Brady Perkins's blog

回來了

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 00:00:00 Z

家裡的下雪天。

好像我已經回來紐約，但我把些在台灣學到的習慣帶走。

昨天我從家裡回到羅徹斯特，但我禮拜四才想到我回這裡的方式。

我以前打算先坐公車去波士頓，換車用鐵路從波士頓去羅徹斯特。

但，要是我做那個計劃，我凌晨就會到羅徹斯特。

所以，我想一想就想到我在紐約市會換車，就可以坐紐約州的「Empire Service」列車，八點就到羅徹斯特。

也可以去紐約市，看到美國最大城的環境！

所以，昨天我去了紐約市。我在那裡一個小時多了，但只拍了一張照片：

在紐約市的我。

我那時候也對坐紐約地鐵期待，因為聽說紐約的大眾運輸是美國最有用的。

我最地鐵的時候沒拍什麼照片，但我找一找共工照片：

紐約地鐵。

照片作者：Ac530, CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons。

是比較好的，但一個朋右告訴我地鐵懷的地區是真懷的。

坐地鐵之後我坐了Amtrak（是我十年第一次！）。

也是比台灣的列車少一點，比較沒有質量，但比自己開車一定好，我下車之後沒有那麼累！

因為我現在沒有ＲＩＴ學生證也沒有學生公寓鑰，我昨晚有旅館房間。

但，我快要坐共車到ＲＩＴ。回來ＲＩＴ就是一般生活再一次會開始。

謝謝又一次看！

Magnetism

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 00:00:00 Z

The Zhongli of just last Friday...

As per the schedule, I’m no longer on the tiny island of big dreams. I’ve been drawn back home by the inevitable pull, as happens every few months.

But I think I took some of the energy I earned over there back with me. That was the plan, too.

The past few months have been more than a little bit of a juncture in my current life. Maybe that sounds dramatic. It kind of is. But I’m still trying to find out what I think my future is going to look like (as everyone does in their early 20s).

I’ve been happy lately with my notable lifestyle wins. Like, as I’ve made relatively clear in all my past posts and writing, I sort of identify myself as one of those radical Internet urbanists. I obviously don’t have any kind of credentials or even much experience living in a city, but I guess I know what I want (and what I want is evidently to ride more buses).

I did do a lot of bus riding in Taichung (the 中興乾線: I would shout out the rest of the “small crowd” who frequently ride the wheels between Wufeng and downtown, but it’s really not a small crowd. Like, I’d imagine it’s one of the most efficient transit lines in the entire city, because I’m pretty sure in its relatively small citybus-sized footprint it carries at least 5,000 people per day over weekends).

And while I was gone, I convinced my dad to sell the family spare car, because by the time I left I was the only one using it (driving it between Rochester and home and everything). I decided that the best way to adopt the mixed-modal transport methods of the future was to just get rid of my car and make it work (I mean, Rochester has a bus network so dense it’s hard to read the map).

So I’ve got the habit and the means to become the biggest public transit aficionado in the Erie Canal-Northern New England corridor (the bar is low and the sprawl is high).

Anyway, it’s the small wins that count. Yesterday I took a bus down to Boston because I wanted to go to the Microcenter in Cambridgeport and get some of the electronics components I’d need to rebuild the project I was working on in Taichung (so I could have a copy here for video call troubleshooting purposes).

And while I was somehow even unable to find individual transistors at Microcenter – resistors and capacitors for some projects, I guess, but no TIP120s – as per request of a professor I met at the Taichung university whose last request to me before I left was that I send some nice winter landscape photos, I did get myself a nice pigeon shot on the bridge over the river from the Green Line station at Boston University.

The pigeon trot.

And a photo from my front yard here for good measure (we have a nice winter snow going, it’s very “White Christmas”-ish but a little too late):

Actually nice snowfall!

Anyway, I went to the Microcenter and stayed on the floor in the electronics section sorting through a stack of microcontroller boxes I picked off the shelf for about half an hour, and then I bought them and walked up Magazine St (a neat looking neighborhood) to Central Square station on the Red Line.

With my new reference for metro styling being the spotless and brand-new Taichung MRT, riding Boston’s metro system was a little different. But, I’m not going to lie, I think I prefer it. Maybe it’s blind patriotism, but I’m a fan of the “lived-in energy” – I forgot about how unbeatable and… vibeful American urbanism could be when done right. I’ll pull some comparison images from the archive:

The venerable Red Line.

The sparkling Zhongjie.

You know, the Green Line wasn’t even screaming that loudly when I rode it yesterday. Either previous Green Line riding experience wore down that portion of my range of hearing, or they’re actually fixing things.

I’m finally becoming a little more familiar with the great city that’s been only about 90 minutes south of my hometown my entire life. I’m hardly a Boston native, but I am a proud New Englander, and the phrase “drive ’till you qualify” comes to mind.

Maybe when MBTA commuter rail finally comes to Manchester, that can become “ride the train ’till you qualify”. The future is nigh (2029, here I come!).

But during the past week that I’ve been home, I’ve had a good time working through the last bits of communication about the future of my internship work (the aforementioned troubleshooting of project over a video call), I’ve gotten some good rest in, and I’ve seen my dog again.

