Going through RSS backlog
So, I’ve decided that going through my RSS feeds seem like a good use of time. To give some context, I haven’t opened my RSS feed (on FreshRSS) for a few months and well, it ballooned up to 2k unreads. Yeah, seems like a bit daunting.
My management skills are lacking, so what I did in the first place is go through short posts that I could find (pretty sure I follow some tumblr blogs, which kinda explains the 2k number) but after some time I gave up on my losses and marked quite a few blogs as read. Some feeds such as news, blogs with overwhelming small updates, ones that I know that I won’t be able to start because it’s a long read (sorry). That took it down to around 1k. Okay, making some progress there.
After that is some skimming to go through the others. Why I didn’t just mark it as read? Personally, I don’t feel as guilty skimming than marking as read, at least I try to ingest the blogposts. So yeah, skimming and a little bit of normal reading. With that I managed to get it down to a (comparitively) modest 350+ unreads. Most of it is end year reviews, I think I’ll just skim those considering how I never got around to it.
Also, while we’re in the topic of reading blogposts, seems like I have a hard time on reading weekly updates. Not sure why, but it feels daunting every time I see a few updates every time I refresh. Oh and link posts. I think I understand what people mean when they say they won’t be able to read everything they wanted in their lifetime.
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Back home update
So hello again (again). No, I didn’t take that long of a holiday. Anyways I might or might not have done stuff since then.
There’s still time for relaxation, and I used quite a chunk of it on catching sleep (surprising). Other than that, I’ve actually started on my games backlog.
Now I kinda have to tell the context for that. See, before this, I bought an external hard drive bay, which allowed me to expand my storage without buying an nvme drive (which I sadly missed out on when it was affordable). Then I just bought second hand HDD, since I’m not looking to store any critical data on it (I have a proper external HDD for that purposes). I thought about it for a while, and realised I can just migrate all the games I have on the laptop to the external HDDs (it was getting full from Beamng).
A few hours of transferring games to the HDD (and redownloading some of them), I managed to make space on my laptop. There’s still quite a bit of space, so I thought it would be okay to add a few more games that I might want to play in the future. Notably, I downloaded and played Paper Trail. I bought this game before on a deep discount, but never remembered to download and play it. It’s quite a nice puzzle game, the world it is set in is a world of papers, and you can fold it to reveal pathways or items on the other side of the paper. Pretty nice gameplay, though I do have trouble on some levels, it has a been a quite a few years since I played puzzle games.
There’s also other games I tried playing, including Portal. Now that one I forgot how I got it. Was it a deep discount or was it free? I can’t really remember much.
Anyways, that’s all I think I want to write here. Might or might not make more blogposts in the near future. Not promising though.
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tags: blog, update, lifestyle, game, paper-trail
Going back hometown
Hello again, forgot how long since my last post (I’m not checking) but I know it’s been at least a month. Okay probably more than that. Anyway, don’t think I could really write what happened in that period either because it was nothing to write about or it’s pointless drama. All I can really think of is it was a busy period, which is weird because I know there’s more than just ‘busy’ but I can’t remember for the life of me what is it.
Moving on, we have a week of vacation and decided to go back to our hometown in a while. Mostly to avoid the loud fireworks for CNY (there’s still some fireworks here, but at least it’s not as long as if it’s in the city (I don’t mind loud noises once in a while)). We kinda had to a few stuff that we neglected to do before though.
First of we actually needed to buy a few appliances. A TV (the old CRT ones have broken) and a few electric pots. Fortunately for us, a hardware shop nearby had a sale, so we saved up a bit there. They even have a non-smart TV, though it’s the cheapest one from a no-name brand (it’s Fukizu if anyone’s wondering). It’s a 32" LED TV, quite a nice spec for a TV (almost the same size of the CRT to boot). The electric pots are needed to cook as restaurants would be closed for the holidays, I mean, except the usual fast food places, but at that point why.
The place also needs some repair and upkeep, notably upstairs. It’s probably because we just go back to rest from the chaos of the city, but it’s either we go out or go to sleep here :P.
Hmm, what else? I think that’s all that I want to share for this blogpost. Oh yeah I just finished with my semester with a month break. Not sure whether I’ll use this time properly or just catching up on sleep.
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A review of a cheap e-reader because I bought one
Hello again, my internship finished a few weeks ago (hooray) and the new semester just started last week (not hooray). I got some experience out of the intership, but that’s not really something I would like to write about today (besides, that’s more for professional blog).
