Daryl Sun's Journal

This Week (and the previous weeks) — Hellos and Goodbyes

TL;DR:

A fresh new year inspires a refresh of my software stack, and a foray into PikaPods and Johnny Decimal. I discover new things in my virtual pet games and Steam library, and say goodbye to my first mobile gacha game. On the rest of the web, new websites rise and fall.

This blog post has approximately 3719 words and may take 19 minutes to read.

Belated Happy Holidays, Happy New Year, and Happy Valentine's Day, everyone!

Yes, this is my first weekly update of the year, and yes, I'm aware that I'm extremely late for holiday greetings. This is primarily because the blog reconstruction took me much longer than planned, with me thinking of more potential improvements to my blog and doing more tasks! In fact, it's not complete yet: ironically, I haven't finished reformatting my old blog posts, which was the purpose of the blog reconstruction in the first place. Instead, I focused on cleaning up the HTML and CSS for this blog, and redesigning its appearance so it looks cuter, whimsical, and more unique. I don't regret the change of focus, though; I'm happy with how my blog looks now. However, I still have some tasks left before I can consider myself done with the blog reconstruction. I plan that once I am, I'll write up a post-mortem of the entire process in a separate blog post. I also plan to post some of what I learned while redesigning this blog, mostly CSS-related, as notes .

Anyway, for the past two months or so, I've been busy in the physical world: mid-December, our office had a week-long year-end workshop, which was both fun because I got to meet training facilitators from our branch offices throughout the country, and stressful because I had to assist with running some parts of the workshop. Then near the end of December, I helped Mom with the shopping for our holiday celebrations, and brought her on a trip to a museum she has always wanted to visit.

Early January was fairly quiet, with some work meetings here and there, but during this time I was updating my software stack and organizing my files, which I'll expound on later. Near the end of January and the start of February, though, I assisted with running a series of orientations for our organization, which went surprisingly well.

I also went on a trip with Mom and my sister to our metropolis' version of Chinatown in celebration of the Lunar New Year; we did get lost for a few minutes before finally finding the restaurant that my Mom wanted to try there. That was an interesting trip: I think my favorite part was when we saw several cosplayers in elaborate dragon-themed Super Sentai-style costumes hanging around the local church there.

Now that I've caught up with ten weeks' worth of real-life updates, it's time for my shenanigans in the virtual world!

Software Stack Update

First, inspired by the Accessible Net Directory, I decided to switch my font stack on my devices from Lato to Atkinson Hyperlegible for general reading, and from Hack to Intel One Mono for coding. So far, I'm enjoying these fonts, so I think I'll keep them around for a longer while. (In fact, I enjoyed them so much that I'm using them for this blog!)

Second, I found the time to start using and storing passkeys in Bitwarden. While I like that I don't have to deal with passwords or OTPs, only a few websites I often use have passkey support so far, so I don't feel the advantages much. Also, every time I changed browsers, which I'll explain later, I have to update the passkeys too. (Of course, I could be misunderstanding how passkeys work across devices. If I am, please feel free to correct me!)

Third, I decided to transfer my feeds from RSSGuard to Fraidycat. I realized that I preferred reading articles from my feeds in my browser, where I can easily and quickly open them, rather than in a separate app. I also like how you can choose how often Fraidycat checks certain feeds, so it doesn't slow down your browser with all the background checks.

Fourth, on the rare occasion that I check Lemmy nowadays, I found out that Simple Mobile Tools got sold, which drove me to a panic that almost made me late for work as I scrambled to find replacements. Fortunately, later several of the previous contributors to the Simple Mobile Tools project forked the apps and restarted the project as Fossify. I easily transferred over my data from the Simple Mobile Tools apps I used to their Fossify versions, and breathed a sigh of relief.

Fifth, after a year or so, I got sick of websites breaking sometimes whenever I used Librewolf and Mull. Thus, I accepted some compromises with my threat model and committed to using only one regular browser. At first, I tried using Brave only, but I missed some of my extensions. Hence, I switched to the default Firefox build as my daily browser. I'm now quite happy with this setup: decent privacy with minimal breakage.

