@Ree@Dreamwidth.org

good old games

2023-12-28T21:03:46Z

I have determined that an hour or so of self-indulgence in mid-afternoon goes a long way toward keeping me happy, calm, and unscreaming. Mostly I've been playing some old computer games. So far I've gone through Myst (courtesy of ScummVM reading my old CD-ROM!), Monkey Island 1, a smattering of interactive fiction, and some Baba Is You (which gets very hard much faster than I was expecting; how brainbending is the back half of this game if I'm flummoxed already?! But I make slow progress and feel quite pleased with myself when I do). ScummVM even supports and detected The Making of Myst feature on my disc, which I hadn't expected. Still need to get back to that one day but it will have to keep until after Christmas break is over and everybody gets back onto a regular schedule again.

Something else that will have to keep is Get Lamp, a landmark documentary about interactive fiction. I don't monopolize the TV when my family is home, but I got far enough into it to learn some things about IF and how I feel about it. IF sometimes was (is?) held up as a story you can participate in, which is catnip to a books-and-games nerd like me, but the reality is somewhat different. IF has story but the gameplay is not the story itself; the gameplay is puzzles, mazes, mapping, playing Guess The Verb. And those are things that I dislike, am notoriously bad at, or both. This was useful to discover, because I had felt stupid for being bad at stories, but it's not the text that stymied me.

(I think I am overusing commas again. Gotta watch that or I spin up strings of text so long and tangled that even I who write them cannot parse them out.)

I keep not checking Dreamwidth in timely fashion. I may have gotten a setup that works for me, if I remember to use it. (I used to have an icon on my phone that would open Dw in my browser, but frequently my browser would have a bunch of tabs already open and it would get overwhelming and I'd mass close them or forget about it for days. Now I have more browsers installed on my phone, so I have one that is pretty much just for running Dw, and I have a Dw icon that opens into that. As it happens, this means the Dw icon that is displayed is less jaggy than before as well, which is not terribly important but does help in some small way.)

I wish Dw had a night mode site skin that was small screen and touchscreen friendly, but I suspect this is one of those things where you ask support or a dev about making that happen and they say "Sounds like a great project! When do you want to start?" Which makes some sense, but I have little free time and the focus of a hypercaffeinated, phobic squirrel.

And on that note, I suppose the laundry isn't going to fold itself. Have a great day, folks!

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The Quest for Cheesy Memories

2023-11-07T21:32:55Z

Dink Smallwood is just as ridiculous in HD (more, because of its pixel jaggies!) and I have just finished playing a user-created module (The Quest for Cheese) that has an exploding ducks spell. I'm underselling it but the spell is quite satisfying to use.

I ran into a little trouble, though. I played the mod umpteen years ago, so it was basically brand new to me now, and I got stuck at one point. I was confident that I had come across walkthroughs for D-Mods before, so I plugged the main game and mod titles, along with "walkthrough", into DuckDuckGo and hoped for the best.

What I found was this. You see that bit at the top, where it credits the walkthrough to a site resurrected by someone called Jaina? That's me! I'm Jaina!

It's been a day and I'm still processing how I feel about it. The site wasn't mine originally and I deleted it years ago, thinking nobody would miss it. (Also I think my free hosting was going paid-only, costing more than I cared to pay. I had hosted mirrors of the mods themselves along with the reviews, and I didn't think the reviews without the mods themselves had much appeal, and I didn't care to pay to host it all when I thought nobody else cared. So I deleted it altogether.) I don't think I even have the website files anymore.

But the content is not gone, because I was not the only one who cared.

I'm not sorry I stopped hosting the site; it was the right call for my circumstances at the time. But I'm happy that it meant enough to someone else that I came across a shoutout and information from it, still preserved, in the year 2023. And playable Dink in this year! On a portable device!

From a certain vantage, living in the future can be so awesome.

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nope, back to loathing Calibre

2023-05-30T18:39:46Z

The lying thing! Calibre claimed to help me delete the accidentally doubled book—but it didn't. I am still going to have to back up my books and annotations, factory reset my Kindle (a-fucking-gain), and put no more than one of each book back. Until I do, things will continue to be wonky and untenable. The most it did was get the Kindle to finish indexing books for search, and God only knows if it even did that right. Ugh.

