I haven’t made a blog post since July, where I made a single blog post of meowing. So now what?

Make a blog post! I’m alive![citation needed]

Well actually I’m gonna talk about recent stuff. And why there’s no blog post.

blog posts

So I’ve been writing about Taiko no Tatsujin, a rhythm game about hitting drums. Because I went to places and realized that arcade games exist (yes I played the arcade version). In that I wanted to compare that to osu!taiko, osu! version of Taiko no Tatsujin.

But uh, I’ve been trying to write works and I am not satisfied with the words. So I keep thinking about the words.

And then executive dysfunction, etc., so it’s definitely not happening this August (it’s already closing in on mid August now wtf is time)

And I don’t exactly have much ideas so nothing to be seen.

website

I changed the public mailing list comment thingy to a direct email address. This is after realizing of course that I get any comments from readers of this blog. Sure, I’ve received a couple of comments and stuff, but like… I’ve never received anything directly about the Synapse disk space clean up, which is a blog post that has been shared in the Synapse Admin room, some comment on github, and was PR’d into the Synapse documentation. Which means that my blog post was kinda useful, but I guess most people forgot about giving feedback to blog authors.

Uh, not much else? I don’t know.

Oh, I wanted to work the typography of this website maybe, like sizing of headers, spacing of the permalinks. I won’t do it now because I’m writing a blog post. Maybe later. But do let me know what you think about the typography of the website if you think it’s fine or something is hard to do.

I did things on the computer

I’m using Niri now. Well. To see if I like it here.

I still haven’t uninstalled KDE Plasma. In fact, I setup Niri in a way (with systemd wants) that allows me to switch back to KDE Plasma if I want just by logging out and back in.

I switched to Niri because the karousel script thing did not support multiple monitors well at all, which was a major down side. (It was kind of a hack after all)

Of course, I’ve got to what I’ve been dreading with window managers that aren’t a fully featured desktop environment: Setting up the rest of the components, like screen locking, idle management, information bars, launchers, and a bunch of stuff.

What I’ve found to be lacking from Niri is squeezing windows or something like that from karousel. Resizing all visible columns to fit another column from some side.

Anyways, dotfiles here. And pictures:

There is also a bunch of other tiny things I need to clean up that I’m still getting around to. The list of things I want is huge so it’ll definitely take a while.

Debian 13 blu-ray report

I updated my dual-layer blu-ray discs. I also added the source code discs, which went from 2 to 3 discs from Debian 12 to 13. This burning effort took at least 2 days (download + burning) and 200 GB of storage. Also, the third blu-ray disc has become significantly bigger.

Why did I do this? Because I already did this.

The flattop’s drive disconnects.

laptop-server’s alertmanager: Hey we’ve got report that the btrfs is having lots of I/O errors.

Me: Is it the exact same problem again?

Narrator: Yes, it was the exact same problem again.

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So flattop has external 3.5 inch HDD enclosures connected via USB. This is what I call flattop external drives.

It has a bit of history. First, it started as imac external drives, with drives made for the external hard drives market. Then imac died, so I moved it to flattop. Then I realized all the external drives I got is fucking SMR, then I had a briliant idea: 3.5 inch hard drives, which I know for certain is CMR, connected via USB (because flattop doesn’t have space and I don’t have the screws to hold it in place inside the very custom chassis with screws I don’t even recognize).

That history might not be relevant. What is relevant is that the drives never really disconnected randomly on imac, and not when I used external HDDs instead of internal HDDs (with an enclosure).

Also relevant is the location of the external drives and flattop. It is to the right of my foot when I’m at my desktop gayming. The drives are on top of flattop, and also by gayming (by it’s back, precisely). And to the left of gayming is a power strip with 8 plugs. All 4 drives plug into that strip.

When another disconnection happened today, my brain started to actually think by accident. Then it was like “hmm, what if it’s the enclosure having issues or something”.

Some thinking later, I traced the power cable for the drive that randomly disconnected. I pushed the plug in. It was not fully in.

So yeah, there’s my problem. I keep bumping into the power strip (which protects bumps to gayming, but honestly I just wanted the leg space), and that causes connection issues.

Interestingly, today’s disconnection resulted in a downgrade to USB 2.0. So I just turned the drive off and on again, procedure and scrub and yeah done.

Actually, looking at it, I can probably reshuffle things because pretty much all the cables I need from there is long enough to be put elsewhere.

anything else?

Uh. I don’t know. Oh hey look below at the new comments thing