I've been wanting to write a post on my antiques and stuff for awhile, but just haven't been able to until now! For this post, I'm doing images first follwed by description, unlike my usual which is the reverse. I'm only doing it this way because I have a lot to write about and it gets difficult to tell what I'm writing about. The following items were accumulated from various antique stores and Craig's List sellers.

I recently bought this 1950's Tappan Delux gas stove, which I plan to use some time by next year when I'm able to get around to installing the propane. It's in almost perfect condition, and according to the previous owner it does work! I hooked it up to power so that the clock and stove top light would at least work in the meantime.

I plan for both my kitchen and bathroom to have a late 1940's to early 1950's theme with some arts and crafts decorative styles intermixed. It doesn't have to be absolutely on spot; other items from previous decades would be welcomed too so long they have a contributing cozy style that I find tasteful. I wanted a gas stove anyhow and figured this would be tons more fun and look way cooler than any modern crap that sticks out like an ugly sore thumb!

The stove cost me $600 in total, which isn't bad at all. That's about the going price of a new gas stove. I'll need to convert it to propane though, which shouldn't be too difficult. Apparently the orifices are adjustable on this stove (or so I've read), so with that and a regulator should be fine enough.

Up next are my stained glass lamps! I'm not really sure when these things were made, but something tells me their not exactly "antiques" except for possibly the top-left lamp which was also the most expensive.

The top left lamp is an arts and crafts style that was rewired and has newer light sockets. It cost me $180. This will make a fine piece to go above the dining table, which is why I was willing to spend a little on it. The top-right lamp cost me $5, because it was cracked and broken in one place that looks easily repairable. I'll probably put it in the kitchen over the sink.

The bottom left rose lamp was $38. I really like this lamp! It has a nice refreshing glow about it that would look nice in a lightly colored room. The bottom right lamp I got for $8 because it wasn't working. I bought a new wire from the hardware store for it and now it works!

Also you may of noticed my vintage Bartlett Collins cookie jars. The yellow jar on the right is my grandmothers which has a little story to it. The red jar on the left I found at an antique mall for $10. I'll try to collect a few more of these as I find them because they would go great with my kitchen plans. If you're wondering about the two plates, I got them for $3 each at Hobby Lobby and really liked them because of the blue bird and the spring theme colors.

Here's my fan collection! I really like old electric fans and plan to make this into a side hobby in the future where I'll repair and restore them. The top left is a late 1940's working Robbins & Myers fan that cost me $80, albeit the previous owners have jacked around with the blades. I had to bend them back into the correct position, and realized that two of the blades were re-riveted and came from another Robbins & Myers fan because they're not weighted properly for this one. They did a damn good job of it too, because it's almost impossible to tell!

The problem with re-riveting blades from another fan like this is that each set are weighted and balanced for just that fan. So basically this one is forever off balance and will bounce around the floor. So I had to tape down some pennies and quarters on the back of the blades to balance it out. After that it ran perfectly; but the quarters fly off like bullets so I'll have to find a better permanent solution for it later. I'm thinking of soldering weights to it. Anyhow, this fan has a wall mount clip on the base, so it'll go in the kitchen / dining area to circulate air.

The Kenmore fan on the top-right is from some time in the late 50's to early 60's. It works pretty well, but likes to rattle on occasion. I need to get it some grease which would fix it right up and rewire it too since the current wire seems to be hanging by a thread.

The bottom left Atlas Aire box fan on wheels came from my grandfather. This thing is awesome and will blow you away! It's the perfect fan for my front porch on a hot summer day. I don't know what year it's from, but it's completely intact. I just recently got it from my dad, so it needs some cleaning and new grease and oil.

And then last but not least, my prized Emerson Electric oscillating desk fan! I found this at an antique mall, and it wasn't cheap. It cost me $250, which I really didn't want to spend but went ahead and got it... I couldn't resist it, this fan is in nearly mint perfect condition as if some time traveler forgot it in 2023!

I have a suspicion the blades are supposed to be brass, leading me to think that it was likely restored. It runs so perfectly though, I love it! I keep this fan beside my bed at night, falling asleep to its warm hum and soft breeze. You can't beat an old fan, these things are great! Modern fans are always so noisy, cheaply produced, aesthetically repulsive, and can hardly muster up a breeze. No thanks, I'm buying vintage electric fans from now on. They're just way better than anything made today.

That's all I've got for now. There are a few other things, but not really worth mentioning in today's post.

Thanks for reading my blog!

I’ve been very busy these past couple of weeks. So busy that I haven’t been able to focus much on the site here, so some things have stagnated a little. Despite being some of the hottest weeks of the year, I’ve been outside working on the foundation and wall of my house. This would be the most deteriorated part of the house that has withstood northern fronts, a fire, and termites!

These are the subterranean termites too, which aren’t good.

Funny thing though about these termites; they all seem to be long gone and dead. I wonder if the fire baked them all to death, because I haven’t yet found any major active colonies. I did find a few in a shim of untreated wood used on a foundation pier.

I’ve judiciously sprayed down the wall in poison and have sprayed expanding foam poison into any tiny hole I can find in the wall. I’ve even taken a stethoscope to the wall to listen in on any drilling banging noises. So far, I think they’ve been dead before I got here. I plan to pull up the floor on the second level just to make sure they haven’t traveled up into there. I’ll soak it down too just for safe measure if not.

Before

After

I have a few more piers to install termite shields on.

I’ve replace the two main permitter sill beams on this side of the house since they were the worst off in damage. This took lifting the house in areas with 20 ton rated bottle jacks. I bought three of them, which were the only three in town I could find. I had to actually hunt them down because it seems nobody either keeps them in stock, or someone is buying them up. Anyhow, there’s a system to this so that you don’t damage the house, but it’s not that complicated.

The only real trouble I had was maneuvering myself beneath the house. The ground out here is completely covered in stone, which really beat up my bony ass hips. Also, it’s difficult maneuvering cinder blocks beneath the house too because I can’t easily pick them up with my full strength. Just have to drag and shove them around.

I’m also glad to find that most of the wall (as in the wall stud framing) appears to be alright by and large. There were a few that were pretty badly damaged near the ends, so I’ve been lobbing those off and adding in new blocks. I'll go back thru and sister some additional studs to the sides of these when I nail everything down for good.

I managed to get things fixed up good nuff. I also made these termite shields to sit on top of the cinder block piers. You can make these out of rolled up sheets of galvanized steel. Just need some big ol’ tin snips and something to pinch the sheet in so that you can bend it evenly. These should also be helpful in reducing moisture contact with the sill beams since concrete and other similar materials can draw up moisture. The beams are treated though, so they should be able to withstand some contact with water. I also re-treat all of my end cuts with Cut-N-Treat wood preservative just to be safe.

