather vocal self-declared leftists turfing out their own fiefdoms of safe-spaces within the forums themselves. I'm all for being inclusive, but I do not necessarily subscribe to the metaphorical carving of feudal lands in what was essentially an open agora in the first place. I resent the hypocrisy of alleged inclusion through the use of identity politics---if you want some safe space for your kind of people, maybe do it elsewhere, and not carve up the public space and practise the hypocrisy of accusing others of being discriminative while practising discrimination on their own.
Thankfully I was never in a position in NaNoWriMo where I had to worry about that---I stick primarily to the regional forum and stay far, far away from the places where the hypocrites lurk---but I cannot help but notice that their sheer vocal loudness was definitely shifting the overall tone of NaNoWriMo itself.
NaNoWriMo was always about reaching the fifty thousand words within the month of November---it was never about what was written. Even the word count tool, when it was still around, did nothing about reading the contents except to count the literal number of words through counting the number of whitespace segments in between the words. So why would anyone care if someone's NaNoWriMo story was some racist diatribe, or if someone wanted a white male as their protagonist with nary a female in sight, or if their writing of the behaviour of the woman in the story was close to some messed up erotica than what a ``real and normal woman'' is?
So yeah, NaNoWriMo was getting weird and offputting.
Will I get back to it next year? Who knows---let me survive my upcoming birthday first, then we talk.
------
In other news, Cookie Clicker. This has been running almost continuously in the background of Eileen-III for the past two or three weeks. Big numbers with big names for big numbers are always fun.
And then, there's Persona 5 Royal that I have been playing after work. It... reminds me too much of the time when I was still studying. Cleared three Palaces, and there are more to go.
I'd keep writing more, but then I realised we're past stupid o'clock. I'm on leave tomorrow (or rather, today), so it's not that big a deal, even though I really want to catch up on sleep.
And thus, adieu.
Monday, September 16, 2024
QCUE Pairing Issues Resolved?
That was... harrowing.
tl;dr: If QCUE isn't willing to pair via Bluetooth, even after factory resetting, then the only way out is to drain the batteries of the two earbuds completely, shove them one by one into the case to check for connectivity, before trying to pair again through the ``normal process'' of holding the back button with the case open till the blue-light blinks.
Context: I bought me some Bose QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds (QCUE) a few months back on a whim to replace the now-broken third pair of the Bose QuietComfort 20 noise cancelling in-ear headphones (QC20). The key difference was that the new QCUE were wireless, as compared to the QC20.
The reason why I said ``on a whim'' was because I already lug around a QuietComfort 35 Wireless Headphones II (QC35II) to replace the QC20, which is wireless and does its job well. Except for the fact that in SIN city, the high humidity and high temperature meant that wearing these over-the-ears headphones for long periods of time was... uncomfortable at best. I still use these for all the various teleconferencing meetings due to the excellent sound isolation (we used to call 'em ``Skyping'' back in the day), but very rarely use them for casual music listening on the go.
And thus, the QCUE is a thing now.
I recently switched phones to the Xiaomi 14 from my Xiaomi 12. Had I a choice, I wouldn't even bother, but since the replacement of the non-working screen of my Xiaomi 12 back in late 2024-06 (was it only less than 3 months ago?!), I knew that the days of my Xiaomi 12 was numbered. Thanks to the myriad of 2FA and other ``app-fication'', the stupid ``smartphone'' has become a piece of critical equipment. As for my Xiaomi 12, the rear-backing was starting to show signs of the glue [from the repair] failing, and I did not want to repeat the same scramble for a fix, this time from potentially greater failure.
And so I went to get that replacement.
``MT, you're long-winded--get to the point!''
I'm getting there. I migrated the information and apps from Xiaomi 12 to Xiaomi 14 (bye bye Geocache Calculator and Barcode Scanner, no thanks to Android 14 and beyond auto-blocking apps targeting old-enough versions of Android).
And then I tried to reconnect my QCUE. Which was what prompted the first statement.
I tried everything---clearing all the Bluetooth lists, resetting the QCUE, resetting the phone's network connections, factory resetting the QCUE, re-do all the steps a few more times.
It didn't work.
That is, until I saw this innocuous comment:
And when I finally found that both earbuds are completely drained of power (can tell because the welcome ``vrroomsh'' sound was missing when the earbud was applied to the ear), I pencilled the three contact points per earbud, and put each earbud one at a time into the case, to ensure that it was in good contact before putting in the next.
Then I applied the pairing process with my Xiaomi 14.
Whaddaya know. The pairing was successful!
I did the same for Eileen-III, same.
Now, I still need to verify that the QCUE can actually receive the sound signals, but I cannot do that just yet due to the earbuds being completely drained of power.
But having the pairing working is already a great win.
