2025, October 11th

It's been a while!

I have a lot to share... so let's go chronologically.

Computer Doctor, or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned That I Could Go Into IT Just To Make Everyone's Day Worse:

About eight days after my last update -- I had a blog post ready for the 10th of September, actually -- I did something remarkably stupid. I was trying to format a USB stick so I could put a live image of a Linux environment specifically made for writing on it. I wasn't sure what the name of the USB was, though I was under the assumption that my computer's harddrive was named "sda," or something along those lines. So, I mounted a disk called "nmve0n1."

This was a very stupid mistake.

Unaware of this fatal blunder, I proceeded to use my computer as normal for about a day. Then, my computer died a few minutes before my second period. Thinking all was normal, I warned the person sitting in front of me that my computer may make a loud beep when it comes back on (I have a dead CMOS battery. The replacement is coming today, actually). It did not beep. It was stuck in a boot loop

Tinkering with my computer during the lecture, I wasn't sure exactly what was going on. I hit F12 a few times to try to boot into Mint, to no avail. It simply looped once more. Then, after messing around in the GRUB cli for about ten minutes, things slowly started clicking: I formatted my fucking computer!

All was not lost, though. In fact, I sorta wanted a blank slate, anyway. I got this computer (a ThinkPad L14) last August, and this was only a few months after I started really getting into Linux. So, there was a lot of junk that I didn't feel like organizing and packages I didn't want to mess with. After a few days, I was able to properly install and configure Void Linux. To me, it's a happy in-between of the two distros I've daily driven: Gentoo and Mint. I don't plan on switching any time soon.

N-n-n-n-nineteen

I turned 19 on the 28th of September. It seems like a very awkward in-between age, though this is the last year that I'm a teenager... I suppose that's a milestone it itself.

I had a pretty fine birthday. I always get the birthday blues, so I was a bit mopey at the beginning. I got some cool stuff, though, and got to hang out with my dad and friends. I found a copy of the SNES F-Zero at Half Price Books for twenty bucks, along with a Judge Dredd comic and an unabridged audio book CD of 2001: A Space Odyssey... My car had an issue with intermittent stalling, which we later found out was an issue with the idle air control valve, so I borrowed my dad's truck again. Lord is that thing annoying to drive.

I had hotpot with my friends and discovered that, though I love eating octopi sushi, eating a whole baby octopus is the worst sensory experience of all time. The brains explode in your mouth. I would not recommend. Then I gorged on ube ice cream.

"My God, it's full of stars!"

Ahem.

So, during my car's weeklong probation, I was driven to and from school by my dad, primarily. My mom drove me up there a handful of times, but she left for a trip on the 1st.

My dad's main vehicle was also kaput. Or, well, it still is. We're getting it back on Monday, but whatever. Thus, we were in the old truck. It's been running significantly better with how much it's been used...

Point being, the radio in it doesn't work. Not even static comes through. The audiobook I bought came in clutch!

We finished it in a few days. There was a point where we were at the last chapter or so when we got back home, and we took the discs inside and blasted them on my CD player in my room since we didn't want to stop. A day after, on the third, I watched the movie.

Holy fuck.

I haven't had that sensation where you instictually know a piece of media is going to stick with you in a while. Needless to say, I'm neck deep in the Space Odyssey series now. I bought a copy of 2010: Odyssey Two on the 6th and I'm already halfway through. I am HAL 9000's #2 defender behind Dr. Chandra.

I'm going to buy a physical copy of the first book once I've read the whole series... or at least when I see it available. I don't think I got the full experience of it in audio form, just because there were a handful of times I got distracted when we were listening to it (i.e., noisy passengers) so I'll probably reread it... again and again...

A gigabite of RAM should do the trick...

I didn't know what dumb title I should give this section. It has nothing to do with RAM. Unless you were very technical about it...

A few days ago, I decided on a whim to turn my old ThinkPad T440p into a music server. I thought this would be much easier than it ended up being.

Installing Ubuntu LTE was the easiest part, of course. The issue was the "getting it to work outside of my house" part. I first tinkered with Plex before switching to Jellyfin due to issues with Plex not wanting to work properly on my dinky phone. Plus, FOSS stuff just feels nicer to use. None of this would've even happened if I wasn't a moral stickler about the services I use... I still dread having to use Google services, but there's little I can do to avoid that.

Anyway, I first attempted to execute this with port forwarding.

Do not do this. I fucked up everything by doing this and it gave me a damn migraine. If you do not know what you are doing, nor if you're not sure of how to configure port forwarding on your router, do not bother. I managed to somehow screw up along the way and made SSH-ing into my server impossible.

Thus, I redid it.

In the first attempt, I named the poor computer "porncuter9000" because for whatever reason, my dad named the lone Windows machine I have "porncuter." Riveting humor runs in the family.

In the second attempt, I affectionately re-christened it "hal9000" because not only am I super original, I'm also on the spectrum. Golly!

Things went a lot smoother. I said to hell with port forwarding and used Netbird instead. It's a P2P... thing. I can't describe it. It's kinda like a VPN but not. I recommend it if you want to try doing something similar, along with taking a look at these two videos by TechHut as a guide. It took a while to configure, but now it works, and that's what matters.

And another thing...

Um. I will put up the art section... soon. I just need to photograph my stuff properly. I'm also planning on making a reading log section to keep track of the books I've read.

I probably won't do a blog every single update like I've been doing in the future. It'll probably be more like... semimonthly or so from here on out. Also, I completed my first creative writing project for one of my classes a while ago, so I might post that here if I pretty it up and make it flow to my liking. I cranked most of it out an hour before the deadline, in my typical fashion.

To whoever reads these: thank you! It means a lot, truly. I know my site isn't the most visually interesting, but it's definitely my baby and I pour a lot of love into it. I hope you enjoy my rambling... This is essentially my journal, for I don't write in my physical one as much as I should.

Thhhhhhanks...!