The Art Of Not Asking Why

I am now on Bluesky. Feels like old-school Twitter back when everything was cool and without ads. Just my stream and cat pics. Lots of cat pics.

Is there some sort of a way to get into Bluesky that I’m missing? There seems to be a waiting list, but that’s it, yet I see a few folks here who seem to have access…?

It’s nothing major for me, I’m curious and after Threads I’m thinking, nothing can be that bad xD

Today is my Emacs day - the day I created my first “for real now” journal entry in Emacs org-mode in 2018. Wow, 5 years I’ve been using this tool. It did - no exaggeration - change my life. I need to talk about it more. Talk about it… I can do podcasts now… hmmm 🤔

Apple came out with a Classical music solution not too long ago, and most reviews amounted to “meh.”

I wanted to throw in my solution: IDAGIO. For one dollar less than Apple Music, you get a dedicated lossless (FLAC) Classical music solution.

I’m enjoying Vivaldi’s Flute this morning. ♬ ♪

Those of you who have cats 😺: have you found a way to get rid of the litter box smell?

I’d consider one, but this is the main issue. This is a small NYC apartment and the litter box will be in the kitchen / living room / dining room area (it’s all the same room basically).

I decided to give Micro.blog premium a go. I’ve been on the regular tier for a while, enjoying what the platform and community has to offer. After playing around with a FOSS read-it-later app for Android and not getting what I wanted out of it, I figured (with the help of my partner, who saves me from my own complications on a daily basis) that it just makes sense.

Not only the premium version comes with a place to store and read articles, I can also integrate them into the post I’m going to write about these articles anyway. Meanwhile, I get the option to create newsletters and have a place for podcasts if I ever go that route (why not, I already tried my hand at recording videos). With the premium version, I can even upload short video clips, which will be perfect with the pictures I already take.

But the best indication that I’m doing the right thing is the positive feeling I get when I blog on MB. It always feels good to write here; it’s always nice to interact with the people in the community, and the “leadership” is making decisions I stand behind and support myself. A good product from good people.

Heading back home. This wasn’t the magical vacation it was last time, but you can’t make magic, it happens on its own when you don’t have the expectations. Thoughts and (more) pics coming soon.

As a result of a conversation with Pete yesterday, I did some of my own digging into accessibility and contrast.

The first interesting thing I learned: folks with myopia (which is the medical term for shortsightedness), especially those with Astigmatism, are likely to also have halation, which is a “glow” or a “halo” of bright lights. As a person with Myopia and Astigmatism for most of my life, I didn’t know that the third phenomenon has a name. White text on black background increases this halation to the point of making it hard for me to read the text. For years, I thought it was just my own poor eyesight that does that; turns out it’s much more common.

I’ve never liked harsh contrast for this reason. As a matter of fact, a more “gentle” contrasting theme is one of the reasons I like working in Emacs. My website and my wiki are a result of these preferences. The black text on the beige background is comfortable on my eyes. Enough contrast to read, but not enough to burn text into my vision, as many dark modes out there do.

The second interesting thing I learned: Google has a team looking into accessibility, and Chrome has a built-in tool to can check accessibility issues on websites. Here’s an example from my website (my letters-to-background ratio is good enough, as turns out). I’m not sure if Safari and/or Fhaveirefox have these tools.

One of my favorite “bald guy” hacks is the noggin water splash. If it’s hot, go wash your hands, face, and noggin with cold water in that order. Immediate relief. I promise it won’t damage your haircut.

This photo doesn’t do it justice, but I had to capture it as I was walking, with only the phone on me. I hope to get better photos later today or tomorrow.

Question for you weather gurus out there 🌞 ⛈️. When you look at the radar map in a weather app and you see the clouds in all these pretty colors, is this a prediction or is this what already happened? Am I looking at a forecast or what happened earlier with the clouds?

“Yes your dog can come in. Yes we have a restroom. Yes you can use it.”

I don’t think we’re in NYC anymore.

On my way to a short fireworks escape vacation for a couple of days. Took the camera bag with me, and excited to see what photos I take this time.

For the last hour or so, I tried to get VMware working on my Windows desktop. My Linux mint VM, which I had installed and worked perfectly fine for a long while (I’ve used VMs for the last 8 years or so), is unusable. VMware is extremely sluggish, so much so that keyboard input can lock and result in characters duplicating. Watching videos is impossible: the video itself barely moves, and the sound breaks down to sub-levels of slow motion.

Apparently, this is the result of a resent-ish Windows update (what a shock 😤) that changed how virtualization works. Long story short, if I understand this correctly, there is another layer of isolation that VMware needs to work through. VMware uses whatever MS introduced and not the VMware component, and that is what causes the issue.

So far, my attempts at fixing this failed. There are various places showing how to disable this feature (Hyper V), but nothing seems to work. As a matter of fact, I noticed some of the mentioned features were off already, so I tried to turn them on to see if it made a difference. Nothing. My VMs are still unusable.

I do have Linux installed directly on my desktop, but this means no Windows, which I still need for some games I play (World of Warships stopped working on Linux for me for some reason, and Diablo 4 is a no go on Linux for now).

Looking forward to Cities: Skylines 2 🎮 coming this October

Cities: Skyline is a dangerous game if you’re into city building. You can design your cities down to the level of the pavement of the sidewalk, apartment buildings from around the world, and your local coffee shops, all thanks to a thriving modding community.

They’re coming up with a sequel, and they are intimidating us with an even more realistic model. How dare they threaten us with a good time.

Another grey rainy day with some 75% humidity until the afternoon… At times like these I think I was made for deserts.