Once again Calibre turns out to be more trouble than it's worth. Hellscape program is not even sorry. "You misclicked, so now all your epubs will open in me! There's no Undo for this!" Do Not Want. "I can fuck up your metadata for you!" It was serviceable before; mitts off, you monster. "I can solve this problem for you!" Cool, do it then.... Wait, did you do anything? "LOL nope!"

Probably I need to resign myself to using the Kindle strictly for content locked with Amazon DRM and the Kobo Aura for everything else. The Aura feels nice to use and it reads pretty much every practical format (including non-DRM MOBI). I am pretty sure the Aura has had the same book in different formats at the same time and it was fine, which would be prevent a lot of hassle for me.

Books, though. Books are good. Uprooted is lovely and the last chapter in particular gives me feels and opinions. I just finished the first Rachel Peng novel (Digital Divide), thinking it would be a pleasant diversion, and now I need to pricecheck the rest of the series because it's stuck in my grey matter in this really delicious way. Books delight me.

The hardware and software that supports them.... somewhat less so.

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Calibre is slowly growing on me. Like moss.

2023-05-22T15:13:00Z

(Edited the 30th to add: Whoops, I was mistaken, Calibre is full of itself and didn't fix a damn thing.)

I'm starting to see some utility in Calibre. I still think it's a big Swiss army knife that tries to do all the things and I still hate the structure it uses to organize its books, but the blighter does come in handy.

I usually sideload my ebooks. Occasionally this results in two copies of the same book on the same Kindle, and then they get entangled with each other such that neither can be truly deleted, unless I just factory reset the thing. If I leave them be, then new books don't get indexed for search. (I use search a lot.)

But. Calibre does something differently when it add or removes books. Calibre can see two copies of the same book, tell me there are two, and remove the one of my choice. No reset, no reinstall. This pleases me.

I still hate having to put every! single! book! into Calibre or else when I put it on my Kindle, it will have the correct cover thumbnail, except that shortly thereafter whoops no it won't. I understand some of why it works out that way but it remains icky regardless. With this morning's situation, though, Calibre was a real help. Yay!

("So how many times have you managed to put a duplicate book—" Enough. Enough times. Not enough to learn to doublecheck, every single time; enough times to hate it.)

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ree @ 2023-05-01T14:45:00

2023-05-01T20:38:28Z

I have gotten increasingly dissatisfied with my old Kindle Paperwhite 2 and wanted to try something that would natively read EPUB files. Managed to snag an old Kobo Mini for a song. I wasn't sure if I could cope with the lack of a lit screen, but I was willing to try.

Well. turns out I really, really miss that light. I like the interface, like holding the smaller device, but I don't love the correspondingly small screen and the dimness rankles constantly.

So now I have a lead on a slightly bigger, lit Kobo instead. What to do with the Mini?

Well, its small size and glass-free screen make it sturdy. The sleep cover adds some protection. And.... my kid likes it. Likes putting it in and out of sleep mode. Likes practicing letters in the Sketch Pad. Also I have a modest library of public domain children's books, all in DRM-free EPUB. Yup.

Guess I'll have to look into Kobo parental controls. :)

But I'm keeping the Mini until its successor arrives!

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poor Cinder-ree-lla

2023-01-17T18:32:48Z

I've been feeling a little down lately. My mom was a really awesome one, and a great example that I often struggle to follow. I worry that I'm not giving my family enough, that I'm too cheap or too poor to be a good parent.

To save a little money, I've been plundering the public domain for some entertainment. This works well for reading material; viewing material is harder to come by, and seems to have a greater proportion of "meh" to "ooh!" I've gone through all the old Superman theatrical shorts (which are really good! Watch them! The animation is superb and the style will seem fairly familiar to followers of the DC Animated Universe) and am now going through some Betty Boop.

I landed on Poor Cinderella, the only color Betty Boop short. Fairy tales are always interesting. The fairy godmother's voice pinged something in my memory. By the end, I was sure: I've seen this before. It was on a VHS of old, cheap fairy tales that my mother bought to entertain a certain little fantasy fan.

So I've been worried that I'm not as good as my mother because... I cheaped out in the same way she did. Hehehehe.

Thanks, Mom.

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if it ain't broke, I ain't got to it yet

2022-12-20T15:26:20Z

Guess who has two thumbs and (temporarily) wrecked her website! It's me! (And I got it fixed too!)

