Leading universities around the country are laying off faculty and staff as the Tomato in Chief is giving their funds to the company that has repeatedly killed people with its planes. I mean, I guess that’s the point?
Eyeing China threat, Trump announces Boeing wins contract for secretive future fighter jet apnews.com
back in the groove
As I’m getting back into the “groove” of things, I started this pattern:
- Wake up. Switch to home clothes from PJs.
- Go to the kitchen, get some water, listen to the birds and think for a bit (about 10 mins)
- Exercise: stretches (mostly focusing on back and posture), with some push-ups and crunches.
- Meditation (5 mins) follows exercise
- Back to the kitchen to make coffee and breakfast
- Eat, take vitamins, talk to Nat as his morning starts as well
- Start working:
- View the agenda for the day (meetings, major projects, TODOs)
- Looking for Pinned emails from previous days and Reminders, combine them into TODOs for the day
- Start tackling tasks in my agenda (emacs org-mode), recording what I’m doing in notes
- Around 13:00 to 15:00 (depending on meetings and things), time to exercise, or if I’m in the office, go back home for this. No targeted goal specifically yet; it’s mostly about the routine, but I’m trying to include a jog here if I can, or weight lifting
- Back to work: this is a good “quiet time” to work on projects without interruption, depending on meetings.
- Around 18:00 or 19:00 finishing work. Nat’s back at that time, or I spend time with another partner, depending on the day.
- Around 20:00, I enjoy a show (these days it’s Silo) or video games (Helldirvers2 mostly at this point, but there’s also the excellent Mind over Magic I need to review soon)
- I usually sleep around 22:00 or 23:00. Hopefully I can keep up the 7 hours of sleep I get a night or so, which means I wake up around 6:00 the next day to start again.
There are many points that change in this workflow (for example, if I blog, it’s usually in the morning at some point after food, if work allows), but in general, this is the outline I try to get back to.
Once again I see the benefits of channeling all my tasks that come from emails, reminders, my calendar, phone calls, meeting etc - into my org-mode agenda, where I have one simple list without distractions of what I need to do. If it’s not there, I’m not doing it that day. And there’s always more than I can finish each day anyway, that’s just the nature of things.
The big benefit (I’ve said so many times in the past) here is that because I log what I do, I know exactly what was done and I have a good idea of what needs to be done next. This is also very useful when there’s a new project, and you can just use the template from last time. Good stuff.
Buying toilet paper with whogivesacrap part 2: I’m pissed and going to Amazon. VPN is on, Amazon doens’t care, directs me to their brand. I click “buy with one click.” Done. The correct address is on file.
And that’s how Amazon wins 😞
Buying toilet paper with whogivesacrap, part 1: ISP thinks it’s bad and blocks it with Cisco automated protection. Turning on VPN. Works. Buying .. Shopify: “oh no, you have VPN, you’re bad. Also, we have a different delivery and billing address on file.” Turning off VPN to fix. Cisco comes back 🤬
For brunch today, we wanted to try a new cafe in the neighborhood that looked interesting. It was small and loud with conversation and beats. We waited for our veggie burritos - 20, 30, 40 minutes. The sign on the door said they take some time to make food, so we were patient until the table that got in after us was served the same dish we ordered, while we only had our tea and coffee still.
Turns out the waitress, even though she nodded and repeated our order to us when we oredred, completely forgot to put it in the system. A dog owner walked in and sat next to us, and when the dog started barking loudly, I felt the blood drumming in my ears, and I excused myself for a minute outside. The food, which was disappointing (it was OK, but more of a breakfast veggie wrap with nothing on the side, not a burrito with extra rice and beans), finally arrived. We swallowed the food without a word, paid, and left.
As soon as I walked into my apartment, I felt the calm surround me. The relaxing feeling was even better when I got into my room and stepped on the rug I got, colored in blues and brownish-coffee colors 📷 . It’s incredible how such a simple thing can affect my mood so much. I don’t know why I’ve waited so long without having one.
Macmini instead of a smart TV?
One of the future upgrades in the new apartment will be a TV—or something like a TV. Well, that’s the question, actually.
