2022-02-12 | Oof at the previous post but hey I'm here now!

Intro

Hi all,

Last post was extremely depressing. Guess I was just making a blog for the sake of keeping up with it. This past fortnight I got a MacBook, a Romanesco and a break from synchronicity. Read on to find out more.

This {{$TIME_PERIOD}} In Tech

I bought the MacBook! From my savings of course, as I said I would. It's awesome. I really like that it's Linux-y. It's like the best Linux with the best hardware, I'm sold! The iPhone first clued me in but now I've spent some time with a Mac I understand the hype. I've been making shell scripts (though PowerShell seems pretty good too, it's a little verbose maybe), programs and learning the nuances of the MacOS. Everything has gone great with it other than trying to share files wirelessly from my Windows machine on the same network. I'll try again sometime but I just emailed that shit. Actually one other thing which I find annoying is that in Apple apps the home and end keys go to the beginning or end of the first or last line of the selection respectively rather than to the beginning of end of the current line and it really annoys me. Even stranger it works like Windows in other apps like PhpStorm which I use for my work. There should really be a setting for that, I wonder if I could add one myself. Anyway it's probably just as strange for Apple users the other way around. I think that the Windows style behaviour is better for coding but the Apple style behaviour might be better for writing prose. The trackpad though. Woah. It's definitely the best trackpad I've used. Being able to press harder for different options is huge. It's so intuitive to click in the pad to rename something I didn't even have to look it up. Also the battery life is great. I've gone from an hour or two before charging to lasting the whole day with an IDE running.

I also bought some AirPods. The noise cancellation is great for avoiding my "voices" (I really need a better name since "voices" usually implies autonomous entities which can speak at all times whereas mine seem to be mainly internal entities and are reliant on real sounds to replace). The transparency mode is great for what it's meant for. The sound quality is as good as I've ever known (though with my brain damage it could be.... 'lost on deaf ears' hhaa). They last ages too.

Just finished the magic bit down below and thought I should include a bit here about what I've coded and how and stuff. Maybe these different topics should be separate posts. Just a random thought but anyway (another random thought what if I had this whole blog planned out in my head in advance woah that'd be wild anyway) I digressed. I have been coding in Swift this week. I recreated my timer app using Swift UI. It is currently titled Timer but I have toyed with the name FreeTime since I am a freelancer although it seems a bit similar to FaceTime. Swift UI is great. Coming from React I felt at home very quickly and though there are a lot of complicated APIs I ended up going with the simple approach and their Monuments tutorial was plenty of information for me to create the app. I did use Stack Overflow a bit but who doesn't haha.

Speaking of Stack Overflow overuse I found a great answer here. The way they worded it saying that some developers increment the build number with every build really spoke to me. It told me that when coding I've been using too much trial and error and being too focused on the end result. I still do it without complaint but copying and pasting is nowhere near as fun as figuring something out for yourself. Also just noticed some Derren Brown shit in there they start with "Going forward" like telling you think about the future and how you want your life to be. Also I made a note to write more about figuring stuff out for myself and here's a bit of a salad-meme "Bash stuff figuring out for myself" that's the note let me break it down for you: "bash" meaning the thing after this is bad, "stuff" also meaning the thing after this is bad, "figuring out for myself" as in when programming. Put together we get that I should "bash" the part of me that says "stuff figuring out for myself". Sorry really off topic for tech.

In other news I switched my dev environments for Laravel from Homestead to Docker (which I was previously unable to use as a Windows user too attached to switch to Linux). It's been pretty good so far. I had some teething issues some of which I actually managed to figure out myself. For example when I had a blank white screen on a Laravel app it was because I had switched that project's public root from /public to /public_html. I discovered this by leaving off the -d argument when bringing up the container which exposed details about the requests which were failing. All I had to do was add a symbolic link from /public_html to /public.