So, you know the urge to spend when you got the allowance? Yeah I succumbed to it during my internship :P Thankfully it’s not over the allowance I got. Just some QoL (quality of life) stuff, like an e-reader I just so happen to get my hands on (I bought other stuff but it’s nothing home to write about).
Unfortunately, it’s not the mainstream options like a Kindle or a Kobo, those are sold where I’m from, but the price really doesn’t justify it. To paint a picture here, they’re sold at the same price as a mid-range smartphone. Probably not much to some people, but that’s a hefty price to pay for something that doesn’t have the specs to boast about.
I got my hands on a no name branded e-reader. Well, an internet search seems to point to a brand called Veidoo courtesy of a YouTube video, though the one I got is branded with a different company name. It’s practically the same as shown in the video, a 5.8" inch e-reader with laughably low spec (a 32-bit arm CPU, for the record. I got 32-bit Koreader to install, but the screen refresh doesn’t work on this e-reader). But hey, at least it’s got a usb-c port (that doesn’t work with some cables, but thankfully the one’s I have work) and 32GB of storage, with a micro sd slot. A Kindle could never. I also bought it a price of just over $30 USD once adjusted for currency exchange. That’s cheap!
It sounds too good to be true. Well, probably because it is. The main cons for this e-reader is it’s display and battery life. The display can only show black or white, nothing in between. Even grey is either black or white depending on the shade of it. To be fair, on my part I don’t really mind it, as I don’t mind in particularly care on how the illustration is displayed as I read, I can power through how bad it is. Oh, and also it won’t render properly if the screen is exposed to sunlight directly. It’ll be half rendered with some words like how a pen which is about to run out of ink would write (I don’t know how to explain this and I don’t have photos of it sorry). It’s still readable, so yeah.
The battery doesn’t last as long as mainstream e-reader’s, only lasting around several hours on a single charge. Far from the multi-week charge from Kindle and Kobo. For what it is, I don’t mind. If the charge is low, I’d just charge it with a powerbank. What am I expecting for something so cheap anyway.
Almost forgot the part about transferring the books into the device. It comes with an app called ‘Book Transfer’ that uses the wifi network to create a website hosted on the e-reader to transfer files wirelessly. I used it a few times, but it’s pretty absymal due to the device not getting the best signal reception. Instead I just transfer the files with a usb-c cable. Unlike a normal android phone which will display a prompt to confirm whether to only charge or also expose the filesystem to the connected computer, this e-reader automatically does it. Pretty neat if I do consider it myself.
I’ve used this e-reader for a few weeks by now, and it’s a pleasant use even with the aforementioned cons. I used it during my internship, home, even out at a shopping mall (I’ve read >10 volumes of various light novels on it). I bought this e-reader specifically because my eyes are strained if I read on my phone. Back then, when I’m in the mood, I would read for several hours straight (almost everyday if it’s a semester break), finishing a light novel volume a day at the fastest (yeah I read at a slower pace than I’d like). I would read until I literally can’t focus on the screen anymore, so it’s a nice change to stop reading only when my brain can’t process more words :P
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Talking in waiting
I don’t really talk much. Mostly because I don’t actually go out of the house much (I pretty much only go out for classes exclusively, like go listen to the lecture and straight back home type or when my parents want to go out to vacation). I really dislike traffic, especially if I’m driving and it’s both going out and back of the house. Sometimes public transport is an option, but only if the place I want to go is accessible through the bus or train, which unfortunately isn’t most of the time.
But there are times that I actually do go out for other reasons. Maybe an old friend invited me to do join an event, or them inviting me for a get together to eat (sometimes I do invite, but that’s rarer than rare). Between going there and meeting them, there is a period of time where I have to wait. Either being on my phone or staying alone. At least, that’s what seems to be the only options.
In my boredom I try to fill it by starting a conversation with someone next to me. I do check if they’re immersed with their phones or a bit non-chalant first to see if they’re okay with someone approaching them. Bonus points if they’re on the same event, that’s my ticket to break the ice. Maybe talk about the day, ask where they going, normal small talk. It’s pretty hard to start it, but I get the hang of it the longer I have to wait.
That said I only do it when I have to wait. I don’t have that much social energy, so after everything is said and done I go crashing to my bed :P I think some people refer it as spoons? Now that I think about it, that’s probably why I hate traffic the most in my friend group.
