📁 01-25

Lesson number one: never again will I buy a cheap bootleg shirt from Aliexpress. Thankfully the spider wasn’t a biter. What had happened was (pauses for effect) I tried on the shirt, and realized the bootleg shirt was about the same size as an XL (bound to shrink too). Also the rectangle print made noise as I moved. Like a crinkly sound. I am a 2XL tall, and this was a crinkly XL short. Ah well. A few moments after I took the shirt off the 🔗 pirate spider crawled up my right love handle. That’s when I noticed the telltale sensation of a spider crawling on me flesh. Thankfully I had the foresight to move my finger onto its path so that I could place it on the desk to snap a few pictures. Tiny one, so not likely to harbor eggs, but still. The uh, bag the shirt shipped in had vent holes, and the shirt was 100% machined folded. Plenty of opportunities for spider hitchhikers. I was not in contact with trees or spider webs that afternoon, and it’s not garden spider season. Plus notice the shape of the front appendages

Obviously, for natural reasons and crawling reasons neither spider nor shirt survived the night.

I have plans to turn my internal PC Blu-ray drive to an external to make room for a little SSD/HDD cold-swap bay. All these extra drives around collecting dust when I could be trying exciting operating systems. Also have a copy of Windows 10 on an M.2 SATA drive of which I can use with my new m.2 SATA to 2.5in SATA enclosure. Might need Windows for work. Probably use it for video games. Eventually I’ll move my two containerized environments (Nextcloud via SnapCraft & Jellyfin via Docker) onto a separate machine. If I keep it up I’ll eventually need something like an 🔗 Ansible playbook to manage all the containers. I can already write responsible web scraping–without Python–for javascript webpages and a bunch of other backend stuff, so I don’t see the harm in playing around with containers. Maybe some Kubernetes too if I ever deploy a Pi stack. Figuring out a way to login to a central 🔗 VSCode–development environment I use for this website–host would be cool too. I mean, having a central yoink drive for emergencies would be pretty sweet.

I know, this is very riveting inside baseball huh? And who places rivets inside baseballs anyway? Talk about over engineering. Sheesh.

In other news, I recently dug into the history of the 🔗 Y.M.C.A. song due to its newfound popularity from within the U.S. President-Elect’s 2024 campaign. I have two thoughts on the subject. The primary thought is that one of the two writers, 🔗 Victor Edward Willis is very much pro money–unwilling to deny the use of the song–because money. The second thought I have may be on the minds of most people has to do with the much more popular 🔗 Jacques Morali’s co-written angle of the song. Morali, late leader of the very popular 70s/80s group, brought together people to form the 🔗 Village People, whom each represented ‘macho gay-fantasy personas’. So Morali’s take of the song is very much from the perspective of youths at the time that used 🔗 YMCA facilities to clean up, shape up, and hook up with other men. The likes of who may not have felt as represented by U.S. Presidential-Elect’s 2024 U.S. Presidential Campaign rival 🔗 U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris. It’s also a song commonly used during baseball’s 🔗 7th inning stretch. An example via Spotify can be found 🔗 here played by the Giants Organist(s).

Money, dancing support, and the quintessential male vote (my best guess). Also, seems like our U.S. President-Elect does NOT want to visit Canada, Panama, and Greenland for some reason. Which is a shame. Canada is beautiful this time of year.

snip - Trade deals acquired for Mexico/Canada. 🔗 Occam’s razor strikes again!

Now, there are some secrets I cannot reveal, for they are not my secrets to reveal regardless of what the crowd does or says. This includes from within a pool of potential jurors. I cannot and will not regardless of potential punishments. But I can guarantee you that my body language will at times tell a story that I cannot and must not tell. I am very much grateful for the eagle eyed within that Alachua County courtroom. For what I’m referring too, family was NOT responsible. What I’ve experienced as a child at a YMCA bathroom outside a public swimming pool in the early 90s does not even compare. She (grown adult stranger) was a little forward while attempting to undo my swim trunk knot. Back then it was pretty common for young boys to be terrified of their swim shorts coming off. I think it was popular humiliation gimmick in 90s kids sitcoms. Which when I think about it is kind of ironic considering I could not swim. Her early to late 20s voice was kind of like Rogue’s voice of the hit 90s cartoon 🔗 X-Men: The Animated Series. If I recall correctly, she was in the Men’s bathroom because she was with her own child. I think what frustrated my 8-year-old brain more than anything was giving up control to a stranger. I was told to yell, kick, punch, hit, and bite like hell if someone tried to take me away. But I was never prepared for a sultry voice.

