The last couple of days I’ve been researching how cars work, since I want to make some 3D animations for my new job - and I seriously lack knowledge in this area.

First of all: cars (..planes, trains, and basically all machines) are fucking magic. Seriously, if you don’t know anything about transmission, engines, differentials - like I didn’t - go watch some videos. It’s literally mind-blowing. I have no idea how people came up with this stuff, especially considering how long ago it all started.

Second: while searching for videos about clutches, I found the Animagraffs channel, and I highly recommend checking it out. There’s a bunch of amazing videos explaining how things work. And the craziest part - it’s just one guy doing everything in Blender. There are even a few videos where he explains his process (including the research stage - which is also mind-blowing), so yeah.. I’m definitely down this rabbit hole right now.

A few weeks ago, I updated my setup for video editing (well, and everything else, since it's my main machine) - and I just love it so much! I had been using a 27-inch 2K monitor for a very long time, and it worked well for me, but lately I started to feel a serious lack of space. Especially when it comes to drag’n’dropping stuff between different programs - doing that on one monitor is a nightmare.

After some consideration, I decided to get a cheap 21-inch monitor and use it in portrait orientation for all the utilities, browser stuff (especially useful for scripts), scopes, etc. I feel like 21 inches is a perfect size - it has a similar PPI to my main 27-inch monitor, and it doesn’t look bulky in the setup - just enough space to work efficiently. And the dual monitor arm - it’s SO convenient!

Hope it won’t break my table. Until then, I’m happy as hell! Here’s a pic:

My new logging system really helps me stay sane right now. Usually, I psyche myself up a lot during intense work periods (or anything with a high stress load), because it feels like I’m doing something for hours without a break. But actually, most of that time is just me being annoyed by the fact that I have to do so many things.

So, looking at my stats gives me a more realistic picture of how much time I actually spend on this and that - and that’s really helpful. I had some experience with time tracking last year (I think I wrote about it here), and it was a good one - very insightful. The only important thing is to keep it simple, quick, and consistent, so it doesn’t become a burden - just a regular habit, like brushing your teeth.

I'm 100% in work mode right now, and I'll get back to emails as soon as I can! Work sucks - especially when it's just a bunch of endless tasks and you can't see the finish line. I hate this, but you gotta do what you gotta do.

It’s been almost a week since the previous post, and during this time I’ve been working on a new version of my logging system. I wrote a big post about how it works - so check it out if you're interested. As for me - I’m going to get back to real life and spend some time running, eating, working, and doing all the things I’ve been neglecting because of this new obsession! Definitely need some time away from the computer right now.

After finishing work on my logging system and dashboard this morning, I accidentally found these two amazing things while surfing through the webring:

1. Log by Josh
2. Færeld by Mika

Both are CLI utilities for logging and time tracking. They’re a little different, but very close to what I had in mind when I decided to make my own script. The problem is, I’m 100% not ready to build something that complex - but damn, looking at the implementation, it totally seems worth the time.

I briefly checked how such apps are built, and it’s basically Python (which I know a little), using things like Rich, Typer, Textual, and either JSON or SQLite for storage. So, in theory, it’s possible - but it would be a huge challenge for me. I think I’ll get my feet wet by just reading some basics about these libraries and tools first.

A big part of my inspiration comes from the aesthetics of such apps, but there are also a lot of functional improvements I could make compared to my current Bash script. The good thing is that everything still works with plain text files, so there’s no risk - if I fail, I can switch back to my Bash script in a minute.

Spent another 6 hours tinkering with the homepage, trying to find the best-looking layout possible - or at least one that makes sense. I like how it turned out in the end, but I’ll probably tweak it a bit more later - it’s good for now though. Added a few more metrics to the dashboards, structured everything, and made a separate class for icons to invert color depending on the theme.

Blasted through all M.I.A. albums for the first time while doing this - crazy stuff, a lot of gems. She was definitely ahead of her time. Gonna go stretch a bit and eat something - neck and eyes are completely destroyed.

A working version of the new logging system is ready. Still need to polish a few things and think more about scalability, but overall it already works well! My neck and spine hurt after 7 hours in front of the screen though - no idea how IT guys live like this, haha.

Just added a new script that resizes, compresses, and dithers all images and thumbnails! Now I can simply drop pictures into the assets folder and deploy. The hard part was finding all the original files, since I used to delete them and only keep the dithered versions. If anything displays incorrectly, try clearing your cookies and site data.

After automating some stuff with scripts, I had a few more ideas I want to implement here:

• Automatic image dithering before building the site. Right now, I do it manually each time I add images, and it's a pain in the ass.
• Creating a backup file after building the site and uploading it.
• Some kind of template for weeknotes - it would be easier to have a foundation when I start writing. Maybe a tracker that asks questions and generates a table with data on previous week?
• Book log / plant log - both would be great, but it’s probably too much work for now. Maybe someday.

Decided to run on my street instead of the stadium today. It’s different - elevation changes, views, feels more dynamic, though a bit harder. Found a route that’s exactly 5 km from my home and back - that’s nice.

SSH works great too. It literally took me two hours to get it working somehow on Windows - here, I set it up in 30 minutes, and it does so much cool shit. I love it! Should’ve done this a long time ago.

plantay@fedora:~/plantayme$ plndep
Date in navbar updated to May 14
Building site...
Checking all internal links with anchors.
Successfully checked 0 internal link(s) with anchors.
Creating 46 pages (0 orphan) and 3 sections
Done in 104ms.

Zola build completed
Starting deployment...
Deployment finished

Deployment Report:
• Total site size: 987.40 MB
• Transferred this deploy: 877.62 KB

Site deployed to: https://plantay.me/

Also, I finally added an automatic date update in the navbar!! It's so fucking great to just build the website and never have to worry about updating the navbar again!

The RSS and Atom feeds broke after adding new sections btw! Everything is working again now, but for those who used my rss.xml feed - it no longer exists. You can now use Atom instead; there are 3 feeds: full, weblog only, and microblog only. Sorry for the inconvenience!

Also, I finally gave up on using Windows for website maintenance. I tried using SSH for deploying the site, and my experience on Windows was horrible. I updated everything on my Fedora laptop - it’s so smooth and cool. Really excited to write a couple of scripts to automate a bunch of things; I’ve wanted to do that for a very long time.

I wasn’t sure about adding a microblog section of any kind, since I use the weblog for literally everything. But lately, I’ve had a feeling that I’m not writing down a lot of thoughts there simply because they’re too short to bother with - coming up with a post title, description, all that stuff. Maybe this little thing will help with that problem - I don’t know yet, so why not find out?