The beams themselves aren’t exactly the best quality in my opinion, being southern white pine. But they were all I could find! The construction of this house and how it sits on the foundation is also sort of odd. There’s really no weight bearing down on these beams. Instead, the weight is bearing dow on a rim joist behind the beams. The rim joist doesn’t sit on the perimeter sill, but sits behind it on the very ends of large perpendicular beams running beneath the house. I don’t know why it was built this way, because it should extend over it, not behind it! I’ve also noticed that a lot of weight is bearing on the rim joists that should be on the sill, but this might be due to settling as the previous sills were rotting away. Once I finish up with replacing some of the rotted framing and nailing everything down, I plan to apply the bottle jacks to the sills and lift them so most of the weight is bearing on those instead.

I’ve also discovered that the back utility closet of the house was once a porch, which will also need some re-working on one corner. Walking thru the house, I’ve realized that this back porch was once a front porch! Things started to make sense then. I wondered why the stairs were hidden off in the kitchen, which was actually once a formal entry. I can even see marks on the wall beside the stairs where there was once a sitting bench that would have been attached to the wall. The ornate door back here was the front door; It has always been in the same place. I figured it was moved here from the now-front porch, but no, this is where it belongs!

I imagine the ceiling in here would have been opened up with a banister and balcony up top that you could look over. The whole upper floor was remodeled, so a ceiling was added and a floor up top where the balcony would have been. I might actually restore this someday, but I’m not going to flip the house around.

That’s all that I have for now in house repairs. I’ll be writing another blog soon on a few cool things that I’ve bought in preparation for moving in soon.

Thanks for reading my blog!

Found this on Reddit. I like it.

The past few weeks I’ve decided to give the Plasma desktop another spin. I haven’t really used this desktop since KDE 4, which I believe was the one with that cool red bouncy ball desktop widget. What had initially kept me away from KDE was the instability. So far it’s been doing great; I haven’t encountered any crashes yet and the performance has been good. I haven't even experienced screen tearing, which is usually an issue elsewhere.

Before my adventures into different desktop environments, I was using XFCE4; It’s a good desktop. Since I’m more of a visual type, I prefer an actual desktop with floating windows, buttons, task managers, the whole package. So what I look for in desktop environments is at least some sort of a launch dock for pinned applications, a built in application finder, a file manager with SMB support, and system tray icons. Most desktops meet this, so it’s not that difficult to adapt to them. It’s the paper cuts department in minor details that sets them apart.

Coming from XFCE (and then recently GNOME on Pop_OS just to humor it), to the KDE Plasma desktop has been fairly nice. Not to cast any shade on XFCE, but there are some things here that really makes this a proper desktop. For example, the icon view in the file picker with adjustable zoom levels. I also like the file tagging feature, which has been nice for organizing my frogs and cats.

The default window borders were too thin to grab onto, as is typical of modern desktops for some reason, so I changed it to the “Plastik” style and bumped up the border width to the “Large” setting. I also adjusted the color scheme so that I could tell which window was focused and which windows weren’t since the default didn’t do such a good job.

I’ve never been very fond of dock bars, so I changed that to a traditional task bar with those little quick launch icons beside it.

And with those minor improvements, I’m pretty much good to go. Check it out!

I didn't ever consider the difference in functionality and integration between GTK and Qt based applications and so typically stuck with a GTK base. As part of this bloatmaxing adventure, I've decided to replace as many GTK applications as I could with a Qt alternative.

• Thunderbird -> KMail: Visually kind of ugly and it was a little clunky to setup. I think I can get used to it though.
• Brave browser -> Falkon browser: Not a bad browser, and it integrates with the Qt filepicker; however Brave does too. Lack of uBlock kinda kills it, but I'll see what I can't figure out with the built in AdBlock.
• N/A -> Konversation: I've used IRSSI for my IRC client forever! I'm not so fond of graphical clients like Pidgin, ChatZilla, etc. However, Konversation is actually alright. I like the UI and how it represents the servers and channels in a tree list.
• Liferea -> Akregator: So far it seems pretty much the same. Good enough for me!

Some notable features:

I like being able to adjust the volume of individual applications quickly and easily from the volume icon in the system tray. I haven’t seen the likes of this since Windows 7; I don’t understand why nobody else has implemented similar functionality on other desktops. I always have to dig into the system settings anywhere else.

The network manager here is actually nice. The gnome-network manager you’ll frequently see on other desktops kind of sucks and is sometimes buggy, especially its system tray icon menu.

The Dolphin file manager is pretty good. I did setup the toolbar with a similar layout to what I’m used to from Thunar. The icon thumbnails are much better here than Thunar, and actually load up quickly where as it was always a drag on anything else.

I’ve always heard of KDE Connect, but I’ve never used it. I prefer my file share and NAS setup for moving files around. I think it might have some phone interactivity, which sounds pretty cool, but I don’t really use phones except for calls and short texts, so it’s an unused feature here.

The Konsole terminal is alright. I can tile it and it’ll take up the whole area instead of leaving off an annoying portion of the screen like XFCE Terminal does. The split view function is nice, but I’ve used tmux for so long now that I think I’ll just stick with it.

Minor complaints:

Icons along the task bar aren’t very uniform in size or spacing. It's a little annoying.

Drag and drop shortcuts to the quick launch doesn’t always work.

Drag and drop files in Dolphin while in icon view doesn’t work very well when needing to scroll up or down a page. Requires precise placement of the pointer on the frame edge to activate scrolling.

Beside the defaults, nearly every Plasma style theme doesn’t take traditional task manager buttons into consideration, so it’s difficult to tell which application is focused from the task bar alone. Almost starting to feel like a neglected function of the desktop here.

The “Discover” software finder leaves a lot to be desired and doesn’t appear to integrate with flatpak, unlike the Gnome software store. I will say though, it at least performs and functions competently. The Gnome software store and its derivatives on the other hand have always felt like a half aborted project with the most clunky performance and crap ass UI that gives the Microsoft Store a run for its money!

Conclusion:

KDE Plasma is a desktop environment that seems to have evolved naturally and unmolested by touch screen shit and brain damage inducing phone UI/UX paradigms. No more do I have to simply live with the anachronisms of Gnome-creep in GTK, which by extension infects the functionality of my desktop. With the Plasma desktop and its competent suite of Qt applications, I can finally move on from that failed mid-2000’s convergence pipe dream that has perpetually haunted the greater Linux PC desktop ecosystem.

Now I wish I could get a QIMP to replace GIMP, because I'm not letting GIMP go.

Thanks for reading my blog!

In light of recent events at Linus Media Group.

Since I have a tech job and have worked in this career field for about 10 years now, I’ve come across quite a few situations that I think would make fun stories to read.

The IoT nut:

This is a co-worker of mine who’s pretty big into IoT stuff. Personally I don’t care about installing wiretaps around my house, but this guy wanted to take it to another level. He was going to setup a connected temperature sensor to his shower head!

