As an avid computer nerd, I’ve hoarded many computers from various bargain buys on ebay and gumtree. Here are the ones I actually use.

The Hall of Fame

After my first year of uni, my dad consolidated our computers and gave all the laptops away to his friends.

The “Workstation” (HP Laptop 17 cp0xxx)

A pretty decent laptop specs wise, though build quality leaves a lot to be desired. Bought on facebook market place for around £100. Served me well as a workstation away from home. Now being used by my dad as a portable desktop running Ubuntu.

CPU:

Ryzen 5 5500u

RAM:

16GB DDR4 3200MT/s

Storage:

512 NVMe SSD

OS:

Linux Mint 22

The Forever Maybe Laptop (Dell Latitude 7390 2-in-1)

A good quality convertable laptop that served me well as my main laptop for uni. It was pretty solid, and it never really gave me that many techical issues. 8GB of RAM wasn’t a lot though, and the battery life wasn’t great. Swapped SSDs with my main latitude, so it lives on in spirit.

CPU:

i5-8350u

RAM:

8GB LPDDR3

Storage:

256GB SATA m.2 SSD

OS:

Fedora 41

The Guinea Pig (Dell Latitude e7270)

As the name suggests, it’s been my goto computer for experiments, and has basically ran every operating system under the sun it seems. Highlights include tiny10 and 11, MacOS Big Sur hackintosh, ChromeOS Flex, and of course, way too many linux distros.

CPU:

i7-6600

RAM:

16GB DDR4

Storage:

256GB NVMe SSD

OS:

Arch Linux

Le Goober (Prebuilt PC?)

Initially bought as a silly thing, I upgraded this from an A6-6400k and 4GB of RAM to it’s current A8-7650K and 8GB of RAM as well as adding a 128GB SATA SSD. Mostly used for more long term linux experiments, though I did install Windows 7 as a final send off. Given to a friend of mine.

CPU:

A8-7650k

RAM:

8GB DDR3

Storage:

128GB SATA SSD, 1TB SATA HDD

OS:

Windows 7 Home Premium

ThinkCentre M93

A SFF PC I used to run docker containers before I consolidated into the Tanix TX6.

CPU:

i3-4130T

RAM:

4GB DDR3

Storage:

128GB SATA SSD

OS:

Alpine Linux

I have a huge huge problem everytime a government puts out a new piece of legislation or techology intended to “catch criminals” and more recently “protect the children”. Don’t get me wrong, there are some major issues like human traficking and child exploitation which happen daily and hurt many lives. However, I keep stressing to people that these can also be used for mass survalence of the population as well as censorship, not just of harmful or adult content, but of criticism against the government and resources for vulnerable people and minorities. The government gets to determine what is “harmful” or “indecent”, and more often than not this ends up being resources for queer people, mental health resources, whistleblowers, and impartial accounts of history.

The Online Safety Act of 2023 has set a precident that other countries like the United States and Australia are already following. Under this legislation, social media and online chat apps now have a responsibility to follow guildines set out by Ofcom, the regulatory body for internet safety, or face large fines. Already this has resulted in many apps requiring ID and pictures of your face in order to not only view nsfw material, but also basic functions such as DMs in the case of bluesky. Additionally, chat apps such as whatsapp are now required to scan for child pornography even though doing this will most definitely result in a compromise of privacy.

This is supposedly done to “protect the children”, and though that might be true at face value, in reality this results in the government having a large increase in power over what people get to see online. Additionally, a poor implementation of age verification could result in large amounts of people getting doxxed online. More importantly though, the government now has a large database of online identities and their corresponence to real life people, which could be used for survalence and targeting. This is particularly scary as a queer person since the internet is what allows us to converse safely, and getting exposed could result in violence and death.

