blog

12.28.2024

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12.18.2024

Steamdeck

i recently got my hands on a steamdeck, not my own, but i did order one of my own. of course having my steam library accessible from a more powerful switch is pretty great, but what really sold me was the desktop mode. i'm a mild linux dweeb, so having a robust portable gaming console with the open-endedness of (effectively) arch linux is really exciting to me. my first time using it was to get and send my girlfriend an atlyss save she made while over. i was easily able to sftp into my server and upload the file. i couldn't help but think of the ways i could use it in place of my archtop. we have a bluetooth keyboard, so the sub-par screen keyboard isn't an issue as long as i bring it with me as well when i go somewhere. it's basically just a laptop with controller features and a detached keyboard

lately i've been re-playing slime rancher on it while i go out to smoke which has been pretty nice. the battery doesn't drain very quickly even while running it at max settings, but it gets the fans whirring occasionally. I've also installed zed (code editor) and jellyfin clients (default and finamp) on it which was real easy, but i had to do it through their gui software center rather than the terminal, which i ofc tried first. i haven't prodded it too much, but it seems like steamos locks a lot of terminal functionality as far as installing packages, instead trying to lead you to use the software center. you can't even run an -Syu, all updates are managed through it. i'm def gonna look into breaking that open when my deck comes in, but for now, i haven't had any functional reason to use pacman, so i can't really complain just yet

oh yea, i'm actually typing up this blog post through zed on the steamdeck, pretty neat

anyway, on to personal updates, i've been doing a bit better than the last post now that i have some of my meds (i was splitting my anxiety med dose to make it last). i still needa make a planned parenthood appt to trade my blood to the vampires for more hrt, i've been bumming patches off mom and riding off my stock of extra prog (no spiro, doing monotherapy), but today i'm gonna look into scheduling that hopefully. i haven't mentioned that i have an eating disorder, but i've been getting better about eating even though my body hardly ever reminds me to, and weirdly it seems like the physical sensation of hunger has been slowly coming back as i actually feed myself enough, even if it's still not always urgent enough to make me go eat. i'm even able to stomach notably more food at once than before without getting nauseous. bodily maintenance fucking sucks, but even if i slip a bunch, at least i'm still trying

-Lynn

12.12.2024

Vent

a lot of the time i feel like i'm just slowly decaying. even with a few wonderful people in my life and no responsibilities besides eating and cleaning myself, i just can't help but feel as if i'm not getting better. if i try really hard, i can see that i've maybe gotten a little better at treading water, but i'm still so far from functional or where i'd like to be that it could take a lifetime to get there. i need so much reassurance to keep from spiraling over others' perceptions of me and have a really hard time seeing what i provide to others that keeps them invested in me. it feels so pathetic to be totally disabled by things as minor as finding out that we ran out of the food i was thinking of making or being around people i don't know or relate to enough.

i miss days at the skate park bumbling around on my board or jumping bowls in my skates. i miss screaming on stage and slicing my fingers on guitar strings. i miss band practice and the times we took breaks to go fuck around in the hellish massive developing suburb, breaking fences and exploring plywood houses. i miss taking 15 shots of vodka at a stranger's huge house on lake tapps. i miss the feeling of my body against the cold pavement as i heaved those shots into a ziploc bag on my side in their driveway for an hour. i miss smoking and drinking at the pile of pipes in the field by my high school with my partners. i miss bonfires with friends, music, and weed, or even just being with friends, music, and weed regardless. i miss watching waves of smoke slowly rising, falling, and twirling in our room, exuding the same comfort as a night light that projects stars on the ceiling.

every time i realize or discover something new about myself, besides being just good to know and good tools for navigating my identity, it usually ends up making me feel more estranged from general society. i don't think it's necessarily the fault of labeling or anything, it's more so just putting a name to a disconnect i all ready felt but didn't quite understand. as i start becoming more cognizant of how exactly i feel and how unrelatable those feelings are to the average person, i can't help but fixate on that and not quite know how to navigate talking to someone i don't know. like what, "hi, please be patient if i'm strange and off-putting and zone out in the middle of our conversation or go into a nervous breakdown, i'm literally just an animal and a child trying to pretend to be an adult human. also i'm plural. so how about that weather?" like just shoot me

we don't really know how to make ourselves digestible to others, much less what to do or how to stick up for ourselves when someone dislikes us for not being digestible

