This is why I am still not done with the blogpost on many topics, such as my overview of 2023, or my favorite XYZ of the year. Besides, I am having a great time playing Ori And The Blind Forest on my Switch and that’s keeping me a little busy. I’ll probably finish it really soon so stay tuned for a review!
Still, I also want to go to sleep early today, hence the briefness of today’s post, its more of a notice rather than actual content so I am sorry for that.
Don’t worry, though, I am making use of the drafts feature in Jekyll to keep track of the ideas that pop into my head and also just write blogposts bit by bit over the span of a couple days, against my usual practice of just writing everything down in a single day. Some blogposts will still be written like that, and others will take some time, I’ll just try to keep it simple, and stay consistent.
This is day 4 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>However, now that I got a job and have decent money and not much to necessarily spend it on—thanks to living with my parents—I’ve felt the need to just give something more expensive to them, just because I can.
Obviously, that’s not the point at all of these times, my parents taught me that very well. However, I am grateful with my family and I just wanted to show that gratitude in a way I’ve never been able to do so before. And of course, I was faced with a huge amount of options. I don’t know if it was a YouTube Short or a full video, but I remember hearing about the “Paradox of Choice”.
Basically, if you have 3 or 4 things to choose from, you will probably take some time and pick the best product from the options you have, but once you get a thousand products that do the same thing, no matter what choice, you can’t be sure if there was something else that was better for you, which ends up leading to stress and more problems.
Whatever, I was weak, and I decided to just give them some money and let them pick the stuff they want, and we had an alright shopping day, we are all adults anyway.
Right when I was going to publish this as is, I remembered one time my parents just gave me a spinning top for christmas, it wasn’t expensive or even good quality. Maybe it wasn’t actually a christmas gift and something they got for me on a whim some other day. But I remember being so happy because of it, and trying to learn how to get it spinning all the time. I was happy with something that simple, and recalling that memory at this moment—it got me thinking. I didn’t even learn how to actually spin a top until months later but, I was happy.
By the way, due to the days I have left I think I’ll stick to shorter posts for now and put the “Favorite XYZ of the year” posts on hold until 2024 comes up, but I’ll still try to do one more next weekend. What will it be? Anime? Movies? Videogames? You’ll find out soon enough.
This is day 89 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>I like to read, that much is obvious, but I am not an avid reading who will go for 70 books a year or some crazy goal like that. I don’t particularly like reading self-help or non-fiction. I’ve always been into sci-fi, and recently (last year, pretty much) I realized I can read regular fiction novels, detective stories, philosophical stuff and the like. But yea, I mostly like science fiction.
Anyway, after finishing The Mote in God’s Eye I realized I can actually read for longer than I would’ve thought, which was great to know since I was always a little afraid of starting big books and never finishing them. I actually didn’t even check how many pages there were until I was like 200 pages in, so maybe I should simply avoid looking.
I mostly like to read in digital format, I am looking into getting an ink reader, but I am still not so sure about it. I don’t really go to the library, but I am looking into it. With my internship I have not had time to check.
The app I use on my phone is Librera, I had already mentioned it in my what’s on my phone blogpost, it just works and it is pretty full featured. I like to change a few settings like the default theme, and I move the navigation bar to the bottom, but other than that it has pretty sane defaults, if a bit of an outdated interface and no animations.
In my laptop I don’t read very often, but when I do, I just use Foliate, I remember reading quite a bunch of 1984 on it while listening to a fantastic dramatized audiobook by Steve Parker, he made it available on YouTube and it is superb.
So, as you might guess, I really like audiobooks too. There’s some people out there who dislike them, or who like listening to them at 2x and such crazy things. I just listen at 1.15 at most. What I use for Audiobooks is just AntennaPod, while the app is focused on Podcasts, you can actually just set a local folder as a podcast. In my case I just place the audio files on a directory, alongside a cover image, and call it a day. Later I might write about how I get audiobooks and format them to my liking.
Another software I’ve tried recently is Audiobookshelf, this is a self-hosted audiobook and podcast manager, and I’ve also used it to store the audiobooks and access them via an RSS feed, I discovered all this thanks to this blogpost by Dom Corriveau.
While I like audiobooks, for some reason I have a hard time listening to them by themselves, there’s something different about typical dialogue and speech from podcasts, and the narration style used for reading books aloud. I just don’t get some words sometimes, it is how it is.
Therefore, most of the time I read and listen at the same time, I did this for Dracula, 1984, The Mote in God’s Eye and some of Sherlock Holmes’ stories. I didn’t read them 100% like this, there are times where I just read, and others where I only listen, but it has to be when walking or doing nothing. If I deviate my attention just a little bit I simply don’t understand, it is quite annoying, having a decent English level and being unable to do something like this, but life’s unfair sometimes.
I also like to read while listening to music. I find a playlist about whatever I’m reading, being something classical or futuristic, sci-fi, horror, anything. Funnily enough, I have listened to the Halo soundtrack more while reading than by playing the games at this point, it fits very well with a lot of genres somehow.
This has been post 65 of #100DaysToOffload.
]]>Anyway, it was not until two years ago, that most of my feeds were those of common tech news sites and even some YouTube channels. Back then I didn’t care much about blogging or what other people had to say, unless they were in video format, I guess.
Clearly all of that changed once I joined Fosstodon and discovered the blogging sphere. I’ve joined a webrings, some clubs, and other nerdy things like that, because why not.
Lately, I’ve added a ton of new blogs to my feed, and I came across an article by Rach Smith about the way she consumes content online. Basically, subscribe to everything and pick what to check and utterly ignore the rest.
I’ve been doing pretty much the same thing, except that my current clients don’t make it as easy, or so I thought.
Swiping to either ignore or queue up is actually kind of a cool feature that both of my mobile clients for podcasts and web feeds can do.
AntennaPod, my podcast app of choice, recently added a new Inbox screen. Which is pretty much a general feed with new episodes of all podcasts (I can also whitelist them, I believe) and just by swiping left or right, I can ignore them or add them to my queue of episodes to listen to. This is not the best for some types of podcasts, but for the news and weekly content I follow, is actually awesome.
Readrops, my RSS reader of choice on Android, has a To Read section, and its also a matter of swiping left or right, to hide an article (although I can also show read articles if I want to) or to add it to my reading list.
This is quite great, because I can now parse all feeds and categories and quickly get a general stream of articles I am actually interested on reading later. If only it didn’t have an outdated design…
Read You, a reader I’ve been watching grow and improve may become my new choice once FreshRSS support works properly. Right now they added Fever API support, but its still a bit rough around the edges.
Regardless, I think I found a better way to consume this content. So I am glad I came across that article, now its just a matter of sticking with it.
On desktop I don’t really mind having to still deal with the usual interface, since FreshRSS also has a mark as read button, even if it doesn’t hide the post immediately, I don’t mind it much. My eyes already ignore them anyways.
In the span of me starting this blog and me finishing it, I already added 4 new feeds I just discovered to my FreshRSS instance. So there’s that.
This is day 27 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>I think the reason I managed to get a good score in almost everything has to do with how I managed to get into focus mode a lot more often than in previous semesters, and of course, quite a lot of luck involved with some teachers giving good scores as long as you seemed like a dedicated student to them. As a Mechatronics Engineering student, I was quite thrilled with the classes I had this time, so here’s a quick summary of how I did on each of them!
Business Management and Business Planning were the two classes I considered to be the simplest but also the most tedious.
Management’s teacher was very active and liked to make us work a lot, she always wanted us to make a summary of every module we went through, and classes consisted of everyone sharing their thoughts on every topic. This was a nice idea but when everyone realized she only wanted us to talk but didn’t check our writings, most only looked stuff up on the moment with their phones and pretended to read from their notes when asked to speak.
We also had to do presentations, videos and essays on the matter. Everything was pretty chill and simple to be honest. If it wasn’t for other classes that were more important and demanded more of my attention. This class’s homework was quite time consuming.
I did good, because I delivered everything and wrote a bit more often than the rest, even though I would lie if I didn’t say sometimes I too was doing my homework in class while others were speaking. I ended up with a 100 regardless.