I laughed at him at first thinking it was some joke, but he was serious! So then I asked him why.

His response was that he wanted to know when the shower water reached a certain temperature so that he could then re-adjust it to his preferred temperature. This would involve cranking on the hot tap first, then walking out and doing a few things in preparation for the shower like grab a towel or something. When the water reached a certain point in temperature, the sensor would send a notification to his phone stating that the shower was ready. He would then return to the shower and adjust the cold tap enough to where it was the desired temp before stepping in.

I told him that sounds like a massive waste of water, and that I just turn the shower on and step into the thing; it doesn’t take long to warm up! But he really wants that perfect temp.

I’m going to get a little off topic now. I think baths are much better in conserving water than showers. Sure, you can take a quick shower that only takes a few gallons of water versus filling up a tub; anyone can do that. But in reality, does anyone really take a quick shower? Be honest now, you know you like spending a good 15 or even 20 minutes in there jacking off and who knows what else. You can bathe in a tub for as long as you’d like and not waste as much water, and then you can route that perfectly fine bath water out to a garden in the backyard! (unless you live in a suburb or city.)

Bathtub > Shower head.

The IoT nut (Part 2):

Guess what else this crazy nut wants to connect to the internet now? His trash can! To be more precise, the trash can lid itself. I don’t know if it would actually be connected to the internet since it’s using some arduino setup. I laughed at him again, and asked what for?

He says that it would be nice to have a trash can lid that would open automatically when you stand nearby it so that you don’t have to touch it. And the reason in not wanting to touch it was because of dirty hands from handling raw meat and plus it would “look cool.”

So I told him that they make trash cans with peddles you can push with your feet that would open the lid. He said that the trash can right now has one of those peddles, but would prefer that it opened on its own and controllable by an app on his phone so that the function could be toggled, that way the cats won’t accidentally activate it while he and his wife are away.

This stuff is a hobby for this guy, so it’s more of that tinkering enthusiast appeal whether or not it’s actually practical or beneficial, so I can kind of understand where he's coming from. Plus this dude is retirement age and probably bored as hell, so I guess why not?

The porch hawk:

There’s a lady at my job that always keeps her phone up on her desk on its own little perch. What is she watching on that phone? Not Netflix nor YouTube or anything like that. Nope; She’s watching the front porch of her house!

If it weren’t for the company wireless access, she’d probably run thru her data plan in a day because she watches that front porch like a hawk! I almost wonder if there isn’t something wrong with her, because I think it’s a little unusual.

Every time I’m at her desk or nearby working on a service ticket, she always has something going on there. One day it’s a family of birds nesting on the porch, another day its squirrels playing in the front yard or the kids getting off the bus from school. Is this entertainment for her?

I asked her what she was looking for one day and she said that she was waiting on a package to arrive in the mail. I asked if she was having trouble with package thieves, and she said that she just wanted to know when it arrived so that she could text her husband to pick it up after getting home from work. I didn’t want to pry any further, but that seems a little silly. Would he not see it after getting back from work anyhow? You can’t just wait and find out after getting home for yourself? Kind of obsessive, no?

This lady must be the modern equivalent to a Russian Babushka that’s always watching the neighborhood from the window, except now from her phone while at work.

Turbo normie:

This guy is roughly the same age as me, 30. He has a wife and daughter, and is ingrained in product brand names, the current thing, plays Disney music in his office all the time, and talks like a fag. He even told me one day that his favorite part about the super bowl are the ads after unsuccessfully trying to talk about sports ball, which I know nothing about. He worked in the marketing department though, so would always parrot that cheesy marketing corpo language whenever talking. We’re actually on pretty good terms though!

Anyhow, since I work in IT he wanted to have a conversation on tech, because you know me and technology, I just can’t get enough of it! /s

So he’s a very optimistic fella and was talking about how the next generation of kids were going to be so unbelievably smart because of AI and all the great technology we have, and how they would surpass all of us today. Oh boy… He’s also very proud of his daughter for being smart (his words), who I believe is now 5 years old, because he raised her up on an iPad (again, his words), has her taking some basic programming for kids class, and knows how to do computer things with Alexa.

So this must be one of those people that I’ll occasionally see with the “Proud parent of honor roll student” bumper sticker on the back of their car, shortly before cutting me off. I’m sure the programming classes will be beneficial, and perhaps she is smart, but something about all of this seems a bit off to me somehow. It’s like some caricature cutout from a TV show. Maybe I’m just too jaded?

I didn’t want to be a negative nancy black pill dispensary on the the matter of technology, internet, and youth, so I just kept a tight lip on it and nodded my head. To lack such self awareness must be bliss.

Doctor Stink Eye and the NumLock woes:

This one’s a little special to me simply because of the setting. I mentioned this one on the About page already. I use to work IT help desk support for a hospital, albeit they had a different name for the department. It seems like every place has some weird title for what is essentially “IT;” I don’t know why. I think they called it “Information Services,” despite us not being very well informed

So the doctors here were to be prioritized over the common scum. They’re practically treated as Christ himself, and sometimes they let it get to their heads too. I had one doctor here one day give me the stink eye when walking past him in the hallway. Never seen him before or ever spoke to the guy, but boy my presence must have ruined his day. He looked absolutely disgusted. No idea why, although back then I was early 20’s and looked like I absolutely didn’t want to be there (because I sure as hell didn’t), so maybe he was displeased by my lazy millennial composure. I use to not comb my hair back then and just wipe it into shape with my hands, and only ever shave once out of the week.

Fast forward some months later and I get a priority 1 ticket for some doctor that can’t figure out how to type his password. Usually password issues are dealt with by a call center, but if the user is exceptionally retarded, then the call center will kick the can down my road. This came from a dictation room where we had these computers setup with the Nuance Dragon speech to text software. They even had fancy microphones that worked really friggin well! They worked unlike any text to speech software I’ve ever seen.

So lo and behold it’s Doctor Stink Eye himself, and he’s PISSED. I see a clipboard with some papers on the ground in the back where he no doubt threw it in a tantrum. He’s zoned into his phone tip tap tapping away on it, and I’m just standing there after saying “hi.”

After an awkward moment of silence, he finally looks up from his phone at me and barks out, “I don’t know what the hell you guys are doing but I haven’t been able to get onto this <expletives> all day!” And slams his phone down on the table.

The classic “all day” line. Heard it a thousand times and it isn’t going to make me budge any quicker than the minute I receive the ticket, so I don’t curr! But I remain tactful and ask him a few questions, like has he tried signing in from one of the other computers beside him?

