Kitchen hood
My family and I decided to spend the long weekend a few hours away from where we live, so we boooked a homestay (or more like an airbnb, the term is commercialised here) so that we can cook there instead of buying food outside. We came to just walk around, not really for food.
The place we booked looked pretty modern in my eyes, it was situated in a newly-ish built apartment (5 years is still new, right?). Other apartments around also seemed to be also built around the same time period. And they’re pretty tall. 30+ stories tall. I didn’t know apartments can be that high, the tallest apartment I know at my hometown is 16 stories tall (we also have apartments where I live, but I never bothered to look up how high those are. they’re probably higher…).
The place is not big if I’m comparing it with a landed house, it’s a studio room. It’s practically a large living room and kitchen in one big room and a bathroom… that’s next to the kitchen (the bathroom in particular is big. like twice the size the bathroom we have at home. why?). I know back in my uni people who are well off rent this sorts of room. I can see the appeal if it’s compared with a dorm…
After we checked in and put our bags, we went around and bought some food to cook for dinner. It was just sardines, eggs, instant noodles and some marinated chicken (they were 50% off. then again even the place near our home has marinated chicken at 50% off…). Going up 30+ stories each time wasn’t that big of a shock, we just have to make sure our ears don’t pop from the sudden altitude change.
We then tried to cook and immediately encountered a problem. We don’t know how to operate the kitchen hood. There was no physical buttons to press as it was just a slab of metal with the engraving of the brand in the middle. At first we thought it was integrated with the induction stove as it was from the same brand, but even if we turn the nob to max heat it won’t start the hood.
It took around 10 minutes of finding a button that I decided to check over on YouTube to find out how to operate it. Apparently, for this type of kitchen hood… you just have to pull that slab to start it. We were hysterical when we found that out. This was like the time we rented those cars which use buttons for ignition and didn’t know that we had to push the clutch to make it start XD
Modern appliances are very cryptic to understand :P
Another (small) site update, why not
The changes this time aren’t that significant like the time I switched to readable.css from my personal css. I made the contacts section in my about page more consistent. I also added Signal and Delta Chat on the list, although I still haven’t linked my actual contact yet (if you press on the link it’ll just redirect to the respective messenger’s website).
Other than that I made this website use sans-serif instead of serif for its font (for context, sans roughly means none, serif is tail, so sans-serif is the font without a tail i.e. the little things that poke out when using Times New Roman). How is a bit too technical for me to put here, but long story short I have to rebuild my blogposts in entirety to make the change. This may or may not make a lot of duplicates in the rss feed. I just want to say sorry in advance.
Rendering stylish rss feeds
I was browsing for a way to do raw rss feeds when I came across this blog post from Darek Kay about styling rss feeds. Don’t ask me why I was searching about doing rss manually, I’m still not sure on what to do if I have that knowledge. Anyway, the blog post was informative. Rather than showing raw, unstyled xml when you click on the rss link (for this blog in particular it’s https://marmar22.tilde.team/blog/feed.rss, although it’ll download the file instead of opening it in the browser. This may be due to it ending in .rss instead of .xml), it links a stylesheet of sorts where it transforms the xml to html and css that your browser can display (at least, that’s how I understand after reading it).
However, I tried opening one of the example rss feeds such as https://darekkay.com/atom.xml in Firefox and it put out an error (in particular it’s Error loading stylesheet: An unknown error has occurred (80004004) followed by the link to the stylesheet in red). This happened with all other examples listed, so I thought it was just broken at some point until I decided to open it in Chromium and it worked like a charm. Huh, I didn’t think this was that obscure of a functionality to only be on Chromium and not on Firefox. It’s only a linked stylesheet right?