Business Planning started off as quite a complicated subject when we had to do certain calculations of things like the break-even point, utility, liquidity and other concepts that I have to admit I never managed to fully understand.
The final project was a Business Plan draft, the teacher told us we were not supposed to do something complete since “plans can always be improved” and other things like that. So my team and I pretty much made everything up. 🙃
Most classes during the first month were pretty hard, but after that it was mostly conceptual stuff and theory. We learned about loans and stuff like that. I think the most important thing I learned was that “the best way to do business is doing business with other people’s money.”
The rest of the time I was doing assignments for other classes (or origami) while listening to his talks, which he gave with passion and the best of intentions, but I couldn’t really focus on them despite my best efforts. I wish I could since there was some interesting stuff.
I think what saved me the most was the lack of exams and that I had taken notes a few times on my computer and had a good grasp of the topics he taught, so I was able to participate and stand out from others. I got a 98.
My Digital Signal Processing teacher was incredibly chill, and a little too relaxed. Sadly this meant his teaching was also incredibly boring. There were times where he wrote down a problem to solve, spent the whole class developing it and slowly but surely, he told us “this result is not what I had in my notebook, I am not sure why I got it wrong, let’s leave it for next time.”
This happened multiple times, and every time there were new concepts he introduced and only managed to confuse me more. The homework was easy enough, and he didn’t really care about exams much. The couple times he gave one he just arrived to the classroom, said: “so here are the problems, send me your solutions by the end of the day” and just left us there. I am sure I don’t need to explain why everyone got good grades on this one, I got a 100.
Even so, most of the concepts had already been explained to me in previous classes, so it was fine.
Classic Artificial Intelligence was great. But the teacher didn’t pay us any attention, many times he didn’t show up and he only laid out a problem for us to try and solve.
They were always the same problems each semester and most of the classroom (which got split in teams) had obtained the code from previous students that took the class before. I decided to do pretty much all the code myself and pretty much carried my whole team. They were in charge of doing the written reports so I had to add good comments on my code and call it a day.
Sadly I got a pretty low score (for what I wanted at least, 87 isn’t bad) at first because the reports were supposed to be in LaTeX and we thought he would not care anyways. He did. Thankfully, after sending a couple of emails and taking my participation in the Science Fair into account. He gave me a much better score of 97.
Expert Systems was also given by the same professor, and it was the same thing, we had to do everything on our own. Well, not as much, he actually showed us how to do stuff a couple times sharing his thought process while projecting his screen and coding the first problem given to us.
It was really interesting to be honest. Again I ended up programming everything and, despite still doing the reports in Word, I got a much better initial score of 90. I think the reason is that this class ended up with only two projects, because the teacher was really busy (or ignored us a little too much), so he probably went a little easier on us. Regardless, I dared to ask for more, and he complied. I ended up with a 95.
I know numbers don’t matter much, but I also really feel like I deserved a higher score. And it looks like he agreed with me, so I am happy.
Fuzzy Control was not the subject I thought would become my favorite of the semester. The teacher there knew how to teach and how to get us (or at least me) interested in his subject.
He did a full proper course, some days it was theory, others we only solved problems. Every exam was good and had a good difficulty level, the options he gave for extra points were also quite reasonable. I participated in the Science Fair because he encouraged us to try it.
Because of that I managed to get 30 extra points on top of my final score. This made it so I didn’t really need to do homework at all, which was great because the only thing I hated about the class was the very repetitive problems we had to solve, even if they were kinda relaxing, since it was just developing simple calculations.
By the end I actually got a score of 94+30, because I did great in my exams, I could have skipped doing the science fair project and gotten a good score anyway, that’s how much I loved this class, very interesting stuff.
Materials Mechanics was supposed to be a very simple class where we learned about external forces being applied to materials and structures. Compression, tension, torsion, among other concepts that I had learned semesters ago.
The teacher I had was extremely chill and pretty decent. However, everyone on that class was like 3 semesters below me, still figuring stuff out, so it looks like most of them hated the subject and didn’t even understand how to manipulate equations to calculate unknown forces and such, for some reason.
However, somehow, the teacher got changed last minute for another one. The reason remains a mystery to me, I liked the guy. The new teacher was online only, but very reasonable and chill too. I had a score of 100 until a final exam showed up.
Departmental exams are done by all the teachers giving a certain class, and while it was not hard, it carries a lot of weight in your final score. The other classes I took didn’t have this kind of exam. I got a 70, because when you measure forces you get a negative or positive value depending on your assumptions, and my initial assumptions were indeed, wrong, even if the absolute value was the right one. I ended up with a 90, its fine.
This is my best semester so far since the pandemic started, during the pandemic pretty much all my scores were higher because nobody seemed to care a lot and whatever you sent counted as a complete homework for most.
I feel quite accomplished this time around. I am actually able to graduate and get my degree based on average alone, no need to do a thesis or anything of the like.
I think I will still consider making a thesis but I am not sold on it yet, even if it would also help on my curriculum.
Anyways, until my next post. Or you know, follow me on social media if you want more of me.
]]>The products on those videos change like every month and they are always super expensive for what they are and I never really get anything out of watching them. I decided to write this either way, but at least the stuff I use ain’t crazy expensive. You’re welcome.
I have a simple bifold wallet made of cheap looking leather that I got as a gift from a friend back in like 2018. Up until then all my wallets were made of cloth, and were quite thick. I think it costed like 6 bucks or less, and it has served me quite well, even if it does not have any fancy features. I only have my ID and University ID, some coins to take the bus, a couple bills sometimes. More than enough, and its super thin too unless I have a lot of coins.
I don’t get people who get fancy metal wallets and similar, but I can’t deny some of their mechanisms or cool designs seem great, too expensive to be worth it though.
I use a degoogled Xiaomi Redmi Note 8, a 4 year old device that still runs fairly well for a low-mid range phone. I really enjoy using it still, not planning to change it at least for another year. I plan to do a What’s On My Phone kinda thing one of these days, so I’ll expand on this later.
I know you may not carry your laptop everyday, but as a Mechatronics Engineering student, having a laptop makes a lot of things easier. I have an Asus Vivobook S15, its not really that powerful, but it has proven decent enough for my use. I don’t do a lot of super complex simulations though, I only use Matlab, LabVIEW and other programs, but nothing as complex as other Engineering fields or universities.
My current earphones are the Sony WF-C500, I think they are the cheapest TWS earphones Sony has (under 100 dollars), but that does not mean they are bad, not at all. I really enjoy how they sound even if there can be some white noise when listening to quiet songs or some podcasts, I won’t die because of it.
They do not have any fancy features, no ANC, no Transparency mode, no touch controls (just physical buttons) and I am fine with that. However, I do think they may not be the best for their price, but I don’t see a reason to change and buy a different set anytime soon either way.
Currently the Casio AE-1200, also known as the World Timer, is my current choice, it got a really cool and unique look that kinda fits with everything.
Among my favorite features is its 5 alarms that I’ve found more useful than I thought, as well as their timer function which is helpful when I want to set limits to my activities or have a quick alarm for some event in a few minutes, not to mention it keeps running in the background, so I can return to the main mode and it will just beep when the time’s up. The world time is the most known feature of this device, I have a couple friends overseas and I now know the time over there with the push of a button.
In the end, the stuff I use is not really that special, but its the stuff I actually carry with me day to day. A lot of the little gadgets and things that those videos feature aren’t really something I care about, like key holders or knives. If you like camping or handy work, or you have many keys I guess they make sense. But for me this is all fine. I do have a Rubik’s cube keychain too, usually on my backpack, which is quite nice. That’s all!
]]>I had been interested on updating my Mi Band 4 for a while now, funnily enough, a YouTube review channel I actually trust finally dropped their opinion on it after like 2 months since the Mi Band 7 came out, I found a really good deal online and even convinced my dad decided to get one for himself too.
I was excited and really happy with the device, I actually shared a couple posts on Mastodon about my purchase. The Mi Band 7 is a nice product, and I don’t have any complains for the most part. During the last 3 weeks my sleep statistics were not being recorded by the app. This was annoying, but I didn’t even realize until later.