“No! I want THIS computer to work! The other computers never work, I want THIS ONE fixed!” And then blah blah blah this is completely unacceptable blah blah blah. Alright fine. So I sit down at the computer to take a look at it and able to sign in with my domain account no problem. He’s in the back tip tapping away on that stupid phone while I’m basically just making a show out of nothing over here. After a few minutes of bullshitting around, I ask him to try signing back into it again. Despite him wanting this resolved urgently, he’s too distracted with that stupid phone of his. Wait a minute later and he comes over to try signing back in again.

I watch him closely as he types because I know he’s up to some sort of shenanigans. As he’s poking in his password, I see him activate and deactivate the Caps Lock for each capitol letter in his password instead of using the shift key! Just unbelievable, but it’s also a common habit among the lower functioning… Then as he gets toward the end of his password, he picks up his hand and takes it over to the numpad, deactivates the Num Lock, and attempts to type in some numbers shortly before hitting Enter!

“See it’s doesn’t work!”

And then I said, “Bro… you turned off the numlock to type in those numbers and you need to use shift to capitalize your letters, not Caps” -

“Are you SERIOUS!? Do you think I haven’t tried that already!?” Uh ohh…

And then I hear this loud rumbling come from his gut. He quickly tries to talk over it by yelling, “I’ve been here ALL DAY trying to get on this damn thing. They’ve changed my password FIVE TIMES! I AM NOT TYPING IT WRONG! THIS COMPUTER IS BROKEN AND I NEED A REPLACEMENT NOW!” Yeah, way to completely ignore me and the issue.

Then he jumps up from his chair and says that he expects the computer to be fixed when he gets back from an appointment, and then quickly leaves the room. I can smell shit coming from off of him as he passes by me. He shat himself in the chair; I could even see a wet spot left behind! Grossss!!!

I started laughing my ass off and ran out of the room back to my office to tell everyone that doctor stink eye shat himself!

Red LED lights make the computer go fast:

This was a meme going around I think sometime in 2010? I have a cousin that’s really into gaming, as was I too at the time. However, he was a console pleb while I was part of the glorious PC Master Race. Actually I was running a cheap ass HP clunker up until that point, because console gaming was too expensive for me. I found it more affordable to buy a middling GPU to play my crappy free to play Asian MMO’s than dropping cash on a console and $50-a-pop-per-game. I didn’t have a job back then.

Anyhow he didn’t know squat about computers and was just getting into the idea of buying one. I was all hardcore at the time because I had just built my first proper gaming PC and was all like “bro don’t waste your money on some over priced alienware crap, just build your own lol!”

Then he asks me why my PC has blue lights in it. I tell him because I like the color blue. And then he says “okay, but aren’t the reds for gaming?”

I asked him “wtf are you talking about?” I thought this was some gag at first, but he actually meant it. He even reiterated and said that when they manufacture the computers, the red lights are to indicate that it’s a gaming brand line of computer. This dude fell for the meme!

Somehow he didn’t make the connection that I picked out each part and assembled this thing together, as if that just wasn’t a possibility. I had to show him in detail that I assembled this computer myself with each part and picked out the blue LED fans because I liked that color. He was still confused and thought I was bullshitting him that I built it, as if it would take some rocket scientist to do what I did. He just killed my glory because I was all like “I'm totally a badass for building this!”

He one day bought some parts for a computer based off of a video he saw on YouTube and had no idea how to put it together. I had to help him over a Skype call without being able to see anything to put it together. Miraculously we got it working, but it was short lived. Only a few months later and his mom dropped water down the PC while cleaning his room. RIP.

Thanks for reading my blog!

The past few days I spent some time setting up an internal search for the CozyNet blog. It’s now present on the main blog page, as well as a search engine option on the Homepage too.

I had to look around for awhile until I was able to find something suitable, because I’m sure as heck not going to reinvent this wheel here. I wouldn’t even know where to begin, so I figured there was something out there simple enough that I could plug in. Turns out, it was surprisingly complicated to find anything up to snuff; and by up to snuff I mean it has to be completely server side, preferably PHP and MySQL based, and absolutely no javashid dependency!

I knew that it could be done because I’ve seen them all my life; mostly on old school sites which is what I had in mind. I came up with Sphider, Sphinx, and a few others. Sphider doesn’t appear to be maintained and a little complicated to setup on newer environments. Sphinx looks way too complicated for what it should be, and the others were all half baked bloated crap that would never fit here.

So I looked around a little more and found Xapian. It took some considerable reading in the documentation, but it actually worked surprisingly well. The funny thing about Xapian though is that it’s a CGI program. Not exactly PHP, but it works! It’s a blast from the past to say the least.

I did make some extensive edits to the main query search page so that it blends well with the overall site, as well as fixed up some bugs. If you take a look at the source it’ll look like a mess, but you should of seen it before because it was in even worse shape then. There were missing tags, quotes, unnecessary spaces, etc. It’s also intermixed with other things that are unseen, but cause large empty gaps in the page source.

So long it works and looks nice, then I’m fine with it really. It also works quite well in text based browsers, which I bet you don’t see that very often!

I did notice though that it pulls the <title> element as the “caption” title for each result, which I’ve unfortunately set to simply “CozyNet Blog.” So every search result comes back with “CozyNet Blog” and a short summary, which isn’t exactly very intuitive. Going forward, I’ll begin implementing the title within the <title> element for each blog and video post so that they show up properly in the search. I might go thru and update the older ones, but then again I might not.

Setup

If you want to setup Xapian on your site, it’s really not that too difficult. It’s all command based, so you’ll want to create a shell script or a daily cron job to update its database of indexed pages. However, forethought and proper organizational hierarchy of your web content is needed or else you could index crap you don’t want showing up in search queries, like template files for example. You can filter some things, but proper organization goes a long way.

Here’s the command that I use to index the blogs:

omindex --db /var/lib/xapian-omega/data/default --mime-type html:text/html --mime-type-match=template.html:ignore --depth-limit=1 --url /blogs /var/www/www.cozynet.org/html/blogs && echo "Blogs done…"

• The --db option and following file path sets the target database to be updated. You can makeup whatever database name you’d like.
• The --mime-type option sets the types of files you want indexed. I have it set to only html so that images and audio files won’t junk up search results.
• The --mime-type-match option filters out by filename, which I’m filtering “template.html” with the “:ignore” bit on the end.
• The --depth-limit=1 only permits omindex one directory deep.
• And the --url option requires the directory to scan (starting from the webroot) and the full file path.

Each time you run this command, it will completely replace the previous contents of the database. If you would like to add additional contents to the database without writing over it, then just include a -p after the omindex command to preserve. The preserve option is only beneficial if you want to index additional directories into the same database or update the pre-existing database contents with new contents, which includes a “modified” timestamp feature in search query results.

In my shell script, I have the first omindex command rebuild the database by writing new content to it, then the next omindex command includes the preserve flag so that additional directories can also be included in the same DB. You’ll want to try and keep everything in the same DB, or else you would have to create individual search forms dedicated to each DB on your site. This might not be a bad idea if you want to separate blogs, videos, and images; however Xapian doesn’t have an image or video viewer, so just keep that in mind.