Sixth, because I value both security and efficiency (I'm slightly paranoid and rather lazy), I've started using WinGetUI and Obtainium. I previously used topgrade and a combination of Droid-ify and FFUpdater to keep my apps updated, but topgrade would sometimes break and simply refused to update my Powershell modules, while it was cumbersome to check both Droidify and FFUpdater for updates.

Seventh, Aseprite went on sale during the Lunar New Year, so I decided to buy a software key. There's nothing wrong with Pixelorama, which I used for my previous pixels: I just got curious since I often see Aseprite recommended more over Pixelorama. I haven't actually tried it out as of this writing, but I'll report back when I do.

Finally, I found out recently that the Android app for Money Manager EX has updates again, so I decided to try and use Money Manager EX instead of My Expenses for my personal finances. I'll admit, the UI has much to be desired, but I haven't used it much yet, so maybe it'll grow on me.

(Side note: This isn't really part of my software stack update, but since I previously used Hexchat for a while in the past, I thought this was worth mentioning — Hexchat has ceased development, due to lack of maintainers. While I don't know if I'll be using Hexchat again anytime soon, I do wish the previous maintainer the best of luck with their future endeavors.)

Adventures in Self-Hosting (But Not Really)

Sometime in January, @jcrabapple mentioned PikaPods on Mastodon. PikaPods is basically a one-click app-hosting service, which uses Docker containers and doesn't required users to supply their own virtual private servers (VPS). I got curious and checked out the apps they support, which includes some services I like such as Nextcloud, Vaultwarden, and wallabag. (In case you're wondering, Vaultwarden is an unofficial implementation of Bitwarden, which is supposed to be lighter and faster.)

I decided I wanted to try my hand at self-hosting but with cheats enabled, and start my own Nextcloud server. After calculating the costs, I signed up and started a pod, which was what PikaPods calls their app deployments. The entire process went much smoother than expected, and my Nextcloud server is decently fast with just the apps I need. With only Nextcloud, I've replaced Syncthing, EteSync, and Standard Notes.

Much later, inspired by my success with Nextcloud, I decided to also self-host Vaultwarden and wallabag. The transition from the official Bitwarden instance to self-hosted Vaultwarden was also smooth: the data export even included my passkeys! Any attached files weren't transferred, however, but that's intentional behavior for exporting and a oversight on my part. Since those files were simply my PGP key backups, I can easily recreate them. On the other hand, while I could still claim the same smooth transition for wallabag, I ran into a bug that's several years old and basically reversed the order of my articles in the wallabag Android app. (The order of articles is correct in my instance itself, so indeed, it's a bug solely in the Android app.)

Currently, I'm considering whether to run Actual and Miniflux as well, for easier syncing of data between my devices. I'll think it over.

File Organization

After I started my own Nextcloud server, I realized that I wanted to organize my files first before syncing them to my new server. Then I recalled seeing a blog post by @robb about something called the Johnny Decimal System. After browsing through the website of the Johnny Decimal System, I decided to buy the workbook and try it out for myself.

I deliberated on my own implementation of the Johnny Decimal System, which was what took a good chunk of my January. Eventually, I settled on the following areas for my implementation:

00-09 System
10-19 Work
20-29 Household
30-39 Finance
40-49 Technology
50-59 Creative
60-69 Learning

I used the Drag-n-Drop Johnny Decimal Index Generator to create the above outline.

I'll explain more about my implementation of the Johnny Decimal System in a note. (Okay, this is because I haven't made a proper index for my system. I know, I'm a heathen!)

Virtual Pets

I'll confess: while I focused on the blog reconstruction, I fell behind on actively collecting and monitoring my virtual pets. The two games where I've been consistently active, though, were Pixel Cat's End and Pixpet, since I had daily tasks in the former and plants to look after in the latter.

Last December, Pixel Cat's End held its second Snowmelt event, which is the transition between Winter and Spring in-universe. During Snowmelt, players can collect rare event-only items, including user-designed snails from a previous contest. (I considered joining the contest, but I didn't think my pixel coloring skills were very good yet, so I didn't.) To my surprise, I collected all but one of the snails just by finishing my daily tasks; I rounded up the collection by buying the last snail from the Open Market. By the end of Snowmelt, I even had extra snails, which I sold on the Open Market for a neat profit. (This was how I learned that I could sell items. Once again, I have sabotaged myself by not reading the manual.)