Despite my shiny new gadget, I started to feel the itch to use some of the watches I already owned. Perhaps it was nostalgia, or maybe I was influenced by the appearance of the Casio F-91W in Stranger Things’ 4th season, or maybe the new watch a friend got at work and happens to also have a small collection. Anyways, tons of factors coming into play proving my free will is only an illusion 🙃.
I have 2 analog watches that were gifted to me years ago, as well as a Casio F-108W. They were all in need of some fix, a battery replacement for the analogs, and a new strap for the Casio. I got them all working, and started to wear them again.
It was at that time that I shared the toot that started it all, and the replies got a little crazy for a bit, especially the Casio wearers among the crowd. Of course I and many others jumped on the bandwagon that still prevails after a couple weeks, funnily enough.
So, my smartband, which I bought in August, had now been relegated to staying in my backpack or pocket, still counting my steps, and to being worn at night to see if sleep tracking started working again – It actually did after an update a couple days ago, awesome!
Yesterday I finally bought a Casio F-91W for myself, and it was quite a fun story. I was planning to do it a week earlier, in a small store downtown, which is the only place where I could find it (other than online), I could not afford it at that time since I expected it to be cheaper. Funnily enough, when I asked again this time around, the seller actually gave me a lower price – reducing it by a 2 bucks.
He actually explained how the price fluctuates from time to time, although I suspect he may have recognized me from the previous week and decided to lower the price to get me to buy it. Anyways, I happily paid for it this time, since the cost now matched the one from online stores, without having to wait for it to arrive.
So, currently, I have 2 casios, 2 analog watches and a Mi Band 7, I gave my previous band to a sibling. At this point I guess I’ll start a collection of affordable watches, since thanks to some generous donations I’ll be able to get an AE-1200 this week. I think I’ll stop there for the time being, but I plan to get something for Christmas too.
I’ve also gotten a bit more conscious about my clothing and looks. I don’t really care about current fashion trends and stuff, but I’ve been trying to look a bit more presentable and I’ve even let my sisters pick some outfits for me and stuff like that. I guess I care a bit more about the impression I give to people, I am growing a beard too, which is going quite well, if I do say so myself.
The plan I have for now is to wear whatever watch I want (I am rocking my F-91W while typing all this), have my smartband with me to keep track of steps, wear it at night to keep track of sleep, rinse and repeat. I really don’t feel the need to have constant heart tracking and stuff. If I excercise, I can just wear it during those moments. I haven’t really been able to excercise constantly, I want to do it but I just don’t give myself the time for it, I still have to work a bit more to get my life in order.
]]>I decided to serve at the computing center of my campus. Since its called “social service” you are supposed to actually help on places outside school, but they also let you do this, and I took advantage of it (like most students). Its easier and they are more flexible with schedules, which I liked.
I thought I would learn some stuff, like using a CMS and post things, or at least fix a computer or two. But most of the time I am just sitting around, lending equipment, keeping a record of it, sometimes printing documents and reserving computer classrooms when a teacher needs it. There was one time where we went to install new computers in some classrooms, which was quite fun.
So, it was not what I had in mind, but at least I have a lot of free time which still fills the amount of hours I need to do, quite a lifehack! I can use this time for whatever I want, scroll my FreshRSS or Mastodon feed, read a novel or manga, design some icons, fold some origami. Its quite peaceful to be honest.
I do have some fellow classmates who also don’t have to do a lot. I am not very talkative but sometimes I am in the mood to chat and change the routine a bit. Sadly I share no hobbies with any of them, and they look at me weird when I have a terminal open on my laptop, but I can’t help it. I wonder if I should try and be more social, but I don’t drink, I would never go to their weekend parties and I don’t really get some of the gossip and topics they talk about. I guess that most of the people in here already knew its a pretty easy place to fill your required hours and chose it for that, rather than any actual interest in computers or technology.
Regardless, as I am typing this I am about to end today’s service, which was pretty average, I lent a projector for a meeting, a computer for someone’s thesis presentation and I also read a chapter of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. A very normal start of the week.
]]>This time I was on vacation so I don’t really worry much about how I’ve spent my time. I should consider doing some more productive things, but meh.
I can’t really recall any particularly interesting podcasts.
I did listened to a couple of reviews from They’re Just Movies, specifically Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness, and Lightyear, which I haven’t seen, but since I heard it ain’t that great I wanted to see their opinions anyways. Also, they just released an episode on The Thing, which is my favorite horror movie, but I didn’t listen to it in June.
Other than that I listened to a couple Darknet Diaries episodes, Hot Swaps and Hot Wallets, which were really interesting.
MKBHD’s Waveform podcast also had some great episodes, I liked the one with Tom Scott as guest, it was really interesting.
Still pretty much none, there is a reason I joined a Bookwyrm instance named Bookrastinating lol.
I started and finished The Boxer, this one is actually a manhwa (south Korean manga pretty much), like Solo Leveling, which I’ve mentioned before. As the name implies, its about boxing, but its so much more. I’ve not read a lot of sports manga, but I’ve seen those stories in movies and series all the time. This one is different, it takes the stereotypes of the genre and gives them a really unique twist. Every character is well written and has a reason to be there, and the plot is simply fantastic. I don’t want to spoil anything, if you are interesting in reading or watching anything I did during June, this is it.
I also finished Horimiya, which is pretty much the ideal Rom-com manga with characters that actually make decisions that make sense and have a realistic behavior when facing X or Y situations. That does not mean it does not have its wholesome, funny and romantic moments though, now I understand why its considered among the best of the genre, although I still have some others to read.
Also I gave Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou a read, It seems like a nice slice of life in a pretty unique kinda dystopian, yet hopeful setting. I’ve only read like 5 chapters though.
I am pretty much up to date in other manga like Kingdom, Sakamoto Days and One-Punch Man, which is going through a fantastic arc right now, you should catch up to it if you don’t wanna miss it.
I am still reading Alita, I only read a couple chapters this month though.
I finished SPY × FAMILY, it really enhanced the manga to new levels, the animation was fantastic and it was really fun watching it with my sister. It’s pretty family friendly too, which is nice.
I am also watching the 2nd season of Komi Can’t Communicate, I am at chapter 8 so far.
I watched the 4th season (Part 1) of Stranger Things, its really good, if Season 2 made you leave and Season 3 was not good enough for you, I think this one may be just enough to pull you back to Hawkins. I will be watching the second half this month, I hope the quality stays high.
I also watched Kenobi, and enjoyed it quite a lot, but there are some issues with the plot and writing. The last two episodes get real good though, if a bit fan-servicey, but that’s what I am here for!
I watched Jurassic World Dominion and it was a really fun popcorn movie where I just shut my brain off and enjoy whats happening on screen. I liked it.
Also, Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness. I really enjoyed what Sam Raimi did with the material he was given, its messy at some points but its so fresh and different that I didn’t really mind, there are some moments where I thought “they could have handled that better” and some others where I was like “How did they let him do that in a Marvel movie?”, it was really cool.
I kinda didn’t use Spotify nor my own music server. I found URL Radio on F-Droid and discovered some radios with Ambient Space music and LoFi, since I listed mostly while sleeping (with a sleep timer of course) or writing.
Alright so lets go with some facts about my phone usage.
Since I got a new laptop I didn’t install ActivityWatch yet, but its pretty much just Firefox and Vim as always.
So that was the month of June, I consumed quite a lot of content this time, I still haven’t put much time into reading books, again.
Anyways, vacations are great, I just have to find another sci-fi universe to get myself invested into, so give some recommendations if you think I might like them.
]]>So I thought it was about time I went ahead and wrote about the history of devices I’ve owned and played around with, I thought it would be fun to make a trip down memory lane…
First, what did I have before Android was even a thing? Well, I was just a kid back then, so I don’t remember specific models, but I at least know the type of phone and brands I had.
My first cellphone could not do phone calls, it was a Nokia phone that was locked down so it would only work in the US (I didn’t live in the US). It had a green monochrome screen that served me well to play simple games such as Snake and Space Impact. It was a wonderful little thing with tons of battery and fun, it resembled a classic Nokia 3310, but the up and down keys were in the middle (Kinda like the 3510, but I remember the keys being separated). I have not found a picture of it anywhere.