As a side note, there was also an unknown
And apart from the nugget that saved me, here's the rest of the thread which has other useful information. For how long Reddit will be around for such things to be in existence, is something that only time will tell.
Till the next update.
tl;dr: If QCUE isn't willing to pair via Bluetooth, even after factory resetting, then the only way out is to drain the batteries of the two earbuds completely, shove them one by one into the case to check for connectivity, before trying to pair again through the ``normal process'' of holding the back button with the case open till the blue-light blinks.
Context: I bought me some Bose QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds (QCUE) a few months back on a whim to replace the now-broken third pair of the Bose QuietComfort 20 noise cancelling in-ear headphones (QC20). The key difference was that the new QCUE were wireless, as compared to the QC20.
The reason why I said ``on a whim'' was because I already lug around a QuietComfort 35 Wireless Headphones II (QC35II) to replace the QC20, which is wireless and does its job well. Except for the fact that in SIN city, the high humidity and high temperature meant that wearing these over-the-ears headphones for long periods of time was... uncomfortable at best. I still use these for all the various teleconferencing meetings due to the excellent sound isolation (we used to call 'em ``Skyping'' back in the day), but very rarely use them for casual music listening on the go.
And thus, the QCUE is a thing now.
I recently switched phones to the Xiaomi 14 from my Xiaomi 12. Had I a choice, I wouldn't even bother, but since the replacement of the non-working screen of my Xiaomi 12 back in late 2024-06 (was it only less than 3 months ago?!), I knew that the days of my Xiaomi 12 was numbered. Thanks to the myriad of 2FA and other ``app-fication'', the stupid ``smartphone'' has become a piece of critical equipment. As for my Xiaomi 12, the rear-backing was starting to show signs of the glue [from the repair] failing, and I did not want to repeat the same scramble for a fix, this time from potentially greater failure.
And so I went to get that replacement.
``MT, you're long-winded--get to the point!''
I'm getting there. I migrated the information and apps from Xiaomi 12 to Xiaomi 14 (bye bye Geocache Calculator and Barcode Scanner, no thanks to Android 14 and beyond auto-blocking apps targeting old-enough versions of Android).
And then I tried to reconnect my QCUE. Which was what prompted the first statement.
I tried everything---clearing all the Bluetooth lists, resetting the QCUE, resetting the phone's network connections, factory resetting the QCUE, re-do all the steps a few more times.
It didn't work.
That is, until I saw this innocuous comment:
I got the same issue and got to fix it by draining the whole battery of the earbuds, waiting about half an hour more and then charging them againWell, that's the one thing I hadn't tried, and so I left out my QCUE for a day and change. It took much longer due to not having any existing connection to tap into to drain the power faster.
---Tyras25
And when I finally found that both earbuds are completely drained of power (can tell because the welcome ``vrroomsh'' sound was missing when the earbud was applied to the ear), I pencilled the three contact points per earbud, and put each earbud one at a time into the case, to ensure that it was in good contact before putting in the next.
Then I applied the pairing process with my Xiaomi 14.
Whaddaya know. The pairing was successful!
I did the same for Eileen-III, same.
Now, I still need to verify that the QCUE can actually receive the sound signals, but I cannot do that just yet due to the earbuds being completely drained of power.
But having the pairing working is already a great win.
As a side note, there was also an unknown
BT 600 device ID that was emitted by my QCUE---I wonder if this is significant in any way about why the pairing was jank.And apart from the nugget that saved me, here's the rest of the thread which has other useful information. For how long Reddit will be around for such things to be in existence, is something that only time will tell.
Till the next update.
Friday, August 09, 2024
National Day Grab-bag
Okay, it's a public holiday today celebrating SIN city's independence. That's excellent.
Naturally, most denizens in SIN city that are able, have found ways to head out of country to enjoy the ``free'' long weekend. As for me, I have an even longer weekend due to the extra days of leave that I took for yesterday, and the upcoming Monday.
``But MT, aren't you in the middle of a high-key period? Why the sudden long leave?''
The leave... was planned before any of these things went bananas. And it was roughly when I first learnt that Cat Quest III is released on 2024-08-08. Naturally I had to take leave to play it!
So far, Cat Quest III hasn't been disappointing. True, it is no Elden Ring, but notice that I've given up on Elden Ring, whereas I am still having fun with Cat Quest III.
The primary purpose of a game is to be fun, so as to encourage the key reason for its existence---play. Any game that doesn't encourage play isn't really a game anymore, and should be called something else altogether. And what constitutes as fun is highly subjective, which is absolutely fine---everyone's life circumstances are different. Some things that one finds fun (like playing a musical instrument or programming a computer) might be a job/chore for another (think professional musician/music teacher, and software engineer), but that's diversity and freedom of choice right there.
Speaking of games, I finally completed the last two achievements of Faerie Solitaire, which involved:
Talk about addictive.