Additionally, there are pieces of legislation on other countries that restrict access to social media for people under the age of 16. We’ve already seen the other implications of these laws, so we will take it at face value. There are many studies showing how social media is harmful to mental health and results in exploitation and radicalisation. However, restricting or eliminiating access to social media is not the answer. Many people online have said that social media and chat apps like Discord is how they met people, escaped situations of opression such as religious groups, abusive parents, and the alt right pipeline by being able to see the perspective of other people. I know people who have found their sexuality and gender through resources and by talking to other queer people online which they never would have gotten from their community irl because of conservitism in their area or country, or how small their irl community is. I can talk about people who have climbed out of depression and anxiety and people who have found fandoms which they feel included. All this would be taken away, allowing governments and groups to teach false information and turn otherwise caring and empathetic people into hate mobs, as well as being able to control them easier, simply because they have no other perspective or experience.

1984 is a book about an athoritarian government who controls its workers using fear, propaganda, and survalence for the sake of raw power over people. Within it, there is the telescreen, a device that broadcasts propaganda 24/7 but can also record audio and video without the people knowing exactly when. At first, I naively thought that this was a future that, though we were inevitable going to trend towards it, was far away, and that the people would notice before it took hold. However, with legislation like this and other events such as payment brokers prohibiting nsfw material and the supreme court ruling over trans women in the UK being pressured by large organisations of people, we are already at the stage where false information and utilising it for targeting is spreading to the masses easier and easier. “Online Safety” and “Criminal tracking” technology is simply the next step in allowing for censorship and survalence of the internet. Perhaps governments see how information can be spread freely by anyone on the internet and how it unites people together, and are afraid of it. They want to eliminate the people who could start rebelion, and leave only the people who further advance their goal of total control.

This is all just my word soup from a person typing at 5am in the morning, but I hope somewhere within this mess, someone was able to see the future we’re heading towards. I’m not advocating for anarchy, and catching large scale harm is a good thing. Ultimately though, we need to be able to keep governments in check in regards to these laws and others they may make.

I’ve added another domain to my website now, clue.is-a.dev. cluedo.me is a free domain, but it only lasts for a year and around 6 months have already passed already at the time of writing. It’s pretty cool, but it was never gonna be permanent. clue.is-a.dev is from is-a.dev which is one of those “commit to a git repo for a free domain” and while I still don’t entirely own it, hopefully it should be way more future proof. cluedo.me still redirects to the current one, so hopefully there won’t be any dead links.

Also, I finally have a site badge. Funnily enough initially I was gonna go for a windows aero look, taking elements directly from windows 7, but it was quite daunting to replicate the look in an 88x31 badge and I quickly lost motivation. Someday I might go back to that concept, but for now though I’ve gone for a unix looking approach with a shell prompt and the default VGA font.

I’ve swapped hosts from blahaj.land to vercel.app since it’s more flexable and I don’t have to feel bad about asking the owner to update stuff.

Finally, the theme colors have been changed to a more dark pastel from the catppuccin palette. Also, the site badges have been moved down to the footer so they can be seen on all pages.

It’s been a long time since I’ve finished any articles, and at this point, I’m tired of saying that I’ll get around to posting my backlog, because I’m not motivated enough to go through them all at this point. I’m sorry, I’ve failed my goal.

Evidently a lot of other people though this too and while various other time standards were made by ISO, including ISO 2014 which documented the most-to-least-significant date format, ISO 8601 merged all of them into one standard in 1988. It’s really simple, just YYYY-MM-DD, 2006-01-02. Months and days with single digits have to be padded with leading zeros, like with 24 hour time (01:00 or 0100). It’s wonderfully simple and allows for some cool stuff, like being able to sort files by date simply by putting the date in front of the filename.

The standard also allows for times to be notated too, though it is way more confusing. There are two ways of writing times, basic format T130102, and extended T13:01:02. Times use 24 hour time and must be padded with 0s. If you don’t to be as precise, you can use just T[HH][MM] or even just T[HH]. The T can be omitted in extended format, but you’re not really supposed to ignore the T in basic format unless you’re sure it won’t be confused with a date. There are also ways of writing time zones with the time and combining dates and times, but if you’re interested in that, I recommend the wikipedia page on the format (you can read the latest revision of the standard itself from 2019, but you need to pay almost $200 for it).

