It's been a while since I last updated this blog and the reason is fairly simple: there simply isn't anything tech-related that already hasn't been discussed to death by plenty of other people. It gets boring fast and it doesn't help that the revival of both my Fujitsu “T-Bird” and Fujitsu “Cordant” have been paused due to work and my other hobby – currently a mixture of lepidopterology and odonatology – having started to consume more time due to getting closer to the first “cut”. 2026 will mark the fifth year of my amateur studies and thus provide an ideal dataset for some analysis and appropriate maps (which, for the time being, I cannot make public in its entireties and not just because I only got a handful of basemaps done whilst getting familiar with QGIS).
I could talk about the bizarre PowerPoint presentations my friend sent me a few days ago which put BOKU (“University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences”, Vienna) in such a bad light that this institution should be banned immediately for spreading easy-to-debunk bullshit. I could also talk about the growing trend of “Etsy girls” reviving and popularizing the illegal trade of endangered insects for a pathetic “aesthetic”. Both are equally worrisome, yet only the latter touches on the aspect of niche social media cultures causing dire consequences in some of the poorest corners in the world for some cheap clout, leeching off the – and I'm not gonna bite my tongue here – stupidity of the average social media user doomscrolling their lives away out of sheer boredom.
Writing is a tiring process and due to my tendency to talk about stuff that already is draining in itself, it just gives me unnecessary headaches and ultimately wastes my limited time.
This blog will remain dedicated to tech and, to a lesser degree, online cultures but will be updated much less than my Gemini capsule, where I kind of found my home to vent into an actual void and discuss stuff that may or may not get me into some avoidable legal trouble with petty academics (and other easily offended people). But even my capsule will see less activity, except for my sub-capsule dedicated to my ecological observations. Those currently are being prioritized.
It's being recommended by Google Play Store, no one outside of TikTok seems to talk about it but when people talk about it outside of the video app, they talk about being contacted by scammers.
(I really don't know what to do with this blog anymore, now that I'm trying to avoid the AI hellscape and keep most of my stuff on Geminispace.)
Update (10 Feb 2025): I only wanted to add some screenshots and correct some typos, bad language and a factual error (again, I'm not a programmer and know little to nothing about PHP in particular) but just a few hours ago a long-time pixelfed.social user got banned for highlighting that Pixelfed suffers from many open issues persisting for years. If my account should be gone without me posting that I deleted it myself, you may take a guess what possibly could be the cause of this.
Keeping the mandatory-by-unwritten-rules-about-blogging introduction as short as possible, let's just kick this off by my failed attempt at getting most of my stuff, particularly my post, off pixelfed.social after having learned more about dansup and why he's a server admin AND dev no one should trust for as long as his behavior remains unpredictable.
I, not even a coder but somewhat familiar with system administration, digged through the project's GitHub repository and not only did I discover it's lacking features but also strange configs and a single commit that is bordering on being intentionally misleading. Account migration in particular thus is broken by design.
Update (28 Jan): I tried to at least get my shots off Dan's server but it turns out that account migration has been broken since January, 2024, and Dan has not even reacted to it to this very day. Yeah, fuck Pixelfed.
With the next “big migration” and dansup's plans to turn Pixelfed into a carbon copy of Instagram, there's no point in me continuing to use anything relying on Pixelfed. It was fun while it lasted and I want to thank my ~70 followers for not only granting me some inspiration and some new insights but also assisting me at determining species new to me.
I also just learned that dansup is... quite the guy people should trust, no different from Automattic's Matt Mullenweg. Miss me with that BS, I'll keep my shots to myself again.
On this day in 2014, I was using my mother's Fujitsu computer as usual. Windows XP went into a sudden BSOD and immediately revoked the product activation, effectively locking us out entirely due to the original Recovery Disc having disappeared (we either lost it or one of my uncles, who did the initial setup but has a habit of never returning anything he borrows, kept it).
After installing antiX and encountering the same thermal issues I witnessed on both Devuan and Salix, alongside a desktop experience much worse than on both, there wasn't a point in testing the remaining distributions targeting old 32-bit machines. It became apparent that all distributions still under active development either long abandoned optimizations for netbooks or never offered them in the first place. What made this realization particularly frustrating were quite recent forum posts on Reddit and other sites still recommending distributions such as Lubuntu, which are WAY too heavy on such devices not in terms of RAM or the type of storage device (“install a SDD” is almost always being recommend by those people for some reason) but of CPU demands. All tested distributions, in fact, performed smoothly, however my netbook eventually started to smell like melting chips and, because sensor readings turned out to be largely useless, I had to use my (even less reliable) hands to estimate this machine's CPU temperature, which were MUCH higher than all of my notebooks constantly reporting temperatures above 48°C.
After a week of testing all kinds of Linux distributions, I settled with Devuan and Salix for the final test. I initially planned on writing just one post for both tests, however Devuan managed to be THAT weird (and frustrating) that this post would have gotten too long and convoluted.
Spoilers: I'm close to losing my sanity halfway through this and it may or not be entertaining to read.
Silly me for having made all my Linux partitions too small for VM tests, so there was no way around going back to my old setup on Windows 10. Right off the bat, I was greeted with a BSOD, ironically foreshadowing how most virtual tests eventually turned out and forced me to improvise.