Just Venting

I am still unsure about uni. Caro now agrees that I should drop the course but it doesn't feel right. Neither option feels right and I wish I'd never been put into this situation. I enjoyed uni for sure but I don't think that it was the right choice at the right time. Maybe if I'd lived life for a bit outside of the education system then returned knowing for sure that it was what I wanted then things could've turned out very differently for me. I literally didn't care about uni at all when I enrolled. I wasn't excited for it. I didn't do any planning. I didn't pick my uni. I didn't sort out my accommodation. It just felt like school wasn't over for me. Then I got there and started living for myself and it was fun. But then the second year came around and it wasn't the same. I hadn't advanced academically or socially and half of the group was gone living elsewhere. Then there was a split between the two halves and it just sucked so see these people I'd grown close to arguing. I don't remember what it was about, though perhaps they do. Anyway my point is that a gap year would've been great. I had the funding and perhaps travelling alone would have given me insight into living life. Now I'm just stuck in a shitty situation where I don't want to drop out and feel like a failure but I also don't feel like I can continue because it's simply too stressful even to watch an online lecture. I suppose I could wait another week but I just don't have the will to put myself through that right now. At least going to the shop I can buy some instant noodles or chocolates or something. Uni gives me nothing in the short term (other than knowledge which I will happily gain in my free time if it's useful or interesting to me anyway) and in the long term it may well be useless too since experience may be more useful to have than qualifications and I really want to work freelance anyway. I'd be willing to try working with a software company but I just don't feel as though it would work out.

What's Been Cooking

I finally got a Romanesco! It's basically expensive cauliflower I now realise but I'm sure it's plenty nutritious and it tasted good in a wrap (once it was thoroughly cooked through after reheating the next day). I've been eating mostly vegan recently and close to entirely vegetarian. I haven't really noticed much difference and I certainly don't miss meat. I'm amazed at how much of the stuff I must have been eating before. Mince, chicken and lardons were staple. I've treated myself to some crème fraiche in risottos and used cow's milk a handful of times in mocha (which I am now drinking instead of tea) but since there are substitutes for both I shouldn't think that would continue for much longer.

The Magic Bit

I write this shortly after the whole Russia/Ukraine will they won't they thing started in Western media. I hope that the people living there are right in not worrying but who knows what'll happen. I thought of this as I was trying to think of any synchronicity related stuff that'd happened recently. That made sense to me but I just realised that it might be a little opaque so I'll expand on that. The news sometimes appears to follow along with my recent actions. Things like the article on my phone talking about how somebody getting up early changed their life could be faked with technology but unless the whole news is AI generated and tailor made for each bubble algorithm theory or general supernatural synchronicity are the only two explanations I can think of. Anyway I thought of the tensions because I really can't think of anything that they relate to in my life (unless I've pissed somebody off without knowing it). This lack of synchronicity seems to actually be a theme. In places where usually I would find it it has now disappeared. That's not to say that it's gone but certainly when flipping through pages of a book (or, in actuality, scrolling through and lightly skimming an article) there is little to none as often as not. It's actually weird to notice that it's not there. I'm certain it didn't go away when I was last taking my pills but seemingly there could actually be some effect. Annoying this comes right as I was getting used to it and even utilising it in a way. If this is God I'm talking about could a pill really reduce his influence? Perhaps merely the act of taking the pills is enough for less influence to be judged as needed. I really want to stop taking them and this isn't helping. Worse there has been at least one occasion where I have heard voices that do not require a carrier sound. Maybe it's the pills maybe it'll happen either way and maybe these (as it has happened before) are rare occurrences. I don't mind if they get more frequent if anything though I just wish that they would decide one way or another to happen or not so I can decide what course of action to take going forward.

Just went off to write a bit more about tech and coming back I sound super crazy in the above paragraph. I say it's worse and then immediately turn around completely and say I don't mind if they get more frequent. Also blaming my pills for the voices?? I think the pills could be a good thing if this is how I'm coming across on a daily basis. I have certainly noticed obvious contradictions in my speech similar to what I've just described but it's weird seeing it in front of me like this. I'm probably super brain damaged.

Conclusion

Overall I've been having a good time.

x

I deleted this part from the tech section because I realised that the technology to sense the user's intentions might not be there yet.

However it's not all good with these things either as the ecosystem concept which I hear touted so much seems a little weak here. I expected that when audio started playing on a different device they would automatically switch over but it seems as though that only goes for tablets and phones. There is a notification to connect them to the MacBook if I'm wearing them in the vicinity but I would expect that if I play music while wearing them they would connect at