After that, my second device would be a Sony Ericcson, after some googling I was able to find that it was a K300i. I remember playing a Darts game on it, as well as recording a lot of videos of me practicing magic tricks, the quality was not great, but kinda decent back then. Again, I didn’t really had a SIM card, so no phone calls.
There was another phone that I really liked, because it finally had a QWERTY keyboard, it was an LG phone with a Windows Mobile OS, it was really fun. This was one of the first times I tried side-loading stuff, I realized the phone could run java apps, so I found a version of Plants vs Zombies and managed to get it running on it. It didn’t run great, but it was cool nonetheless.
Looks like LG made a ton of phones with QWERTY keyboards, so I couldn’t quite find the model I used to have. I remember its keys were all separated, instead of being like a single grid, they were all a bit spaced out, and it was quite squared, the body was not as rounded as some of the models I saw online.
When Android came out, I remember the talks about it, one of my most clear memories were a friend who thaught Android apps where pirated versions of iOS, and that’s why they were free on Android’s Marketplace and paid in the App Store.
I really defended Android back then, I remember phones like the Samsung Galaxy Ace taking over the budget market, and stuff like the Galaxy S phones growing in popularity. I also remember the Galaxy Young ripping everyone off with its terrible performance compared to its older brothers.
Back then my dad didn’t really like smartphones, and didn’t feel the need for one, and my mom had a similar sentiment. But one day we ended up at a gas station where they had an electronics store, my dad was buying a FM radio transmitter for the car. I saw some phones there, and I somehow convinced him on the spot to get a phone for mom. It was some terrible chinese knock-off that was super cheap. It ran android 2.3.5 and it kinda sucked, it was already out of date when we got it, I remember around that time learning about Nova Launcher and icons packs, and it all required Android 2.3.6 or 4.0.
It didn’t take long for my mom to give up on the touch keyboard and get another phone. The thing actually had quite a lot of buttons compared to today’s navigation gestures; along the volume and power buttons, there also was a Search, Menu, Home, Back and Overview buttons, which is kinda interesting.
I ended up getting it, and I was very happy, at least it had some things that modern phones lack, like a removable battery, a TV antenna that also worked for FM radio (without needing plugged in headphones) and an SD card slot.
I got Whatsapp, games like Flow Free, Pou, or Zombie Highway, and it was quite great. Sadly, I didn’t have a lot of storage, just updating from the Android Market to the Play Store left me with enough space for a couple other apps. So I was quite limited.
Eventually the battery inflated and I did not bother to look for a replacement it, I wasn’t even aware of stuff like that just yet.
I actually still have the box of this device, but it had another thinner box around it that contained all the information, so the actual container does not say anything.
The next phone I got was once again passed down by my mother. She got an HTC Status, also known as the HTC ChaCha, and it had a QWERTY keyboard and Android 2.3.6, still.
I really liked its interface, it looked really nice, with great animations and a skeumorphic look that rivaled Apple’s. Sadly, the horizontal screen limited the apps that worked on it, they just didn’t look right. It had a direct Facebook button, which I found quite annoying since I didn’t have an account (although I wanted one, back then). The storage was, once again, quite limited so I never really had a chance to explore too much with it. I did try a couple of launchers and icon packs tho, like Smart Launcher 3 and an icon pack called Goolors, which is not available anymore. Most other launchers were vertical only though.
It was not until the Samsung Galaxy S III mini, passed down to me by my father around 2015, that I finally got the chance to play around with root access and custom roms. I remember that I bricked it the first day I got it, I was so eager to mess with it, and I flashed the wrong recovery. Thankfully, Odin was a thing and flashing the stock rom was not hard at all. I decided to wait for a while (only a couple days, actually 😅) to try again. I eventually found out about the rom mantainer’s website of the different roms available for my device, so I stopped relying on specific YouTube tutorials.
I was very happy during this time, I tried a ton of roms, many mods of the stock samsung UI (Touchwiz), stuff like Carbon or Resurrection Remix, with versions like Android KitKat, Lollipop, up to Marshmellow and even Nougat. It was a great time.
Sadly, out of nowhere, my phone died completely, it just stopped turning on. I actually had two Galaxy S III minis, but the second one was locked down, so, again, no phone calls, it worked for a while though, until I managed to fully submerge it in water, and it ended up dying months later, the charging port was also quite messed up, so it wasn’t even charging properly already.
I ended up going back to the HTC Status for a while, with only Whatsapp, Facebook Lite and Geometry Dash installed on it, anything else would not fit, at the time I realized there was a 4.0 custom rom somewhere, but I never bothered trying it out.
It took until now to finally get a new phone, that was actually new. I had saved some money, and my dad would pay half of it, I wanted a Xiaomi Redmi 5A, codename: Riva; it was a really good phone for the price, pretty low end, but good enough for me, since I knew it had good rom support, even today I think it has some Android 12 roms available.
I remember I spent a couple months running MIUI on it, I kinda liked it to be honest, it worked just fine. However the limitations it had on background processes, and the bad support for auto-fill were a bummer. It was around this time that I started to get interested in using FOSS, and since Bitwarden, my password manager at the time, did not work properly, I decided to try out some custom roms.
Once again, I got the wrong recovery for it, I was getting some blurry lines instead of the proper interface, turns out that the recovery to install Android Pie roms or Android 10 was different, but thankfully it was a matter of running an ADB command and flashing the right thing. It did scare me though, so I waited a couple weeks until I tried again, this time I succeded and got into the world of custom roms once again.
This was the first device where I could try pretty much everything without worrying about compatibility. I only had 16 GB of storage, but I learned to live with that just fine.
Sadly, once again the charging port was starting to show its age and quality, becoming looser and faulty. If there was anything that made me want to switch phones, it would be the lack of a fingerprint scanner, and that it still used microUSB for charging, other than that it was pretty awesome, I could probably still use it today, since I kinda like the small form factor too, which is even less common today.
And finally, we arrive at my current phone, the Xiaomi Redmi Note 8, codename: ginkgo. Yet again I saved up half of the price and my dad completed it. I remember being so excited about it, since it would be the biggest step up since the S III mini. I would be having a current gen phone for the first time, even if it would be a mid-range phone, its more than enough.
I have to admit there were not a lot of new things that weren’t possible with my S III mini or my Redmi 5A, but just type C charging and updated hardware is more than enough for me, not to mention the great support for custom firmware.
Its the phone where I’ve managed to go degoogled for the longest time (if you don’t count the ocasional browser logins for Google Classroom and other school shenanigans).
I am still really happy with my current device, and I don’t see myself switching at least for another year. For the future I am looking forward to getting a Google Pixel 6A or 7A, whatever is latest when I have to change. Or I might go with another chinese phone if they still have Snapdragon chips, since they have not been in the Redmi Note series for a while, as far as I’ve seen.
There were other less important dumb phones I used too, but I didn’t see the point on mentioning them since I don’t remember their model or anything interesting I did on them.
It has been fun to write all this, I was remembering stuff on the spot and many fun memories returned to me. It was quite a wordy post this time around, vacations seem to be going quite well.
I hope more people try doing this, I got the idea from a post by Ru, so maybe you’ll be inspired too.
]]>I finally managed to properly listen to the 4th season of The Magnum Archives. This is a fantastic show with horror and suspense like no other. This season has some incredible new concepts and really intriguing statements to listen to. I am still not done yet, but its going great.
I don’t think I’ve mentioned the Trash Taste podcast before, but I really enjoy having it as background noise, the conversations these guys have are always super entertaining and fun, and the few times where they actually talk about anime and manga are really enjoyable. For some reason AntennaPod won’t load its cover though, so I struggle to find it sometimes.
I know I said I would catch up this month, but I did not, sadly. I just can’t choose what to read for some reason. But I have decided that manga counts too!
I started reading Horimiya, a fantastic rom-com manga that is considered among the best, I am at chapter 70, for now, Its finished, so I will probably end it in a couple of days.
