It’s been a good while since I wrote about the baby steps of my very slow transition to as much open source as I can manage. quick recap early twenteens: apparently (I searched my own blog XD) I was using linux on a small rig (laptop, the desktop is the “big rig”), and apparently it was Ubuntu/Kubuntu or some other derivative and I had a lot of problems with it (mostly because I wanted updates faster than I was getting them and getting what I wanted broke things) and went to Ubuntu Studio which was less of a problem enough to make a difference but still a problem 2016: acquired the big rig (fondly referred to as “the frankenbox”) with its current case and original parts, installed Ubuntu Studio, problems persisted 2017: so many problems that I fully cracked it after yet another dist-upgrade explosion requiring a reinstall, an online friend recommended Manjaro (and stayed up really late for him to make sure I got through the install process fine) mid-late twenteens: started using ownCloud, and at some point after that switched to Nextcloud (purely on principle as I wasn’t sure I liked the direction ownCloud was going, it still functioned fine at the time) late twenteens: broke away from the open source trend briefly with the acquisition of my current iPhone (reasonably certain I was replacing an Android which was doing my head in, I apparently hate Android a lot more than iOS) and much later a Macbook Air (both phones and Manjaro or the photo apps I was trying refused to play nice and my media was infinitely more important than my stupid principles) 2020: acquired a NUC and started properly self-hosting my websites (of which I’m down to just this one now) and Nextcloud 2023: the frankenbox got a lot of new hardware (basically all components except the case, drives and the gpu got replaced), switched to Arch for what ended up being no other reason than I’d mentally prepared for and committed to it (originally we thought I’d have to reinstall because Manjaro wouldn’t recognise all the new hardware but it didn’t care and just worked) the watch In much more recent history I’d told JJ I was going to have to switch away from Fitbit really soon partly because my Charge 4 was starting to die anyway (screen wouldn’t always turn back on with wrist turn or taps and then was never bright enough even if I explicitly set the brightness higher and the battery life had gotten noticably shorter but it was still going a few days between charges so that wasn’t a massive issue) and also Google had gone from being naggy (some crap about how it would somehow be so much better if you just use the Google account) to coercive (if you want to keep using this thing you have to use a Google account). J said the strap on his watch (some random cheap thing he’d gotten off ebay or something) had broken and he needed a new one too and told me to send him the one I’d been looking at.

Pulled earthy colours today so very boringly it was a plant, but at least not the one I had in mind when I pulled the pens out.

holoz0r started up a community for handwritten posts on hive and it seemed as good an attempt as any to try to post more than just my irregular progblogs. I do actually have a lot of stuff that I would like to blog about, I just don’t seem to have the time to do it in I’m deliberately doing it in my sketchbook/journal as I’m very casual with it. I’m not sure when I started stressing about blog posts but I’ve just realised that I really do consider what’s “worth” blogging about and I’m not sure when that developed.

Last Christmas, I gave you my heart we finally made it back to Christmas Island after way too long and this was one of the things sitting under the tree for me from sibling dearest who loves buying Christmas presents. The gift tag reads:

Last week was “interesting”. I found out (from deviantART via another friend of hers who found out from a mutual friend of theirs on Facebook, which is how I’d suspected for a long time I would find something like this out) that an online friend that I have been talking to almost daily for the last couple of decades had died apparently on Christmas Eve. We had been chatting the week or so before, and she had told me at some point not long before then that she suspected she was cancer-riddled and that her organs were starting to fail and she probably didn’t have long left (she suspected cancer quite a while before then but was so terrified of hospitals she chose to just die from it rather than seek treatment, and the myriad of health issues she’d had throughout her entire life probably played a part in that decision too). I don’t know what the actual cause of death was.

We apparently have to use lesson plan templates this year which has increased my admin time a little bit (I now have to translate it into the template to send to my boss instead of just exporting a pdf like I was before). This would have been fine if LibreOffice hadn’t decided that it wasn’t going to play nice with the template and I had to rebuild the damn thing so I could use it which took a bit of doing.

New hardware! I finally got a new cpu and logic board…and some unexpected new ram as J accidentally bought a logic board that required ddr5 ram instead of ddr4 which was what I had. The upside of that was I got a massive upgrade (as I asked him to double the ram when he was buying new ram and he actually did) and we accumulated enough parts to put together a machine from the leftover parts for middle child.

As requested by @dreemit who assures me that WednesdayWalk just has to be posted on Wednesday and doesn’t necessarily have to occur on Wednesday. As luck would have it, we actually went on a nice walkies on the correct day. And I’m a day late for me because shenanigans happened but I have the advantage of being on the side of the world where a day late makes it on time for the other side of the world? Aargh shenanigans. It didn’t start out that way. I had taken Little Miss Puppy to my aunty’s place (having not been to see my aunty and grandmother for a couple of months because covid and colds and grandmother gets pneumonia so we don’t go there if anyone is sick just in case) and she had played forever with my aunty’s dog and been pretty knackered when we got back, so J had decided maybe we should just take her for a short stroll around the block (he also wanted his walkies).

I wonder if my hive crew have been missing my incessantly nonsensical comments or if they’re enjoying the serenity. As I mentioned at the end of the last progblog I wrote two weeks ago (x_x), I finally managed to pick up a cute laptop (I’m so used to getting the highest spec’d things that getting something practically off the shelf and only upgrading storage feels so weird and wrong) and get back into the overpriced (I’m now broke for the next 6 years) and very…um…“special” Apple ecosystem that I have this love/hate relationship with (love it because it’s the one that gives me the least problems and I find their devices fun to use, and hate it because it is so very overpriced and some things make me -_-).

After an epic two day battle with my phone and my computer, I am now able to show off my new shinies. What you’re seeing here are the purple flower that I bought from @bearone for 200 hive, an owl that she said I could have because she loves me (awww _ I did tell her I wanted to buy one when she was ready to sell them) and a candle that made me really glad I was extremely careful about unpacking the box because I had no idea it was in there. It has a really nice smell that was slightly overwhelming when I first opened the box (it was a small box and I thought she just sprayed essential oil into the box to make it nice for the recipient when they received their goods but nope bonus scented candle XD).