Dates in person aren’t so bad since you can infer based on the location, but chatting online removes a lot of context and when someone sends me 01/02/24, I have no idea if their American and that’s the 2nd of January, or if they’re sane and that’s the 1st of Febuary. Writing out dates in full is obviously impractical, so I think we all start using iso date formats, and if it doesn’t catch on mainstream, at least we can have some sort of inner circle type thing where IYKYK.

Anyways, new stuff:

I’ve changed the theme from hugo-bearblog to hugo-bearcub. Even though bearcub is a fork of bearblog, it adds a lot of accessibility features like skip-to-main when tabbing and bigger spacing between interactive elements. The main reason I swapped though is because I was curious about a setting to use “Herman Martinus’s version of the Blogster Minimal theme for Astro”, which is quite a way to say a whole new seperate theme. This turned out to be way more modern and clean looking, and gives me a new way to customise colors with link highlights.

Also, I’ve sucessfully requested a url change from qqwui to clue.blahaj.land, which should make it way easier to give my website to people irl, as well as being more memorable in general. The old url will still redirect to my current one though. Shout out to Eryn, who manages blahaj.land, for making this work!

Finally, I’ve added badges/buttons to my homepage to all my favourite sites I’ve found so far. I don’t really have friends who have websites rn, but if I find any with some, or if I convince my other ones to, I’ll add their’s too.

The dates on the blog listings are when I started drafting them. I’m gonna start filling out publish dates too from now on, as well as for all the posts I’ve already made.

My last post was close to 2 months ago now, but I have tons of posts in the backlog I’m still writing and editing. I’ve been pretty busy with uni so I’ve been working slowly. I hope to release all those articles sometime.

I’m at the apple store right now and while the iPhone 16 was cool, I was more interested in the iPhone SE since I had my iPhone 6 to compare it to.

General thoughts:

• Both phones literally have the exact same chassis, owing to the fact that the iPhone SE is based on the iPhone 8, which was based on the 7, which was based on the 6. The only real difference is the fact the iPhone SE has a glass back, which I’m not sure how to feel about. Interestingly, the iPhone SE has a black front bezel even on light colours.

• The second difference from the iPhone 6 is the lack of a real home button. I mean, it still exists, but it isn’t a physical button. Instead it’s a pressure sensitive area with haptics (thanks iPhone 7). I’m really disappointed with apple about this since the iPhone 6’s home button properly clicks. I prefer the iPhone 6 button even to the older button type on my iPad mini 2.

• I was fairly excited for keyboard haptics since the Taptic Engine was only introduced on the iPhone 6s. However, on the demo unit, the setting was disabled by default, so I had to enable it myself. Unfortunately, the haptic strength was disappointing in comparison to my google pixel 7, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to adjust it. That’s just my preferences though.

• I’m really glad the kept zoomed display option, albeit under a different name now, since the screen is kinda small nowadays. The normal size isn’t so bad, just personal preference really. It’s interesting how they didn’t make an iPhone SE plus model, for people who still want a home button, but a larger screen. Then again, the whole point of the SE is the small form factor. If you do want a bigger screen, the iPhone 12 and 13 mini exist I guess. Shame apple isn’t making more of them.

• The screen resolution feels the same as the iPhone 6, but since it’s a retina screen, there’s basically no need to increase the resolution if you can’t see the pixels at length anyways.

• The keyboard has remained the same from iOS 12 (and probably older). Same old annoying keyboard with no punctuation.

• True Tone display is something I noticed, but I wouldn’t call it a significant feature or anything.

• I was pleasantly surprised with the speakers now being landscape stereo, with the earpiece being the left speaker. The iPhone SE seems to be better than the iPhone 6 in terms of treble, but both seem equally as bad with bass. Then again, I was doing these tests at the apple store, so it was kinda noisy. The iPhone SE seemed to be louder than the iPhone 6 since the volume indication was lower for the same perceived loudness. At least it doesn’t peak out 90% of the time unlike the iPhone 6 I have.

