I decided to create this site out of frustration with the modern Internet. Everything's so bland and flat nowadays ! Where's all the color and whimsy gone ?!¹

Me, well, I'm a massive nerd whose interests can be mostly summed up as video games, arcade machines (of every variety), and generally speaking designing and building stuff for the sake of it. I love DIY projects, whether it's something like programming, woodworking, welding, or 3D printing, and write about them over here. I'm going to open-source as much of my stuff as physically possible, even though I don't really know how I'm going to do that for wood and metal stuff yet !

I also write short and long form content every once in a while. Usually I try to write a couple blog posts and one long article per month, but no guarantees. It's not really something I'm used to do, you could even say this is an attempt to get out of my comfort zone, but I still need to have something worth going in depth about, y'know ?

Anyways, grab yourself a bev, load up a cozy playlist, and make yourself comfortable, aye ? Let's pause the rat race for a minute and enjoy some slow-paced nostalgia. Sounds like everyone could use a break.

1: Here on NeoCities, apparently (which is a good thing)

We're in the middle of a heatwave here, with predictions going up to 45°C for the next couple of weeks. Yay.

It'll take more than that to stop me from being a goofy goober, so I thought about putting all my computer stuff in a rack. Both for freeing space around my craptastic apartment, and for adding extra stuff (yay verticality !) to better control what my few IoT devices do on my network (and nominally prevent them from reaching the WAN at all). But mostly, I'm bored, I haven't built PC related stuff in a long time, and quite frankly I also think a huge ass rack would be easier to move if I were to ever change my living conditions (this might be slightly wrong).

I've been running the math. For most of my daily setup, I can fit this in about 10U (router + switch + eventual WAP for guests/the 3D printer take 2U at most, 1U for the power sockets, 1U for the Pi shelf, 4U for the PC case, leaves up to 2U for extension if I want to add a n95 based pfSense machine), the 3D printer (Elegoo Centauri Carbon 1) fits in a little under 14U (and I can even side-mount a Canvas if I want to), so if I go for a 42U giant-ass overkill rack this leaves me with 20U worth of extraneous storage - plus possibilities to mount Gridfinity on the sides, which is absolutely bananas !

Perhaps it is time for me to also pick up a cordless drill so I can make filament storage shelves...

I've been waffling about for a while on the subject of installing a Linux distro on my main computer. Have virtualized a bunch of alternative OSes to see what I can daily drive and what I can't - I don't really have hard limits set, but if possible I'd rather do without systemd and GNU. So basically, Alpine or some sort of LFS, the latter of which is still a tiny bit out of my level of geekness.

Installation went relatively smoothly - I don't trust myself with the full text-based partition editor (even though I can feasibly do that with gparted), but otherwise it does seem to check most of the boxes. I keep writing "apk install" instead of "apk add" out of sheer reflex, but like everything that's something I'll eventually learn to deal with, should I indeed go with Alpine as a daily driver.

So you probably already sussed out that I might not.

Because I'm  goddamn insufferable  a little bit inconvenient, I wanted to install either KDE 1.0, or CDE (which you might know from the style selection menu). In both cases, this implies compiling from source, which I'm not exactly a stranger to (not quite a Gentoo user but I flew close enough to that particular sun). Alpine, due to ditching glibc entirely, relies on musl which is an alternative implementation of the C standard library, and therefore the replacement to GNUtools are built on top of that. Which causes PROBLEMS. (that admittedly I created myself)

On the KDE side of things, for some reason that I haven't dug up yet, the musl C runtime uses a syntax that differs from glibc's, more specifically a certain object's main function isn't actually called "main". This causes a funky linker error that, quite frankly, I have no idea how to solve. We're talking about libc, so I can't exactly go change the function name willy nilly; if that stops working, the entire OS stops working. There has to be a workaround; I just haven't found it yet. Perhaps there is a certain specific way to link to musl that I am unaware of ?

For CDE, it's actually a far stupider issue. CDE requires some basic glibc tools such as compress, uncompress, and gencat. The latter of which seems to also be better known as... the Government of Catalonia ? Wat.
Anyways, point being, this is actually one of the few glibc tools that musl does not reimplement (hell if I know why). I'm either too lazy or too unskilled to do the port myself for such a silly reason, not to mention this is still a virtual machine for now.

So yeah as you can tell, I'm... pretty bored right now lol. Maybe a new coat of paint is in order.

I merged the Home page with the first page of the blog. Wrote a piece of really inelegant code to treat the intro message as a blog post created at the moment of generation, so it always stays on top of page 1.

May is going to be a really quiet month for me, as I actively seek a job, even part-time, to make ends meet. Fortunately I still have games. Recently hit God of Destruction with two of my three characters in Tekken 8 (only King is missing for now), and picked up Zangief again in SF6. There's a small tournament of both this Sunday, in a goddamn movie theater no less, so that's probably gonna be the only tryhard action I'm getting this month.

I am working on a Wordle-like game when not fighting. Helps ease up the tension. Not as satisfying as building a new controller of course, but eh at least it's fun !

That'll be all for this post. Over and out.

Finally got off my lazy butt and tried my hand at an Aero-inspired stylesheet. As usual, I favor "done" over "perfect", but that won't stop me from revisiting it down the line if need be.

Aero is such a wonderful design language. Most of my negative opinions on modern design is how bland, neutral and generally uninspired it is overall. All done in an effort to uniformize the web to better display it on pocket-sized terminals. Convenience has cost us so much, and for so little in return. Hecc phones.