So in a few days, when I get to ride the Amtrak train from Boston to Rochester, I’ll be fully recovered from the jet lag and ready to get back to school for the first time since last spring.

Other than the one active class that I took just to fill my second “activity elective” (I will never understand why, after graduating high school and whatnot, forcing college students who don’t want to to play sports with each other is apparently such an important and necessary part of the curriculum), I have only classes I’m interested in (engineering ones, language, and hopefully getting back into at least one of the performing ensembles).

Now that I’m out of my gen-eds, I mostly realize that making students try things that they don’t want to and take classes in subjects they don’t like is definitely one of those cases where being somewhere you don’t want to be and having a severe lack of confidence is a shared part of basically everyone’s experience, and that it’s good for people.

Mostly, I feel grateful that I’m now able to recognize people who don’t ever step out of their comfort zone by the look on their face in a situation that makes other people uncomfortable (hello, many people over 30 and the one person in the introductory criminal justice class every year who chose this as a major).

So I’ll choose to feel good that I’m finally getting into the wheelhouse I chose for myself while simultaneously taking comfort in the fact that I don’t have to read any philosophy textbooks any time within the next few years or so. And this past internship has definitely cemented most of the skills I’ve learned so far, which does a good job at compounding the confidence.

I hope all this confidence I’m taking into the new semester is actually meaningful toward my class performance, but at the very least, I’ve never felt this good about my course schedule before, so I’m relishing it at the moment.

But I do feel more fulfilled with the lifestyle and career developments I’ve made over the past few months. The professor I had in Taichung seems interested in having me back, and I’m definitely interested in not having to stress about finding another internship in the near future, so I might take him up on that as soon as I can formally submit my application to return and keep progressing with something new, like data collection.

I've now made a very well-behaved device.

I’d love to go back to Taichung and get myself a real apartment (even downtown) – since I didn’t do the earthquake drill so the dormitory is no longer an option… – and maybe even come back with a friend who has some set of skills that makes my work easier (and we could share the apartment and have a good time together and everything: it could be excellent).

And although I don’t think I want to return to the lab for grad school, I do think that making career connections like this (especially ones that stand out on a resume, even just for their location, like having worked in Taichung stands out to most American employers), I think I should have an easier time finding other jobs or applying to grad school overall in the future (laboratory experience, especially, and a name on a few papers has to look good when trying to go past a bachelor’s).

So even though it’s been four days since jet-setting from Taoyuan, I think life experience sticks. Like, you’re just kind of going through life drawing in the environment everywhere you go. And that makes me feel good, because it gives me solid justification to keep going out of my way to have neat experiences. And I feel lucky to have the opportunity to have such good experiences.

Although I am back at a Starbucks writing a blog post, so some things don’t change so much.

Basically self-explanatory.

I’m looking forward to Friday’s rail-riding. Amtrak trains are, apparently, as fast as the Tze-Chiang express trains in Taiwan – you can verify with this cool site I found out about yesterday, but the trip is still going to be something like ten hours because of the sheer distance between Boston and Rochester (it doesn’t look like that much on a map, but apparently that’s like the length of two Taipei-to-Kaohsiungs).

I’m sure I’ll post some pictures on my Instagram, too, which is fairly new and I don’t think I’ve promoted it at all yet.

Thank you for the visit!

Life

Sat, 09 Aug 2025 00:00:00 Z

Headed aboveground!

I’ve been gone for a while. I think I need a real break.

The past week has been a lot: it started out with something neat, though, and I wanted to share a little bit.

Since I’ve had my car on campus at school, I’ve been wanting to make a journey across the lake and see the city on the other side, and this summer I made a friend who self-identifies as as much of a city person as I do and who is equally impulsive. Last Sunday, we popped into a car together and crossed the border and got on a GO train to Toronto.

That was the beginning of the giant wildfire cloud that blanketed the entire US northeast and Canadian woods for a while, and visible in a lot of the pictures.

I did take a lot of pictures. I’ll give away a few (I love taking these)! I’ll definitely upload some to my Wikimedia Commons profile, too:

The view stepping out of Union Station.

The TTC, a surprisingly nice metro.

Taipei or Toronto? The tram tells all.

This isn’t all of the pictures, but I did try some poutine and rode plenty of TTC (although I missed the trams, since none of them were traveling from places to places that both me and the friend I was traveling with wanted to go).

I did hit Chinatown and a Muji in the Chinatown (my favorite store). If there are two places in any North American city that I feel obligated to visit when I show up, it’s the Chinatowns and the historic districts (looking for charming brownstone shots and anywhere with brick roads).

The distillery district: even nicer than I anticipated!

Chinatown felt surprisingly like Taipei, and Corktown and the distillery district scratched the other itch as well as it could’ve. I also missed the Toronto Islands, which I hear are a ferry ride away (fun) and also historic and adorable.

I’ve discovered, with all of this friend-making and city-walking, that what I enjoy the most is making good friends and seeing and trying new things.

As much as I thought, when I left Taipei for that one-week trip those few months ago this year, that what I was missing was something I couldn’t get in America, I’ve more than proven that wrong: my personal bar for satisfaction in life is much lower than I imagined, and I think that’s a good thing.