-Lynn & Lichen

12.05.2024

Blog update

been a while

a lot's been changing in my life since the last status update. i think we're gonna make the blog a more personal thing now

my living situation is finally stable AND healthy. i'm both out of my abuser's house and in one that can accommodate my needs and my difficulties expressing them. for a while, it was one without the other or neither, but i'm pretty sure i'm finally out of that pit for good. i've even been able to go nearly no contact with my abuser. there's a long road ahead of us and progress is still slow, but i feel like i might slowly be putting myself back together now that i'm being given the means to. my moms spend time with me and always make an effort to help me with whatever needs or issues i have, so long as i can communicate them. gosh they're so wonderful and hardworking, it's honestly hard on me to imagine where i'd be without them, cause it certainly wouldn't be as a house-pet/daughter thing. we all sleep in a big conjoined bed together,, ~w~

i love my moms so much////////

anyway, as i've been getting better, personal projects and art have been actually possible for me to work on, so it's safe to expect at least some more site updates on their way. a high-poly redesign/remodel of crona has been in the works for a long while, but it's looking like i'll be done with a drawing of it first. i'm far enough through the modeling process to use it like a posing doll (which is so amazing for me cause i suck at defining body proportions/posing in 2d space). hopefully gonna be working on music again too, it's been a bit rough trying to pick up my guitar again when there's a buncha other housemates around that could hear me as i practice, but that's only half because of any reasons that aren't related to my ex getting pissed at me whenever i tried to practice. it looks like i might be having a jam session soon for the first time in a long while, excited but anxious

ok i can only hold the urge to go outside and get high in favor of writing down my thoughts for so long, gonna go do that now :3

the moral of the story: if you meet weird older women on an obscure peer-to-peer file sharing platform, move in with them immediately. nothing bad has ever happened in this fashion, and in fact, only good, even GREAT things can and WILL come of it. that is the way of things

-Lilliana & Lynn

08.30.2024

My wallpaper script

Unless this goes full-blown diary, I don't have much new to share, but i feel like posting. So, I'll just show off my first little bash script project.

I made a script that changes the my wallpaper and re-themes the whole desktop to match it's colors. This requires a bunch of set up, such as sorting the wallpapers you want to use into certain directories, manual assignment of a theme to a wallpaper (for when the automatic color matcher is shit), and having packages like pywal installed, but i think it's pretty cool.

Full disclaimer, this isn't a tutorial. The script is very specifically tuned to work with my arch/xfwm4 desktop and even hardware. If you're a bit bash-inclined though, this could maybe be a little interesting to look at or laugh at me for or something, idk lol

The script is split into 3 parts, the main body ("choosewall"), a few arrays with the names of themes and the hex values of their primary colors ("Redmond97colors"), and a script to compare the extracted primary wallpaper color against the primary colors of each theme and find the theme that most closely matches ("deltaE").

I use nano, sue me.

This is the first section of code in choosewall. Essentially, it opens up my file browser to my wallpapers folder and saves the window id of it to close it later, prompts me to drag in the wallpaper i want, and then closes the file explorer, splices the directory string of the wallpaper to just the name of the file, and determines whether the wallpaper needs to be tiled or zoomed to fit. Sadly, there's no crazy algorithm that determines that, i just sort my wallpapers so that the parent directories are named after the way they need to be formatted, easier solution than just code and keeps things organized.

This section is pretty simple, it just sets the wallpaper and format of each workspace on each monitor, and the bit at the bottom is a pywal command to extract the primary colors from the image and change the terminal colors to them. I know there's probably a super efficient for loop for this, I just don't care. Fortunately for us, pywal saves arrays of hex values from the colors it extracted to a file for us to use later. If pywal sounds interesting at all, I'll link the github here for you to try it out.

