Assorted updates on a Sunday evening
I'm still working on the write up of my Finnish bike tour which, somehow, ended already a month ago. Fair warning, it's looking on track to be my longest gemlog/phlog post ever.
Last week I went ahead with my previously mentioned circumlunar hostname shenanigans. It didn't go as smoothly as I hoped, mostly due to problems on my VPS provider's end where one of the two machines which were "swapping identities" couldn't be reimaged without an error. Things seem mostly sorted out now. The Zaibatsu has been rebuilt from scratch for what I hope is the last time (it's on KVM virtualisation now, not OpenVPN, so I can do OS upgrades in place now). This has been my first encounter with Debian 12 (I still haven't bothered doing my ThinkPad yet). Apparently we're not allowed to use `pip` to install Python stuff like a normal person anymore. Modern dependency management is such a ridiculous edifice, but whatever, it's genuinely not worth the energy to rant about it. I still have one more bit of server wrangling planned for this year, combining a personal webserver and a personal mail server running on separate VPSes to one, as part of my "Blazing Star" to reduce my computing footprint and costs. I'm not looking forward to it, but want it done, so I'll have to bite the bullet soon.
See my 2024-04-19 post "Embracing the universe like a blazing star" for footprint reduction plans
Yesterday's mail included the fifth and final volume of Seven Seas Entertainment's "Deluxe Edition" of Hitoshi Ashinano's "Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou" manga, it's first official English release. I am forever indebted to Sandra of idiomdrottning.org for bringing this release to my attention! I first read YKK via online fan "scanltions" in 2020. It's only been a thing in my head for four years then, I suppose, but it's so dear to me and has had a tremendous influence on my present worldview. I'm really happy to own a nice physical copy.
Remember when I mentioned back in May that I saw somebody flying a remote controlled glider in a nearby park and I thought that seemed really cool but acknowledged that I "need more hobbies like I need a hole in the head"? Yeah, well, I'm building a glider now anyway (I'm the problem, it's me!). Not an RC one, a so-called "free flight" model, which flies in circles after launch when a rubber band mechanism actuates the rudder. It's not a complicated model, but I'm spread so thin these days (or maybe I just tell myself I am, which has more or less the same mental effect) that I hope I get it finished before the end of the nice summer weather.
See my 2024-06-05 post "A mostly offline May" re: gliders
I did a slightly longer than 73km bike ride with a colleague the weekend before this one just been. Pretty sure that's a record for me. I say "pretty sure" because, as you'll eventually read, I had some cyclecomputer malfunction issues on my tour and have no authoritative record of daily distances, but the absolute maximum plausible estimate I would assign to the longest day of that tour was 75km, and I kind of doubt it. We are going to try for 100km later this month. I'm pretty confident at this point that I can do that, the hardest part will be consistently pacing myself a little slower than I find natural for the sake of endurance.
I started reading Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" a few days back. Last year I read David Wallace-Wells's "The Uninhabitable Earth", which somebody on the back cover proclaimed was "this generation's Silent Spring". I hadn't, at that point, heard of the original, and couldn't find any reasonably priced used copies online nearby at the time. My wife and I just started watching Three Body Problem, which makes reference to the book, which reminded me of its existence, and this time I did find a copy. I'm only a few chapters in, but enjoying it so far.
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