Site Changes

TL:DR: Site redesign incoming, expect links to break and a new look in the near future. The RSS feed at /rss will stay the same.

I’m not overly happy with the current design. I’m thinking that while I do the work of properly documenting the hugo themes I use, I’ll also work to completely revamp this site’s theme visually. I feel I have a decent grasp of how to use CSS, but I don’t really have the faintest clue what to use it for.

The sidebar design is interesting, but I’m terrible at making the header/sidebar component look interesting and useful but still keep it customizable. The new plan is to build the hugo theme with a straightforward concept: the home page is designed with various shortcode widgets and combinations of them that allows for easily switching. This way, individual components can be overwritten but maintains the rest of the properties of the theme. This is all about building on the concept I discovered in big brained hugo

Designer tools?

I toyed around with a designer tool penpot that I found when I stumbled on the Creative Freedom Summit. Unfortunately I don’t think it beats what can be done with inkscape, a browser, and an IDE. Sure having everything in one program is nice, but I think for what I’m trying to accomplish it’s not quite refined. In addition to this, penpot requires you to host the service even when running from flatpak, it would be nice if the desktop application optionally included an “offline” version.

Pi Server 2.0?

My Raspberry Pi 5 now boots from usb because I ordered the new official power supply. The Pi5 needs 5A at 5.1v to even attempt to boot from usb so don’t try fiddling around with different chargers that don’t provide that. Given that I don’t support a lot of users I would like to host everything I run from the pi5 but there are a few hiccups. The biggest problem is that it’s not quite enough for transcoding large PeerTube videos. What I’d really love to do is to configure this pi5 and leave it with a relative with some storage and have a remote backup server.

Personal Update

Quit Diet Soda ‘Cold Turkey’ 🎉

Three weeks ago from today, I was down to my last 2L bottle of coke zero, and decided I would commit to leaving it untouched. Three difficult weeks later the same bottle is still there. Instead of entirely eliminating the temptation by removing it or throwing it out, the point was to acclimate myself to refusing to have it. This was quite a challenge for me. I’ve struggled with being exceedingly dependent on the caffeine I would get from drinking insane amounts of diet soda. Predictably, I’ve slipped on other bad habits like eating more and snacking more in general. I still consider this a victory as I can work on those while I maintain that objective.

I’m definitely not unaware of the various health concerns related to diet soda. High caffeine intake isn’t ideal, in addition to this the artificial sweeteners have their own potential issues. Originally, I thought it would help mitigate risks from having regular soda. Unfortunately switching to diet soda has not helped me at all in the last few years, and going back to calorie-dense soda is a non-starter. I’ve wondered more and more about why diet soda contributes to weight gain despite artificial sweeteners having trivial calorie counts. I don’t have any academic proof, but based off my personal experience I would argue that consuming large amounts of diet soda creates these problems that interfere with weight loss directly:

• Impacts proper digestion

  I can only speculate what the actual mechanism is, but I have a feeling you get less out of the food you do eat when constantly over-caffeinated.

• Increases anxiety/stress

  If you eat for comfort, making the problems worse will only make your eating worse.

• Ruins sleep

  Unfortunately, it’s very hard to live an active and healthy life late into the night when one isn’t very mobile. Arguably, sleeping well is the most productive thing an unhealthy person can do during the night.

To say nothing of other more complicated effects…

Gone Swimmin’ 🌊

I’ve also been making significant progress on maintaining by mobility throughout the winter months, it is springtime now and I’ve still gone swimming on a regular basis for the last few weeks, before then I was doing more walking. I’ve come into a lot more time over the next little while, so the plan is to (metaphorically) hit the ground running, doubling down on exercise. I’ve been gifted a significant amount of time to really make progress so I’m optimistic for this spring.