• I guess it makes sense that apple still uses the lightning port on the iPhone SE since it’s made for people who are used to the old style of phones, but I’d definitely like to see an iPhone SE with USB C.

• A nice side effect of apple keeping the same dimensions for the iPhone SE is that cases made for the iPhone SE also work for older devices, like the iPhone 6. It even leaves a cutout on the bottom so you don’t have to worry about the headphone jack being blocked. The camera doesn’t align anymore though. The official apple case has a little lip on the edges to protect the corners and screen itself. It does kinda interfere with typing though, which I don’t like. Still, the cases are compatible enough that I could use one if needed, especially since iPhone 6 cases are practically gone now. I believe they’re fully compatible with iPhone 7 onwards.

This could all be imposter syndrome speaking really, and the content could be ok. Without feedback, I cant improve, but forced interaction defeats the purpose of this website. I’ll try and proofread my backlog and get them released soon, but I have no idea about when the half finished ones will be released, or if there’ll be any other posts once they’re finished. I don’t want to release any half-baked articles purely for the sake of more content, that’s not the objective of this blog, but a post must be posted eventually, and I can’t keep tweaking stuff forever.

It took a couple tries at connecting, but I was already impressed when it prompted me to type the numbers on the screen to confirm it was the correct keyboard. After that, it worked immediately.

I opened up a new note and started typing. iOS knew the keyboard was connected and didn’t open the on-screen keyboard, instead adding a small bar on the bottom similar to the top bar on the normal keyboard with the spell check and stuff. In Notes it also had options for drawing and formatting. Safari also recognises common mac keyboard shortcuts such as Ctrl-tab for changing tabs. Function keys function as they are labelled with keys adjusting brightness and volume all working.

One thing I was impressed with was that cmd-tab cycles through open apps like it would a mac. Another thing was that the eject key (yeah, I forgot apple keyboards had those too) toggles the on-screen keyboard. Finally, holding cmd for a little bit brings up a pop up showing the current app’s available keyboard shortcuts.

The typing experience on the keyboard itself is a wonderful experience. There’s the perfect amount of tactileness and the base is solid. The arrow keys are a little mushy, though that could be how small they are, or the age of this keyboard.

This post is a little weird since iOS 13 added support for mice and full support for keyboards, this is mostly outdated now. But it was certainly a fun experience typing all this out on the keyboard. I definitely would not recommend the iPad mini 2 as a weird portable computer thing since it can’t updated past iOS 12. If you really want this setup, the iPad mini 4 is past 9 years old as time of writing so it should be cheap, but it’s also stuck at iOS 15. A much better option would be the iPad mini 5th gen from about 5 years ago, which is still getting the latest updates. However, both still use the lightning port, so Bluetooth is the easiest way to connect peripherals, unless you find a lightning to USB adapter.

A lot of other people with ADHD also seem to have the same issue. When I browse r/adhd, sometimes people can write pages on their experiences and a few of the comments are like “can you split this in paragraphs, i cant read this” because it’s just one big block of text. I guess I have a lot in common with them.

I do know it’s when my thoughts are the loudest, and writing them down is sure better than drowning them or bottling them up.

I’ve been working on this website continuously for the past 2 weeks getting it to a stage where I can write thoughts and it appears on the page. This has been tricky in the past since I only used pure html. Every time I wanted to create a new page, I would need to copy over the template file and add my musings in raw html, which got pretty frustrating when the layout gets messed up because I forgot to close a <p> tag.

Sometime around when I moved, I found a Codeacademy course on setting up Jekyll with Github Pages. It was very well made and they even gave you your own shell to type the commands on, and you would get a real working website on your github account once you were finished. At least that was what was supposed to happen, I think I got an error towards the end despite me typing everything exactly and passing the other lessons. I thought nothing of it and abandoned the effort, though I continued to use Github Pages to host other websites I made. This year I decided to make a website archiving all my other websites. I realised that crating a nice looking page would not be possible with my rusty html and css knowledge, which made me think about jekyll again.