I am caught up with Spy X Family, and anime-only enjoyers are going to have a really fun time. I am at Chapter 62
I started and caught up with Kubo Won’t Let Me be Invisible, its just so wholesome, I think its anime is airing just now, but I don’t think I’ll watch it since its super fresh, I am at chapter 109.
Btw, Komi Can’t Communicate is going through one of the funniest arcs ever so if you are not up to date with the manga, you really should.
I am up to date with the usual stuff.
I completed Kaguya-sama: Love is War in like, a day, I watched the video on it by Schaffrillas Productions months ago, and I finally decided to give it a watch. This one is so much fun and I was so sad when I realized there were only 12 episodes, thankfully, the next season is airing right now, so I will watch it once its done.
I also watched Record of Ragnarok, a more action-focused anime about a battle one on one between gods and humanity. The greatest humans agains the most powerful gods of different religions and cultures. It honestly makes no sense, but it has some fantastic animation and nerve-wracking moments, I still haven’t watched as much anime of this genre since I got into slice of life, but this one went by really quickly.
I am also watching Spy X Family and Komi-san’s 2nd season.
For some reason I still don’t finish My Dress-Up Darling.
I gave Uncharted a watch, and it was not as boring as I expected, I have not played the games though, so that might be a reason. There were definitely moments where I was thinking “I wish I could control this right now”.
I also started watching Kenobi, and I am really happy with it, but looking at the community kinda made me sick, so I will stick to watching it and keeping it all to myself, and my sister!, who is also watching it with me, which is awesome.
I have been messing around with local music players, Jellyfin and stuff and I think that I don’t really have good stats this month, but its pretty much the same as the previous one.
I had a bit of a nostalgia hit with some EDM stuff, like Middle by DJ Snake, Runaway (U & I) by Galantis and others.
I actually didn’t expect my usage to be like this, but it happens.
Desktop is mostly Firefox and Vim, so yeah.
Somehow, despite having final projects and everything, I managed to do a lot of hobbies and stuff, I folded origami, read manga and I also took the time to distro-hop, this time I went with Fedora 36, and went with KDE instead of a window manager, to change things out a bit.
I hope I read a lot more text-only books during summer, I will have a lot of free time, so I should manage to read 5 or more if I control myself.
]]>Because of this, I will place a redirect on my Fosstodon account to my new one, which is at @joel@benign.town, I will not migrate all of my followers, I did not feel like doing so, just in case.
Funnily enough, I realized that my University blocks the domain name, I have no idea why, but I can’t access it there. Honestly, it’s not the end of the world, since I shouldn’t use social media when I’m supposed to be learning.
In other news, I just realized that my semester is ending a lot sooner than I expected, but I still have hope that I’ll be able to finish all of my homework and final projects. I have to be honest, I am pretty far behind in a couple of assignments that had no set due date, and a fair amount of those have accumulated. I need to get going and finish all of them, pretty much in less than two weeks.
This will be my last post in Fosstodon for the time being, so if you would like to keep following me make sure to go to my current account.
Also I kinda wanted to add some pictures to my feed, I know its bloated, but its my bloat. Time is running out.
]]>Interestingly, while COVID seems to not have vanished just yet, pretty much nobody wore a mask, but my whole family was already vaccinated, as well as many of the guests. I can’t confirm that everyone was, but thankfully, we didn’t hear any bad news from anyone, thankfully. It was a great time, but very tiring for me and my dad who had to arrange everything. Some friends came over to help make the food, the cake and decorations, it was nice.
So, with that little catch up out of the way, this is how I spent most of my time this month.
This time my favorite podcast of the month was Episode 168 of Criminal: The Magpie.
Also I finally gave a fair chance to Reply All, a pretty famous podcast that I hadn’t gotten into until now, with episode 184, Alex Goldman, Demon Hunter.
Finally, I really got into Season 8 of Command Line Heroes, which focuses on Robots and what they are, focusing on a different aspect each episode.
I only managed to finish the Arc of a Scythe trilogy, with the Toll being the only one missing, it was pretty long compared to the last two, and it had a pretty solid ending, I don’t really know how I feel about it since there were some decisions and events that were a little forced. Overall, I really enjoyed it.
Because of the events that happened during vacation time and other hobbies that took over, I didn’t read anything else, other than manga.
I caught up to chapter 14 of Alita: Battle Angel.
Caught up to Komi Can’t Communicate, Sakamoto Days, One Punch Man and the like.
I also started Spy X Family and I am at chapter 17, its super fun and not what I expected at all, super wholesome, I will definitely watch the anime.
I completed Kill la Kill, its quite weird but I have to say its the kinda thing that only japanese media can pull off, I enjoyed it. I also watched the OVA episode.
I watched up until episode 7 of My Dress-Up Darling, pretty fun, It makes me laugh a lot and its pretty faithful to the manga so far.
I also watched the first episode of Attack on Titan’s Final Season: Part 2, it was cool and all, but then I kinda forgot to keep up. I will watch some more episodes during May.
Finally, I started episode 1 of Cowboy Bebop, it was a really strong start, the animation was really good, especially those fight scenes, It really hooked me up.
I watched Free Guy, it was quite a funny movie, much better than I expected! Some NPC develops a consiousness and the story goes from there.
I also rewatched Spiderman: No Way Home, and I still really liked it.
This time there were quite a lot of changes, because I managed to improve on things that were a bit troublesome in previous months, but because Elon Musk and the migration of users, I spent more time than expected on Mastodon.
Most of my desktop usage was still tracked but its mostly Firefox, this time I spent a lot of time in different mastodon networks, I am now part of a newly born instance named Benign.Town, so if you wanna join, we got space!
This is the first time I have this section, since I had not had time to finish any games the previous months.
I played Metroid: Samus Returns, it took less than 12 hours and I made a review about it
So, that was pretty much it, not too much to add this time around, I have quite a bit of homework to finish as always, have a good day folks.
]]>Just like 30 days ago, I will take a look at some of my media consumption and device usage and divide it into categories, and I will also talk about how I felt about it.
Nothing too different this time, I listened to the regular Darknet Diaries and Late Night Linux episodes of the month, which were actually quite great.
A notable mention should go to Tech Over Tea’s episode 108, I don’t listen to it that often , but I did so this time.
My highlight would go to Already Gone and its episode, The disappearance of Cari Farver, one of the weirdest true crime stories I’ve heard in a while. I tend to sleep while listening to these, but I just couldn’t with this one until I finished it completely.
Last month I had mentioned that I wanted to start reading more books, I had read a ton of manga, but I kinda didn’t wanna count them as proper books, still, while I gained a lot of respect for manga lately, I will still differentiate them a bit just for the sake of it.
The Stranger, by Albert Camus: a philosophical novel with a protagonist who kinda doesn’t care about anything, but everything he does ends up being quite important for his future. Its a short read, but really interesting, I think the author won a Nobel prize so there’s that. I found myself identifying more with the main character than I thought, I kinda hated that, but I guess you tend to dislike the features of people that remind you of yourself the most.
Scythe, The Thunderhead, by Neal Shusterman: This is a trilogy, and I am currently reading the last part. Its a sci-fi novel about a future where humanity achieved immortality, and its governed by a a benevolent (and, so far, actually good) artificial intelligence that makes sure humanity lives on an actually happy and good life, despite how meaningless it has become for new generations that don’t know what mortality feels like. However, the matters of life and death are outside the Thunderhead’s jurisdiction, and in hands of the scythes, humans chosen with the right to kill (a.k.a. glean), permanently, too keep population in check. The story revolves around two scythe apprentices, their adventures and struggles. It’s a really awesome read that will probably be turned into a movie at some point.
Dracula, by Bram Stroker: I had never given classic horror a go before, but this one was a pleasant surprise. The original Dracula story was something I thought I knew, elements like Dracula’s castle and the power possessed by that monster make an appearance here, but despite what you might expect of the original vampire, the book is still filled with great characters and moments that were truly nerve-wracking. I couldn’t help but read faster and faster at times where the tension raised up, hoping for it to end when it was only getting worse. But its not all bad, there is always hope, and the determination of the characters to defend their loved ones and the future of humanity from the reign of the un-dead, is just great, but a few moments of old English were a little hard to read. I listened to different audiobooks while reading, which was quite atmospheric too.