Fortunately, it doesn’t seem to be a problem on Firefox’s side this time. What happened was that NoScript, which I have as an extension on Firefox is interfering with the stylesheet loading. I didn’t realise it at the time as the NoScript applet didn’t show a number (which is an indicator on how many scripts have been blocked from executing). However, when I clicked on the applet, it showed an error (In order to operate on this tab, NoScript needs to reload it. Proceed?). Okay… was this something that NoScript wasn’t tested against? I’m not particularly sure…
I guess that’s all. Seems like this went to a tech rant halfway in. Oops :P
Scrolling
I don’t know if this is a common issue, but all the mice I’ve used had their scroll wheel broken. I didn’t use them aggressively, probably often, but certainly less than what I would expect to make it break. I don’t have expensive mice, just the normal office ones, so it’s not that bad for me, but still.
Now that doesn’t mean I want to buy another mouse. Only the scroll wheel doesn’t work. All the other buttons work (so like, left and right click? It’s not a gaming mouse). It’s just that I have to use different methods to scroll through websites and apps.
Fortunately, there are several ways to do it. The most straightforward is using the scrollbar on the left. It shouldn’t be that much of a nuisance if the scrollbar were how it was a decade ago. For context, back then, scrollbars took a dedicated space beside the webpage, and it stayed there in perpetuity (except if the page isn’t scrollable). Nowadays, it’s barely visible and hides itself if you don’t have your cursor near it. It’s not unusable, but it’s still a pretty bad experience. It’s especially atrocious to encounter websites with bright and colourful backgrounds that I can barely make out the scroll wheel on (not the website’s fault).
There are also other methods, such as using the spacebar. However, for that, you have to click on certain regions for it to scroll, as the spacebar also functions as selecting or ticking a checkbox when being focused on those elements. Also, it’s not as universal, as sites like YouTube would override it to function as a pause button. That leaves the last method I know of, which is the PageUp and PageDown buttons. I admit, I don’t see the purpose of these buttons except what the name implies, to go up or down a page. I haven’t found a website that overrides these buttons, though you do need to click on the place you want to scroll in the case that there are multiple scrollable elements in a webpage (why).
It makes me glad that I don’t really have to go out of my way to buy a new mouse or go and try to fix it, even though the other methods take a while to get used to. I guess this is what some people say about how accessibility helps everyone.
Memory of a particular highway coner
Trigger warning: abandonment (this is in regards about an inanimate object in fiction later on. just thought this might be warranted for some people (yes, it’s still related to the corner, trust me))
There’s a highway corner that I drive through every few months, mostly because of a shopping mall nearby that my family likes to go to. It’s just a normal highway corner. There’s an overpass over it, and there might be a slight angle as most corners do, but nothing too significant will ever be observed by others.
For one reason or another, that corner brings back memories. It’s in the back of my head whenever I have to write a story. I still remember it vividly during third grade, when we were first taught how to write an essay. Typically at this stage the essays are just about inanimate objects, i.e., I am a bottle. We could pick anything that we liked, and I decided on a bike, probably due to the fact that my family just purchased one around the same time.
The essay is just what you expect from a third grader; it starts out with how the bike felt when it was bought and used, but I ended it in a tragic way (it’s inanimate, how could it have emotions). The bike was going too fast on a corner and had a pretty bad crash at the fast food chain near that corner, bad enough that it was discarded right after. Try to guess what corner third grade me imagined while writing that scene. You guessed it, that same damn corner.
The thing is, that particular corner didn’t have a fast food chain near it back then (there’s still isn’t one even now). I cannot shake the feeling that there’s supposed to be one. I’m not sure whether it’s deja vu or what, but it just feels right to me. That’s the only thing I can think of when I see that corner.
(I’m supposed to be asleep one and a half hours before writing this. I don’t know why my brain thought of writing this rather than going to sleep TT)
tags: blog
Just a quick update
If you paid attention to this blog before, then you’d realise that there was a blog post that was unfortunately deleted, partly due to the shenanigans I’ve done yesterday to spice up the blog page (just made the footer consistent with the rest of the website, no really). Not sure whether I’d re-release it in the future, it’s just about why I made my bluesky account, and there’s probably a lot that I have to update and check if I want to release it again.