And while we are talking about old games, Jupiter Hell Classic was recently announced to be available on Steam soon. It's really DoomRL v0.9.9.8 in disguise, reskinned heavily to avoid the ZeniMedia Doom IP. I stopped caring about ChaosForge after realising the KK was now beholden to his shareholders instead of the fans, and have not looked into the ChaosForge Forum ever since that day back in 2022.
And no, I haven't really gone back there. And I don't think I will head back there. I never wish KK ill, and sincerely hope that he will continue to succeed. It's just that I will no longer play an active part in his endeavours.
Will I get Jupiter Hell Classic when it is released? Maybe... for old time's sake. It'd be nice to see Nyarlaptoptep's Boots once more, as well as the Mother-In-Law, two items that I have had a hand in naming in one way or another.
And while we are on the old stuff, WordStar 7 has seen a release by science-fiction author Robert J. Sawyer, as noted in his blog entry. WordStar is among the OG of word processing---they came at a time just between the typewriter, and the advent of WYSIWYG word processing, roughly when people were looking for more out of their text processing beyond full-screen text editors.
I sadly never had the need to work with WordStar, but I do enjoy me a good text-mode word processor as a concept. I'm part of that ``weird'' group of people who prefer writing in as distraction free a manner as possible, which was why something as arcane as TeX or the much better successor LaTeX appeals more strongly to me than good ol' MSWord (or these days on Eileen-III, LibreOffice Writer). My writing tool of preference these days is either good old vim, or Q10 on Windows.
There's just something about the 80-character wide monospace font form factor that makes the writing feel more fluid than trying to bang something out in a GUI with proportional fonts, and twiddling with formatting every which way, even though almost all word processors actually have semantic styling defined from the get-go.
But back to WordStar. The modern user may be put off by the need to run this old DOS program in one of several DOS emulators (Sawyer's 680MB package has all these sorted out, while I already have a DOSBox-X set up on Eileen-III), but I think they will be really put off by the entire keyboard interface. The semantics are quite foreign to the modern user as the interface was designed for a time where the keyboard standards weren't standard yet.
The ``WordStar Diamond`` is easy enough to get used to---it's like WASD, except it is ESXD, with control held. It is slightly less arcane than vi's hjkl movement, and thus more tolerable.
The problematic part is text selection (``marking blocks'' in WordStar lingo) is persistent. This means that the text can be marked [in a block], and other things can happen, while the marked block remains marked. So, if one wants to replace the selected text, it is important to execute a block-cut or block-delete before typing in the new text, otherwise the outcome is... not as expected.
I've had my fill of this back in the old days of working with the IDE of Turbo Pascal and Turbo C/C++ from Borland International. They followed the WordStar semantics, and it was usually a pain to turn that option off, mostly because of my scenarios of using them at programming competitions where the hardware and environment are provided for by the organiser.
It's not hard to get used to it, but it does get old pretty quickly.
Old software aside, Beyond Compare 5 has been out for about a month now. I love this file comparison tool---it's multiplatform, it's fast, it can compare stuff over the network, and the price is always reasonable for the functionality it has. The big thing for me to upgrade (for free in my case since I bought Beyond Compare 4 within the window for it) is the ability to have word-wrap enabled when doing text comparison. Oh, it can also handle table comparisons better than before---no more single-sheet preparation like before.
There's also the last bit of switching back to Mozilla Firefox from Google Chrome for my ``serious'' web applications (i.e. logged in stuff that companies would love to use tracking on) due to the shitstorm that is Manifest V3 and how it nerfs ad-blocking. The modern web is not usable without ad-blocking---everyone seems to want to load as many advertisements as they can on their puny web sites. On its own, it's not a problem per se, if these advertisements are tastefully done. But that has not been the case for the better part of a decade now. Apart from the technical problems of increasing the attack surface area, these advertisements (full-blown multimedia extravanganza too, for some of them!) consume precious network bandwidth, making that gigabit Internet connection trudge along slower than the bad old days of dial-up.
Do I recommend switching? Sure... it's pretty painless. But it's still up to individual choice whether to do so.
And anyway, I think that's about it for now. Back to Cat Quest III for me.
Till the next update.
Naturally, most denizens in SIN city that are able, have found ways to head out of country to enjoy the ``free'' long weekend. As for me, I have an even longer weekend due to the extra days of leave that I took for yesterday, and the upcoming Monday.
``But MT, aren't you in the middle of a high-key period? Why the sudden long leave?''
The leave... was planned before any of these things went bananas. And it was roughly when I first learnt that Cat Quest III is released on 2024-08-08. Naturally I had to take leave to play it!
So far, Cat Quest III hasn't been disappointing. True, it is no Elden Ring, but notice that I've given up on Elden Ring, whereas I am still having fun with Cat Quest III.