I was pretty good with a 🔗 Bō staff too 🐱‍🏍

Anyway, I’ve been looking into how I can convert this 🔗 Kinesis Advantage 2 keyboard (KA2) into a Bluetooth or 2.4G wireless keyboard. There’s an interesting project on the subject I may reference, but I want make my own. I’d like to have an inline fuse to protect the keyboard against faulty batteries. That and extend the keyboard with a 3D printed battery compartment much like the backside bump on the 🔗 HHKB Professional HYBRID Type-S. Since interest has waned on my preferred keyboard it could be interesting to stealthily make a custom board for it. Theoretically the board could be similar to the 🔗 KinT controller board, but with a wireless module. Probably time to upgrade the wired touchpad I use to a 🔗 Magic Trackpad. I like the Kinesis Advantage for being a split layout keyboard that I can pick up with one hand. I’m not pinching my shoulders or wrists as I type too. I mean, it was also featured in the hit movie 🔗 Men In Black. Might be a good time to get my hands on a Raspberry Pi Zero W. With all that being said, the 🔗 HHKB Studio calls out to me. What a beautiful little device. I just might suffer through discomfort to have that little keyboard on the desk. I’ve already built my own KinT controller board from scratch (🔗 link), and I have some understanding of keyboard hacking from my time spent on the 🔗 Geekhack forum as Csmertx & Xtrafrood. So uh, could be a fun starter project for someone with rudimentary knowledge of circuitry.

Writing posts on Geekhack is how I learned to chunk out paragraphs like I do in this blog. I just–well, I wasn’t much of a keyboard warrior 🐱‍💻

And here is the litany of fear from Frank Herbert’s “Dune”:

"I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."

An old ex-pro skater/Christian band leader friend of mine that took me to a Sunday school at a Lutheran church once told me:

"Fear is only temporary.
Death is forever."

I’d never attended Sunday school at a Lutheran church before. Thank you.

I’ll never hold hate in my heart. Only disappointment.

Ah yes, 2025. This is going to be a good year. The giant pores in my nose are ready for their close-ups.

Several years ago I dedicated spare time to organizing my life. It was something I needed to do to become a more productive member of society. For me this was not exactly an enjoyable experience. As part of the organization process I wrote a simple script I called 🔗 ghemx. I didn’t have an Amazon Echo or a phone with a digital assistant, so I wrote my own sort of egg timer script. With that script I could keep track of washing machine cycles, dryer cycles, and reminders for 13-72 hours in the future. I wrote it from scratch via 🔗 Bash shell scripting, because I am in fact a mad lad. Are their Python libraries I could of used to make writing it easier? Oh sure. Anyway, as you know there are many ways to interact with timers, and many of those ways do not include labeling the timers. Labeling the timers and calling them back from a config file was why I wrote the script. I incorporated the timer script into the operating system I was using to see the timer at a glance, but that’s another rabbit hole altogether. Or gopher turtle hole if you’d like. Me remembering why I set a timer 55 minutes ago? lol.

==> ghemx -m 55 -t "Washing Machine" &

-m = minute, -t = title, r = hour, & = run in background

The output notification looks like this: Washing Machine [00h:55m:00s]

Ok, this isn’t a blog post about my super duper great Star Trek named timer script. I have an issue. Many people have this issue. And I’ve mentioned this issue in other posts. My symptoms share many of the symptoms associated with ADHD. The thing is, I live in Florida, which is not known for helping money challenged individuals sort out their mental disorders. My guess is that Florida is not the only state with the issue of non-existent mental health facilities for the currency challenged. I wouldn’t know, this is my only state of residency. With all that said, I have to make due with a combination of technology and awareness. The first step was to read several books on the subject (written by real doctors). The second step was to find a way to be slightly less money challenged to afford such devices. The third step is avoid all money sinks like ‘healing’ crystals, ‘protection’ scamulets, and pay to win video games. The only aura I have is mild aura migraines. While I must admit, I may not be doing financially well for 40, in comparison to how I was I’m doing pretty terrific.

“Get on with it nerd.” Ok, fine. I will sheesh.