To create the search box itself on your site, you can include the following in the HTML document. You'll also want to make sure that CGI execution is enabled on your web server too, by the way.

  <form method="GET" action="/cgi-bin/omega/omega" role="search">
    <input name="P" placeholder="Search for..." size="50" autocomplete="off" accesskey="s" type="search" spellcheck="false"/>
    <span>
      <button type="submit">Search</button>
    </span>
  </form>
  

Thanks for reading my blog!

The pizza is aggressive

I like to make my own Calzone’s and Pizzas since they’re not greasy or as cheap quality compared to what you would typically get from a food chain or grocery store. I use the same dough and sauce recipes below for both my Calzone’s and Pizza, so I’m including them both!

Marinara sauce:

• One 14oz (400g) can of unsalted tomato paste.
• 4g (a little less than 1 teaspoon) of salt.
• Basil
• Oregano
• Parsley
• Garlic (powder)

You can add the herbs to taste, but be careful because their flavors won’t spread into the tomato sauce until after a few hours (roughly 24 hours in the fridge.) There are other ingredients you can throw into the sauce too if you would like, like wine and oil but I like to keep it basic.

After you’ve mixed together the ingredients, store the sauce in the fridge over night.

Dough for two large pizzas or four calzone's:

• 2 teaspoons (6 g) of active dry yeast or instant yeast.
• 7/8 to 1 1/8 cups (210 to 270 ml) plus 2 tablespoons (30 ml) of lukewarm water, divided.
• 2 tablespoons of olive oil
• 3 cups (361 g) of unbleached all-purpose flour
• 1 1/4 teaspoons (7 g) of salt
• Pinch of sugar

Dough for three large pizzas:

• 3 teaspoons of active dry yeast.
• 1 1/2 cup water plus 3 tablespoons of lukewarm water, divided.
• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 4 1/2 cups of flour
• 2 teaspoons of salt
• Pinch of sugar

Dough prep

Dissolve active dry yeast in 2 (or 3) tablespoons of lukewarm water in a large mixing bowl. Add the pinch of sugar to the yeast water mix. Stir until the yeast is dissolved and let it sit for 5 minutes at room temperature.

After the yeast has been activated, add your flour to the bowl along with the olive oil, salt, and rest of the water. Avoid putting the salt directly onto the instant yeast because it will kill the yeast.

Stir the ingredients to make a sticky dough. Knead the pizza dough until it's soft, smooth, and stretchy. You may need to add a few more drops of water or pinch of flour to get the right texture.

By this point you can freeze the dough or set it in the fridge for using later if you would like. If you do, then let it sit for an hour after taking out of the fridge.

Lightly grease a bowl and set the dough in it. Let the dough rise for 1 to 1.5 hours in a warm spot.

Calzone / Pizza prep

You'll need at least the following items. I don't have an exact measure on how much is required, so you'll have to eye ball what you think you'll need while at the grocery. I typically do a small bag of each cheese and topping.

• Mozzarella cheese
• White cheddar
• Italian three cheese
• Choice of toppings

If you’re making calzones, you can divide the dough down into preferable sizes. For pizza, divide the dough in half if you made enough for two pizzas, or divide into three parts if you made enough for three pizzas.

Stretch the dough thin with a roller then let it sit for 15 minutes (for calzone's you don't need to wait.) You can apply melted butter with garlic mix on top of the dough for extra flavor at this point. Let the butter sit for a few minutes to dry before applying the sauce or else the sauce will push the melted butter aside.

If you’re making calzones, then you don’t need to apply the marinara sauce. The sauce will be used for dipping from a small bowl instead. Also to make a calzone, you just roll it out into a small oval, apply the cheese and toppings on one half, then fold over the other half. You can dampen the edges with water so that it will stay shut like a glue when folded together. You should also cut some slits in the top so that it can vent while in the oven.

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees (218 celsius). After you’ve finished dressing the calzones or pizzas with cheese and toppings, set them in the over for 15 - 20 minutes.

Pictures

Calzone's

I like to mix a little oregano, basil, parsley, and crushed red pepper in with the cheese.

Pizza's

I forgot to take a final picture of the cooked pizza's because I was hungry when I made them and ate them! I'll update it someday in the future if I don't forget.

Thanks for reading my blog!

So it’s been pretty friggin hot here in the house. My little window unit in the front bedroom has done well, but I’ve been needing something bigger to cool the whole fist level. I looked around hardware stores and anywhere that sold window AC units, but they were always smaller ones that were intended for just a single room. They go by BTU and square footage to determine the coverage area, and I was needing something for 1,900 square feet.

Since the ceilings here are like 9 or 10 foot high, it would need to be a big bad mama jama, so I was in the market for a 28,000 BTU unit. I found a Frigidaire for $920 on Home Depot’s website and ordered it a few weeks back. It finally came in just last weekend, so I spent the time setting it up. Since it’s just me, I had to get creative in positioning it into the window because it’s so heavy. I built a small ramp up to the window and slid it in. I got the unit in the house by backing up my pickup to the porch and sliding it out onto a Rubbermaid roll cart that came with the place.

And in case you’re wondering, I did follow the instructions that it came with. These larger units are a little more involving than the simpler smaller units. You have to take them apart as a step in the installation, but it’s nothing too difficult besides handling the weight.

Something else the house came with was a large AC window unit support bracket on the outside wall, which fit exactly down to the centimeter! The unit also just barely managed to fit inside the window; I had to forgo the attachable side panels because they wouldn’t fit given how tight of a space remained, so I stuffed some insulating foam pads in between.

You can see the old bracket on the wall of the house here.

Everything seemed to be going pretty well, but then a problem occurred… Unfortunately the Home Depot website’s technical specification on the unit was misleading, stating that it would work on a NEMA 6-20 outlet at 20 amps and 220 volts. I made sure this was exactly what I had in the bedroom so this wouldn’t become an issue. But after installing the unit, I went to hook it up and realized right then that it was physically impossible to plug in. This unit has a NEMA 6-30p power adapter and the box it came in stated that it required 30 amps and 240 volts! Oof…

That was pretty disappointing, but I wasn’t about to let a little electricity stop me from a comfy cool house. No sir! So I looked up the required outlet, receptacle, and wiring gauge then drove back out to the hardware store to buy what I needed to change it all out.

That’s right bros; in addition to being a webdev by virtue of running this site, a tech analyst and system administrator, by the aid of YouTube and Stackexchange (yeah, they have an electrical engineering section) I’m also now an electrician too!