Haha, I wanted to do one thing with my website, and then I found other stuff I should do with it, and somewhere in the midst of it all, I discovered that it was all running on PHP 5.6! (Current is somewhere in the sevens/eights, for reference.) Long ago, I had meant to keep one subdomain (a version of Legend of the Green Dragon) running a then-slightly outdated version because it wouldn't work on newer ones, but apparently now either everything would be running insecure PHP or everything would have to be upgraded in one fell swoop. I took a moment to say goodbye to my LotGD install, toggled the upgrade stuff in cPanel, and clicked a button to finalize it.

And then nothing on my website would load!

Because of a snippet of decrepit code dating back to 2003!!

And then my famously spotty rural internet cut out!!!

I got it worked out though! Eventually. I don't remember what all went into the repairs, so maybe some rare helpful gremlin took pity on my stressy self and slipped something back into place, instead of out of it.

So that's sorted. Now if I can just convince Jellyfin to let me play my Christmas playlist... (Hopefully that's simpler. Strongly suspect the playlist simply no longer has a valid owner, and manually editing one in may fix it. We shall see!)

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a run-by rundown

2022-12-16T17:49:52Z

Hello I am barreling through here while I have a moment to spare and some happinesses to record!

Rural internet was patchy yesterday but much better today. My lifeline, restored! (I am like 30% kidding. At most.) I was able to get back into my Facebook account (first time since last year) and snag some in-game item gift codes for the pin-pulling game my kid likes. I even, heh, took a guess at what the next gift code would be and I got that sucker on my first freaking try, w00t! ...I should try Wordle later, see if today's my day. Dreamwidth first though.

I have given up on Twitter and moved shop to Vivaldi Social, a Mastodon instance, at @pokitty@vivaldi.net . I don't love my username there but I do love Vivaldi. They've hosted a forum and user blogs since Vivaldi started, and their predecessor Opera did, too, so I trust their experience with moderation. They also speak a number of languages besides English, so I trust their moderation of non-English posts more than I do a random American (sorry, 'Mericans, but we tend to monolinguistically suck).

I still have some misgivings about Mastodon, moderation, and non-monetization; I more than half expect 2023 to see instances asking for (or requiring) money, and users leaving rather than pay. But the vibe there is solid and sound. I like logging into the Vivaldi Social much more than Twitter. People keep linking to Mastodon accounts for people freshly banned from Twitter, and they make a pretty dandy reading list!

I tried Tumblr as well, but crappy internet does not love their media-heavy (and completely non-ALT-texted!) communication. I unfollowed everybody I didn't pout to think of losing. Now I am only bothering to even try to check there on a good internet day. (I almost always just queue stuff up for the system to post later, so it might look like I'm there more regularly than I am, but I am not.)

I tried looking for a self-hosted to do list server, but found no consensus as to the best one. I'd love to have a lightweight local server that let me go to IP_ADDRESS:PORT and toggle ticky boxes next to tasks. Dunno if that exists. I suppose most people manage this on their phone and/or with Google Calendar, but my phone is frequently charging, in a kid's hands, or otherwise separate from me, and I'd rather not invest myself further into Google's "ecosystem" anyway. A thing that could be edited (or at least viewed) on a Kindle would be ideal. Sometimes that's the only screen available to me in the moment, but I very nearly always have *something*.

Lunchtime! Hope yours is tasty as mine.

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a very good day

2022-09-08T15:42:19Z

Today is going so well that I wanted to mark the occasion. I had a chance encounter with someone who seems rather similar to me and who seems very likely to be in my orbit on a regular basis. I'm glad I got off on the right foot, which is not my default mode, especially early in the morning! I also got some small but tedious computer problems worked out. (Pretty sure the speakers originally just needed to be plugged in more firmly, but in the course of troubleshooting, I accidentally told the computer to use a set of speakers that were not physically present. Result: no sound at all until corrected.)

My home is still a shipwreck of a dwelling, but that's normal. I have some peace and calm right now, in the moment. There's an increasingly broken box of toys on the floor, slightly in the way. If I can get all the toys put into better places and the box broken down, that will make everything feel lots nicer.

If I don't manage it today, it will still be an improvement, whenever it gets done... but let's see if I can't get it done today.