The primary purpose of a game is to be fun, so as to encourage the key reason for its existence---play. Any game that doesn't encourage play isn't really a game anymore, and should be called something else altogether. And what constitutes as fun is highly subjective, which is absolutely fine---everyone's life circumstances are different. Some things that one finds fun (like playing a musical instrument or programming a computer) might be a job/chore for another (think professional musician/music teacher, and software engineer), but that's diversity and freedom of choice right there.
Speaking of games, I finally completed the last two achievements of Faerie Solitaire, which involved:
- Raising all 32 pets to adult forms; and
- Completing all Challenges.
Talk about addictive.
And while we are talking about old games, Jupiter Hell Classic was recently announced to be available on Steam soon. It's really DoomRL v0.9.9.8 in disguise, reskinned heavily to avoid the ZeniMedia Doom IP. I stopped caring about ChaosForge after realising the KK was now beholden to his shareholders instead of the fans, and have not looked into the ChaosForge Forum ever since that day back in 2022.
And no, I haven't really gone back there. And I don't think I will head back there. I never wish KK ill, and sincerely hope that he will continue to succeed. It's just that I will no longer play an active part in his endeavours.
Will I get Jupiter Hell Classic when it is released? Maybe... for old time's sake. It'd be nice to see Nyarlaptoptep's Boots once more, as well as the Mother-In-Law, two items that I have had a hand in naming in one way or another.
And while we are on the old stuff, WordStar 7 has seen a release by science-fiction author Robert J. Sawyer, as noted in his blog entry. WordStar is among the OG of word processing---they came at a time just between the typewriter, and the advent of WYSIWYG word processing, roughly when people were looking for more out of their text processing beyond full-screen text editors.
I sadly never had the need to work with WordStar, but I do enjoy me a good text-mode word processor as a concept. I'm part of that ``weird'' group of people who prefer writing in as distraction free a manner as possible, which was why something as arcane as TeX or the much better successor LaTeX appeals more strongly to me than good ol' MSWord (or these days on Eileen-III, LibreOffice Writer). My writing tool of preference these days is either good old vim, or Q10 on Windows.
There's just something about the 80-character wide monospace font form factor that makes the writing feel more fluid than trying to bang something out in a GUI with proportional fonts, and twiddling with formatting every which way, even though almost all word processors actually have semantic styling defined from the get-go.
But back to WordStar. The modern user may be put off by the need to run this old DOS program in one of several DOS emulators (Sawyer's 680MB package has all these sorted out, while I already have a DOSBox-X set up on Eileen-III), but I think they will be really put off by the entire keyboard interface. The semantics are quite foreign to the modern user as the interface was designed for a time where the keyboard standards weren't standard yet.
The ``WordStar Diamond`` is easy enough to get used to---it's like WASD, except it is ESXD, with control held. It is slightly less arcane than vi's hjkl movement, and thus more tolerable.
The problematic part is text selection (``marking blocks'' in WordStar lingo) is persistent. This means that the text can be marked [in a block], and other things can happen, while the marked block remains marked. So, if one wants to replace the selected text, it is important to execute a block-cut or block-delete before typing in the new text, otherwise the outcome is... not as expected.
I've had my fill of this back in the old days of working with the IDE of Turbo Pascal and Turbo C/C++ from Borland International. They followed the WordStar semantics, and it was usually a pain to turn that option off, mostly because of my scenarios of using them at programming competitions where the hardware and environment are provided for by the organiser.
It's not hard to get used to it, but it does get old pretty quickly.
Old software aside, Beyond Compare 5 has been out for about a month now. I love this file comparison tool---it's multiplatform, it's fast, it can compare stuff over the network, and the price is always reasonable for the functionality it has. The big thing for me to upgrade (for free in my case since I bought Beyond Compare 4 within the window for it) is the ability to have word-wrap enabled when doing text comparison. Oh, it can also handle table comparisons better than before---no more single-sheet preparation like before.
There's also the last bit of switching back to Mozilla Firefox from Google Chrome for my ``serious'' web applications (i.e. logged in stuff that companies would love to use tracking on) due to the shitstorm that is Manifest V3 and how it nerfs ad-blocking. The modern web is not usable without ad-blocking---everyone seems to want to load as many advertisements as they can on their puny web sites. On its own, it's not a problem per se, if these advertisements are tastefully done. But that has not been the case for the better part of a decade now. Apart from the technical problems of increasing the attack surface area, these advertisements (full-blown multimedia extravanganza too, for some of them!) consume precious network bandwidth, making that gigabit Internet connection trudge along slower than the bad old days of dial-up.
Do I recommend switching? Sure... it's pretty painless. But it's still up to individual choice whether to do so.
And anyway, I think that's about it for now. Back to Cat Quest III for me.
Till the next update.
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