Recent posts

Still working on the house. Last weekend, I put a tile backsplash in!

This weekend I’ll be adding the grout and finishing the wall. Slowly but surely!

I found this project today! I had no idea it existed, it’s an initiative by the Free Software Foundation Europe to try and get governments to fund open source software for our own digital infrastructure. Check out the videos for a quick explainer! Sign on https://publiccode.eu/en/

So owing to my New Year’s resolution to get away from a lot of stuff, including subscriptions to tech conglomerate companies I don’t really need, I wanted a personal audio player. I remembered throwing one in a drawer because of some annoyances and decided to dig it out, before I’d spend money on a used iPod I could modify to my wants.

Fiio

There’s this subgenre of Hi-Fi equipment from China called Chi-Fi. I don’t know whether it’s a term of endearment to most people, but it is to me. You get relatively high quality equipment from brands like Fiio, Sound Artist and Topping for lower prices, especially on the consumer side. Now I’m not really an audiophile, I can barely tell the difference between 128 kilobit and 320, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. It does let me use cheap equipment without much annoyance though!

On the audio side, that is. I have this little Fiio M3K that out of the box has an onerous operating system. It works, sure, but it’s clunky and the touch interface on the front makes it slow to use. It has a bunch of features I don’t need, accessing music through it’s menu’s is confusing and its internal database for music indexing is strange and slow.

Rockbox

Enter Rockbox, this wonderful little project that lets you flash alternative operating systems on to all kinds of little Personal Audio Players. You follow the instructions and pretty soon your player looks like this:

It’s much faster and easier to use, does the basics just right and then gets out of your way. Highly recommend!

It’s snowy out today:

The US kidnapped the Venezuelan president and everybody’s cool with it! That’s something I guess.

I think I’ll start on the upstairs hallway this afternoon… I’ll write a yearly ‘now’ page soon that explains why a lot of my walls are still bare drywall.

Aaand I did! Here’s a before:

And here’s an after:

Primed and ready for some wallpaper. I’m gonna slap that on next weekend.

The first blog post from this idiot to the web.

What?

In the past I used to slap some updates on the socials every once in a while, but since I have deleted all those accounts more than a decade ago, I will be posting what I would have put on there on this here little blog.

Why?

In a world dominated by huge fiefdoms lorded over by assholes, we have lost our voice. This is happening while setting up your own little world is cheaper and easier than ever. This blog here got me to do this, so I spent half a day setting up a little VPS and a static site generator.

Who?

This is not said idiot. This is my best friend Chip.

Where?

Somewhere in the Netherlands. It gets misty here.