I didn’t make the time to script anything to get this data via the API, but here is my manually obtained data.
Other than that, I pretty much kept up to date with other series I’ve mentioned before.
I didn’t really watch a lot this time, I only watched the first episode of My Dress-Up Darling, which is pretty much like the manga with overkill animation, and I watched until chapter 21 of Kill La Kill, which keeps getting weirder and weirder while somehow having epic moments in between.
I watched a couple movies this month.
Edge of Tomorrow: I heard that this movie is based on a manga, and I decided to watch it first before reading it. It was pretty good, came out a few years ago but I think it holds up.
The Batman: It was quite a fantastic movie, I really enjoyed it a lot, I actually missed the first few minutes but still managed to see Batman’s first appearance in the movie. I actually almost cried at the end, good stuff.
I tend to just shuffle the same City Pop personal playlist, but I recently added Moonset, by Yukika, and kinda liked it, which is why its the first one, clearly. Still, I have a lot more Anri songs, so she got first place.
Like last month, I don’t really feel like plain old statistics, so I will just mention some interesting details and stuff like that.
Most of my desktop usage was still tracked but its mostly Firefox and websites, 4 hours of Joplin, a ton in the terminal too.
I feel a lot less “guilty” about this month, but I have been meaning to not consider my hobbies as a waste of time. I recently started folding origami again, and shared a few pics on my mastodon account, and folding paper takes time too, probably 4 to 6 hours this month.
I entered my community service for university, where, most of the time, I can do as I please as long as I am available when needed, which has allowed me to spend some time reading, folding paper and doing techie stuff.
Overall, a nice month, but I gotta admit, there is still some school work I haven’t finished, I might also have to dual boot Windows again at some point, and I also want to switch my android ROM again, let’s see what happens…
Thanks for reading, I am out.
]]>I have not watched as many videos lately, because I have been reading books and manga quite a lot, and I recently entered my community service at University (basically I work for them for free). But I still decided to take some action to reduce my temptation to lose myself into YouTube rabbit holes, since I know that even if its not a problem now, it is bound to happen in the future, as it has happened many times, despite my previous efforts.
The first thing I tried was installing an add-on that I heard of in, well, a YouTube video about distractions and such (I probably kept watching videos about that topic for a while…) named DF YouTube, which allows you to have a distraction free experience by disabling the feed, comments, recommendations, etc. However, the extension has not been updated in a while, and I realized I can just block those elements using UBlock Origin.
My main focus was to look at YouTube as its most essential form: a search engine. I only left a search bar for the main page, and the video frame, description and comments for each video page. It was all looking pretty nice, I also added the Return YouTube Dislike extension, because its nice.
At some point I restored the discover page because I tried another extension that allowed me to group subscriptions and keep track of them without an account, named PocketTube, and it didn’t show its custom feeds if I disabled the whole thing.
Another thing I decided to do a while ago, and came quite handy now, was deleting all cookies and site data from my browser (which is still Firefox) by default, so I only white-list the websites I actually use. I decided to log out and remove YouTube from the white-list, I also assigned a Firefox container for it, so its pretty much unable to track my movements outside of itself.
However, after a couple searches or links clicked on a browser session, I can tell YouTube figures out some stuff and shows things that are actually atractive to me. Restarting the browser session can fix it, but realizing how effective it was at fingerprinting my interests, I decided to take this a step further and stop using youtube.com altogether.
There are YouTube alternatives such as Odysee and Peertube, but there is just not enough content for my taste, I know the purpose of all of this is to restrain my YouTube consumption, but not to such a degree just yet.
I already knew about Invidious and other YouTube front-end alternatives, but I went for a Piped instance I was already using before. There are also things like Freetube which is a native client available for Linux (and others), but I’d never had any luck with it, since it slowed down when importing my Newpipe subscriptions and was quite buggy for me.
The Piped front-end is quite light, and it worked just fine, so I decided it was worth using instead of a client. There are also some bash scripts, rofi scripts that use mpv and such, but I didn’t feel like going that far.
Also, while writing this, I decided to check out some invidious instances and realized they are not as slow as they were months ago when I first tried it, so I might consider switching to it instead, although as I said, Piped is a lot more minimal.
Well, if you asked that question yesterday, I would have probably told you to go with Youtube Vanced.
But YouTube Vanced is dead. Going back to Newpipe then!, I actually prefer it over Vanced, but it has some problems on Android 12, which I use, so PiP doesn’t work as well and takes over the entire screen, disabling touch for everything under it. There is an adb command I used to fix it (I don’t remember it now):
adb shell settings put global block_untrusted_touches 0
Now I can use it just fine now again, even if its still a bit less polished than Vanced and the official app. Also, keep in mind that this command can leave you vulnerable to malware.
There is another very promising client that uses the proper PiP API and works wonderfully, named SongTube which has an awesome user interface and is a bit more suited for music (as the name implies). Sadly, it doesn’t have a way to import subscriptions, which is the reason I haven’t fully switched to it, but if you don’t mind, I recommend giving it a try.
YouTube is such an incredible tool, but it had turned into quite a problem for me, with suggestions and tracking that, even though I was aware of it, I chose to bear with it because of how good it is at knowing what I want.
I might still struggle to leave it behind, I know returning to its intended experience (minus the ads, clearly) is just a few clicks away for me, I could just keep using it as is, enjoy it, spend hours on it and tell nobody, but I really want to stop that.
There are tons of Vanced users migrating to Newpipe and asking for ways to log in, leave comments and even get their recommendations tab back. I know I can’t force anyone to stop depending on the algorithm, some might have legitimate reasons. But, regardless, this is what I chose to do, and I hope it helps others who are also struggling with this. Let us be the ones in control instead of delegating our consumption habits to some soulless algorithm.
]]>I read quite a lot of manga, especially the last couple weeks ot February, I just scrolled through my anilist feed, but I should be able to automatically get this if I check their API for a bit. This is what I got manually so far.
So, yeah I read quite a lot, but that’s what happens when I start a new hobby, at least for me.
I didn’t really listened to a lot of music this time, I tend to do so while sleeping, but lately I’ve felt like playing background raining sounds via another podcast that uploads such content (I also wanted to avoid messing up my Spotify stats).
I listened to a bunch of Halo’s soundtrack while reading Kingdom, it fit quite nicely.
For some reason ListenBrainz is down while writing this, so yeah, I also listened to some of Evangelion’s sountrack and Chrono Trigger’s too.
I rewatched Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse, because its a fantastic movie and I was trying out Jellyfin a bit.
I keep track of these things with ActivityWatch, although it hasn’t been updated in a while, it works just fine.
I’ll only share my phone stats because I still don’t setup my computer properly, but Alacritty and Firefox are at the top there. And I used my computer for 127 hours total, according to the tracker.
I won’t really share all of my phone stats either, because I also don’t really know how to plot them in a graph and such yet. But here are some of the numbers.
Overall, I spent a total of 293 hours in my phone during February. Which is probably a lot of time, but I hope I can calm down this month.
I always have a hard time when getting into new hobbies, it happened with Rubik’s cubes, where I spent whole days tracking my speed, when I got into trying out PSP mods and plugins, or the first time I flashed a custom ROM for my phone. This is only normal, at least for me, I know I should try to not interrupt my life that bad, but man, Kingdom was just too good to put aside.
]]>First, I switched to DWM as my tilling window manager of choice. Yeah, right after I upload my blog showcasing my dotfiles and my spectrwm configuration, I pick up my stuff, git clone the dwm repo and start learning how to patch this thing so it does the stuff I want. And guess what, I couldn’t be any happier right now. DWM is not the window manager I wanted, but the one I needed.
Seriously, once its all setup and ready to go, it looks exactly like my previous spectrwm configuration. However, the bar is better, the tags are clickable (I know, I am sorry), and (again, I am sorry) I can change my gaps size on the fly.