Our sofa should be here mid to end of April, and with it, it will be time to look into this more seriously. Nat and I are not TV people: Nat watches most of his content (mostly YouTube “let’s play” kind of clips) on his MacBook, and I watch my movies and show on my Ultra-wide screen in my room. We’re both very volume-aware, especially in the new place, and love to have earphones anyway (better sound quality, for sure).
We do have “our show” though, which is a habit I also have with other partners. It’s a nice experience. Besides, some things are meant to be experienced on a bigger screen with a warm order-in on a cold winter day.
I could go the route of a smart TV, probably a Ruko or Apple TV (since we both have iPhones, and my media library is usually served through my Mac). However, I was considering getting a “dumb” TV, even a projector, which would give me more screen room rather than “smarts,” because I have a mostly unused Mac Mini I’d love to use for that purpose.
Airplay from the iPhone seems meh at best, at least when I try to share something from YouTube to my Mac. The video keeps stopping after a few seconds, and the quality is not that great. However, with a Mac Mini, I should be able to use a Bluetooth keyboard and Mouse to navigate where I want. Typing on a keyboard, while more cumbersome than a remote, is a much faster way to get around and search for titles. Besides, I could arrange for quick shortcuts in the Background to launch a media center or even have a Siri Shortcut or something similar.
I’m just not sure where to start with this. I’m sure good projectors (instead of a display, which will probably be more expensive) exist and get cheaper than a large TV or even a screen at a certain point. And I’m not going to get a sound system, as we will both be using our earphones (at the same time? I know this is also possible). The money I will save on the sound system and the “smarts” of a smart TV I don’t need could go into the quality of the projector.
Is anyone familiar with an entertainment system like this? What are some keywords to search for?
About Micro.blog summaries
I’m a bit late to comment on this: Micro.blog has released another great blogging tool - summaries:
When automatically cross-posting to Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, and LinkedIn, the summary will now be included for long-form posts with a title.
Ok. But what does it mean and why it’s so great? To explain, let me explain my old process for long-form posts (posts that are longer than 300 characters, and usually come with a title).
Among Micro.blog core features is its ability to connect to your other social media accounts (like Meta’s Threads, Bluesky, and even Twitter back when it was Twitter and not the cesspool it is today) and post a link back to the post you’re writing on Micro.blog. So, this post you’re reading now will automatically show on Mastodon and Bluesky (in my case, since that’s where I chose to connect to) without me needing to log in and post to these services manually, linking back to this post here. In theory, anyway.
Because Bluesky and Mastodon have a character limit and most people there won’t read a full-length post even if it was possible, I had to create a summary of the post: I’d explain in one to three sentences what this post is about and then include a link back to my post here. I tried to automate this summary, but even if I had it working somehow through Hugo’s functions (which I didn’t), the summaries would still be manually written.
What Manton did is connect these summaries with AI. It’s the same AI tool you see everywhere that sums up what a post is about, only this time, it’s me, the author of this post, who chooses to turn it on and gets to see how the AI captures my post—not your AI, which might decide I just wrote something about gardening or snake capturing or something worse.
The result is a summary made by AI that passes through a human “quality check” before it’s released to the wild. Of course I also have a choice, as with everything AI on Micro.blog, and I could turn this off if AI was to gives me the gibbies - but it doesn’t, because here on Micro.blog, it is used responsibly and with consent, something I wish would be done more in general.
Here’s how AI summarised this post so far:
“Micro.blog has introduced an AI-powered summarization feature for long-form posts that enhances cross-posting to other social media by providing concise summaries.”
It’s not bad. It’s not great, but I can work with it in a dedicated Summary window from inside Mirco.blog—something that didn’t exist before. I’m changing it to:
“Micro.blog has introduced an AI-powered summarization feature for long-form posts that helps to automate cross-posting to other social media by providing AI-assisted summaries, allowing the author to tailor summaries to their needs.”
This is another example of how Micro.blog works for the author to help the blog. This is something I don’t see often enough.
Some results are in
Today, I woke up after almost eight hours of sleep. I don’t remember the last time I slept this long in my old apartment—it was always something I managed on vacations outside the city. In fact, I only remember waking up too early once this week and getting a glass of water before getting back to bed and sleeping.
