Checking in – July and August 2025

I have once again neglected to do anything of note over the summer months. I don't know why, but now I have something more to report again, and the angry orange reminders on my org-mode notifications is getting irritating so here we go.

Health

I've been given a small health reprieve in the sense that my inflammation indices have gone back down enough that I can hold off on the more annoying permanent medicine.

My weight has gone up a little bit on the order of grams per day on average. While I have had days where my maximum weight of the day exceeds 64 kg it has not been permanent and now I'm sticking around 63 kg. It's mostly a simple case of counting grams, i.e. portion control; being a physicist I am a little bit too dim to understand the concept of "calories" and have replaced it with the simplified concept of just plain mass, essentially asserting that every calorie weighs the same. It works surprisingly well even if I then also make the even more outrageous simplification of assuming every bit of food and drink is 1 t/m³ and so things that look like the same volume has the same mass too. It certainly beats having to look up the calorie amount for every little thing.

I am reminded of the other half of the equation: to stay active and to do exercise. It seems like I'm one of the people that for whatever reason doesn't become incredibly joyful after doing a workout. I don't know how common this is, but seeing lots of about "runners high" as it is makes me think I might be in the minority here. Anyway I don't much like sports and I like the sweat that sports makes even less so I don't know what to think about that.

Programming and other creative stuff

For some reason I have finally decided to take the time to make a GUI after years of failed attempts and this time because I used Python it sticks and everything seems to be working great. I wrote two small programs that have benefited from having a GUI, including an ersatz program that allows me to

Otherwise, I haven't had much time to do much else. Even my daily pages have trickled down to weekly, and I have had trouble trying to keep up with the whole thing. Having said that I did write something about a thing that i enjoyed, mostly about tuning theory and a new theory someone wrote called Shavistic music theory. It's good and I have some time writing some notation, and it has inspired me to dump more things into the queue of things to write.

On the topic of computers, I have once again did a pacman -Syu and after a while I see that a problem that has been plaguing me – that something is constantly leaking memory to Xorg and bloating it to 10 GiB of RAM in a few days. Whatever it is, it's been about a month since that upgrade and Xorg has been holding steady at 300 MiB, so something in that upgrade must have fixed whatever was leaking the memory. Well, that means I can push back the upgrade.

I still want to buy some additional storage. I think my motherboard supports one M.2 slot which I can use for an SSD where I can put a new OS on, and so I can be more confident in dumping things over. I would also now have three 1 TB HDDs that I have no idea what to do with, and they're very large and I don't know what to do with them, yet they all have Stuff that I would rather want to keep. There are hard drive bays that I can shuffle them out of but they seem to be external – connected via USB and not SATA – so I dunno how to proceed from here.

The outside world

It has been raining and raining and raining for a long time. I have finally replaced my pluviometer that has its electronics broken after it fell over upside down in a way that I struggle to visualise. It's cheaper and smaller and worse but it's good enough I guess.

I also went to an anime convention to see random guff. I got some trading cards which will then go in the trading card box. They allegedly form a game, but I don't know anyone who would play with me and anyway it's all in Japanese so I would need to find someone who can speak the language. It's fine, the pictures are good enough.