About Jekyll

Jekyll is a static site generator, meaning instead of creating dynamic webpages that use a backend such as php or node.js, it outputs pure html files. This has the advantage of being more flexable as many free hostng platforms will only accept html files. It also allows pages to be created in markdown, which is vastly easier to write pages with than html as it is mostly plain text with markers for things like headers. Finally, there are plenty of premade themes to customise the website, thought I stuck with the default theme, minima. I started my archive site using the github pages tutorial on jekyll as well as the jekyll quickstart guide. Once it was fully set up, it was much easier than managing my own site. Themes could be included simply by adding the name to _config.yml and jekyll-remote-theme would included it straight from the github repo. Also, themes were really easy to override as includes and templates each has their own directories and layouts are defined explicitly for each markdown page.

However, Ruby, the language jekyll is made in, was the main issue I had. Starting out I had trouble configuring bundle and realised I needed to set my gems location every time i needed to use it. Also, some dependencies I needed such as json weren’t in the Gemfile and not mentioned in both guides. Also, when I want to work on the website on another computer, I first need to install ruby and then go through the whole bundle business again, which seemed too much for a website to me. Basically everything is a gem too including local themes. It wasn’t just me either, the people running blahaj.land also had issues configuring jekyll for autobuild and suggested I try other SSGs such as Eleventy, Hugo, and Zola.

Enter Hugo

I ended up trying hugo, which is written in Go, for this blog and from the start it fixes the number one issue of dependency hell. Like, its just one executable that you can get with most package mangers. Also, everything is included, so no more gem bundles. Also, it finishes generating much faster than jekyll being basically instant if you have an ok processor (rip raspberry pi taking 3 seconds lol). Also, there’s no dedicated posts folder, all non-section pages are treated the same, so no messing with specific filename structures to show the page is a post.

Themes work a little differently in that the theme is included in the website project itself, which makes things interesting when you want your theme on a seperate git repo than your website. Initially I used submodules to include the theme, but that had issues when I either forgot to initialise the module or update it to the latest commit. Also, the deployment scripts for blahaj.land weren’t made for submodules, so hugo would be confused as to where the theme was. After just including the theme in the same repo as the site, I eventually stumbled on subtrees , which still include the theme in the same repo but allow it to be synced with an external repo. As a bonus, changes made in the site can be synced back to the external repo.

Asides from that, page layouts are inferred rather than explicit. There are some indicators you can change such as underscores indicating section pages (like the posts listing), but other than that, you just have to make sure your templates are specific enough that hugo will match it to the page you want.

Conclusion

Hugo overall is a very solid SSG, and I can live with the quirks. Like i did with jekyll, I’ll stick with it until a major issue prevents me from continuing further. Zola does seem like a good alternative being written rust so keeping all the advantages of hugo, as well as using about the same format for configuring pages and the site itself. For now though, the benefits aren’t worth it, especially now that my blog is configured pretty much the way I want it.

The Thing Itself

The TX6 is a small android based set-top box made by Tanix. It has an Allwinner H6 SoC at it’s core and mine came with 4 GB of DDR3 soldered down and 64 GB of eMMC. Asides from the thing itself, it also comes with a remote to control it and a 5V 2A power brick with a barrel jack.

I bought the TX6 off of Amazon for around £30 in 2020 after my parents bought another android box based on an rk3188. There are a lot of cheap android boxes coming from chinese OEMs and they give SBCs like the Raspberry Pi 3 a run for the money.

As an Android Box

The TX6 comes with Android 9 preinstalled with its own custom launcher that provides a 10-foot ui. Additionally, it also comes with some apps like Chrome and Kodi as well as Google Play Services so you can install your own apps. Using it with the provided remote is a pain as it essentially uses the arrow keys to move about, which android was not designed for. The remote also has a mouse mode where the directional buttons instead move a mouse cursor around the screen, which is only marginally better as android was also not made for mouse. If you’re getting this, consider also buying a keyboard mouse combo or all in one so you can plug it in and hopefully have a better experience.

