📁 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 not 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 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.

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. Well, converting this KA2 to Bluetooth would make the ultimate couch keyboard. 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.