I borrowed my dads multi-meter and a few other tools like a wire stripper with wire gauge holes, and found the 20 amp breaker the old line was connected to. Switched off the master breaker, popped out the old breaker with a flat head screw driver and pulled the line from it. Then I found a 30 amp double pole breaker that wasn’t being used for anything except for a water heater upstairs I think, which I don’t care about right now and pulled both conductors out of it and set it aside.

20 amp on left, 30 amp on right.

Then I pulled out the old 12 gauge romex from beneath the bedroom and fished my new 10 gauge conductor back up and worked my way beneath the house to the other side with the breaker box. I fished the other end up thru the floor where the previous line was and pulled up about what I needed. I left some slack in the line in case I want to move it around later, because the setup is sort of temporary and kind of janky. The whole back bedroom needs to be redone, so I’m not going to bother with finalizing stuff until later; I just need the AC to work for now.

Anyhow, I fitted the wires (both hots and a ground) to their outlet in the bedroom and connected the other ends to the 30 amp breaker and ground, then connected the breaker back onto the bus and flipped it all back on. So far no smoke and fire, so I returned back into the bed room with my multi-meter to make sure the outlet and receptacle weren’t somehow going to shock the snot out of me if I were to touch them, hooked up the AC, and powered her on!

It worked, and I didn’t kms from electrocution in the process, so in all I think it was a job well done. I need to find some long screws so I can mount the receptacle to the wall because it looks really jank just leaning onto the floor like it is; I accidentally bought the wrong size screws, then again bought some longer drywall screws just to later realize that the interior walls are all shiplapped with sheet rock nailed over it. I also need to get some sort of tubing to cover up the romex so it looks a little less trashy. One day in the soon to be future, I intend to redo this bedroom and get a more ornate receptacle that would look decoratively appropriate coming up thru a stained hardwood floor. The brutalist industrial looking stuff that you’re supposed to mount inside of the wall was all they had at the hardware store.

It's about 26" wide.

With the new AC unit working, I went ahead and bought some box fans to set around the house to circulate the air. So far it’s doing a pretty good job of cooling the place, but the kitchen is the last room to receive its cool air and tends to stay warm during the day. It’s not unbearable, like outside being 100F, but it hovers around 84F in the kitchen while the rest of the house gets to around 74F. 72F is really my target temp, and if I can at least keep my bed room at that point then I’m good. I don’t like it too cold, but I also don’t like it too warm either. I might get one more smaller unit for the kitchen.

During my time beneath the house, I finally got a good look at the foundation and the condition of the joists and subflooring. I can see where the previous owner had obviously flooded out their bathroom and kitchen areas because there was repair work done in those spots as well as old rot left behind.

In the back of the house in the utility closet, the whole corner sill beam is completely rotted to nothing. I hadn’t noticed it at first, but you can see the light from outside in the closet where the floor is separating from the wall! So my next plan of action is to clear the washing machines and all of the crap from out of that room that’s just weight on the floor. (There are also actual dumbbell weights on the floor in that room too.) It’s quite apparent that the washing machines had been leaking in this room for a long time. I’m surprised though that the flooring beneath looked just fine; all the water went right into the corner.

I really can’t wait to get to the fun part, which is replacing and repairing the siding on the bad wall as well as fixing the windows. I want people to see what a beautiful house this once was before the blight of vinyl snuffed out its soul. Just have to fix these sill beams first, which is posing to be quite the challenge because none of the foundation companies in the area are interested.

I might just have to become a foundation repair expert too bros.

Thanks for reading my blog!

"This is Winner-winner-tendie-dinner. I repeat, there are no signs of life out here. Over!"

Click image for wallpaper size!

So I’ve been pretty busy with things these past few weeks. First of all is with the house and trash pickup, junkin junk in a roll-off dump! I took a few before and after pics, but there’s still some junk left. I have a 5,000lbs weight restriction so trying to be careful here. I have seven of these crapped out doors that weigh somewhere between 80 – 100lbs, so that’s getting up their in pretty quick.

There's still some junk left, but I'll get it next haul.

Also the previous owner must have been nuts for canned olives and tuna because I can safely say that there was a ton of them bagged up around the place. There’s just so much junk, and with it being the dog days of summer in Texas, it gets anywhere between 97 to 100 degrees fahrenheit (36 – 37 celsius.)

I recently ordered a new window AC unit that should hopefully cover the whole first level of the house, rated at 28,000 BTU that can cover 1,900 square feet (176.5m squared). It’s a Frigidaire unit, which I got to check one out just like it at my grandparents not so long ago and thought it was good.

My only concern is that the power outlet that I’ll be connecting it to won’t work. It is the proper connection (220V NEMA 6-20), but the back half of the house on the lower level doesn’t receive power. I keep the breaker off to it for that reason, but the outlet for the AC unit is on its own breaker so maybe it’ll be alright? I noticed that the line is ran up thru the floor, so it likely also hangs out beneath the house and would be easily accessible. Kind of a common thing in old houses where the owners didn't want to hire someone to run wire thru the wall.

Finally here’s a picture of the well. It has a new well pressure tank, psi gauge, and plumbing work such as a cut off valve. I was using it over the weekend to wash some things and noticed that the water was really dirty. It wasn’t like this a month ago, so I don’t know what’s up with that. My guess is the water table is low in the summer and so it sucks up mud? I collected some in a bucket and gradually the dirt fell to the bottom. When I slide some up the side with my finger, it feels sort of like sand but will dissolve if you rub it. I think I’ll just leave it to run for an hour and see if it ever clears up, because the amount of material in it is too much for a filter to handle.

I had also read that I should disinfect the well since it can build up bacteria if not used for a long time.

That's all I've got for now. I'm still cleaning inside the house and have started moving in some of my own junk that's been kept in storage. My aim is to move in within the next month or two. It won't be easy living seeing that I won't have a septic for awhile, nor a proper bath or hot water, but so long I have muh AC and internet it should be fine enough.

Speaking of internet, I need to look into buying my soylink setup soon.

One more thing unrelated that I want to mention. I've made some small updates to the site so that images should fit better on phones. I'm not going to bother too much with older blog posts though, and the banner image is a little messed up. I intend to fix that later.

Thanks for reading my blog!

It’s been a little quiet around the blog of late, but don’t worry because I’ve actually been working all week on a little project for the site!

Some of you might recall internet homepages like MSN, Yahoo, Netscape, the list goes on. These days homepages for the most part have either become a thing of the past or annoyingly ham-fisted into the New Tab page of modern browsers so propaganda can be rammed down your throat along with your morning coffee.

I wasn’t really ever fond of homepages, except for that one time where I believe it was Yahoo that allowed you to make a custom homepage with all sorts of cool widgets. Typically they’re just ad filled web waste with a search form at the top. When Google search came out, it was one of the first to have a simple clean page without all the crap, and to this day they’ ve kept to that approach.