I’m laying down in bed with my laptop now. Life’s gotten in the way a little bit lately, and the plans I had for this month have fallen out of possibility. I’m back at home early from my summer internship. I’m thinking about the future even more than I usually do, because I can’t help it now that I don’t have much else to occupy my time.

My bedroom at home.

In that bedroom photo, you can see my super-cool new giant teddy bear. That was a gift from a friend. He’s even more stylish with my Bopomofo handbag that I’ve now strapped around his shoulder.

Rather than give a rollercoaster series of events, as I tend to do, I think I’m going to take a break for a long time. A month, two, or maybe more. I’ll come back in the future and report back, but the blogging bug has been sufficiently squashed over the past while.

I'll be home for a while. At least some parts of home are nice.

Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoy my posts and I hope you check back in a little while if you remember. I’m sure I’ll have plenty to talk about.

See you then!

Move-in day!

Sat, 24 Aug 2024 00:00:00 Z

Day one.

Today’s been the first day that I’ve been fully moved in to my apartment, and although I was unsure how my experience would be before I got here, since I’ve arrived it’s been pretty nice. I’m pretty happy with my living situation here, I guess, although I won’t recommend it for fear of doxxing myself (the ever-present danger of talking about your life on the Internet).

Overall, it looks nice. I did put some effort into that — the furniture was provided, but of course none of the bedding/printer/amenities came with the room, so it was able to be personalized. The shower curtain didn’t come with the shower, either, and upon forgetting to buy rings to hang the curtain that I bought at Target, I accepted the engineering challenge.

Curtain.

So far, all I’ve managed to do is get myself in, get set up, and explore a little bit on that electric scooter that I bought in June, which is finally very useful (!).

As I was typing this, I also managed to open up this absentee ballot that I got in the mail — I can now vote in the primary for the political party that I guess I’m affiliated with now, and so I have my first foot in the door toward the timeless privilege of participating in democracy. Nice.

I just need to sit still until classes start at the beginning of the week. That’s when this all really gets good.

Thanks for reading the short post!

Fresh Apple

Mon, 19 Aug 2024 00:00:00 Z

Fresh apple.

The Apple ][ — is using the brackets to type the title out cheesy? I mean, clearly it’s stylized to look neat and computery.

Anyway, I’ll say that I’m mostly done. I’m missing a key component (being the RESET key), but since this is a II Plus, not an original II, I don’t need to press CTRL+RESET to get to BASIC (I think that was an addition that they made to the II Plus ROM, but I don’t remember where I heard that—regardless, my machine works this way), so it’s not a huge deal (I can just turn the thing off and on again to reset to a clean prompt).

So, first, I took the whole computer apart. I brought the case pieces into the bathroom and gave them a good scrub and a little shower.

Apple bath.

The cleaning went fairly well, because I had some Magic Erasers, which tend to do a good job on plastic if it’s just a layer of dirt and/or oil.

Washed apple.

Besides, as is visible in the photo, after it was clean the whole case looked pretty acceptable even without any whitening. I realize that early on, Apple computers (both II and Macintosh) came with their cases pre-yellowed just a little (they made the stylistic choice to ship a nice, rustic beige). It looks very classy.

After I was done with the cleaning, I tried to get at the only functional problem that the computer had, which was the keyboard. At first, I thought it was just the mystery signals that were a problem, but after a little bit of testing and troubleshooting I found out that the key switch for the “zero” key was also broken.

I took the whole keyboard apart and cleaned in between the PCB and the switches, and I also resoldered all the switch connections with new, lead-free solder.

Apple keyb.

(Don’t worry, the above photo was taken before the dusting).

After this, I put it all back together, but didn’t have any luck. There was no improvement (it was at this point that I figured out that the “0” key was broken. I tested all the others, and they all seemed okay for now, but I know that old keyboards can be unreliable as a rule, and all tend to use different, strange, sub-optimal mechanisms).

Since I don’t have time before leaving to move in to my apartment later this week to wait for an eBay item to arrive, I figured that instead of ordering a new switch on eBay I should just take the switch from the RESET key (which did work) and put it in place of the one for the 0 key. I threw away the old 0 key switch, since it was my first attempt at removing one and it was a little destructive.

Missing key.

But, after that was done, the 0 key worked just fine.

000.

After that, I put the whole thing back together. At some point, I’ll find some very satisfying and very clicky switch to throw in place of the RESET button, and I’ll call it a net improvement. Maybe a “period-accurate bodge”. A rustic bodge.

Clean machine.

The whole computer looks nice, but still has that problem with the extra signals when I type too fast, but that’s not a terrible problem and I fully expect that this keyboard is going to go down the gutter within the next decade anyway, so I’m not going to spend too much time trying to make it perfect.

I also attached an audio cord out the right side of the computer via the cassette jack to try to load some games from Apple II Online Game Server, but couldn’t get cassette loading to work. I’m pretty sure nothing is broken, since the friend I got it from was able to get it to work according to his reporting, if I remember correctly (?). I might just be too much of a Gen Z to figure out how to load games from cassette. That’s fine. I’ll take the loss for now.