*reading back* .... care to use yet another comma, Ree? Of course you did. *headdesk*

I am wording today! Sometimes words are hard; sometimes dippy punctuation is not. But I am awake and pleasant and getting things done, whether I am linguistically stylish or not!

Ack the computer goes *ding* now! *turns sound down from 100%*

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for my mother (repost)

2021-12-30T13:18:56Z

(Originally posted June 25th, 2009, on LiveJournal.)

My mother.

I don't know where to begin to describe her. She's a lofty example to aspire to: an excellent cook; a careful, safe driver; the best mother I could have.

I mean that, though I'm not sure she quite believes me. There are other mothers who are better equipped to handle a child who is profoundly disabled, or to help a child discover disparate parts of their racial identity, or shield a child against paparazzi. But I am not any of those children. I don't need those particular protections. For who I am, I could not ask for a better mother. I would want no other mother.

She has embraced me when I was at my lowest ebbs and cheered me on toward my highest peaks. Somehow she still loves me, despite knowing me better than anyone else knows. I live in awe of her selflessness and compassion. She's more than just the best mother I could have: she is also my friend, one whom I prize.

There is not an inch of my skin that is not written with my mother's genes, not a memory in my head that is not somehow shaped by the way my mother raised me, and I know that I am much improved for it. If I am sometimes petty or cruel, it is in spite of her teaching and her example; she raised to me know better, although I sometimes shamefully ignore that. And if I am occasionally caring, diligent, or generous, it is because my mother taught it to me.

If girls learn to mother from their mothers, then I know that I would be a strong, loving mother. Following her example could achieve no less.

If I thought it would make my mother happy to hear me yelling her praises from the rooftops, I would do it even now, at three in the morning in the pouring rain and pounding thunder. My mother did teach me to be sensible, however; if I must yell, I will wait for a saner hour and a drier roof.

I wish that I could write her a poem declaring the wonder I feel for her, something beautiful and rhythmic and worthy of her. But my poetic talent is insufficient. Anything I write would not be good enough to adequately convey the way I feel. Even as I write this piece, I keenly feel its flaws, but I hope it conveys what I mean regardless.

Someday, Mom, I will get things collated into that poem you deserve. In lieu of that, you have my endless admiration.

I love you, Mom. Thank you so much for being Mom.

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things I have learned in 2021

2021-12-30T13:15:36Z

I can't sentence structure, so list:

I really should have backed up my PC ebook settings into a different folder before I uninstalled+reinstalled.
Difficulty swallowing is a symptom of dementia.
The Croods movies are surprisingly good.
Funerals suck even harder when you're in the next-of-kin row.
The old "I'm recovering from surgery" excuse only lasts until the next relevant person needs and gets surgery.
I thought grief would feel like intrusive thoughts of sorrow, but it's mostly feeling like a thick, foggy static/panic that is hard to think through and also everything non-physically hurts.
Dhalgren is confusing and long. No, like, way more confusing than you're imagining.
Being a mom keeps getting harder. Always worth it, but ever harder.
I do not like reading a book with death magic, finding death abruptly all to pertinent to my daily life, and finding that the next book on my to-be-read pile starts at a fucking deathbed. Do Not Want!
I can't even fathom how much my mother must have done to help me throughout my entire life. So often, I didn't even see it. Now it's gone and I am at sea.

Stats:

Percentage of household requiring emergency medical care in 2021: 100%
Time since last crying jag: <1 hr

Found and reposted this and now I shall have a hard cry again before breakfast.

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a little bit techie

2021-04-24T21:25:59Z

I've been having some fun. Last year I set up a Jellyfin server on my humble home computer. It works pretty well—very well, for a totally free product that connects many sorts of devices to your self-installed server—but I had a few friction points that I wanted to satisfy more completely, so I have been trying some stuff.

(Not so much stuff, because a bunch of things that otherwise sounded neat turned out to require Java, and I don't particularly want to reinstall Java on my computer after taking a silly amount of joy in getting to remove it quite some time ago. But still.)

