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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Weird eggs we bought
Our family bought some eggs recently, but those eggs were not the best batch we bought. We usually buy eggs in cardboard cartons at the supermarket, but it was sold out when we went there. There are still C- and D-grade eggs, but those are too small. So we go to the more expensive aisle and buy those eggs in plastic cartons. I’m assuming the plastic carton exudes a type of luxury, but eh we just bought enough to last our next visit. Shouldn’t be that bad, right?
Well apparently we tried frying those eggs, and it was very explosive. The pan and the spatula were dry, so the only thing left that could make the oil splash was the egg itself. Does it have a higher percentage of water compared to normal eggs? What do people even do with these eggs to not realise this? I could only guess.
Okay, so frying them is out of the question. How about making half-boiled eggs with them? Tried it; it was good, just that it’ll probably be too much preparing the eggs. You see, the eggs are stamped with ink, and my family doesn’t want that ink to seep into the eggs as it’s being boiled. We can see the cancer risk rise just by thinking about it. It’ll take a while to remove the ink, as it has been absorbed by the egg’s pore.
The only thing I can think of using these eggs in is soup. It’s not going to explode from hot oil, and there won’t be the fear of the ink seeping into the egg. There’s only one problem: my family doesn’t make soup regularly. Probably once every two months, but nothing more than that. Quite a shame; guess we just have to wash the eggs thoroughly to make them into half-boiled eggs.
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Organising my notes
Note: This seems to have gotten a bit too tech centric again…
So it comes to a point in everyone’s life where they found about a thing called a second brain either from YouTube or word of mouth. It involves getting a notes app, preferably Obsidian or Logseq, and try to create notes the Zettelkasten way (or something similar) which creates a very fancy graph that some people share on social media [1].
Now it’s not like I don’t understand the appeal of it. Like most people who have been exposed to this, I tried dabling in Obsidian and Logseq to make a second brain that works for me. I tried using it on an off, but it never really clicked each time. Not saying that it doesn’t work for everyone, it’s just that I specifically cannot work with that mental model. It took me quite a few years to find a note taking method that works for me, which involves Emacs with Org mode.
For anyone who doesn’t know, Emacs is a text editor, kinda like notepad, but is extensible by programming in a language called elisp. Org mode on the other hand is a type of markdown language, like markdown with ways to style and format the contents inside of it. Although org-mode has a unique syntax, it is arguably more featureful than markdown in a lot of ways. There are a few applications that support Org mode, but a lot of Org mode functionality can only be accessed by using emacs.
For context here, I use emacs as my go to editor when I want to do programming or just edit a text file. I’ve been using it for a year or so, so I’ve been quite comfortable in using it (though I only learned the basics for navigation and saving files). I know text editors aren’t something that people look out in a note taking app/workflow, but for me it’s something personal. Something about my identity. This is probably why there are a lot of
What I would do is that whenever I am doing something that I know I want to reference later and it’s hard for me to find the information in the first place (for me it was on how to flash a USB drive) and write down just the answer or a simplified flow to do it. Most of it is tech related stuff. How to configure Linux, Firefox, tar. How to diagnose Windows installations. Not everyday things I have to do, but it would take me longer than I would like to admit to search and find the answer for, considering the landscape of search engines in the past few years.
If the file becomes too big (too much scrolling for example, I’m okay with a bit), then I would split it up and put it all in a folder by theme. This hasn’t happened yet as I don’t take that much notes now, although I already made folder in advance because it’s notes from a specific website.
As you might have guessed, this is pretty simple compared to how other people would describe their note taking process elsewhere. Instead of Org mode and emacs using markdown and notepad might be more effective for some. I don’t know everyone needs to find their own note taking method that works for them. There is always something simpler, notably paper and pen, but I have a problem of misplacing the paper each time, so yeah.