Anyway, I’m happy that I had a project to occupy my time yesterday and today, and I think that this came out pretty well (and I even got the thing for free!). The Apple II Plus is peak 1970s (or, according to the date codes inside the machine, early 1981 in the case of my unit) computing, for sure.

Thanks for reading!

A solution to that problem

Sat, 17 Aug 2024 00:00:00 Z

Rotten apple.

More will come later, but here’s a summary for now.

I have a friend with ready access to a good harvest spot for e-waste, and he uncovered this a while ago — he used it for a little while, and to my knowledge he even played a few games on it loading over the cassette jack (since the audio files from old cassette games are readily available on today’s Internet), but doesn’t have a purpose for it any more and has given it to me in a condition about the same as it was when he found it.

So, here it is — a trash-picked Apple II Plus that I got for free with a little black-and-white CRT included! Extremely classy. A restoration project — something to do in the last week before I return to school!

Monochrome apple.

The case is a little dirty. Once I took the computer out of the kitchen with its bright daylight bulbs overhead, I could get a better picture of just how nasty this thing got sitting underground for a little while. And, as you can see, there’s a missing key (it should be “RESET”. According to the friend, that key may have not been missing when he got it, but we don’t know where it could have possibly fallen off to).

Apple skin.

And while every key on the keyboard does work, there’s a strange problem with the signaling when I type too quickly on the left side of the keyboard. It generates some extra ghost signals that are probably the fault of a little bit of corrosion on the keyboard’s PCB, which shouldn’t be too difficult to deal with. In the image below, all I typed was “ASDF”.

Asjdf2.

Again, I will come back with more information later. Until then, I’ve got to go run and buy some Magic Erasers. Fortunately, comparing the inner plastic to the outside, the color difference is barely noticeable, which means that this case probably doesn’t need any kind of whitening. It’s a little brownish, but not any further than what’s probably caused by the thin layer of dirt and oil.

All this being said, it’s time to crank up the synthwave tunes! See you later.

What to do?

Wed, 14 Aug 2024 00:00:00 Z

Gnome.

Right now, it’s still the morning. I’m still sitting at my computer and listening to podcasts — that’s just what I’ve been doing for a lot of time within the past week or so (my physics class is finally over, so I’m on a little bit of a vacation).

School starts in about a week and a half, which is fun and exciting, and I can’t wait, but until then I need to make money, see people, maintain a minimum baseline for mental health…

學中文有意思一點，不過我每天只能一，兩個小時做。But, don’t worry, I haven’t given up on it yet, especially not considering that my actual class starts up again in less than two weeks.

The problem with going places is that it wastes gas that’s pretty expensive for someone who isn’t receiving a paycheck at the moment (this weekend, again, is the flea market that I can use as an opportunity to make some money, but that isn’t exactly a reliable source of income). I might try to find someplace interesting anyway, since that’s always a fulfilling way to spend time.

I could go on a walk. There are some neat little nature trails around where I live, which is a good thing about living in the middle of the woods, although I guess that if I actually lived in a city there wouldn’t be nature trails, but there would be many other things to do within walking distance…

On other notes, I found a cool open-source Firefox-based browser that I’ve been enjoying using for the past few days. It’s called Zen Browser, and I saw a lot of random instability and crashing at first, but it wasn’t just limited to Zen Browser, it was also the case in Epiphany, so I think it had more to do with my highly unstable Internet connection (although when trying to download the featured image for this post, the browser did crash again. Oh, well, it’s almost worth it, because everything else about this is so polished). It’s available on Flathub as “io.github.zen_browser.zen”.

I’ve also switched distros back to Elementary OS 7.1, and noticed that it exists firmly in the Flatpak ecosystem. Flathub has a lot of neat little programs on there, although a lot of them are now themed for GTK4, which looks really out-of-place on the Elementary OS desktop environment. Oh, well — it’s the price you pay for both software freedom and a really polished experience at the same time.

I’ve also started trying to make full use of the PC that I built a while ago (it has an Athlon 200GE and an 8GB RX 580, so it isn’t the greatest gaming rig of all time, but it’s definitely powerful enough to feel meaningful and I’ve been having fun with it). I was thinking for just a moment about selling it, since it’d probably be reasonably valuable at the flea market and I thought I needed the money, but I think if I sell this thing now, I’ll just want to build another one later and, at the end of the day, it’d probably have been a waste of money. Plus, all the cool kids have gamer boxes these days.

I hope that I don’t have any classes so demanding that they force me to use Windows in the coming semester, like I did last semester (just joking, that digital systems class was excellent). Maybe I could get away with a virtual machine now that I have a decently powerful system.

So, at the end of the day, I have all the material goods that I could possibly need to keep myself occupied for the coming length of time. I just need to get creative with them.

Thanks again for reading!

Things that don't go to plan

Wed, 07 Aug 2024 00:00:00 Z

Apple.

A lot of the time, that’s a lot of things. They even wrote a whole book about it (“the best-laid plans…”).

I thought I would be able to move in to my new apartment earlier this week (because the first rent payment was due a week ago), but after calling, it seems like I’m not able to get my keys until the 24th (nearly the end of the month)! That seems fairly unnecessary — I mean, if they’re spending two weeks cleaning in there, I’d be more than happy to do it for them — I’m good at cleaning, right? I would hope so. I would also hope that I could clean a single empty bedroom in under two weeks.