Another hopefully trend in the making is my exercise routine. My new room is huge, bigger than I ever remember having (in the city, for sure), and it allows me to have a dedicated exercise corner with some of my equipment out. The neighborhood is mostly quiet, with one main road at the end of a long segment of stairs from our street, which provides a natural opportunity for a warm-up before a quiet run into the local park, where I can run different trails of different difficulties. I’m happy to report that I already tested it once, and with the stairs, my stamina has improved enough to earn me a nice protein shake with an espresso shot made at a nice local juicery.
I hope to keep this up and make this apartment my self-recovery and self-improvement place.
You know things are really bad when you get email after email from leadership with motivational stories and “Here’s what we’re doing” and “We’re taking this very seriously.” blerg.
Now that my personal projects and worries from January are fading into new (and good!) reality, my concerns revolve around the tomato in chief and the musky circus. Since I work for a large medical center and a university, these uncertain times affect my colleagues and me.
Some happiness, at last
Yesterday, I was euphoric, the opposite of the stressful feeling I’ve been experiencing since January.
I went on a “run” (at this point, it’s a fast-paced walk as I’m picking up the habit again, hopefully) yesterday, going up our new street during the sunset. It’s an average slope, one that makes you breathe hard if you go as fast as I did. I continued to make a loop in the park at the end of the street and came back the same way. There’s a curve free of buildings right before our street merges with the main road, and the evening colored the sky in purple-blue. I looked down the slope.
Each apartment building is different, and each one is lit with slightly different lights. Some extend their lobby like an arm into the sidewalks, while others have a pathway and lit stairs leading into an internal U inside a courtyard. There was no traffic, and coming from Broadway, with all of its ambulances and loud music blasting from passing cars, it felt like I was in a different place, on a vacation in a different town somewhere.
Even though I know the area quite well, I didn’t shop here before. My partner and I are surprised by the neighborhood-ish feeling of the local supermarket, the pharmacy, and the pizza place. It’s part of Manhattan, yet somehow it’s not. I can’t stop smiling. When I got back from my walk-run, I had enough energy to finish unpacking most of what was left in our common area. We are waiting for a few more new furniture to arrive in boxes so we can put away the other stuff we have.
The move is complete. New apartment. New neighborhood.
I have so many things to set up and many more to learn how to do here; I get stuck in mental loops of “I can’t do A before B, but that’s up to C, which comes with requirement D.” Oh well, getting there. Hey at least the internet is up!
It's too easy to get Windows 11 VM on Linux
Yesterday, I mentioned that I will probably set up a Windows virtual machine on my Thelio, My Linux Pop OS desktop. Later, I decided to play around with it, and I was surprised to find out how easy it was to get Windows 11 up and running. I’m surprised. Here are my notes:
Checking requirements
Before we start, we need to make sure our Host—the Linux computer we’re going to install the Windows environment on—has a CPU that supports virtualization. Most modern computers today probably do, but in case you have Linux running on an aging computer, you want to make sure.
To do that, run the command lscpu in the terminal and look under virtualization. It should say VT-X. If it is, you’re ready to go.
Of course, you will also need to get the Windows operating system. Download it from Microsoft and use their official Windows ISO (for this, I used the Windows11 ISO)
Install needed libraries and software
We’re going to install several components needed for virtualization. queue-kvm, the hardware component and the kernel level environment; virt-manager, which is the software and GUI we will be interacting with for configurations; and bridge-utils and libvirt-daemon, which are several components that allow the host to run virtualization as a service and connect your host to your guest virtual machine. We can install them all in one go:
sudo apt install qemu-kvm libvirt-daemon bridge-utils virt-manager
Restart the machine (the host) before continuing, or it will tell you the libvirt service is not available in the next steps.
After restart, verify the service is running with sudo systemctl status libvirtd. It should show as active in green. If not, enable it with sudo systemctl enable libvirtd and start it with sudo systemctl start libvirtd. Then check again.
Next, we also need to add our user to the appropriate groups for access. This is useful:
sudo usermod -aG libvirt $(whoami) and then: sudo usermod -aG kvm $(whoami).