I no longer have access to a config file that can be changed on the fly. But it is still quite easy to read, and building from source is not slow at all. Besides that, the bar (which I spent most of the time customizing) is a separate program (aslstatus btw), so I don’t need to reboot the WM to see the changes.1
Overall, I am really happy with DWM, and I will probably talk more about it in the future.
Since my Pi is confined to my local network, I decided to keep playing around with it and using programs that can be used despite said limitation.
I already mentioned Pi-hole, which is an ad blocking program that works in the whole local network. Since then I added radicale, which is a contact and calendar server that uses CalDAV protocol, I can just save my contacts on my phone, and using DAVx5 it gets synced as soon as I am connected to my network.
Another program I decided to try was an RSS server. Something that I could use and would work with Newsboat, a terminal-based RSS reader that I believed was local only. But after reading the documentation, I realized it was able to work with multiple services like Newsblur, Tiny Tiny Rss, FreshRSS and Miniflux.
At first I tried and enjoyed Newsblur, but after I found the limitations of the free tier, I decided to use my Pi and find some server to use. I chose Miniflux, and I am pretty happy with how it turned out.
While the integration with Newsboat was fine. There are not a lot of apps compatible with Miniflux, at least on F-Droid, the only one available was Fluent Reader, which looks like an iOS app, and while functional, didn’t really fit my style. After some digging on Reddit, I found out about Miniflutt, which is available on GitHub and, while a little bare bones, works fine enough. I really like having my read and starred articles synced across my devices, the kind of feature I didn’t know I needed!
Of course, I am also making icons for the Arcticons icon pack, while I don’t have as much time during school, I have still managed to create a few icons for some apps, including the Miniflux RSS readers I found. You can see the pull request here.2
So yeah, just a quick catch up, Here is a quick list of another quick things I did:
Anyways, I wrote more than I expected to! This has been day 55 of #100DaysToOffload. I hope you have a great day.
Being honest, due to how aslstatus works, I feel like it could be easily used in spectrwm. But I have not tried it, and since DWM works just fine, I don’t plan to. ↩
I did not feel like adding pictures to this post, so I just shared a link where you can see the icons in their full glory (Unless you use light theme on GitHub, which is disgusting). ↩
In my previous blog, I talked about what I did during social media detox day, and I mentioned how most of the things I did were done while also listening to Podcasts. In a matter of months I discovered some new shows with a bunch of episodes to listen to. And I decided to share some of those here!
So yeah, most of the stuff I listen too is quite focused on these topics, but I only listen to these at nights right before going to sleep. I think I might have some problems in my head…
I started listening to this just a few weeks after my previous post. It is simply amazing, as the name implies, the podcast shares stories and events that don’t seem to have a logical explanation, from haunted houses to UFO’s, the voice and narration by Richard MacLean Smith is simply incredibly. The only thing I dislike about it is the ads located in the middle of the show that manage to break the atmosphere quite heavily. Maybe if he kept the creepy background music and tone, as well as a nice segway it would be a lot more acceptable. Nonetheless, I’ve listened to 63 hours of this show, and it must be for a good reason!
This true crime podcast is amazing, a solo, female host with a super smooth voice describing events in a great manner and a good structure, While the voice got me hooked, the quality of each episode kept me going. I had listened to a lot of Crime Junkie and I started to get tired of the same structure of making questions and short “huh’s?” and that deal, is good to have simple narrations without filler. The episodes are also quite shorter, around 40 minutes, but you’ll have to skip a couple ads in the middle of each episode.
At first, I though I would not like this show, but the short and concise episodes, along with the great voice acting made me stay. This is a single story about a young couple who decides to investigate a mistery after watching a VHS tape with an unknown origin, it is really short, with only 10 or so episodes, and the story is worth it, I hope there another season gets made.
This one is amazing, this audio drama tells the story of how almost all of humanity extinguished just by looking up, and how the try to find a way to stay alive. The mistery is strong on this one, each episode follows the events of different survivors that interconnect in a bigger story. I don’t wanna spoil it, so all I can say is this. Do not look outside, do not look at the sky, do not make noise.
I just started listening to this, it shares multiple fiction stories of horror and suspense. The ads don’t interrupt at all, since they are located at the beginning or end of each episode, it seems to have some interconnection but each story can be enjoyed separately. Sometimes the audio is a bit bad but that only adds to the experience of low quality recordings being archived, as the title implies. Another great thing about this podcast is that it is licensed under a Creative Commons license, which is actually really cool!
If you are not a fan of being unable to sleep (Although I actually listen to all of the above while in bed), you might enjoy these other lighter, more tech focused podcasts. I listen to these across the day, while cleaning my room or doing the dishes and stuff like that.
As the name implies, this is a small podcast where two friends travel back in time and talk about their experiences playing an old videogame, from Super Mario Kart to Halo: Combat Evolved. This show is quite enjoyable, the audio quality is great and it also starts with current news to stay up to date with the gaming world. I wish it went deeper into the significance and importance of the games being played, since a few times it feels a bit rushed. Overall it is pretty good!
This is the podcast hosted by Marques Brownlee, tech talk at its best with some nice sections, the audio quality is spectacular, it is not too focused on software, but it is still a nice addition to have. The episodes are less than an hour most of the time too, and its easy to listen to at 2x speed. Not my favorite, but is quite enjoyable and has a great video format if you care about that.
No Website RSS Link
This podcast became an instant favorite, different stories narrating the creation of programming language, the evolution of open source and technologies used all around us today, the host has a great personality and there is many interviews with experts of their field. This means that some sections have lower quality audio, which might be a bit annoying, but I have learned a lot from this podcast. Its also short and sweet, around 30 minutes per episode, and quite easy to listen at 2x.
This is another gaming variety podcast, it is somewhat similar to RGTM, but quite more general and also with better quality audio. It has no significant structure and its quite rambly, but that’s what I like about this podcast so much. You can get started with any episode and binge it all the way, this one is a bit harder to listen to quickly because the hosts have a faster pace, but it is still really enjoyable.
I had a bit of an adversion against most of Linux focused podcasts, I felt that they would talk about the same things over and over, and I was already quite repetitive with the Linux content I watch on video format. But DL proved me wrong! There are multiple hosts who talk about their Linux Journey week after week, and they have formed quite a big community, a network of fans and Linux enthusiasts, the podcast is quite cozy and the audio quality is fantastic, I find the intro music super cringe, but its tolerable enough. I really recommend this one if you are a fan of Linux and FOSS.
You can think whatever you want about Linus Media Group, but this podcast is just great. Listening to the hot takes of Linus against whatever dumb thing a company does each week is super fun, and these guys really know how to make ad segways seamless, I don’t even like the idea of skipping them because of how integrated they are with inside jokes and charisma. Luke feels like an audience mirror most of the time eager to see Linus rant about whatever is going on. It is a great show and I absolutely love it.
I have quite a list of new podcasts compared to the last time I talked about the topic. I have started to enjoy this format a lot more, right now I am listening to DL while writing all of this, I gotta admit its not the best podcast to listen to while writing, but I can deal with it.
If you have not given podcasts a chance, I recommend you to just embrace them. You can take a look at my previous blog about it if you’d like to read some more of my suggestions, I did not went into a lot of detail there, but I think that I got a bit repetitive here, but I write whatever I want!
This has been day 52 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>So, social media has been quite useful for humanity, however, it has also become a big problem among people of all ages and demographics. Personally, I have been affected by it differently as I grow up and develop my thoughts and lifestyle.
The first contact I had with social media, was MSN Live Messenger, I used to talk to people I knew, play online games and of course, ping them constantly until I had an answer from them!
But I was just a little kid, and I only talked to family or friends from school. I was still inside this little bubble where I had no real idea of how big the internet could be. I also had a Club Penguin, but despite being in a multiplayer environment, the social aspect of it flew over my head at the time.
It was not until middle school, that I got an android device, I got Whatsapp, and got engaged into looking for apps and customization. At one point, I created a Facebook account. I was not allowed to have one, and I felt incredibly guilty the moment I did it, so I actually did not use it for years.