Anyway, I was hoping to find a free, open-source music server that would support the Subsonic API, so that I could use one of many Android apps to stream music to my phone and cache it there for future re-listens. (Jellyfin, especially Gelli, works nicely for music, but neither has any support for downloading more than one track at a time, and both only work when connected to a server - no playback from offline cache, unless I've missed something lately.) All the main Subsonic forks are Java based, but I stumbled upon Navidrome, a separate project that supports the same API. I'm liking it a lot. Mind, I turned out to have a loooooot of work to do sorting and tagging my music correctly so that Navidrome could parse it correctly (don't even talk to me about Starmen.net's Mother 1 soundtrack and its several embedded typos), but I finally seem to have got it all Picarded up.

After trying several Subsonic API clients, I think I've settled on Ultrasonic as my fave so far. It's not as pretty as Gelli (none of the Subsonic clients I found are; they seem to range from "maybe a little dated" to "this storefront's version has not been updated since 2013"), but it works for me and isn't years out of date.

The other difficulty I had with Jellyfin was ebooks. Jellyfin persistently misidentified a subset of mine: it thought that a slice-of-life humour comic book was a true crime story; that a Hugo-winning time travel novel was about football; that a copy of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was instead a biography of Shelley; that a supernatural romance was a Mickey Spillane noir. I could correct these mistakes when I found them, but I could not prevent Jellyfin from doing the initital misidentification.

And then I updated my Jellyfin install, and it re-pulled metadata for everything, even the books it had gotten wrong which I had specifically ordered it to never do again. So I had to trawl through every subfolder, again, looking for and correcting mistakes, again.

And if I want a way to get Jellyfin to start automatically when booting my computer, it will require me to re-scan everything from scratch. Including all the books, which I would need to search and correct. Again. That's because of a mistake I made early on with Jellyfin, but there's no correcting it now without embracing the hassle.

So now instead of Jellyfin, I have my ebooks folder set as a Windows (SMB) share. I can access it on my phone through Material Files, which had already become my default Android file manager even before I found it would solve this problem for me. Pretty sweet. Not at all fancy, no metadata search, no browsing through covers - and no snarling at Jellyfin, because the only mistakes lying within are ones I made myself. Plus it also helps me keep space free on my phone, since anything I download to it can be promptly shunted to my much larger PC hard drive. (I am pretty sure I have some sort of linguistic badness happening in that previous sentence, but I'm too tired to figure how to fix it and I just want to get a thing written here so I can be done and stop.)

Technology can be a pretty good helper sometimes.

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I'm still around.

2021-03-12T22:09:51Z

I don't have much to say these days. I'm quiet and tired and basically okay, just... quiet and tired.

Words are hard. Communication is hard. I try to read my friends' social media and tap "like" so they know that I am around and I am pulling for them, for their happiness, but just trying to string some words together is usually too frustrating and ends with me canceling my unposted comment. I hope likes can be enough.

I am trying to pare down my ebook library to save some filespace and make it easier to back up. This goes against my squirrelly nature; normally I grab and stow absolutely everything that I can. I'm only just starting to rummage through folders and honestly ask myself, "Am I ever going to read this? Yeah? So I may as well start reading it now? Ugh, I'm not interested in this at all..." Some things I'm keeping (sooner or later I do think I'll come back to that collection of vampire stories; I generally do return to vampires) and some things I am not (mostly Victorian fiction that is public domain throughout the world, easily re-obtainable for free if I ever change my mind; and some nonfiction that should appeal to me but somehow doesn't quite).

It may be worth noting that, with me, organizing is generally a coping mechanism: something bothers me that I cannot control, but I can control this small, specific thing, so I am going to control the shit out of it. Pandemic (one South Dakota county had over 51% positive tests and what the what, WHAT). Insomnia. Parenting. Older parents. Everything.

Everything is kind of hard and I am slogging onward, one determined footstep at a time.

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cool stuff on a hot day

2020-06-26T20:17:45Z

I am not caught up on anything - so business as usual. It is eighty-freaking-three degrees where I am, and that's indoors. Things around temperature, humidity, and technology are yucky.

So I'm going to focus on some nice things.

I'm running a local media server. I'd toyed with doing so for awhile, and came across Jellyfin, which sealed the deal. (It's a bit like Plex and a lot like Emby, except all free and open-source, nothing locked behind a fee.) I downloaded a couple of old public domain movies and got to watching them on our Roku, by way of the Roku Media Channel and Jellyfin's DLNA support. And yesterday Jellyfin launched their dedicated Roku app! It's prettier and makes better use of the screen space. It kind of feels like a gift. I hope I am appropriately grateful.

Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant are the best forever. (context)

Central air conditioning is wonderful, even when it can't keep up with the heat. We'd be so much more miserable without it. Similarly, dehumidifiers. YAY.

SLUSHIES

I still need to find the iPod charger and then I can use it to dump my entire digital music library into Jellyfin. Something to look forward to.

I should do more around the house though. Have several good days! Do it for me! Please.

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not much new today

2020-05-01T20:58:41Z

I renewed my website's Let's Encrypt certificate. Apparently my host automatically notifies me when renewal is coming up; it wasn't actually due for a couple of weeks, but I'll be busy around when it would have expired, and this way it won't expire while I have eleventy zillion other things on my plate. Huzzah. (My web host doesn't support updating the cert automatically because they are backward and silly. Also cheap.)

There are not enough places to put all the things. There are not enough places to put things while seeking better places for them. The things are in all the places. Things are everywhere. There are no empty places in which to escape. This is a horror story without end.

I couldn't focus on more needful things, so I played on https://picrew.me/image_maker/315844 instead:

The figure in the image looks utterly exhausted. I think it's a fairly accurate likeness. The pic is missing the food stains in the shape of tiny fingers and the ponytail holder dangling somewhere off a rear strand of hair, so much of my mane having escaped that I forgot it had even been tied back. However, it'll do. (The paleness is 100% on point.)

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a very good day

2020-04-27T20:30:23Z

Today has been nice. I was able for some long-overdue catching up with a dear friend. It sounds like we both miss each other and are interested in spending some time online together, and we have the means to achieve that, so that's just yayness all around.

I had worried that, if I spent today chatting, I wouldn't get anything done around this house. That didn't happen. I think I actually got a little more done than usual, because I was looking forward to responses instead of sitting alone with my "welp, everything is terrible" mood. That's extremely promising for chat-housework balance in the future!

(Maybe I should have been able to figure out that, if I took better care of my emotional needs, life would go easier. But. Everything is harder lately, for pretty much everyone except maybe a few assholes. And I figured it out now and can use that knowledge, moving forward. Yay.)

I like today. It's very good.

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brief update

2020-03-12T18:53:38Z

I'm not sure what I want to write about, but I wanted to pop in and say at least this:

My local people and I are well. Weather's getting mild. Nobody has a virus, so far as I know. Come to think, my household got a little windfall, and a well-timed one too. Things aren't super-amazing, but they're fine and we're fine and that's better than some.

I'm still poking around the internet, up to my usual habits of reading without posting much. I keep on top of my Dreamwidth reading page and triage my Twitter at least daily. (I also check my email, made a dismayed face at the spam, and exit right back out, as a general rule. Sorry not sorry, etc.)

Take care of yourself. See you 'round another day.

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Dreamwidth backup clients (with bonus illness)

2020-02-29T23:42:44Z

I am sick. Boo! Common cold, sore throat, exhausted, but pretty much pain free. The offspring seems uninfected. Good thing I have plenty of hand soap.

I keep forgetting to ask this... good Dreamwidth people, what are you using to backup your Dw account(s)? I had been using ljarchive but it started choking when I tried to backup a community with comments. I think it began around the time Dw forced HTTPS but I can't be sure.

Anyway, rec me your Dw backup software, please! I have seen http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/notes/Compatible_clients and https://zvi.dreamwidth.org/477997.html , but they are oooooold and I don't have the energy to try all the relevant options in sequence.

(If you want to tailor an answer to me specifically: I'm on Win 10. I'd prefer a GUI but I can work with a command line - I used to do a little MU* Telnetting, learned to FTP on the Windows command line, that sort of thing. I don't have perl or anything installed on my computer, but if I need it to make my backup dreams come true, I'm willing to give it a go.)

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the good and the bad

2020-02-10T19:44:06Z

A list of things that I hate today, partial:

broken washing machine
bra fitting
bra not fitting
whatever is making that ominous click somewhere by either the heater or the hard drive - oh, it's the clothes dripping dry onto the floor. Terrific
broken light fixtures

Some things that I don't hate today:

the less-than-a-dollar toys that my kid loves to death and refuses to be parted from
desk chair. Sit good. Wheels good. Much sit, much good
a giant canister of peanuts, so I'm not just gnashing my teeth, I'm also getting protein
Dreamwidth!
Whatever this is:

That repeated lyric is embossed across my brain now and I am not the least bit sorry.