Anyway, I left my part-time job in preparation for the plans that didn’t end up happening, so now I’m at home, just kind of sitting here and regretting, kind of wishing that I’d read a little bit more of the lease agreement (more than just the… title?). That’s my fault, although I think it’s fair to say that I’ve never heard of an apartment charging a month’s rent for a month that they don’t let you live there.

I have a class to finish, though, so I’ve been working on some assignments for the past few days, although not too much — there’s also a quiz that goes live later in the morning, which I’d like to get done. The final is live on Friday, then we get a little less than a week to finish it, which will be nice. I hope I don’t do badly. I should get studying (for both today’s quiz and for the final). Other than that, we have one more lab left. It’s a physics class.

Following all of this, my beloved phone for the past few months (since I bought it off of eBay) has been the Unihertz Jelly 2, which has done everything I’ve needed and been an excellent little piece of hardware, although I was a little upset that the battery wasn’t removable. My parents want to FaceTime me once I’m back at school, though, and weren’t happy with the reliability and quality of the cross-platform FaceTime implementation that has been a relatively recent development of Apple’s arm being forced into actions they wouldn’t have otherwise taken (I can smell the malicious compliance in the video quality). So, yesterday, I took some of that money (the money that isn’t replenishing anymore because I don’t have a part-time job anymore) and spent it on an iPhone SE 3, which is neat, and makes my parents very happy (they can even track my location now, too — I think I sound sarcastic, but honestly, it’s probably a good thing if it really does make them feel better). I had a $150 Apple Store gift card in my wallet from a MacBook that I bought at a flea market and then traded in to the Apple Store (that is a brief summary of just one of my many stories at that flea market), so the cost was subsidized just a little (although, technically, getting that gift card was a net loss of $30).

Anyway, now that I have this iPhone, I’ve also got a 3-month free trial of Apple Music (that I’ll probably continue to pay for once the trial period is up…). I’ve been having a lot of fun with some of this Anders Enger Jensen synth music that I didn’t have access to before (his music is on Bandcamp too, and I did have a Bandcamp account in the past, but that has since been deleted since I was still getting most of my music from the Internet Archive). That’s been inspiring — fun — whatever. Apple Music is a legitimately good service, although $12/month could be a little bit steep depending on how you think of it (that’s the same price as YouTube Premium, which also includes YouTube Music). At least Apple Music doesn’t suffer from it’s a Google product, oh my goodness syndrome.

So, the next time I run around to that flea market, I’m going to try to make some sales to make up for lost money. Then, the next day, I’ll finally be able to move in to my apartment. Augh!

Until I take some good photos with my new iPhone, today’s featured image is from the wallpaper collection of Linux Mint, which is honestly one of the best sources for pictures overall. This one in particular is from my first version of Linux Mint, 17.3 “Rosa”.

Thanks again!

Podcasts and this photo

Fri, 02 Aug 2024 00:00:00 Z

Train.

To help us get around this big world, we have trains like this one that I saw the other day. And that’s really cool.

A while ago, I was looking for podcasts to entertain myself, since my library was a little short and I wanted to branch out and learn about something new (until now, most of my podcast library has been technology-type podcasts). As a quick recommendation, I think that the weekly Linux news podcast from The Linux Experiment is pretty entertaining and informative and whatnot.

Anyway, I managed to stumble across another completely unrelated podcast that equally stole my attention, a podcast about Taiwanese history called Formosa Files. Considering that my two favorite areas of interest are science and technology and then Chinese language and history, I figured Taiwan wasn’t too far off (although I really don’t know that much about, you know, Literary Sinitic and Confucianism and dynastic rule and all those other key elements of Chinese history, since the classes at my school are really just the language part. They leave the culture minute to us, and so while I’m still unsure of what exactly the four principles of Confucius are, I’ve seen plenty of Genshin gameplay).

Those two podcasts are both pretty good and worth listening to (The Linux news one is really only for Linux enthusiasts, but Formosa Files makes a good attempt at being readily accessible and a good listen for anyone. Even if you don’t care about Taiwan, it’s human history. And if you’re trying to learn Mandarin, they’ve started putting out episodes in that every Tuesday—even putting out exclusive content as of late, instead of rewritten reruns—where one of the hosts interjects with English pretty often, which I think is supposed to be helpful for Taiwanese listeners trying to learn English, but is also helpful for listeners like me who, you know, are only really good at English). Then, today, they put out the long-awaited TSMC and Morris Chang history episode, where it was kind of funny when they had to read out the definition of “transistor”.

To everyone reading, thank you for staying with me, it always feels good to have Internet friends and a one-way channel for communication.

Netbook!

Mon, 22 Jul 2024 00:00:00 Z

Netbook.

I found this thing at a flea market yesterday for $10. It’s pretty great. I installed Debian 11 with Raspberry Pi Desktop (which hasn’t been updated in around two years, but it’s still cool as a novelty). It even plays games and holds a charge!

Boing.

Raspi netbook desk.

Raspi netbook hand.

Sometimes, this is just what you need to call a deal. Who says thrifting is dead?