Oh yeah, I went adventuring once, reached the final boss fight, and beat it on first try. My strategy was basically, "let Thersa and Wrecker beat up the boss while Web distracts them and Shadow keeps everyone alive." I didn't think it would work, but it did, and that's amazing!

Then come January, Pixel Cat's End again opened registrations for a few days. Around this time, after much grinding and buying, I finally gathered enough materials to build a Village Lodge, which lets me assign cats who can grant my other cats buffs. The Village Lodge is considered an end-game building, so I thought it was a great accomplishment for me to achieve after just a few months of joining.

Meanwhile, in Pixpet, I was deep in the trenches... of the egg and item bidding wars. Sometimes I'd win and push the limits of my inventory with everything I've collected; sometimes I'd lose and sulk for an hour or so. In the end, I currently have 62 Pixpets, including the recently-released Winter-only Pixpet Wucheimon that gave me so much trouble to get after several failed bidding wars.

I did check Dragon Cave long enough to try and collect all the dragons for the Holiday and Valentine's Day events. While I scored all available Holiday dragon breed, I got all but one dragon breed for Valentine's Day. (The Valentine's Day dragon breed I missed was the Xocoatl Dragon.) From experience, the previous year's dragon breeds are the hardest to catch, so I wasn't too disappointed; I plan to try and get it next year instead.

Mobile Games

To my utter shock and dismay, I found out last December that Dissidia Final Fantasy Opera Omnia will be ending service on the 29th of February this year. I quit playing some time ago because I could no longer fit it in my erratic schedule, but it always held a special place in my heart for being my first mobile gacha game, with its odd but compelling stories and generous giveaways. I may have my gripes with the gameplay, but I'll miss it all the same.

Farewell, Opera Omnia. May fate unite us once more.

Thankfully, it looks like Granblue Fantasy isn't ending anytime soon. (I hope. Please, Apollo, don't let me jinx this.) Unlike in previous events, I wasn't able to max out all the stats of the weapon for the Exo Ifrit Crucible in December, because the event ran during the year-end workshop and thus I couldn't pay full attention to it. After I got back, I preoccupied myself with the blog reconstruction, so I skipped Proving Grounds and several story events.

In January, I paid attention long enough to participate in the month's Unite and Fight event. It was Fire Advantage, though, and my Fire party isn't really impressive, so I didn't grind as hard as I could.

What did I grind for was the My Hero Academia collab event. (Yes, you read that right. My Hero Academia did a collab with Granblue Fantasy) I love My Hero Academia, so you bet I finished the story, maxed out all the event characters, and got most of the rewards. (Okay, I skipped the story and didn't bother grabbing the last reward because that would involve joining public raids which I didn't want to do.)

Oh yeah, I also did a little grinding for Dread Barrage this month, just enough to get some more crystals.

PC Games

My Steam Review for the previous year revealed to me that my top five games, from the most player to the least, were:

  1. The Sims 4
  2. Cookie Clicker
  3. House Flipper
  4. APICO
  5. Monument Valley: Panoramic Collection

I'm not surprised by the first three entries, since I developed a fixation on Sims 4 and House Flipper throughout the year, and Cookie Clicker always held a special place in my heart. What did surprise me was APICO, since I played it very late in December. To be fair to whatever algorithm Steam used, I sank about forty hours into APICO in two day, because for some reason, crafting mechanics fascinate me. Also, bees.

After receiving my Steam Review, I decided to try out some of the other games I've previously purchased but haven't touched in my library: Power Wash Simulator, Garden Galaxy, Sticky Business, Chillquarium, Cloud Garden. Out of these, Sticky Business is my favorite so far; there's something so relaxing about designing stickers and packaging them for delivery. (I'll confess: I played Sticky Business on Endless Mode.)