Originally I wanted to put a list of files and folders I have using the tree command down here. Unfortunately when I previewed the posts it shows that my setup doesn’t support codeblocks. Then again, I guess putting up my file list does constitute as showing off.
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[1]: Here I wanted to highlight how influencers and YouTubers always show those very complex graphs, though I suppose it came out as a bit negative here. Appologies for that.
tags: blog, lifestyle, note-taking
Average
The week’s going pretty fast. Lectures just ended last week, so I only have some presentations and tests remaining before my short semester break. Though it doesn’t feel like it. I’m at the point where I am contemplating on how to use the time. Use it more efficiently, upskill yourself, read some (educational) books. All those thoughts rush to my brain on how to use my time. Every semester break. And every semester break I seem to not be able to follow what I set myself up to do.
There are some semester breaks that are more filled than others. A few of my semester breaks were solely dedicated to reading light novels. Like literally. I would read an average of one light novel a day for weeks on end. Though my reading speed is probably around average, as I spend most of my waking time dedicated to reading. If I don’t need to focus on something without distractions (say for example, driving), you can bet I was reading.
I know learning to speed read would make me enjoy more books at a faster rate, but I don’t feel like motivating myself in picking up that skill. It’s the same with my typing speed. I learned touch typing after I finished high school, but I only practiced until I got a speed of ~40wpm. I could do better, faster with practice, but I don’t see why in increasing my typing speed. I mean, it does increase, albeit slowly. Currently it’s between 50 and 60wpm, quite okay, but not blazing fast speed.
Most of my life is like that, I can pick up a skill if I put earnest attention to it, and sometimes I would appreciate doing it deliberately; but it doesn’t translate to me mastering it. I don’t have the drive to go beyond acceptable in my eyes. Why master some craft, which would entail years or even decades of one’s life, when doing mediocre is enough to get by. It’s probably that I don’t see something that I would enjoy mastering instead of doing, but I don’t know how to proceed from here.
This website is evidence of that. I write serviceable html and css to present this website in a good manner without anything fancy. I wanted to have multiple columns, fancy animations or a background image, but every time I attempt to do it I give up halfway from the lack of enjoyment of implementing it. The css isn’t mine, it’s technically a framework, though I do change the colour scheme for some personality. I don’t use fancy static site generators, the only thing automated are the blog posts using bashblog, which some people still use but has stopped updating years ago (why would I setup something else when it still works). I have to manually copy pictures that I want to display in my photoroll using scp instead of figuring out a CMS setup to do it seamlessly.
Sure, there’s some extra goodies that doesn’t make it the bare minimum. I setup a favicon so that my website stands out in the tab bar, there’s opengraph on most websites so it’ll look pretty nice if I share my website somewhere else (as far as I understand it, bashblog uses twitter’s opengraph style, so it may look different), there’s rss for what it’s worth. Though those do less compared to changing the layout of my website in other ways.
I probably won’t pick it up unless it comes out of necessity, like how most people function nowadays. There’s so much that can be done, explored and mastered, but that means that I have to manage my time, and I’m bad at doing that. Maybe I have to start with that than other things.
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Hidden time
My family and I were getting lunch at a cafe. Partly because my father had those free discount vouchers on hand. It’s pretty good, sans that you can only order coffee with it, but they offer decaf, that should compensate drinking coffee in the evening somewhat. They didn’t have decaf. I’m probably staying up late today (this was written a few weeks back, but I don’t want to delete this…).
I have bad time management. Like if someone says to meet up in an hour, I won’t be able to allocate the time to get ready and be there on time. Sometimes the place is only the faculty next door, and technically, I would have time to do other stuff and get there on time, but I always for some reason not do anything and still be late.
I’m not sure whether this is just me mindlessly scrolling on social media (yes), having the immediate urge to read a long technical blogpost in its entirety (yes) or just spacing out (also yes). My mind seems to perceive time either on slow mode when I am not doing anything or super fast when I am doing something. I couldn’t even time my walks. Sometimes it’ll only take 5 minutes, sometimes it’ll somehow take 15, and I would wonder how am I walking a three times slower than previous walks.