Part of why I found homepages lame was because I was just a kid back then and they always had some boomer FUD about wars in Iraq, terrorists, spiraling economy, end of the world stuff. I wanted to see game news, flash games, funny videos of the day, dope ass WindowBlinds themes, a project spotlight! It could have been great, but it never happened, and now today I’m an internet boomer myself.

So I had a great idea about a week ago while I was bored at work, and that was to make a homepage; and not just a private homepage, but a public one that anyone can use! Check it out!

So this it pretty niche. I’m not trying to make something for a wide audience here bros. If you’re familiar with image boards and the alt-tech sub / counter culture areas of the internet, then this might make the perfect homepage for you! It’s also kind of specific to me and my interests too, so there’s that to keep in mind as well…

But the idea is that you can make it into your web browsers homepage, pull it up throughout the day and then quickly scan over some of the daily or weekly topics. At the moment I have three primary topic sections, “Cozy Corner,” “Tek NEET,” and “News General.” I might add more or move things around in the future. Also the Schiz-O-Monitors section would have some cool schizo tools. Right now it’s just the GCP graph, but a Gematria calculator would be cool to have if I could figure out how to set one up.

I tried keeping the use of Javascript down and not dependent on the functionality of the site. It just complements a few things, like the input auto-focus switcher when changing the search type or the music player.

The most difficult part out of all of this was making that dang web search box. At first I was using the DuckDuckGo search widget, which they copied from Yahoo’s search widget that would live within an iframe. Since it looked like ass and I couldn’t adjust the theme (because it’s remote content), I figured I would just make a SearXNG search box by ripping off what I saw in their search box. Basically it’s just a form POST with some input options that would be forwarded by the user client to the SearXNG instance. This worked pretty great, until the instance I was using was rate limited into oblivion. Not a good experience, and thus why I don’t use SearX, which is too bad because I wish it could work.

So then I decided to use what I had learned with the SearX search form and apply it to a custom DuckDuckGo search box. This was a complete slog because I had to reverse engineer their friggin URL system. It looks simple now if you inspect element, but it was complicated because I wanted this to work without depending on Javascript!

Now I’m not 100% certain, but I did carefully check the apache HTTP logs and I didn’t see any search queries or header info when performing a search, so I’m pretty sure that it’ s private and all on the client side, so you shouldn’t have to worry about me MITM search queries to DDG.

The search box is actually four individual boxes set on top of each other, then with a little CSS magic you can flip between them by the tab options above. I also added a Wiby search! The only problem with this is that it’s not keyboard accessible and the buttons are a little easy to miss.

Also one more thing to mention is the crypto price stats. I have a script on the backend that retrieves crypto values from a bitfinex API that runs as a cron job every minute. At first I had the iframe reload itself every minute, but I decided to make it static, so you'll have to refresh the page to see changes.

Conclusion:

It’s still a work in progress, but it’s at a point now that I believe it can be used. I would like to add more stuff to the page over time and experiment. Now don’t expect me to update it every hour of every day, or even every day! I don’t have that kind of time, but I will keep it updated with stuff on most days.

If you want to add it as a homepage to your web browser, don’t forget to enable the “Home” button, since it’s now a thing to disable that by default these days.

Thanks for reading my blog!

Tard:

"Ahh heh n-n-nigbahhh MAhhh heh haha!"

Limited in their mobility and intellect, Tards are frequently overlooked as invalids and underestimated by normies. As a result, Tards make for unsuspecting intel rangers in recon quests and effective crowd dispersal agents.

Unique ability: Can distract and repel crowds by yelling obscenities and slurs without getting into trouble or taking damage.

Stooge:

"Whatch you say 'bout my mama?"

A little slow and often mischievous, Stooges are natural barbarians and agents of chaos. Their high hit point value makes them especially resistant to physical attacks and capable of fending off multiple bullies and nonfrens simultaneously. Their crude perceptions and simplistic nature makes the Stooge naturally resistant to theoretical mind traps and logic bombs, yet highly susceptible to taunts.

Unique ability: Has a passive intimidation that weakens an opponents morale.

Fren:

"And a little bit of chicken fried, cold beer on a Friday night!"

A fren of frens and perhaps the most versatile, Frens can speak and understand the dialects of both his fellow frens and normies. Frens are vital in keeping a party together and morale high with song, dance, and memes. Without a Fren, parties will quickly descend into infighting and tribalism. While a Fren can dual class a fighter build, his primary place is in caring for others.

Unique ability: Can temporarily shape shift into other roles by mimicry, even into a normie!

Giftwit:

"I'm a Barbie gurl, in a Barbie wurld! UwU"

A bit eccentric and obsessively intense, Giftwits are like a glass cannon. Though highly sensitive to persuasion attacks, the Giftwit’s psycho kinetic abilities are unmatched. If pointed properly toward nonfrens and bullies, a Giftwit can devastate with a blast of pure unadulterated autism rays.

Unique ability: Has a passive aura of annoyance that can taunt both frens and nonfrens. Strategic party formation and containment practices are advised.

Smartie:

"Ackchyually I like numbers more than grils." *sniffs*

Patience and determination are hallmarks of the Smartie who unlike his fellow frens, is not as easily distracted or led about by the nonfrens and their lies. A Smartie is an expert in the knowing of all things with an encyclopedic knowledge and strategic resolve. Smarties are vital in the planning and organizing of quests and missions.

Unique ability: Can increase a targets rage into a full blown hissy fit by casting logic bombs.

Savant:

"I have tasted the rainbow and it did not taste like skittles..."

None other is quite like the Savant when it comes to pattern recognition and eidetic recall. Not only are Savants adept at revealing hidden traps, but they are also capable of sensing future events, alternative timelines and detecting temporal shifts. Alternative timelines however do affect the accuracy of their readings, making them error prone and often ignored among normies. Savants can only be understood by a Fren or Giftwit.

Unique ability: Possesses an otherworldly musical prowess and passive immunity to memory hole attempts.

I figured this would be a funpost to make for you all. I’m thinking that I might rank as a “Fren.” So what about you, which one are you?

Thanks for reading my blog!

Post NAS specs or GTFO

I mean, you do have a $1,000+ NAS with at least 10TB’s of storage capacity archiving the best parts of the internet before it’s all gone right, RIGHT!?

So I like to dabble a little in archiving things of interest; that is, things that I find interesting. I don’t really care what other people think about it though because I’m archiving for myself you see. Besides, I'm sure it'll still fetch a pretty penny in the future when data trading with some no-NAS pleb on war torn streets after it's been memory holed from the WWW collapse. This includes all sorts of things ranging from dank memes, movies, games, software, to whole YouTard channels! And let’s not forget about my frogs and cats; I have lots of those too. My collection of stuff is eclectic to say the least and it isn’t that very well organized either.