However, after I got permission to use it, I ended up pretty addicted to it, I joined different groups and follow random pages that were popular or that I heard from classmates at school. Some of them were fine, others were a little bit to edgy, and I was constantly distracted by memes and mostly useless posts. As I grew up, I started to delete old groups and follow more meaningful topics for me. And of course, due to all of this, I was feeding Facebook with personal data and ad revenue.
At some point I realized how problematic this was for my life. I managed to stay with good grades and keep up with real life shenanigans. But I still felt attracted to my phone and to Facebook.
I would like to say I stopped using Facebook because I started to use my phone and social media less. But no, looking back, the reason I did, was because I started to learn English, and I joined Reddit. I had heard of it for a long time, and it was actually pretty amazing. I started to see how most of the memes I saw in Facebook where born there, I got interested by the sense of anonymity and separation. How nobody cares about you, but the content being shared in the subreddits.
I joined a few communities related to my interests, Doctor Who, Origami, but I also joined a bunch of places full of toxicity and gossip. Yeah it was nice to see how news and memes came out here first, seeing how Youtubers got ideas for their videos and stuff like that. But at the same time, I started to be surrounded by politics, debates, conspiracies and a lot of weird things that I was not really interested in seeing, and yet, there I was. I am probably going to clean up my subreddit list one of these days, or just start from scratch with a new account. It is kinda amazing how powerful reddit’s Karma can be, I have a decent amount, and only because of that I have doubts about getting rid of my account, even though it has no real value.
At some point I also had a Twitter account, but I successfully deleted it. I have to say I only had it to participate in Giveaways of app codes and such, and I actually won a couple times, but well.
Anyways, after I grew aware of how most of social media disrespects my privacy, I ended up looking for alternatives, and I found Mastodon, which a social media app similar to Twitter, which can be self-hosted, so all of your data stays with you. Or you can join instances hosted by people you are willing to trust. The point is, there is no single centralized server where everything you do is tracked. At first, I decided to join a bunch of instances, since I did not know how federation actually worked back then. I have found some nice people, and I have been inspired to do things to improve my life, like making this website! Thanks to it, I have a way to share my thoughts without having unwanted eyes all over my data. Of course, anyone could scrap this and make some profile to identify me, but well, I am saying this willingly, without having to abide to any terms of service. Even if Netlify or GitHub, where this is site is hosted, have anything against me, I can at least keep all of my information locally and host it somewhere else.
Anyways, the original reasoning I made this post was to share what I was going to do during this day. Besides writing this blog, I have spent quite some time contributing some icons to the Arcticons Icon pack, while listening to podcasts on YouTube and AntennaPod.
Being honest, I opened Mastodon for about 4 minutes until I remembered which day it was, and I also opened Reddit for 8 minutes because I forgot again. But other than that, I have avoided social media, enabled Do not disturb, deleted some apps. I even decided to leave Nova Launcher, which has been my choice for years, and tried out Olauncher once again! I hid all of my those distracting app icons and ended up with a pretty sick looking setup, if I do say so myself.
After some though, I’ve also requested my data from Reddit. There is no way to export my data from the usual settings menu, but it can requested via this link. I’ve decided to finally delete my account. Having a history and social media points is not that important, and some peace of mind should be quite good.
After listening to the latest episode of Darknet Diaries, which is about the problems someone got because of having a good Instagram username. The fact that an account can be that valuable is mind-blowing! Thankfully none of the usernames I’ve used are worthy enough for someone to harass me because of them.
So, I started writing all of this yesterday, during Detox Day, and this final words are done a day after. I hope this movement takes off, in my case, I did not found a lot of movement in my country and language, although that might be because Facebook and other common social media I don’t use are more common here. Anyways, I found myself having a decent time, but I have to admit I spend quite a lot of it on YouTube, but it was not that bad, since I mostly use it as background sound and, as previously stated, to listen to a few podcasts and long videos that are only available there.
I deleted my Reddit account, funnily enough, the exported data only occupies a couple megabytes, since it does not include the images and videos, just csv files and hyperlinks. I think I will keep most of the posts and comments there since they don’t contain any compromising information. This is mostly about getting rid of social media and less about gaining privacy, although it is a nice plus. I’ve also exported my Instagram data, and I might delete it sometime soon.
The journey has been difficult, but I am happy with my progress. This has been day 51 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>Last week, a some family friends had to go out of the city for medical reasons, they have a little chicken farm and a couple of pretty active dogs, and they asked me to take care of them all for a couple days.
Both of the dogs are really great trained so it was pretty easy to take care of them, they let me know when they need to go outside and “fulfill their needs”, they eat in order and they even know their schedule when I had to give them treats or take them for a while. All I had to do was be there and pay attention when they stared at me for a while xD.
One of the dogs is a little puppy, and she liked to bite stuff, but she had a couple of chewing toys, and it never represented a big problem. Even when sleeping, all I had to do was leave the bathroom door open, and they would go there if they needed to.
Now, our friends got some chickens too, they actually sell eggs, and they are pretty great, since they feed them with a good mix of corn and other natural seeds. I picked up more than a dozen eggs during the days I was there. It was quite an interesting experience.
I also had to cook for myself. Having parents who cook is quite epic, it is one of the things I enjoy about my culture, families still gather around almost daily to eat together, at least once a day in my case. But of course, this time I was alone, although there were some goodies waiting for me there, like some homemade chocolate cookies and stuff.
In the end it was quite a nice experience, I actually got a nice amount of time to be by myself and think, which is always a good thing, I did not even felt the need to write a post or anything until today, a couple days later.
The last day when the house owners arrived we all ate some burguers together.
While I was still taking care of our friends house, I got a message from the family group, asking me when will I be done. Turns out that they wanted to go to the movies, for the first time since the pandemic started. We ended up unable to do so that day, but we were all free tomorrow, so we all got ready to got right after lunch (and doing the dishes).
The only movie we decided to watch was Black Widow. It was quite an interesting movie, while not a masterpiece, I still had a great time watching it and we even got some popcorn, which is quite a privilege for us in our economical situation. If you don’t wanna be spoiled, just stop reading already, because that’s the rest of this post.
I kinda really liked Yelena’s personality, almost like a female spiderman who happens to be used to kill people. She is basically being set up as the next Black Widow, and I am OK with that.
I kinda not liked that the OG Natasha Romanoff got carried into all of this in a not so natural way. Also she got into a lot of situations that should not be survivable by a normal human being, of course she also fought with aliens, so its fair enough.
Honestly, most of the protagonist companions were pretty good, compared to other movies where they have no depth at all. The Red Guardian got pretty mistreated tho, I wish we could have seen a more serious side of him without being ridiculed.
I am sorry, but nowadays most people are saying to men to share their feelings and to not hide their emotions, that it is OK to cry and stuff like that. Yet, the Red Guardian gets the role of a caring but dumb father who is treated like a clown every time he opens up their feelings towards his family. Actually, most men in the movie are ridiculed one way or another. Except for the one who gets Romanoff a place to hide.
Lets not talk about Taskmaster, seriously, I am not qualified for that since I was unaware of his story on the comics, or in this case, her.
The final villain is quite interesting, but of course they had to protect him with some incredibly dumb pheromone shield because he is just a regular guy who happened to create an army of Black Widows under his control. And of course that such protection can be broken, by actually breaking your nose.
The last grand action scene is quite epic, not gonna lie, although a huge incredibly impossible mess, but that’s how it is in the Marvel universe, and I am here for it!
When it comes to political stuff, I am a bit annoyed by movies that follow a feminist agenda just for the sake of it, but I would say this movie is not one of those, and its approach is better than stuff like Captain Marvel or Charlie’s Angles, which is a good thing.
Although the overall package is kinda clumsy. Yeah I will give it a 6/10, would not watch again unless I am on a Marvel movie marathon, since I think watching it in chronological order would feel better.
It was a good bit of family time outside of our home. Also, its worth mentioning that, most of my “complaints” did not come up while watching the movie, I really don’t mind to just enjoy the action and the popcorn most of the time, and I did so successfully in this case, which means the movie is pretty goot to me. Also, the tickets here cost the equivalent of 3 US dollars, so that’s epic, I’ve heard that going to the movies in the US is quite expensive.
Anyways, this has been day 49 of #100DaysToOffload
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