Driving is also a problem. I mean the traffic is random in my eyes, but I seem to not be able to be in the car when I want to start driving. Yes, I’m the friend who only starts getting ready when I’m supposed to be there, how can you tell?
In all seriousness it’s not that bad. I’ll only be late by 10 to 15 minutes most days, and I usually inform my friends ahead of time if I am going to be late for the meeting or lectures (for some reason I know I’m gonna be late way beforehand). I do have a conscience, however slim it may be.
I should change this habit (or behaviour? not sure what to call this really), though I’m not sure how. A dopamine detox? I could never get through with it. Therapy? I don’t know if that’s actually relevant here. I feel like I have to do something. I’m not sure what’s the best course of action here.
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Traffic lights
As most people, I drive to get from point A to point B. The place I am residing currently has a pretty good public transport network, though we only use it to go to the capital where it’s horror to drive and navigate the branching expressways. There’s also other factors that contribute me to use a car instead of public transport to move around, though that’s a story for a different day.
There are approximately 5 traffic lights between my home and university. It doesn’t seem that far for some, but for me the traffic lights are an unknown variable once in a while. Sometimes they change the timing of the green lights so it only has time to let two cars go before changing to red, effectively halting traffic for a few kilometres, sometimes the traffic light was just broken, probably from a car or truck hitting it.
Sometimes it has those countdowns with it. Normally it’s the normal countdown led (fancier is the countdown on the light itself), but there’s one junction I go through that has lcd displays on it. I’m not sure whether they had budget to burn through or thought it would make a good ad space. The only thing other than a countdown displayed are reminders to drive safely.
Of course this lcd display is prone to breakdown. I mean at least it’s graceful, the traffic light still works, but it was annoying that I can’t rely on the countdown being there. By now I remember the pattern of the lights, so the countdown now is just something that I look forward every once in a while.
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Charging my phone
I’m the type who always forgets to charge their phone. It’s not to the point that I go out with 5% left, but it won’t really last the day. Yes, I do bring my charger everytime I go out because of my carelessness, but finding a power plug outside is a trouble in of itself. Not to mention that I would have to stay there for around 10 minutes for it to charge a decent amount (my phone has those quick charge features, though it’s only rated for 15W. fast, but not lightning fast). Turning on ultra battery saver helps a ton, but that could only get me so far with 10% left.
The situation at home is less of a problem because I can plug my phone in anytime, but 1. I always left it to charge for 4+ hours at a time because I took a nap and 2. it runs hot when it’s quick charging. I remember reading somewhere that charging while the device is hot leads to higher battery degradation (I don’t have a source for that), so I would like to avoid that. My battery’s only holding 80% of charge after 3+ years of continuous use. Not sure whether that’s good or bad, but it’s getting to the point where I have barely enough battery for the day without resorting to ultra battery saver.
So I decided to do something at home. I used a charger adapter that came with an old Samsung phone my family had bought more than a decade ago (those things last, the fast charging head we received with newer phones only last for around 2 years) and a usb-c cable (that supports fast charging, there’s no normal usb-c cable in the house). It charges at just a normal rate, like phones of the prior decade, but on the plus side I don’t have to worry about my phone overheating. Well, unless I decided to play a heavy game while charging. The battery on this phone is quite big (4520 mAh) so it takes a good few hours for it to fully charge.
Using it is quite nice as I would plug my phone in and do my work on my laptop. By the time I finish my work or I’m eating, the phone has been charged a decent amount. It doesn’t really work if I have to go out early in the morning as it can only charge by 5% the most, but 5% is 5%. Also I don’t have to bring out the charger I always bring with me at home to charge, so it’s less likely I’m going to forget bringing it :P
There are some days where I forget to charge it at home and leave with less than 20% left, but those days are fewer and far between.
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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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