Random miscellaneous updates

Do I post too much about my personal life? Oh wait that’s why I have a blog.

Fibro stuff

So let’s see. Wellbutrin’s been going pretty okay for me, although it’s still disrupting my sleep and giving me intense dreams. At least the dreams have started to get silly instead of angsty, so, that’s an improvement.

It’s also been causing some constipation, but today a gift from my sister arrived: a bunch of coffee from Albuquerque. It wasn’t decaf, but I wanted to give it a try, and a single shot of espresso got me going, in more ways than one. Whoo-ee.

Oh, also, I’ve been on low-dose naltrexone for almost a week. I’m not sure if it’s been helping but it’s definitely not been hurting. At the very least I’ve not been in as much pain lately but that could just be placebo, as these things always go (and anyway supposedly it won’t start being effective for like a month).

DDR is helping a lot too. I’m back up to where I can reliably pass 7* songs, and of course since I’m doing it as an exercise thing I’m sticking mostly to 5* and 6* songs. And my heart rate and blood pressure have already gone down considerably, which was the entire point to restarting this. Also, Stepmania gives me access to so much music that never came out in the US home releases, and holy heck there’s a lot of it.

Computer stuff

I ended up reinstalling macOS on my iMac again and ever since then it’s been pretty stable. Maybe I didn’t need to do the computer upgrade after all. But oh well. I did set up the new monitor with my work laptop and it’s pretty decent, and having the ability to actually switch between multiple computers will be really useful. So hopefully the downgrade to 16GB of RAM from 64 won’t be that big a deal.

Also it’ll be interesting to see how well Crossover runs on the Apple Silicon Macs. Supposedly it works pretty well, so, that’ll be cool if I don’t lose the handful of Windows apps I care about. Heck, this seems like a better way to run my Steam games on my desktop than the actual native Mac versions (most of which were never updated for 64-bit macOS).

Today I also decided to do some storage benchmarking so I’d have a reference point for the new machine, because why not. Here’s how my various drives worked out (all speeds in MB/sec, measured by Blackmagic Disk Speed):

Drive Write speed Read speed
Internal1 603.2 2505.4
External2 318.3 390.7
NAS3 70.6 109.8
NVMe external 880.3 900.4

Benchmarks on the Mac mini seem to all say that the internal NVMe drive gets around 3400MB/s writes and 2800MB/sec reads. But the important speed for me will be the external 2TB NVMe drive that I’ll be putting all of my user files on. Given that it’ll be getting a dedicated Thunderbolt USB 3.1g2 (10Gbit) connection, and the underlying device claims a peak speed of 3400MB/s, I’m guessing that it’ll get speeds of around 1250MB/s, which is still far faster for writes than my current setup (although a bit slower for reads).

Anyway, the drive arrives tomorrow, so I’ll be able to get a better idea of how it’ll perform pretty quickly. I don’t see any reason for it to perform any differently on the Mac mini vs. the iMac, anyway.

(Too bad the mini doesn’t just have an extra m.2 slot inside. Even though it has plenty of room inside that relatively-massive case…)

Update: The NVMe enclosure and SSD arrived today and I hooked them up. The write speed is a bit lower than the read speed, which tells me that writes are limited by the SSD itself, and reads are limited to 900MB/sec, which is about what one would expect on a 10Gbps connection. Hopefully in the future there will be a proper Thunderbolt 3 or USB 3.2 NVMe enclosure I can upgrade to in order to improve the performance of this volume, although frankly a gigabyte per second is plenty fast for anything I do anyway.

Update 2: In transferring large, non-hot files from my internal drive to the new SSD, I’m getting a read rate that varies between 2-10MB/sec, which is pretty pathetic even for an HDD. I don’t know how much of that is due to Finder overhead, though, since Finder always seems a bit inefficient when it comes to managing file transfers. I should have probably used rsync to get a better idea of true throughput (not to mention making it take less than 3 hours to move 100GB).

Crowd Cow

I’m almost done with the venison hot dogs, and also the last pound of ground beef. This finishes off the first Crowd Cow box. And, per my recent price breakdown it’s a pretty good deal overall and having this stuff around has gotten me doing a lot more cooking (and enjoying my food), so I’m going to go ahead and get another box.

Currently on-deck for January:

  • New things
    • 4 oz hanger steak
    • 16 oz flat iron steak
    • 12 oz kielbasa
    • 9 oz spicy breakfast sausage patties
    • 12 oz prepared teriyaki salmon (a variety not available at QFC)
    • 16 oz bavette steak
  • Repeats from the November box
    • Beef tenderloin tips
    • Chili relleno sausage
    • Smoked salmon
    • Five pepper sausage
    • Ground beef

I’ll be particularly interested in the bavette steak; I’ve never cooked that before and I have some ideas about how to prepare it.

So, I mean, so much for me being a conscientious omnivore? Oh well.

Project updates

I really want to work on Publ more. I also really want to get around to improving the friggin' website for it. Or I wish I could get other people excited enough about it to actually, like, work on it, or use it, or… really, anything with it.

I mean I’m glad that I built it, since it works pretty well for my needs. But it feels like the way I think about software is so far removed from how software is built and deployed anymore. And this makes me think a lot about career stuff I’m unhappy about too.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about a JRPG idea I had a while ago that I really want to work on at some point. As if I don’t already have enough unfinished games in progress.

Also some gender crap

♫ On the first day of Christmas, my family gave to me… 50 minutes of Zoom misgendering ♪

At least my sister-in-law used they/them for me. Not my first choice, but better than the alternative.

Also, ugh I really hate seeing candid photos of myself. Someday I need to get around to writing an article about “photography privilege” and how annoying it is that cis folks just Assume that trans people are cool with having random photos of them posted online.

I’ve also been making a lot of progress with my voice training, but I can’t bring myself to actually try using my femme voice with anyone I know. Bleah.

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