Checking in – January and February 2025

January being the awkward month between the two new years, it's been kind of a nothing month. So there hadn't been an update that month. But now there's more things to talk about, so there's that.

February on the other hand has been relatively active not only because of the lunar new year but also because of many strange things happening at the same time.

Less social media, more video games, also some tech woes

I cracked the screen on my mobile again and the repair costs aren't worth it, so I bought a new phone. For this I consider the old phone as having given up the ghost, though it's still alive and mostly functional – right now I still have it active and working but it doesn't leave the house anymore. I eventually plan to use it as a third screen on my computer that would display basic diagnostic material such as CPU usage and temperature, but I haven't found the software for it. Irritatingly, the ones I have found are Windows only.

Flush with newfound mobile computing power and storage I went to the Google Play store to put it to use. So I have bought a Japanese-Japanese dictionary on Google. I thought, well, now that I have some money in my account, I might as well buy something else. I already have Balatro on my computer, so buying a known good game on my mobile phone seems like a good idea. At the very least, I could avoid the usual low quality, ad-laden, microtransaction-laced nonsense that the usual fare is well-known for.

But aside from having to hide it from my mother, who much like PEGI saw the dollar sign next to some playing cards and was unreasonably down about it, it had a somewhat unexpected benefit: I finally managed to get off the social media habit. Every time I feel like scrolling on one of them blue skies or tweets, I instead boot up Balatro, and everything worked out fine. I even won a few games, but my win rate is not impressive.

It's very much good news for me.

So much programming

Since we're on the technology train, I found myself learning a few more things that I wasn't expecting to learn this month, or ever really.

I thought to upgrade my automatic Wordle clone collector so that it isn't a script written in three languages, and indeed I spent most of the month rewriting the whole thing in Python and threw in a few extra features as well. Lo and behold, it's now three times larger but at least it's all written in one language and also has a nice GUI to show collection progress so it's not a total loss.

And it really isn't a total loss, because through this I have somehow managed to stumble my way through the entire process of making an "app" (as it is called nowadays, I think): making a virtual environment, adding dependencies to it, and then packaging the whole thing and uploading it to a package repository. It's actually available in my private repository, but its utility to literally anyone else is dubious as it depends on a bunch of strange things that very few people will have in this particular combination.

While developing this thing, I have finally had to deal with threading, which is necessary as the tk library requires the main thread. And sure enough, after a while the event loop model becomes blazingly obvious. This is despite me having to work with threading code while I still had a job and it just never clicked with me at all. I'm thinking of doing something similar in my other program that I'm actively using that is managing my notebook scans. Perhaps it is this urgency of needing the program immediately that finally made the topic tractable.

In not Python news, I have also out of strict necessity learnt how to use the exam class in LaTeX. I had to create a small test (like academic, not like experiment) in my volunteering tutoring, and sure enough it all came together very easily. Alas, the exam class is too divergent from ordinary typesetting and therefore org-mode's conversion cannot handle it, but a little work with tex-mode solves that issue. I don't like working in tex-mode directly but if that is necessary then so be it.

Weight is stabilising, but very voracious

Healthwise, I think things are getting better. Although I still have an inflamed gut there's been a period of time where that is basically gone so I guess that means that I'm almost in remission. So close but not quite...

...I think one of the side effects of steroids is that you become ravenous, and I have been eating a bit. My weight has slowly crept up over the last few days and now is solidly above 60 kg, now more like 62. I promised myself when I was coming down that my goal is 65 kg, but now I'm kind of antsy about going high, and I don't know what that says of me. In any case I understand that weight alone does not health make, and at least I'm enjoying my newfound appetite.

A renewed sense of power

Overall I can say that I had a genuinely busy month, and indeed a few extra bits of creative work has made that clear. I've drawn two new railway maps in Inkscape and they look very good. Again, they're built kind of in necessity: the new phone needs a new background image, and because the new monitor that's very large also needs a few graphics for the lock screen.

And those things have spawned new things as well: I have learnt something about the conlangs I have used to draw this map and so I should document them some more.

(Speaking of languages: I also learnt I passed JLPT N3, but that's ancillary.)

It's all in all just a sense that I can do things now. I hope I can continue this motivation towards other things too.