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Earlier this week a friend was lamenting in a group chat that a local pet shelter was unwilling to take in a stray cat from his neighborhood. Another friend in the chat blamed "prissy Golden Ghetto b******s" for the shelter not wanting to "train" strays. I found the sentiment rather unfair. Shelters are liable if they sell a pet that is unfit to live with a family, especially if the pet was a stray or feral--essentially a wild animal. I know from experience that it can be extremely difficult to impossible to domesticate such an animal, cats even more so. I ended up holding my tongue in the group chat.
My Nintendo Switch has been modified to run custom firmware. I don't do it to get games for free; I simply want to have full control over the software my devices run. This week I needed to reinstall the emulated firmware I was running on the system, which meant that I lost all my save files.
The digitization method I use for VHS and Hi8 cassettes involves plugging a VCR or camcorder into an old HDMI capture card and processing the saved footage. The card itself and my version of the software are six years old. In the last few days, the capture software has begun to crash unpredictably, usually when I'm about an hour and a half into digitizing a two-hour tape. One Hi8 cassette required hour captures to save the entire length. It's become pretty frustrating, but I don't want to spend money on another card.
One project I'd like to implement on this capsule is personal todo.txt files. Upon certificate authentication, a user would enter the todo.txt CLI (or a Gemini wrapper to the CLI) and get access to one personal todo.txt file. Of course I'd want to implement checks and restrictions to stop people from loading thousands or millions of lines into one file. My thought is to limit each line to 256 characters and each file to 50 lines.
I went on a long walk around my university campus on Saturday. It wasn't the first time I'd been there since I graduated in 2015, but it was the first time I walked the same routes I did when I was a student. All sorts of memories came back to me as I wandered, some of which I hadn't though about since the time they'd happened. It makes me want to visit my old high school someday.
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Photo of the week:
(PNG, 800x450, 330 KiB)
I am not a practicing Buddhist, but I've found many of the focusing exercises and the general philosophy of the movement to be helpful in my life. I already had some fake plants, a tabletop fountain, and a small figure of Bodai on my desk at work, but I hadn't consolidated them until this week. The result is a very calming space in the frenzy of the workday.
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[Last updated: 2025-01-27]
