Test post on pictures
This isn’t going to be a long blog post but something more technical. I want to check whether I can center a picture in this blog since the previous one had it left alighned.
This should in theory display a picture and caption.
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Tried a cold brew today
Lectures start late today, and I decided to go have a cup of coffee. Not because I was feeling it, but because there’s a voucher for a free drink. The selection for the free drink isn’t a lot, but my eyes stopped at ‘cold brew latte’.
I know the basics of cold brew, it uses cold water instead of hot for extracting the coffee. A lot of people say that the method makes the coffee sweeter, and considering it’s free anyway, I ordered it. Since I’m ordering in the morning, I did not ask for decaf.
The coffee itself tastes nice. I’m not that much of a coffee drinker, so I couldn’t really taste the sweetness people preached about. If anything else, I thought I was drinking normal iced latte. Guess the drink was wasted on me :P
I’ll probably won’t be ordering this for some time. Just gonna stick with good old tap water.
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Got a new thermometer
So funny thing, I caved in to consumerism and decided to buy a thermometer. Not the basic kind, the one with humidity as well.
I’ve been eyeing for this type of thermometer for a while already. Where I live the humidity is constantly high, but I remember hearing that an air conditioner reduces the temperature as well as the humidity, and I’m curious by how much. Also my room has been too humid (humid is not the word I really want to use. there’s a word in my native language for this, but humid is close enough. just imagine it’s the hot variant) to the point that I’m having headaches if I stay in there for too long at any one time. I want to see how the temperature and humidity is at that time, as the temperature seems to be constantly above 30C. Pictured below is a close approximation to what I bought.
Hopefully I did my markdown correctly and the image loads, if not the alt text should suffice. Anyways, I inserted the battery (that came with it) and hey presto, it sprang to life! The humidity updated pretty quickly, though that’s probably because I moved it around the house and went through an air conditioned living room. It hovers around 70% humidity (don’t know if it’s high in comparison to other places).
I tried to do somewhat of a test in my room to compare the humidity and temperature without and with air conditioning (at night as of now, I have to wait until the weekends until I can check for morning). Before I turned on the air conditioner, it settled around 32C with a humidity of 71%. After letting the air conditioner to do its course it went down to 26C with a humidity of 44%. Honestly I didn’t anticipate the humidity would drop by that much (I thought it’ll only go down to 55% at most), so that’s a surprise.
So yeah that’s all that I think I’ll write for today. It’s pretty nice seeing these sorts of metrics. I wouldn’t have imagined these type of stuff was viable at a cheap price point the past few years. No wonder people buy a lot of stuff online :P
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My water bottle
I have had multiple water bottles throughout my life. Most of them were Tupperware. My family was the kind to hoard it around. It’s a reputable brand, and its build quality is high. We rarely had any faulty Tupperware (my grandparents had Tupperware, and we at one point recovered a container that’s produced 30 years ago, and it’s still air tight!).
My current water bottle is also a Tupperware. It’s a blue Eco+ Bottle (it’s pretty popular here) and it holds approximately one (1) litre of water. It is slightly wider than what can fit in a normal cup holder, so I have to hold it or use a water bottle bag if I want to bring it along with me (fortunately, my laptop bag have bigger bottle holders than usual, so I thankfully don’t have to hold it when I bring my laptop). There are signs of wear on my bottle, mostly from me not taking care much of it. A fall here, a fall there, even a story tall, it went through all my carelessness.
I in particular like this water bottle more than all the previous ones. I don’t particularly know whether the engineers at Tupperware were onto something, but for some reason this water bottle makes the perfect chilled water. Like imagine a cup of water that’s been left overnight and drinking it at 3am. That chilled water. All that’s needed from this water bottle to recreate it is ample airflow, and it’ll gladly make it in an hour. I’m almost certain they put a magic spell on this line of water bottles!
For all the time I don’t think about it, I appreciate this water bottle of mine. It reminds me to drink every so often. Saves me time from always going to the kitchen to have a cup of water. I feel safe around it. And I would not have it any other way.
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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