Other than that, I’ve actually made a freshrss account over on private.coffee (shoutout to them) and migrated my feeds over from the app I use on the phone (I was using Capy Reader, it can also use freshrss, so that’s neat). It’s mostly done, though there are a few feeds that can’t be parsed when I imported my opml. I don’t read much on the ones that failed, so I just thought of it as spring cleaning. I’d probably want to reorganise my feed further on a later date.
So I guess that’s it. Oh yeah, I forgot. I have a blogpost in the drafts about a book festival I went to last week, but that might take a while as I’m barely halfway through what I wrote down after the trip (and that’s not to mention the proofreading). Anyways, I have a test in less than 3 hours that I still haven’t started studying for, and I would like to at least go through the slides to make sure I’m not completely screwed :P
Tried out decaf
We were just going out for some fresh air from the constant traffic and my parents decided to have a little bit of coffee, which I reluctantly also go and order. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I dislike it, it’s just that I’m a bit wary of my caffeine intake. I’ve tried one of those coffee energy drinks once a few weeks ago, and I couldn’t sleep properly for 2 days due to that. Not the best experience by far.
Everything is loud
!! This is the first in a series of blogposts that I’ve written on bearblog, I’m gonna retire that blog after finishing the migration of posts to here !!
So I’ve been noticing a thing recently in my life, every sound is loud. Not in the way that it hurts my ears kind of loud, but more so that it is loud enough to drown other sounds. If it’s the middle of the night, with barely any other noise than the fan creaking, a microwave or an alarm would be glaringly obvious to me. If I watch a video early in the morning or talk with someone in a quiet place, it would be very clear to me on what they’re talking about.
So I changed this website a bit
Hello again, it’s not really a long time since the last blog post, and I’ve been up to something. I finally had motivation to clean up my website and create a fresh new look for it!
Admittedly, the css is kinda copied from somewhere (design is not my passion). I’ve taken things from readable.css (and by taken, I mean using it without modifications), but I would like to change a few aspects once I have the mental energy to edit the website again. For now at least everything looks consistent (if you would be so kind not to point out that the title for the blog is under the navbar compared to the root website).
Oh, and that means I can use this blog instead of bearblog huh. I mean there’s more freedom here on what I can do, at the cost of managing posts from the command line. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not /bad/ per se, it’s just that for this place I would need to have the ssh keys on the device that I would want to edit or create a post. Would probably need to setup that now that I’m actually motivated to do this.
And if you’re wondering, yes, yes I’m procrastinating on my assignments with this :P
Edit 4th Jun 2025: Changed the title for this website because it invalidated the rss feed
Originally posted on 9th May 2025
It has been a while
Hello, I’ve not really been active on this place it seems like. Life happened and stuff; and this place became an afterthought apparently, like so many things. Been well, just tired of all the news and stuff.
Currently in a middle of a hectic semester with delays and stuff. Doesn’t necessarily mean I’m busy all the time; it’s just that I don’t have as good as a skill in time management than I thought I was. Daily traffic probably doesn’t help the cause.
This blog post has been drafted in several places actually. The initial draft was done last week on a standing desk outside of the lecture halls. It was actually quite nice, there was a lot of air circulation around there. The second half, i.e. the polishing is done near the library (not in, there’s a dedicated place outside of the library with desks and chairs that’s open 24/7). It’s crowded by comparison. I’m pretty sure there’s no air circulation here, my mind’s been really slumping being here for extended periods of time, but it has pretty comfortable chairs, so I’m a bit reluctant to change places (the standing desks have chairs, though it’s pretty uncomfortable sitting for long periods of time for me).
Originally, I’ve had a draft for a light novel review that I wanted to put at the end of this blogpost as it’s nothing to write home about in terms of length, but I feel like it doesn’t really sit with me to put it here now that I’m proofreading it. Oh well, guess it’ll be in a different blogpost if I can manage myself to write it. Don’t expect anything too grande from that review, I just wanted to update on some stuff I had been doing instead of studying and stuff. That’s all…
Edit 4th June 2025: changed title because quotes would invalidate the rss feed :P
22nd April 2025