Miscellaneous goings-on

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I’ve been on guanfacine for a few days and so far I’m not noticing that my focus has changed any, but on the plus side my blood pressure is great now. So, that’s good.

I don’t know if it’s from the naltrexone or the guanfacine but my dreams have been pretty vivid and weird, but usually in a good way. Unlike when I was on the Wellbutrin and my dreams were vivid and stressful.

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Mac mini updates

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First off, I am a dummy and completely failed to notice that there are in fact two USB-A ports on the Mini itself. The dock was completely unncessary for my initial setup. Oops!

Also, I just played some test content in HDR and holy heck it looks pretty amazing. Conveniently enough, Safari supports HDR in YouTube while Firefox doesn’t, so I was able to play some videos side-by-side to see the difference, and it was pretty immense, especially in the extremes. Which is, of course, the whole point to HDR.

I’ll probably keep using Firefox for usual video stuff, though, because I’m not a fan of not having a decent ad blocker. Hopefully Firefox adds HDR support soon!

EDIT: Oh yeah, I ended up force-quitting the NI installer so that I could finish installing some system updates and the Wacom driver and so on. What’s really cool is that even though the Wacom driver is still x86, Rosetta still emulates it. Holy cow. Also the Silicon Macs use a new driver signing thing that’s a little onerous but also exposes a nicer way of going into the startup disk selector (now you just hold down the power button while booting, no need to remember an awkward keyboard combination that doesn’t always map right to whatever weird keyboard you’re using at the time).

Also, I had meant to do some disk speed tests as well. See below!

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New Mac mini

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Today I wasn’t expecting to get a lot of work done due to my brain still feeling like it’s been through a juicer, and also because my new Mac mini arrived today. So I got to go through the drudgery of reinstalling everything while also seeing the news of the world exploding around me! Hooray!

Anyway, just some random setup notes.

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So much for Wellbutrin

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Yesterday I was feeling pretty off, in a “wow I think my blood pressure is spiking again” way. And I happened to have an appointment at the pain clinic, and they measured my blood pressure at 160/90, which is, you know, Pretty High. At the time I chalked it up to having walked over there in a hurry, but throughout the afternoon and evening I kept measuring it and it remained that high.

And then all night long I had a hell of a time sleeping. I only got around 3 hours of sleep total; most of the time I was just lying awake, blood pounding in my ears, feeling like I was going to die. At 3 AM I also checked my blood pressure again and it was 160/100. Yikes.

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So, comments were broken

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So hey, I thought it was weird that nobody had been posting comments on my blog in a while. Turns out comments were just, like, broken, and nobody told me, for some reason.

The problem turned out to be that Isso currently doesn’t work on Python 3.8 (or at least, the current released version, which is ridiculously outdated, doesn’t), and it was easy to roll it back to Python 3.7, thanks to poetry’s pyenv integration. So, score another one for poetry.

But why don’t people actually tell me when they’re having problems with my site? Do people just assume that if something’s broken it’s broken on purpose? Because I mean… no?

Anyway, comments are fixed now.

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2021 goals

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Let’s not call them resolutions.

One year ago I set out some goals for the next decade. They’re all pretty good goals. But here’s some specific things I’d like to accomplish over the next year:

  • Get my voice to a spot where people don’t misgender me quite so much
  • Get my fibromyalgia and ADHD meds dialed in (so far so good)
  • Actually finish my next non-Novembeat album1
  • PlaidWeb things, such as:
    • An online post editor
    • A self-hosted notification engine (for webmention, activitypub, websub, etc.)
    • Maybe actually write some actual code for Subl?
    • Also maybe actually put a dang site together for PlaidWeb
  • Rebuild my broken social life
  • Get my home clean, and keep it clean
  • Start drawing comics regularly again
  • And the ever-present goal of losing, say, 15 pounds

Kind of ambitious, I know, but it’s better to aim for the stars and hit the moon than to never even leave the ground.

Oh, good

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Just when I was worried that reinstalling the OS on my iMac once again fixed its many stability problems, it’s started randomly killing Sublime Text and occasionally kernel panicking for no particular reason again. And now the kernel panic backtrace involves an entirely different subsystem, and is for things that shouldn’t have even been in use when the machine crashed! (Heck, I wasn’t even at my machine at the time!)

Fortunately the M1 mini is arriving on Wednesday and hopefully then things will actually work for a while. Who knows.

Oh also happy new year etc.etc., no comic this year I can’t be bothered1

3D printing wood

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A week ago I bought some wood-filled PLA, and I’ve been experimenting with it a bit to see how to make it actually look like wood.

The first thing I printed (a Pocket Operator case) just looked like it was printed with boring beige filament, even after being sanded:

IMG_2515D.jpeg

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Flood and Mac updates

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Flood update: Today I checked on my stuff in storage and was happy to find that there is apparently no damage inside any of my instrument cases; they just got a little bit of dirt on the outside. Yay!

Mac update: Even after having done all the stuff to make it stable, it continues to be unstable. Ugh. So I decided to just go ahead and buy an M1 Mac mini (512GB storage, 16GB RAM), monitor, external NVMe m.2 enclosure, and a 2TB drive for it. I won’t have the new computer until January 15. Normally I wouldn’t be so eager to do a first-gen new-architecture Mac but the reviews of it have been great and meanwhile this 2017 iMac has always given me a lot of trouble with stability and reliability and mysterious problems; Big Sur made it worse, but it was never a particularly great computer to begin with.1

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