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A weekend update post
Hello again, seems like I only have the time to write in weekends nowadays. Not really surprising, but I don’t feel like I want to do a weeknotes, I don’t think I can manage every week now.
So what happened between this blog post and the previous? Can’t really remember, I don’t really keep a journal nowadays.
Let’s see, uh, more work. It’s okay, getting to know the flow and people (very grateful to my colleagues). Nothing that demanding yet, I’m pretty sure driving is the most stressful part of the day still (can you tell I hate traffic).
Oh and I am also taking a swing on Proxmox on a spare laptop that I have lying around. It’s pretty okay, though I do have to plug in the ethernet cable because I have no idea how to setup the wifi on it (probably intentional). The laptop’s spec is pretty okay for this laptop, 2 cores 4 threads, 12GiB of RAM, so I do have some leeway in creating the VMs. Haven’t tried a lot yet, I just tried installing alpine and guix to test out (now that I think about it, I should probably try debian or ubuntu server later down the line). Don’t worry, it’s not exposed to the wider internet if you’re wondering, I don’t even know how to do that yet :P
What else… I now have a prepaid card I guess. Probably a bad financial decision on my part but hey, it has Visa, so now I can do international payments like… uh… I haven’t really got that far yet. I ’ll find a way to overspend with this someway.
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Sleepy
Hello again, just ate my dinner. Didn’t really do much today as I was mostly sleeping through it. Couldn’t really help it, it was raining lightly the whole day, perfect for sleep :P
First weeks as an intern is… interesting. The department I was assigned to was a bit chill unless a problem occurs. Well, it just so happens that a problem occured this week. I’m not the one to handle it because you know, I just got in, but my supervisor does seem worn out from that.
Apart from that nothing really. Except I somehow hate driving more than I used to. Going through peak traffic everyday does something.
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Oh hey still here
Hi hi, probably a short one this time. I’d probably won’t blog as much (or as long, depends on how I want to write) for the time being. Time has become something that’s hard to come by.
Why you ask? I got an internship! Well, it’s the mandated one for my course. It’s weird, usually internships are done near the end of the course. I don’t know why my batch’s schedule have an internship in the middle of it. Oh well, it’s okay. I probably won’t go into detail, I vaguely remember there’s a nda with the offer letter. Don’t worry, it’s not a dangerous field, I think it’s just on par with other offer letters my friends got :P
I mean there’s a ton of drafts I haven’t got around to publish that could serve as a buffer (well, most of them are half written still…). I still haven’t finished the bookfair one yet and that one has been what, a few months already? Don’t be surprised if there’s a ton of grammatical errors. I think perfectionism may be hindering me.
In the meantime may I kindly redirect everyone to my photoroll. It’s probably the only thing that I can update semi-frequently. Oh wait I forgot to put half of what I’m supposed to put for July. Uh, stay updated?
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Trip to a fruit farm
Last weekend my family visited a fruit farm. We bought discounted tickets at a convention centre a few months prior and finally found time to make the journey. Every weekend before that involved going back to hometown or servicing the cars, so it was a nice break from the monotony. I also decided to bring a compact camera for taking photos (a Lumix FTC-25, nothing to write home about). I hadn’t got a chance to really take a picture with this camera in a while, so I was expecting some nice photos.
The place is around 2 hours away from our home. This meant that we had to go out quite early in the morning. At least as early as we could have, we went out at 8 a.m.
The place itself was fine. The parking has a small fee, understandable. The place seems to be recently opened, as evident of the clean toilets. The scenery near the parking is a valley where they mostly grow guava trees. The guava fruits were wrapped in plastic to make sure no pest would eat the fruit before it’s harvested.
The place is too big to be on foot only, so they provide a tram service (well, it’s a couple carts that’s hooked up to a tractor, but hey). It’s a unique experience going through the fruit farm in the tram while enjoying the scenery there.
The first stop of the tram is a checkpoint. There’s a cafe, some nice photo spots and also an animal farm. A decorated walkway that’s shaded by the trees connects all of them together. We walked through the walkway before going to the animal farm. There’s an additional fee there but it’s not expensive. The animal farm is the usual kind. Iguanas, hamsters, snakes. Also some chickens, goats, raccoons and hamsters. It’s quite nice touching and feeding all the animals there.
