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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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