An important thing to note is that these android boxes tend to come with some nasty malware built-in, so you may want to think twice before leaving them plugged it 24/7 on your network. Also, since it first came out, it has had only one major update from android 7 to android 9, and hasn’t gotten another since. This means that, if it doesn’t already have malware on it, that exploits that were patched may still work on the box.

As a Linux Box

In theory it has good support for linux, a premade DTB, a u-boot defconfig and somewhat mainline linux kernel support for the H6 it uses. However, one main thing mainline linux doesn’t support is ethernet. More specifically, although the MAC drivers for the H6 have been merged since 5.0, the integrated AC200 PHY has yet to be merged, only existing in kernel patches scattered across the internet. There are some forks of armbian which add support for ethernet and other devices such as wifi through those patches but they run outdated kernels with little way to upgrade, so you go back the problem of security. That being said, libreelec and lakka both offer prebuilt images for the TX6 so if you want to use it as a media player or a light retro gaming box, it might work out. It is woth noting that mainline kernels will boot on the H6 so if you have an external wifi adapter or an ethernet dongle, it may also work for you.

One major issue with the TX6 in general is heat. The H6 generates a lot of heat, the provided heatsink is too small for the purpose, and for some reason, the board is upside-down when sitting. All these mean that, especially with linux, the processor will get past 60C on moderate loads and even shutdown on heavy loads. I had to flip the box over and cut a hole for a small fan to manage temperatures.

Final Thoughts

Despite its drawbacks, the TX6 has its uses. Kodi plays 1080p movies smoothly with libreelec and Lakka can emulate older systems such as the SNES fairly well. However, if you want this as an android tv or as a Raspberry Pi replacement, you might be disappointed, especially considering the Raspberry Pi 3 goes for about the smae price and has vastly better linux support. I’ve tried many time to use it as a server, but being stuck with armbian is a pain. It’s probably going to sit around for a while until more things get merged into linux.

I recently watched a video on youtube called Basic Guide To The Personal Web and it’s helped a lot in figuring out the direction of this site. I initially created this to seperate my website archive from all my personal stuff, since to me it felt kinda like a museum and pushing my thoughts and stuff would be rude, right? But other than that, I wasn’t really sure what to put here and I was worried this would become just another graveyard to put into the archive. The video helped me to realise just what a personal website needs to feel alive and interesting to people passing by, in particular, this list of guidelines here:

The first 3 rules sum up my general aim for longevity in that the website and its contents can and should be regularly updated. Additionally, personal websites should be viewed as a long term project, not something that can be competed within a short period of time, or forever really. These are my promises to the internet.

Anyways, I’m gonna be putting lots of stuff into this blog hopefully. There are so many things I need to get out of my head and into the world. Expect stuff like small musings, proud moments, rants and vents, and projects I’m working on. I hope that, posting to this blog, I’m able to open up and start talking to people, both on the internet and in real life.

As an avid computer nerd, I’ve hoarded many computers from various bargain buys on ebay and gumtree. Here are the ones I actually use.

Honourable Mentions

Other computers in dormacy or not used for general computing.

Tanix TX6

A cheap android box I’m using to experiment with ARM linux. Recently used to run Armbian Trunk.

SoC:

Allwinner H6

RAM:

4GB

Raspberry Pi 1b+/Zero W

I’m not doing much with these Pis since they’re pretty underpowered now. Compiled Embedded Cross Linux from Scratch for the Pi 1.

SoC:

Broadcom BCM2835

RAM:

512MB

Raspberry Pi 3

I found this in CEX for around £20. Recently sold back to where it came. Used to host my internet radio.

SoC:

Broadcom BCM2837

RAM:

1GB

Storage:

16GB SD card

OS:

Alpine Linux

Pricy (13-in Macbook 2017)

A macbook I have tried many times to main, which never ended up working quite right. Currently running MacOS 15 via OpenCore Legacy Patcher

CPU:

Intel i5 7360u

GPU:

Iris Plus 640 iGPU

RAM:

8GB LPDDR3

Storage:

256GB NVMe SSD

OS:

macOS 15