Every week is the same

Sat, 20 Jul 2024 00:00:00 Z

Peacock.

Yesterday, I saw this peacock. It seems pretty chill for a bird that usually is a symbol for pompousness and flashiness. Never judge a peacock by the type of bird it is, I guess…

After living so many weeks, it surprises me that it took this long to figure out that every one is the same. I mean, like, they always start on Monday or Sunday or whenever it is that you think that it starts, and then seven days later the whole thing starts over again.

Or maybe it just feels that way sometimes. I don’t know. We should have one week every year where we run through the days backwards just to mix it up a little bit. Kind of like during the Daylight Savings Time switch in the fall, when it’s 2:00AM one minute and then an hour later it’s still 2:00AM.

Anyway, in an attempt to make it a little bit less monotonous I’ve started trying out some new hobbies. I already owned a few plants, so I decided to buy some more plants, and I’ve been building a little garden on my dresser next to the window. I got one yesterday that’s a few succulents inside of a neat looking little rock. I have no clue exactly how to take care of a succulent, and this one was kind of expensive because of the neat looking rock, so let’s hope I don’t ruin it.

I’ve also started actually using my notetaking Kindle for reading, which to my understanding is what people are supposed to associate with Kindles/Amazon/wasn’t it just so much better when Amazon was a bookstore and not an AliExpress knock-off?

At first, I started reading Vern Sneider’s A Pail of Oysters because that’s a period of history that I don’t know a whole lot about (like, post-WWII East Asia/China/Taiwan) and I wanted to get myself a little bit better perspective. It was a pretty well-paced, understandable, well-written thing, though, and it kept my attention really well. I finished it earlier this week, and I decided that if I liked Vern Sneider’s writing so much, I should read his other famous one, Teahouse of the August Moon, which I only knew was a comedy about something Okinawa (I don’t really know that much about WWII or about Japan). So, I started reading, and it was also really well-written (I mean, that’s probably why it got so famous). Unlike A Pail of Oysters, though, it was definitely intended to be a comedy, and the humor was pretty great (although, as I always warn everyone, I think everything is funny).

The book also did a really good job at giving a little bit of perspective to the target audience of closed-minded Westerners like myself. As I was nearing completion, I went to Target to buy some tea (because, apparently, that’s where we go to get the tea?) and came back home to finish—I wanted to get some sushi at some point, too, but I haven’t gone out for that yet (maybe for lunch later today?). I still drink my coffee a little too quickly, but I can work on that. As a vegetarian, though, all the talk of sweet potatoes and soybeans had me feeling a little bit patriotic.

So, anyway, giving myself a little bit of perspective and some escape has had me feeling like maybe every week isn’t so much the same as I thought. I mean, it’s really up to me whether I have the ambition to go out and try something different when I have the time. Once I finish my physics class, who knows what I can get up to? I have a passport application in processing right now. If I have that back before school starts, maybe I could just drive around freely and see if I end up in New Brunswick or one of those places up there across that arbitrary border they drew in the middle of this corner of the world. And then, once the school year starts, I can try to put it to even better use.

I mean, I don’t know, dreaming about the future is the only thing that can keep me sane, so as long as I write about whatever I’m thinking about here, I’ll probably say a few things that are a little bit too hopeful or a little bit of a reach. But, really, a study abroad would be cool. Employment abroad would be even cooler. Really, I just want to see things and to learn things.

The longer I wait, the more prepared I can be. Have I mentioned “好好學習，天天向上” yet? I read it when I was checking out after buying the MDBG Chinese-English dictionary that I wrote about a few blog posts ago. It’s a neat short phrase that you can keep repeating to yourself so that you don’t forget your study time.

Sometimes, people say that my generation isn’t as motivated as they were in the past, or something along those lines. I think that the path to motivation looks like “freedom > creativity > planning > hope > work > motivation”. Whenever there’s a break in there, it’s a little difficult to recover the whole thing, but writing it out like that makes it easier to imagine how you can put that back together just for yourself. When we use them responsibly, I think, books/movies/podcasts/video games are good ways to help build up the creativity. Learning is hard when you feel like the information you want is far away, but when you have those well-written books or some good teacher to give the information to you in a way that sticks, that also makes learning/working a lot easier.

All this is to say that the semester starts in about a month and it’s going to be great.

I just need to not die before the end of my physics class. Lowering my GPA constitutes dying.

Thanks for reading!

Neat photos

Sat, 13 Jul 2024 00:00:00 Z

Lights.

I took a few photos a while ago that I thought looked nice. They were on the blog in a separate post, but I thought that I should recompile them and put them back with a nicer gallery type setup so that you could just click on them to view.

I also took the opportunity while doing some of this maintenance on my site to change the theme. The new one is called “BlogBD”, and it looks pretty nice, except that I was struggling with trying to apply a header image and had to settle for a solid color that looked okay. Hopefully this site isn’t terribly ugly—my taste in Web design is something approximate to whatever it is they have in Japan, I think. It’s a vibe, for sure.

Here are the photos!

My first electric vehicle!

Sun, 23 Jun 2024 00:00:00 Z

Niu scooter.

