Spent the day tinkering with trying to make #unnamedpopulartilingwindowmanager run in an Armbian VM on my mac with VirGL. Alacritty and kitty don't play nice with acceleration and software rendering has to be used.
Felt like kind of a waste of time, but I guess it was healthy to mess with desktop Linux for a change..

Let's hope this works. Then it would be an easy fix for the bloody IKEA Nävlinge LED Lamp that breaks too easily at the clamp.
Model: https://www.printables.com/model/321152-ikea-navlinge-lamp-clamp-repair

Had Fun

Bought a car/micro-camper

Bought a van to do up as a micro-camper, and did a temporary rush job of that conversion myself while waiting in the list for the pro to do it.
Then the pro gave himself a health criss the week it was booked so I took apart my temp job and only got another temp kit-job in it's place.
Went out in it like four times during that and then broke my wrist and couldn't really use it or improve it.
Then had to take it apart even more to try
and figure out where the ad-blue hole was.
I will do a proper permanent job of the
floor and walls and ceiling and adjustments to the kit-job to make it the nicest it's been so far during the spring next year.
My assumption that the prior conversion
into a van and for wheelchair-access meant the microcamper conversion was half-done already turned out to be false.
If I buy a new one, it'll be one that has never been wheelchair adapted.
But it's going okay. Only scraped it once so far.
Fewer than aimed for or booked, but I broke my wrist and had to cancel the second half of the summer.
Went to a conference about money and computers and fringe decentralized social media and it wasn't as boring as you might expect and felt pretty much like a festival.
Exactly the target number! It's lovely.
Took 3 times longer than I'd hoped and
50% more money than I'd planned for really.
Still improvements to make but they will
be incremental and gradual over the coming year or two now.
It's been interest-only for 20 years so a big old lump sum payment that I never really expected to be able to make. Expected to have to sell and move at the end of the mortgage term.
But surprisingly the stocks ISA got high enough to pay it off after all, so I did that.
Cash-flow ruined by that and the bedroom but should start to feel a bit richer next year.

i'm excited bc i found this absolute classic LP at the record store across the street ...and i bargained a little to get the price down by a third
no skips so far!
#nowplaying #vinyl #vinylrecords

This tragic misshapen lump is the last time I stuff a bauble with batting. It's polystyrene balls all the way from now on. 70mm balls with 3.75mms and DK all works very nicely. If everyone's very good I'll post a photo tomorrow of the one I made for my sister in law, which is on a polystyrene ball and looks much better. I've thrown in the towel for tonight after going wrong testing a chart I've made for another one.

I’ve worked over the past year to reduce the amount of noise in my consciousness on a daily basis.
By that I mean - information noise, not literal sounds “noise”. (That problem was solved long ago by some good earplugs and noise canceling earphones.)
I’ve gotten used to spending less time on social media, regularly blocking most apps on my devices (anything with a feed news, most work communication apps, etc.), putting my phone and other devices aside for extended periods of time. Often go to work places with my iPad explicitly having its WiFi turned off and selecting cafes that don’t offer WiFi at all.
Negotiated better boundaries at work and in personal life where I exchange messages with people less often but try to make those interactions more meaningful, and people rarely expect me to respond to requests in less than 24 hours. Spent a lot of time setting up custom notification settings on all apps that would allow it, so I get fewer pings. With software, choosing fewer cloud-based options and using tools that are simple and require as few interruptions as possible.
Accustomed myself to lower-tech versions of doing things I like to do: reading on paper, writing by hand, drawing in physical sketchbooks, got a typewriter for typing without a screen. Choosing to call people on audio more, trying to make more of an effort to see people in person. Going to museums to look at art instead of browsing Pinterest. Defaulting to the library when looking for information.
I’m commenting on this now for two reasons:
1. I am pretty proud of myself for how much I’ve actually managed to reduce the constant stream of modern life esp. as a remote worker in tech!
2. Now that I’ve reached a breaking point of reducing enough noise that it’s NOTICEABLE - I am struck by the silence. I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t know how to navigate it and fill it. I made this space to be able to read and write and think more deeply - for now I feel stuck in limbo where I’m just reacquainting myself with the concept of having any space in my mind at all.

FOSS power user laptop choice in 2025:
"
* 998 people running [Apple] M1 from 2005
* many Lenovo/Framework/Dell users, everything runs great, battery is bad, sound and display are so/so
* 30 people use laptops from all corners of galaxy that no one heard of, they swear everything is great (probably not)
* a few billionaires who moved from M4 to M5, haven't had time to unpack it yet, seems to work fast!"

Good Morning #Canada
I hope you're waking up to a scrumptious smell from the kitchen because it's National Bacon Day. While you're waiting for it to finish cooking, here are some facts to salivate over:
- Canadian Bacon, aka Back Bacon or Peameal Bacon, is a Canadian invention. It's also healthier than regular bacon, with far less saturated fats
- 42% of Canadians prefer their bacon crispy while 49% enjoy it limp. I assume 9% eat it raw?
- Winnipeg, home of the Bacon Centre of Excellence, is the Bacon Capital of Canada
- Canadians consume over 50M kilos of bacon annually. I ate my 1.25 kilos this year.
- Canadian Bacon, the movie, was a box office flop, only earning $178K on a production budget of $11M
- The average weight of a pig prior to processing is 111.2 kilos
- Canadian producers exported 18.6M kilos of cured bacon and 202K kilos of back bacon
- There are over 14M hogs in Canada
- 82% of Canadians add bacon on their burgers
- Kevin Bacon is not Canadian
#CanadaIsAwesome #MMMBacon

Even though my Lenovo desktop on SecureBlue technically has weaker specs than my Debian box with the RTX 2070, I keep finding myself loving it more.
It’s smaller, sleeker, and SecureBlue just makes the whole experience feel less shit and more enjoyable.
https://secureblue.dev

I think it's time to crack out the daylight lamp. I'm not feeling low - stressed to the eyeballs but not flat - but I do feel like I haven't woken up yet and I've been at work for two hours 😄 My daylight lamp was about £25 and it's been money very well spent. I use it as the light on in the room when I'm getting ready in the morning, rather than sitting staring at it for 20 minutes, and it just works.