I created a #gopher hole at gopher://gopher.club:70/1/users/trdaisuke/

I'll be crossposting my posts here going forward.

This post originally hit the smolweb on 11 July 22 at gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/trdaisuke/2022-07-11.txt

I've been posting about one post a day from my gopher log, but now that I'm getting close to caught up, I think I'm going to make an intentional decision to stay about a week behind on my gopher posts. This is a manual process, however, so don't be suprised if I start falling behind. Check out the actual gopher phlog if you want everything up-to-date!

.... well, as it turns out, Known doesn't seem to want to post this for some reason. (Too long? Too long for a preformatted block? Some other reason?) So you can read it here instead: http://trdaisuke.sdf.org/2022-07-11.txt

I created a #gopher hole at gopher://gopher.club:70/1/users/trdaisuke/

I'll be crossposting my posts here going forward.

This post originally hit the smolweb on 07 July 22 at gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/trdaisuke/2022-07-07.txt

Checking up on the phlogs today, I read nm03's update about "Summer Fatigue"
or "natsubate" [1], and while I wasn't previously familiar with the Japanese
term, I am definitely feeling that summer fatigue this year.

I've heard people talk about "Seasonal Affective Disorder" as primarily
occurring during the winter, but I've always had a harder time dealing with
the summer heat and long days than the cold and dark of winter. The past
several weeks I have gotten significantly less sleep than I'd like - some
nights as little as 4 hours or so - and it's having a significant affect on
my overall mood. I feel myself being crankier, less cooperative, and
confrontational at times.

I should try cranking up the A/C more, but I hate the noise and the over-use
of electricity, pollution, etc. I read today an article about the idea of
"supercooling" your home in the evening to "chill your home right down to
the 'bones' of the building" [2] but I'm not sure that exactly works in an
apartment where the frame, walls, etc are connected directly from my
apartment to the ones above and below me. I also am not on the variable rate
by hour plan with my power company - and their bill calculator says I would
have paid over $200 more based on my last 12 months on a variable rate plan.
Still, I might try decreasing the night temperature because, if nothing
else, I might sleep better.

I also need to get back into the habit of making some nice mugicha - I
stopped that when we had our last run of cooler temperatures. It really
helps me cool off quickly, although I'm not sure if that's anything
intrinsic to the mugicha or just a natural effect of drinking a bunch of
cool liquid that's been in the refrigerator for two hours lol. Either way,
I find it refreshing and am actually going to wrap this post up here so I
can go put a litre of mugicha in the fridge to brew.

Tanabata wishes,

trdaisuke

[1] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/nm03/2022/JUL2022/entry_6
[2] https://www.howtogeek.com/814826/cut-your-summer-electric-bill-by-supercooling-your-home/

I created a #gopher hole at gopher://gopher.club:70/1/users/trdaisuke/

I'll be crossposting my posts here going forward.

This post originally hit the smolweb on 25 June 22 at gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/trdaisuke/2022-06-25.txt

There was a good thread on bboard (in the UNIX board) this week about favorite
Desktop Environments on Unix-flavored machines, and I thought I'd cross-post
and expand on my thoughts here.

My primary computer is currently running GNOME with some customizations. I know
everyone likes to hate on GNOME, but I actually find it pretty good now. At least,
up to date GNOME. I feel like a lot of the frustrations with GNOME on, say, Ubuntu
is due to the outdated packages. I've migrated most of my Linux desktop usage to
Fedora and find that I rarely have the errors and bugs that I constantly had on
Ubuntu.

Besides, I'm trying out Silverblue (and really enjoying it honestly), and GNOME
is kind of required for Silverblue. (I know Kinoite exists now, but I haven't
had great experiences with KDE, so I thought I'd start with the normal Silverblue.)

I had kind of an interesting start with DEs- my first Linux distro was Ubuntu
Natty Narwhal. Unity was new and raw and bleeding and terrible. (So almost
everything has seemed great to me after living with Unity for years lmao.)

After a few years on vanilla Ubuntu, I migrated to Lubuntu due to the age of my
laptop at the time. I ended up getting pretty involved with the Lubuntu
distribution as a result. This was all pre-LxQt (which is abominable in my raw
opinion). But because of my involvement with the distro I've always had a soft
spot for LXDE and still use it on occasion.

Since then, I've bounced around a few things and eventually found the best fit
for me with GNOME, or at least, GNOME with some personalization, and fresh and
updated as possible as long as the hardware can handle it.

I do have one laptop that definitely can't handle it. It's currently on MATE
but I don't know that I'm really a fan of MATE. I don't use that laptop for
serious productivity (it's too small for most things - I mostly carry it because
it's so small but can still fire up a nice shell to home when I'm travelling.)

I also have played with XFCE and may want to give it a shot for real at some
point.

The thread on bboard did make me want to try some of the lighter-power
desktop managers that were mentioned in the thread. I've seen cool demos of
dwm, and I've known other people who swore by i3. I don't know much about
fluxbox, which was mentioned by several people - so maybe I will also add
that to my list to check out when I can.

But for now, I think I'm sticking with GNOME at least on this main computer
while I give Silverblue a good spin.