The NIU KQi2 Pro came in the mail earlier than I expected—I had it before noon this morning, actually, which was nice because I wasn’t working today and got to take it out of the box and get everything set up with plenty of time. It was cloudy, though, and that turned to rain for most of the afternoon, so I didn’t really get much chance to try it in full, although I’ve gotten generally used to the controls just going around my neighborhood. It’s pretty nice!

You do need to connect it to the Internet through the app to activate it, though, and then critical features like customization of the maximum speed, remote lock/unlock, regenerative braking settings, and the rest are all done in the app. It’s fine, though, I guess—the app gets my location data, but only when I’m using it, which isn’t while I’m riding the scooter (my phone, the Unihertz Jelly 2, also has very aggressive memory management and turns off any app that’s unused for more than about fifteen to twenty minutes. I can’t figure out how to change this, but it hasn’t been too much of a problem, and it does save battery life and keep performance high and the phone from ever getting hot). Besides, at least it isn’t Google getting the data, where they might be able to do some damage with it and the help of local data brokers and marketing agencies.

I’ve also been looking around the Internet for more Mandarin learning tools, since I feel like I’m a little imbalanced (I don’t really watch any Chinese dramas, read, uh, Danmei novels, or whatever it is that other people learn Mandarin for…)

I stumbled across r/ChineseLanguage, which is actually one of the few remaining relatively wholesome Subreddits. I’d recommend it if you’re bored for a while and want to relate with some fellow members of the HSK2-sphere (there’s a nice distribution of advanced learners and beginners on there, so I don’t feel alienated! That’s neat). I’m always a lurker, though. I don’t have a Reddit account, so my fun ended after reading the past few days’ worth of threads.

Anyway, after doing the lurking, I decided that I needed a reliable source of challenging content that had characters, definitions, and pronunciations. I installed a Firefox extension called “Zhongwen” (it seems popular—if you put your cursor over some hanzi, it’ll tell you the definitions. If you put it at the beginning of a phrase, it will tell you what the phrase means). I bookmarked 天下雜誌 “Commonwealth Magazine”, a Taiwanese news outlet that also puts audio transcripts for all of its posts (I think this is pretty common in the online news media world, but it’s a good bonus for language learning). Most of the articles seem to not be confusing or excessively politically charged, although I’m not sure if growing to expect that is something that we’ve only had to do in the land of the ( -> ) red, ( <-> ) white and ( <- ) blue.

And then there’s always the classic Hūndì Dūndì for those of us who truly believe in the meaning of the 兒化 (with Gwoyeh Romatzyh on the side for comedic effect, ai ia!).

Finally, I’ve also decided to finally discontinue the old SearXNG instance that ran on this server (on a different domain—it was at justsearch.ing). I think I was really the only one who ever used it—I got a friend to check it out once, but SearXNG just isn’t a drop-in replacement for other search engines like Startpage. Little things, like my server being a little slow and searches taking a while, or searches occasionally failing, just made the experience feel a little “less than premium” after a while.

So, today, I tore down the instance, pointed the domain to a parking page and turned off auto-renew. I took down the Docker container and I made a Kagi account. So far, it’s been great—not only is everything very fast, but customization is even easier than it was on SearXNG!

Custom kagi.

I also pasted the Kagi Oranginum CSS into the “Custom CSS” field, which is a nice theme and one of the few that seems to work with the new UI that Kagi has rolled out just this year. The whole UI is a little big at first pass, but I realized that I preferred the Web browsing experience more anyway when I turned my “Zoom” page-rendering scale setting in Firefox to 80%. Changing the font size in Kagi only affects the text—the rest of the UI elements don’t scale to match, so anything other than “Medium” looks a little strange.

Anyway, Kagi comes with other features that I didn’t expect to be attracted by, either. Kagi has a GPT called “FastGPT”, which is kept separate from their primary search engine (I like compartmentalization, and I can imagine most opinionated Internet citizens are the same) and, jumping at the opportunity for some 中文學, I had a conversation with an AI, something that I’ve been holding off on for as long as possible in an effort to resist change for no reason.

Fastgpt.

It seems to produce results just as good as any GPT（可是我的小腦看不懂）!

And, of course, with an actual fleet of dedicated servers, Kagi search is faster than my SearXNG was.

I know I’ve reported on things that I bought on the Internet today a few too many times in the few blog posts I’ve already written, but hey, you know, I’m having fun.

One thing that I think has also been a net improvement to my life has been this neat Firefox theme that I found (and when I say neat, I really mean neat, I mean, it’s pretty clean). It’s called Solarized Light, and it’s a very nice color palette. I also changed my macOS terminal to match. My eyes are happy, and I don’t have to resort to full-hardcore dark mode!

So, at the end of the day, thanks again for reading. This post was a little long. I hope this doesn’t subconsciously set an unmatchable standard for every blog post that stresses me out into not writing anything else for another three months—that would beat the point of the blog being a personal center for self-expression and low-tension vibes.

謝謝大家！

A neat online tool

Thu, 20 Jun 2024 00:00:00 Z

大家好！

Teng.

