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It has now been ten days since I first showed symptoms of COVID-19, and I've been cleared by a doctor to end my quarantine. Dealing with the symptoms itself was not so bad: the worst of it for me was a one-day fever and a lingering fatigue that makes exercise a little more difficult. The quarantine was much harder for me to handle; I succumb to cabin fever very quickly.
These days the initialism CRT is often used to denote "critical race theory". I wish it was still used to refer to "cathode-ray tube".
I still like to try to solve the Rubik's Master Cube (4x4x4) as fast as I can. I use a "reduction" method, in which I pair up similar pieces until the puzzle can be solved using the same moveset as a regular (3x3x3) Rubik's Cube. One step in the method involves pairing up edge pieces. In the past I've done the pairing in the equatorial slices (u and d), but this week I switched to using polar slices (l and r). This has improved my piece recognition, but I now have to use different setup moves to align edge pieces correctly, and I struggle with that sometimes. Practice will, with any luck, will help.
My wife and I have decided to move. While we like our current house, it is fairly expensive, and staying in it as contingent on both of us having relatively well-paying jobs. She has become increasingly unhappy with her job and would rather pursue a freelance and creative career. We don't want material things like a costly house to hold us back; we'd prefer to live somewhere simpler and be free to chase our dreams.
Every now and then I'll feel like reminiscing and I'll go on a drive. I'll drive by my friends' old houses, the parking lot of my old high school, or parks I used to spend countless evenings at. I'll often take my MP3 player with me, and as I pass by one landmark or another, I'll play music that I was listening to in those days. Sometimes the memories that come back are so powerful that I almost feel like I never left the time period; other memories are so faded and foreign that I can hardly believe they actually happened.
The chess section of my capsule will not be back online by 2022-07-01; I will update the page with a new date soon. I am re-implementing the backend of the service using Python, but I have yet to figure out how to get CGI input into a Python script using my capsule's server software. If you have experience using Python in CGI scripts with gmnisrv, or have recommendations for different Gemini server software that work better with Python, I'd love to hear from you.
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Photo of the week (week 24):
(PNG, 800x450, 23.3 KiB)
My current smartphone is a Samsung Galaxy Note8, which has dual 12 MP main camera sensors. I have 2x optical zoom with the device, but the rest of the zoom--up to 10x--is digital. The pixelation at that level makes photos almost indecipherable, but by altering the exposure compensation, I can at least get some details to come out.
Photo of the week (week 25):
(PNG, 450x800, 272 KiB)
We own a Pump It Up arcade cabinet, and with the help of a friend, we installed an off-the-shelf PC and some generic I/O boards inside the cabinet. The PC runs a standard copy of Windows 7, and input from the dance pads is mapped as keyboard input, allowing us to run any program we want on the machine. Of course we primarily use it to run a home version of PIU. For the last half-decade we've run StepF2, but this week I decided it was time to upgrade to StepPrime.
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[Last updated: 2025-01-27]