Forum Events

I decided to join the basement community after its administrator, orchids, hopped onto the 32-Bit Cafe Discord server to advertise the forum's ongoing first-anniversary event. But first, what is the basement community?

this is is an internet forum purposed for general discussion with more niche topics contained in sub-forums

The event's theme was Internet Usage, which inspired in me the ambitious goal of documenting my colorful Internet history. Unfortunately, it was too ambitious, as the page went longer than I thought it would and I often doubted my no-longer-reliable memory. Thus, at the eve of the deadline, I admitted defeat:

I know I said when I joined here that I will submit something for this event, but life happened and I lost motivation to finish my page. I might finish it someday, but definitely not soon and in time for the deadline. Sorry, y'all.

While I felt disappointed in myself for not meeting my stated goal, I also felt relieved that I didn't have to submit something half-baked just to beat the deadline. My boyfriend supported me throughout my slow breakdown over this, and I'm so thankful to him for being here for me.

On the brighter side: I submitted my pixel snowflakes in time for 32-Bit Cafe's holiday event. (I submitted two, because I couldn't decide on a design, and my boyfriend said they both looked nice.) You can find them on the event's submission page, or on my /cliques page. I also submitted a blog post for the event: the previous blog post!

I wasn't able to participate in 32-Bit Cafe's Valentine's Day event, however, because I was helping with the orientations around that time. Also, how do people design Valentine's Day cards? (Please don't ask me if I've given my boyfriend one.)

However, the most exciting news of all: 32-Bit Cafe launched their Discourse forum last week! It replaces the Postmill link aggregator and supplements the Discord server. It now also hosts 32-Bit Cafe's resource list. I will admit, I'm not a fan of how clunky and sluggish Discord can be at times, so I'm looking forward to participating more in the forum.

Other Shenanigans

I found out by accident, while testing Mojeek, that my blog has been featured by Joe Jenett on his linklog and directory. Amazing!

Also, this blog is now included in PersonalSit.es. Nice!

Also also, I realized that I've been doing the 100 Days to Offload challenge wrong. The hashtag is supposed to go in the toots linked to the blog posts, not in the blog posts themselves. Whoops!

I decided to sign up for neorings, which is a webring platform similar to webri.ng, the service I use for the Unofficial weblog.lol Webring. Website submission and approval is all done on the website, which means that anyone who wants to submit their website to a webring hosted on neorings will have to create an account. Some people might like that, but personally, I prefer application to not need an account, and so I'll stick to webri.ng for now.

I also signed up for BookWyrm, specifically on the bookrastinating.com instance, in support of my goal to read one nonfiction book this year. Okay, the book I chose to track isn't from my Humble Bundle library, but something I bought due to my recent interests: Inclusive Design Patterns by Heydon Pickering. It's about making websites accessible, so I hope that by the end of the book, I know more about integrating accessibility into this blog!

I decided to be somewhat active on Mastodon and Lemmy again. My first Mastodon toot after my unofficial break was a brief about how I chose my blog name:

@anniegreens I remember that when I was naming my blog, I couldn't think of anything creative: naming things really is hard!

Then I just shrugged and named my blog "Daryl Sun's Journal."

On the other hand, my first Beehaw post was... the breaking news that Skiff got acquired by Notion. I've never used Skiff nor Notion, so I find my post to be somewhat ironic.

Miscellaneous

Here's some things that other people have been up to, which I find interesting!

@adam wrote a recap of all that omg.lol has accomplished in 2023, and his plans for the website in 2024. Oh yeah, he also has a blog now.

Somehow, I missed that apollo.town is gone now, but at least I didn't miss @nicolas launching usenet.lol, another Lemmy instance. It's very quiet, but I like the retro website theme.

Speaking of things launched, @sara created RSS JOY, a website aggregating feeds from various web development-related blogs. I love the design!

Last January, SourceHut suffered a nasty DDoS attack that lasted several days. Drew DeVault, the lead maintainer of SourceHut, wrote a blog post about the initial attack, then another after he and the SourceHut team got the website and its services back to full capacity. Nobody knows when some random black-hat hacker will decide that a website they don't like needs to be DDoS-ed, and how long will they keep it up, so I'm amazed by how the team still saved SourceHut. Thank you all, SourceHut team!

Whew! That's ten weeks worth of updates in one blog post. Thank you very much for sticking around this far. Well, see you next time or whenever!

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