On January 19, 2025, sometime between 06:45PM and 11:55PM my Fitbit Sense 2 Amazon Alexa app switched modes. It transitioned from a useful voice assistant that I can interact with, to what is essentially a toy for toddlers (shown in the image above). To be fair it definitely has more animals in that specific database when compared to an actual 🔗 See N’ Say. This is not a malfunction of the Fitbit Sense 2, but a malfunction of the Alexa app for the Fitbit Sense 2. And, as far as I’m aware, the malfunction is localized to my device. My Alexa (via watch) transcripts would probably show a few coffee timers in the morning, food cooking timers during the day, a few word definitions at night, maybe a few oddball questions, and finally a few alarms just before bed. The other functions of the watch are no different than before January 19, 2025. Actually, Alexa does not directly interact with the watch itself aside from setting alarms. Even timers set using the Alexa app are independent of the watch operating system. So if I won the ‘someone did this on purpose’ lottery, the affect does not alter my sleep tracking, heart rate monitor, or location data. And god(s) forbid if I became a suspect for some unknown reason, the data from the watch once subpoenaed, would be just as useful with or without Alexa enabled. It’s just a damn shame, because the speaker is working again. I’ve mentioned in the 🔗 past that it had water damage. Probably from washing my hands while using the Spigen case. I installed that case to protect from 🔗 drops. I’d also used the watch Alexa app a few times to set reminder timers while driving.

01-31-25 - Fitbit Support said it was Amazon’s issue. Two levels of tech support with Amazon led to, “This issue will be resolved within 48 hours.” Will there be a third level of support? Probably not. Switched to 🔗 Gemini on my Pixel phone. Full integration via Google Suite? Sorry Alexa, it’s been real. Plus, the Capella voice sounds so disinterested in everything. Nice.

I mentioned that the speaker only functions with Alexa 🔗 here, mostly because I’ve used simple watches that are 80% of the price and have an audible alarm. It’s just silly to limit the capabilities of an otherwise decent watch for arbitrary reasons. Now, I know that what I wear on my wrist is affordable for many reasons. In fact, I picked it over a Garmin Fenix, and Samsung Galaxy because Amazon offers monthly payments for certain items. I’ve also never worried about wearing the Sense 2. It’s the 2020s, millions of people wear smartwatches. Anyway, no one is hurt, we’re all mentally sound, and I can still set unlabeled timers using the timer app on the watch for stuff. Also, 62 bpm average for 2024 :). For the longer timers I can use the desktop or laptop, and 🔗 KDE Connect will push the resulting notification to the watch. And after this post is published my mind will be free of the frustration anyway. That’s part of the fun.

Little did I know that writing off fears and frustrations was/is a major motivation of one of the most prolific horror writers of our time. I also found his consistent adherence to his working class roots (shit kicker boots) inspiring.

This Fitbit Sense 2 Alexa app issue is another issue to sink my teeth into. I realize that Fitbit probably never developed the kind of granular control needed to explicitly compromise a device. Say, make the a specific Alexa App switch to See N’ Say mode. The infrastructure to do that with millions of individual devices–also a few different skews–would be totes expensive. Like ultra mega totes expensive. Plus the skews for a See N’ Say mode device for toddlers and my Sense 2 are (are?) quite a bit different. Through Bluetooth no-less. It is interesting to know that a bug could cause a database switch-a-roo like that. Knowing there’s a device out there with a See N’ Say mode gives me hope for humanity. Cow goes moooo you know? Do you?

I kind of envy the technical support staff and engineers of Fitbit Support tbh

In other news about my life, which is very much still happening (pretty neat huh?), I still don’t have a 3D printer. Space and heat are an issue. But uh, I think I have a solution for that. Hopefully I’ll at least have the 🔗 hot room part worked out by the summer. To be fair, the 3D printer stuff might not be something a random person reading this would be concerned about. And to be fair again, I’m barely concerned about 3D printing stuff. But, if I did own a 3D printer it certainly wouldn’t be an FDM printer. Not that there’s anything wrong with FDM, it’s just—listen, I’d rather have a part ready for paint. Prints with inherent structural rigidity too. Maybe after messing around with the first printer I’ll branch off to an FDM printer that can print bigger stuff at a higher resolution. With all that said, I’m worried an FDM printer would stop my design-y-flow-state. I have a few ideas for desk stuff that I’d like to get out of the way first.

I highly recommend 🔗 Flightradar24 btw. A little thank you for reading this far

I want to make interesting things ready for painting. I’m not in it for the fame. If I was in it for the fame I would be uh, doing famous stuff right now. Like uh, playing tambourine for a death metal band or something idk. The first front-man in heavy metal music history with a tambourine solo. And then, and then, when they interview me (because you know they will), I’d have a muted video of me playing the solo in frame in the background. Because that’s what legends do. 🤘.