Inside virt-manager
- Launch virt-manager from the terminal or find it in your apps.
- Select Local install media (ISO image or CDROM) and then Forward.
- From the Choose ISO or CDROM install media select Browse and navigate to your downloaded Windows11. Notice that if the ISO is not in the libvirt library (the default location), virt-manager will prompt you for permission to access the location.
- To install Windows 11, I used 8 GB of RAM, 8 CPU Cores, and 50 GB of storage (the minimum is 64GB, I’m not sure how I passed this, but you’d probably want more than that anyway). Finish and launch the virtual machine.
- When launched, the virt-manager boot will prompt to “press any key to boot from CD-ROM,” so don’t forget to press something before looking into why it doesn’t work like I did…
- The Windows 11 installer will locate the disk. Go ahead and install there, it’s the only virtual location you have if you followed the above example. Then it will ask you the usual nonsense (agree to terms, Language, keyboard layout,etc). Note: I always choose Windows 11 Pro, because home version doesn’t come with needed utilities.
Sharing common clipboard
Next, we want to install Spice-VDA, which enables us to copy-paste from the Guest to the Host and vice versa.
- Install what’s needed on your Host with
sudo apt install spice-vdagent. - On your Guest (in Windows), go to https://spice-space.org/download.html to get the Windows guest tools binary
- We also need to install the Windows VirtIO Drivers ISO from https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Windows_VirtIO_Drivers ISO on the Host. Download the latest release from under Installtion and then “download the latest stable” link.
- On your host, switch to the virtual machine’s configuration (choose the little “i” from the top bar) and select your VM’s CDROM configuration. Browse to the ISO you downloaded above to mount it.
- Switch back to your Guest (select the display icon to the right of the “i”). Windows will detect the CD and ask you what to do. Select to browse the files, locate the 64-bit installer, and install.
- Leave all options as is.
- Restart the guest, and you’re done. Copy-paste should now work
Next, I want to set up a share between the Guest and the Host, but this is not urgent. It seems the easiest way to do it is to create a shared SMB folder from the Guest.
I know that in the past, I had to work harder to get Windows to work, and I still ran into some issues. The setup here took me maybe one hour and no more than two head scratches. It was easy, too easy, and I’m not sure how much of it was because of my hardware and how much because of what’s now included in the virtualization libraries… but it works. I already installed Photoshop, and it works perfectly in Linux, just as it should.
Whoa, configuring a virtual machine on Linux was much easier than anticipated. Windows 11 is running smoother than it ever did. Nice! 🤓🖥️💪
Linux for games, Mac for work
At this point, my Thelio from System76 has become an automatic part of my workflow. With my KVM switch, I can instantly switch from work/writing to gaming.
I can happily say that every game I have tried so far has worked smoothly on the Thelio. My latest beefy game was God of War, which worked directly after installing from Steam with a controller without special customizations or any tweaks, and my time with Helldivers 2 has steadily increased to become my second all-time favorite.
Meanwhile, I’m also realizing that my Mac is a superior place for writing, and I don’t have the desire I used to try and make Linux better for it. That position is filled with the apps I use (or must use) and good integration with Emacs. However, I’m probably going to run a virtual Windows environment soon on Linux and use some programs that I want to have in Linux with me (Photoshop, for example) and have a test environment for work.
A year ago, I started using Tiny Theme. I haven’t looked back since. I am wondering about Sumo though… maybe when I have time to tweak things again.
I watched the first two episodes of Silo, and I can’t wait to watch the others. I vaguely remember the books. It feels like what I was hoping out of Fallout so far. Good stuff. 📺
Sick today. It’s been on the verge of happening and I think last night I lost the fight by being out late in an event in the cold weather. Stress didn’t help much, but at least things are shaping up!
Gave up on the Expense series for now, and picked up the second C. J. Box. I enjoyed the first and wanted me some more Picket: Savage Run by C. J. Box 📚
I’m peeping from under my rock for a second, so please be gentle with me:
Can someone explain to me like I’m a 5 year old what is Trump doing that is freaking out higher education institutions so much? I hear grant money. What’s the status on that?
Please keep it as matter-of-fact as possible 🫣