This is the part that imports the other scripts. Honestly, I don't really remember too much about this part, but I know I just stole the script for deltaE from some forum post and adapted it slightly(?). The rest of this part of choosewall checks the dominant extracted pywal color against the primary colors of each theme and decides which hex value is the closest. Unfortunately, because I didn't bother to account for the secondary colors of themes, the color comparisons can be kinda unfitting. To lazily but functionally patch this, I added a manual exceptions list. Some arrays hold the names of each theme, the names of the exempt wallpapers, and the number index in the first array mentioned that corresponds with which theme should be matched with each exempt wallpaper instead. (holy shit i'm high, sorry if this is just word salad lmao)

The script ends, of course, by setting the wallpaper-matched theme and closing the terminal window. I have another variant of the script that just picks a random wallpaper and sets it, but you'll just have to imagine that if you really care to. I bound the scripts to super+f4 and super+f5, one of which I know is really close to alt+f4, but I surprisingly haven't made that mistake (yet ig). I just find them easy to reach, and the function keys on my keyboard are separated into groups of 4, so the split between f4 and f5 just kinda feels nice in the sense of differentiating them, idk.

Oh yea, I almost forgot to mention, the themes I use are various versions of Redmond97, Windows 9X inspired gtk3/2 themes developed for xfce4. They look nice, check em out if you have the means.

08.24.2024

Short status update

I broke the ipod lol, sorry

While re-assembling it after installing the new parts, I accidentally stripped battery wires against the housing, shorting the motherboard and frying it. I'll look into getting a new one eventaully, but i'm broke as fuck and low on luck.

In better news, after a long period of absence, loxnet is back online. My living situation has been a bit turbulent, and because of that, I haven't had the ability to self-host for a while. I absolutely could've moved to neocities or something for the time being, but my brain's just kinda fixated on being able to actually own the server my site is running on. With any luck, there won't be any hosting issues for a while.

-Loxlynn

07.12.2024

Factory restoring a 1st gen iPod mini on Linux, installing Rockbox, and uploading scrobbles

For a while now, I've wanted to mod an old ipod to use as my portable music player rather than relying on my phone or streaming. I've had a few ipods lying around, but until recently, not much motivation to work on them. I ordered a new battery and a flash card adapter for my ipod mini, and that gave me enough reason to get started.

First, I needed to restore the firmware. Usually this is done plugged into a pc through itunes, but hell if i'm gonna spend any time trying to figure out how to install itunes on linux. I decided to look into how to manually restore it from the terminal, and fortunately found a very helpful forum post I'll link here.

For me, the process looked something like this:

After ejecting the ipod, the screen instructed me to plug it in to charge. Once i did, it began first-time setup and then let me choose the device language. Surprising as it was, that's all it took to reset it. I ended up making a bash script to streamline the process i that I'll link here.

i'd all ready put some music on it in that picture using gtkpod, which now seems to be broken, at least through the AUR. If you're following along and are less interested in the default firmware than rockbox, then don't worry. Rockbox has onboard features to scan the drive for music and build it's library, making software like gtkpod semi-obselete. (unless you want the original firmware to see/play the songs too, more on dual-booting later)

In the right of the picture on the top-right is the Rockbox Utility. If you've followed up until this point, you should have functional, fresh stock ipod, but if you want to install rockbox to get the most out of your hardware, you'll need to download and run the (preferably latest) appimage. At the time of writing, the script I linked above comes with the latest appimage as well as integrates it as an option to launch after restoring.

To install Rockbox, just mount the ipod drive, select it in the menu, select (or auto-detect) the model, and choose which components you want to install. If you're not using the script, make sure you launch the installer with sudo privileges.

After that, an eject and a reboot is (hopefully) all it takes to load rockbox :3

To get scrobbles from my music, I first had to enable scrobble logging by going through Settings < Playback Settings < Last.fm Log and selecting yes. While this setting is enabled, every song you play in rockbox will be logged with its metadata for identification on last.fm, as well as when it was listened to, how long it was listened to, etc. To upload these scrobbles, you'll need a tool like this. This is of course an .exe file, so you'll need wine to run it.

Once you launch QTScrobbler with wine, you need to log into your music tracker of choice, but for my sake, last.fm. Make sure your ipod's drive is mounted in your filesystem and click "Open .scrobbler.log". Simply point it to your ipod's root directory (parent directory of .scrobbler.log) and it'll pull up your tracks for submission.

It's been fun learning and experimenting with this, and i'm only more excited for my parts to ship so I don't have to keep using this thing plugged into a portable charger. Well, that and not being stuck with 4 gigs of storage.

In another post, I'll cover some rockbox features to know, features I like, mistakes to avoid, and a few issues I learned my way through while using it. ^^