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muchness

2020-02-04T20:35:56Z

Keyboards are still love. Trying to write a bunch of URL args with a touchscreen is a fool's errand, and one I send myself on all too often. I don't know why.

Bleach wipes are great. Events that lead up to using bleach wipes are nasty but the wipes simplify a lot.

I have Star Wars fanart hanging on my walls. It's framed like proper grownup art and I feel fancy. It's pretty great.

Radiskull & Devil Doll still slaps.

Sleep is better than Mountain Dew, but Dew is easier to get. Also it's delicious.

Pretty sure the offspring is not actually napping during naptime. That will make tonight extra fun.

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Vivaldi beta for Android

2019-09-13T07:29:42Z

Vivaldi is a delight. My bookmarks from desktop synced over. Keyboard shortcuts I rely on Just Work (like Ctrl+Shift+N to open a new private tab). The optional dark theme may not be to my liking (not sure yet), but I appreciate the effort to relieve eye strain.

If this thing can get a decent adblock it will be unbeatable. Right now I'm keeping Javascript off, except on a few sites I trust to not do adtech at me (so Dreamwidth is whistelisted but most social media very much aren't).

Boo, it's stupid late and I need to sleep, but I want to keep playing with my keyboard and shortcuts and other fun things. I should probably be a responsible adult and get into bed already.

Probably.

PS: I can use the arrow keys to select a mood. BOOYAH.

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more fun with keyboards

2019-06-20T21:15:50Z

On my computer, in any web browser, the spacebar scrolls one screen down per keypress. Shift+Space similarly scrolls up.

On my phone with external keyboard, Space worked as expected but Shift+Space switched keyboard language (in my case, between English - US and... English - US. Whoever chose this effect was not wise).

Turns out the secret is to install another software keyboard and set it as the default (it's still possible to switch back and forth). So now I have Shift+Space back and also my newly default software keyboard is Graffiti Pro (also available as Graffiti on Amazon Fire devices), so from now on I'm either typing like a real computer or writing on my screen like it's 1999. This is awesome! Whee, nerdery!

o/' I love keys, I love typing things o/' <3

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it's aliiiiive

2019-06-17T22:16:09Z

Typing is so much better than tapping. <3 It drives me bananas to fumble against glass, constantly needing to inspect my "typing" to see where a foolish-looking error has inevitably crept in. On a real keyboard, I can physically feel when my fingers slip wrong, and take immediate action to fix the problem. (If I didn't fix it, I would feel stupid. Nobody likes to feel stupid but I think I might like it even less than most people do.)

I do have a keyboard (<3!) but I just don't have the brain to do much with it at the moment. I made a little progress on rather a lot of ongoing projects today; nothing worth singling out, but taken together, it makes for a day well spent and a well-spent Ree.

I have been playing a little bit of Colossal Cave. Ironically, this has nothing to do with my dear keyboard (<3)—I found a Roku channel with a few vintage text games adapted for play without a keyboard and have been tooling around with it. It's hard! Maps help. (I also found a version for Android that supports voice input, which might be fun to yell Pokémon names at, such being the traditional method of playing with voice input in my family.)

I'm gonna sleep soooo sound tonight.

Take care!

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new keyboard

2019-06-13T14:26:44Z

Fear the power of my fully operational wireless keyboard!

Sometimes technology is awesome.

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lost in time, lost in space(yness)

2019-05-31T05:35:37Z

Wherever does the time go.

Hate hate hate touchscreen typing so will be brief. Miss you all. Miss who I used to be. Heard I can get back to my pre-parenthood self someday. Rather don't believe it, don't dare.

Got a quite decent desktop so hope to be online just a little more. Was what I hoped a year ago, too. It's good to have dreams. Better to have attainable ones.

Desktop has wifi issues because of course it does, but those are related to sleep mode not mid-activity online. Her name is Shelley because she was an empty shell repurposed, and she got put back together out of parts like Frankenstein, which was written by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. </geeky> (I do love names that have multiple reasons behind them.)

Looking forward to typing more on real, full-size keyboard. Yummy.

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