This has nothing to do with anything, and everything to do with my off-hours Mandarin studying strategies. I was looking around the internet last night and I found a neat tool, which also has an offline version. It’s a Chinese-English dictionary—I used to use the Yabla one until it went down earlier this week—this one has a little bit of additional information, too, like HSK levels. I’m not sure how the vocabulary from one to the other compares, but this one also has an offline version; on Mac, this is a dictionary that you can add to the “Dictionary” application, which makes it pretty clean and elegant and match with the rest of the user interface.

這是我找到的中文詞典：

我希望你們喜歡，我已經能看這個詞典很好用。

If this is useful to you, I recommend you check it out! The full version is $15.95, which isn’t terrible, even if it’s just a dictionary. A paper dictionary would probably cost more than that, and this one is nice to keep around.

It can even do personal names of a few famous people (just see the thumbnail photo).

再見！

Going with the flow

Wed, 19 Jun 2024 00:00:00 Z

Briel brigels.

Although I haven’t taken any good pictures with my phone lately, today’s Wikimedia Commons Image of the Day fits the theme of this post well, so it’s today’s thumbnail. It was taken by Agnes Monkelbaan and you can find it at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Breil-Brigels,_Lag_da_Breil-_Flem._23-09-2022._(actm.)_11.jpg.

“Going with the flow” is something that I think I’d like to do more of. There’s a cycle that just keeps repeating: I get some momentum, I get some sleep, I get some caffeine and I start coming up with ideas. During the semester, I work on projects, I work on schoolwork, and then my sleep schedule keeps declining and declining until I catch bronchitis or something from the person across the table from me in physics class and then I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck for the rest of the week.

Maybe that was just a first-semester thing. You know, just adjusting to the germs in my new semi-faraway environment (I go to school something like seven or eight hours away by car from where I’ve lived all my life — it’s certainly not a distant land, but far enough for them to have some strains of the flu that my immune system has never seen before).

Anyway, I’d kind of assumed that I would be safe from that over the summer. I’m back home, less classes, working will make me more tired, I’ll be more relaxed — what I got, though, was the residue of that school-year energy. I keep signing up for more and more days at work and trying to make more money, coming back and studying for the summer class that I’m taking, you know, on and on… then, a few days ago, I caught some cold or whatever. Completely unrelated to everything else happening in my life.

But sometimes getting just a little bit sick is a good thing. It always changes my brain a little and makes me calmer and more reasonable. I don’t have the energy to be impulsive. I’ve been taking a shower in the morning and at night. I mean, I’m really not that bent out of shape, I’ve been living my life completely normally for the few days that I’ve had this little, you know, whatever it is — it’s been just enough to make me realize that “going with the flow” is the philosophy in life that I want to try to adhere to. I have my own beliefs and goals and ideologies and whatnot, but, like, if something is terribly beyond my control and I keep worrying about it, that won’t do anything. Cool heads and chill people get things done.

We’ve also got a giant heat wave coming in (I live in the northeastern US, which should make a good bit of sense for most people reading). It was almost a sauna outside today, but it’s supposed to keep getting hotter — with all the negative thoughts swirling around, this had climate change more on my mind than it even usually is. You know? I mean, that’s the big issue that no one person can solve and that everybody stresses about. First, at a personal level (which really isn’t where I think we solve this problem, but anyway…) I don’t feel like I’m an atrocious weight on the carbon footprint of humanity — I live in a town where most of the power comes from a hydroelectric dam anyway (I’m just lucky for that), I’m already a vegetarian (not in a pretentious way, I just really like soy-based food products), but I do have to drive around my mom’s old SUV because I live in a town without public transportation. 哎呀。

I had already been thinking about a certain thing for a while, anyway — they seemed popular enough on campus — I’ve really been looking into buying an electric bicycle or an electric scooter. Electric bicycles tend to be expensive (usually upward of a thousand dollars), and they’re big and kind of a shiny target for people who want to steal vehicles (on the car-free campus at my school for which I’m so grateful, stealing bikes is the only and highest form of grand-theft-auto, which makes me worry about it slightly more). Scooters are smaller, lighter, and cheaper, so after a little bit of on-and-off research, I bought a NIU KQi2 Pro. I mean, I know this “NIU” company was created by the former CTO of Baidu and they even advertise as a selling point on their website all the user data that they collect in order to improve their products for city travel, but it was only $450 at Best Buy and, you know, hopefully I can just use it without connecting it to the Internet.

So, anyway, electric scooter aside, all I can really do myself to fight climate change is to get educated, so I’m going to start trying to do my research where it counts (not just about which electric scooter I should buy). I’m going to try to listen to some climate-change informative podcasts, and I find any good ones I’ll recommend them here. And to survive the coming week, I’ll just have to stay hydrated.

Until the hole in the ozone layer closes, global temperatures regulate themselves, and tech companies start respecting user privacy, I appreciate you for reading! I apologize that I’ve just realized now that in the WordPress theme I use (“Twenty-Fifteen”, the default one from nine years ago), the thumbnail images for posts are downscaled so low that they look pretty fuzzy on most modern displays (even on my 2015 MacBook Pro, which is of course from the same year and has a Retina display that makes those image thumbnails look less than optimal). If you like any of the featured images, I’ll start putting links to the full-quality versions at the top of the blog posts. I’ll even edit my first post to include the same thing.

Thanks again!