Next stop was the deer enclosure. There’s also ostrichs there. We gave them longbeans to snack on. They quite like it. Um that’s it really. Good stop, but I can’t write anything else :P
Then we went to a lake. A red clock tower can be seen near it, centering a roundabout. The activities there are boat related, offering canoeing, paddling or speedboat ride. We went with the speedboat. The ride lasted for around 15 minutes. We circled the lake for about 4 times, though it was nerve wracking seeing the water line get ever so close to the boat when it turns.
We ended the ride at a duck pond that’s in an enclosure. Umm that’s how I would describe it. The ducks really want bread, I can give you that. And that’s how I know ducks have sharp nails at the end of their webbed feet. There was also a place to shoot paintball bullets (I don’t know how to explain this either)
Another tram ride and we’re almost at the end of our trip. The last stop was a place to sort of eat and lounge at. There’s also a house replica there where they showcase old appliances like how it is from back then (though I forgot which time period they said). The place to eat wasn’t a building or on a concrete platform. Just some plastic table and chairs on gravel. Reminds me of wedding caterings.
There’s also a honey stand from across the road. They have multitude of honey, though not from other bees. More like flavoured honey. There’s one with ginger that doesn’t taste strongly of ginger, there’s garlic which is strong, and another with a herb that tastes very bitter. It took a good 5 minutes for the bitterness to wash away from my mouth.
The last tram ride brings us back to the parking spot. We were quite thirsty by that point so we went to the convenience store to buy some drinks. Apparently they sell local produce and products. Just a tad bit more expensive than what you could get from a supermarket, but it’s not like it’s robbing us with that pricing. Plus, support local produce? That’s enough justification really.
It was a pretty good trip overall. Quite a nice way to spend the time.
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tags: blog, trip, food, photos
Organising my photos
I’ve done quite the trip yesterday. That’ll probably be it’s own blogpost someday. One thing I will divulge here is that I used a compact camera instead of capturing the photos with a phone. It’s pretty nice having something for one specific purpose and nothing more. Plus I don’t check my phone that much during the trip because I’m holding my camera. Usually I’m glued to it.
Once we finished our trip we rested at home, which continued on today. Since we’re not going out I decided to organise all the photos that we took into an album on an external HDD we have. While I’m at it might as well put all the photos on my phone and the cloud (Google Photos) into that external hard drive as well. The HDD has a capacity of 2TB (not exactly 2TiB, more so around 1.8TiB), with barely anything on it. Also, I’m looking to empty my Google Photos anyway. It’s currently taking a space of 10GiB as of writing and I don’t want to pay for Google One or lose any emails sent to me.
So first things first, the camera photos. I’m fortunate to have a modern laptop that also has an SD card slot for some reason. Like a full size one. I know I’m thankful for that now; no need to buy an external adapter like all my other friends who’re into photography. I’d just have to copy the photos to my laptop and then transfer over it to the external HDD. All the photos took around 1GiB, thanks to each photo taking a whopping 6MiB. For comparison my phone only takes ~3MiB for each photo encoded in heic.
Now it’s Google Photos export. I just went to the settings in the Photos website and scrolled down to the section about data export. Following the process to create a data download. Originally I wanted to just have one archive to download, so I selected to have it be 50GiB size for the zip files. Unfortunately it failed, even when I selected it to be in tgz format. Guess I have to download several 2GiB zip files and unzip them separately.
Downloading and exporting it is just time consuming really. Other than pressing the download button 10 times it’s just waiting for the download and unzip those 10 files at once. All in all the export was around 20GiB (half of it was when Google Photos still offered free storage. Ah the bliss).
Then comes sorting the albums in the takeout with the ones in the camera. This is actually less hassle, as the export from Google Photos already separates the pictures into folders. All that I had to do on my end was copy and paste the folders into place. Well that and renaming the folders, I don’t like having spaces in my folder names :P
Oh yeah there’s also photos from my phone. For that one I transfer it to it’s own folder on the HDD and defer organising it to future me. How to transfer it is simpler than my camera. So when you connect your (Android) phone to your laptop you are given 3 options, one of which is to mount photos via MTP (which stands for Media Transfer Protocol). This means that your phone will only expose the photos. One ctrl-a ctrl-c ctrl-v later, and I have transferred all of the photos.
It’s nearing midnight as I’m finishing this blog post, and I would like to say that I have done all the transfers needed to my external HDD. It currently sits around 34.3GiB. Quite the storage, though somehow it feels less than other people’s. I’m not the type to take a pic of everything, so even on my phone, pictures aren’t taking most of my storage hostage. Maybe I should take more pictures now that I freed my storage somewhat.
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