Some things I do keep pretty well organized, then other things are buried so deep that I couldn’t tell you where it’s at. For example, I’ve been trying to find my old WoW screen shots. I know I have them somewhere, but the older ones I’m not so sure. I did manage to find some old kitty videos of my cats when I was a kid and other dumb computer videos involving bandicam and Notepad instructions. I won’t be sharing them though to spare you all from cringe.

So I built this about five or six years ago, and its been rocking on since. It’s running FreeNAS version 11.1-U7 on five 2TB Western Digital Red CMR disk drives with the ZFS file system, 8GB of ECC memory, and some dual core i3 CPU. I keep it on a CyberPower UPS too so that power dips and outages won’t cause any potential damage.

Unfortunately it’s been out of service these past two weeks because the main boot drive, which was just a flash drive, failed on me. This wouldn’t be the first time since flash drives can’t really withstand being used in this manner for such a prolonged amount of time. I’ve had this puppy running over 2 and a half years solid uptime when I was still living at my apartment. I’ve finally decided to stop being a cheap ass and bought an SSD. Hopefully it’ll last longer, and if not, then I’ll just buy another mechanical drive for it.

The rest of the data drives are all fine though, so there’s nothing to worry about with the data. I also have a few extra replacements in case I ever have a drive failure. I should probably buy at least 5 more for back up though, as well as replacement parts so I won’t have to rig up some Frankenstein’s monster of a contraption in the future.

I highly recommend FreeNAS (now known as TrueNAS) and ZFS for an archive server because of the reliability. It might be a little complicated at first, but if you’re familiar with Linux or FreeBSD then it ain’t so bad. Just don’t go overboard with it by making it into some HTPC media center. Keep it simple!

YouTurd recently brought back the “Oldest” sort button for channels, which is very helpful in dredging up the older and frequently better videos of channels that have been piling on nothing but crap the last decade. Better get to archiving bros!

Thanks for reading my blog!

Enjoy this random picture of cute computer kitties (not mine)

I’ve been sick all weekend long and have been very bored sitting in bed, so I decided to spend a lil time cleaning out my YouTurd RSS feed of junk channels and converting the few possible channels to their Odysee clones. It’s been a long time coming.

There’s been a stagnation of good content on YouTube since 2016 combined with an increasingly bad interface. This eventually led me to abandoning the web frontend in place of an RSS feed reader and youtube-dl; leaving behind the dog and pony show theatrics of “like” “comment” “subscribe” “click bell!” Ironically this had a positive outcome for me as I’ve been gradually weaned off the treadmill of consumerist drivel, political pundit egrifters, and eceleb drama.

There was once a time where I was subscribing to everything, but that hasn’t really been the case in awhile now. My interests have shifted into areas of personal development, history, and restoration. I don’t have that many channels to watch or listen to anymore. As a result, it can get pretty boring during the day at work, so I’ve been listening to sermons. They’re typically a weekly upload so I’ll occasionally play my collection on repeat.

Since it gets a bit monotonous, I’ve set out to find some decent Odysee channels. Unfortunately Odysee doesn’t appear to have much variety, and so it tends to lean toward the same stuff you’ll see elsewhere. It's always some dude in his bed room (or lady) blabbering into a mic about their commentary on matters that are largely irrelevant. All they ever do is talk and talk and talk. The cult of personality is something I’ve never been particularly enamored by, so channels focused around a person for their personality and PoV on things I often find mind numbingly boring. Twitch streamers was the leap I simply couldn't make. It’s from that camp of low effort creativity that seems to have back washed over everything else.

Now I’m not completely against this type of format. There’s certainly an audience for it, but there's just TOO MUCH of it! I think a blog would be a better place for that kind of stuff anyhow! :P

Whatever happened to web series? We use to have Chad Vader, Happy Tree Friends, Angry Gamer Nerd, simple short silly things like the original Console Wars, Salad Fingers, Red vs Blue, or Machinima? Nobody makes stuff like that anymore… Well, maybe the off color cartoons are still around, but there was once a lot of creative variety that seems to be gone now. The few things that do have some originality to them often come at the cost of being a grift grind scheme that stifles its potential; but that’s another matter altogether and not what I’m talking about here today.

Another couple of pretty decent web series that I’ve mentioned on my links page was Dan Bell’s “Another Dirty Room,” and The Game Chasers old episodes before they too fell off a cliff. Another series which I didn’t mention on the Links page was Ben Heck Hacks and the Ben Heck Show, but that’s a dead channel ever since he retired. You can still find an archive of his series though. There was also Strek Continues, which is a fan series made around 2013 that's even better than whatever's being puked out by a studio today. These were all unique and original.

I typically weigh the value of a channel on the re-watchability of its content, so I find it pretty easy to dismiss most channels anymore that have a tendency to focus on largely irrelevant in-the-moment matters like the news, politics, and drama. For example, which has better re-watchability here: An episode of Freeman's Mind from Acursed Farms or a video of Asmongold “Reacts to <insert target of the week here>?” Even mukbang foodies have better re-watchability than most YouTurd ecelebs whole library!

Instead of actually making something, it seems to me that people today are more content with just talking non-stop in this sort of one way conversation toward a wall. How did it even get to this state? The lack of originality and creativity has been endemic across the internet for awhile now. It has me wondering at this point what might could be found in other non-English speaking countries. Maybe they have better shid? Check out this channel I saw linked in an /an/ kot general thread a few months ago (Warning: links to a Chinese website. Better activate shields!) A cat lady attaches a GoPro to her cats and they wonder around the village doing cat things; it’s like Urbex with cats, it’s supper cool! You’ll need a VPN to Japan tho since the videos are region locked.

So then, do you know any cool Odysee channels? So far from my experience the most creative channels are still on YouTube. If you know of any on Odysee, then share them in the comments or something.

Thanks for reading my blog!

I have a few images in this update post, so you'll have to read it on the site again. See you there fren!

Sound the alarm frens!

So check this one out farmer bros! I'm only bringing this up because my mom couldn't buy some antibiotic for her sheep that is showing signs of mastitis.

“The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Veterinary Medicine on June 10 finalized guidance for the agricultural industry that will bring all medically important antibiotics used in food-producing animals under veterinary oversight. Known as Guidance for Industry #263 (GFI #263), the new policy closes an important loophole that allowed producers to purchase over-the counter animal antibiotics without a prescription and promotes more judicious use of these drugs.”

Beginning in June 2023, farmers won’t be able to buy any over-the-counter antibiotics for their animals. This will be a big change for farmers, many of whom are accustomed to doing much of their own veterinary care. Like it or not, farmers need to be prepared.

Here's the original FDA source.

So this was in the works since 2018 and has finally taken effect this month. Farmers aren’t permitted to buy antibiotics for their animals anymore! Notice in the above summary “closes an important loophole,” implying as if. What loophole? I doubt it was ever a loophole, but now it’s being retroactively implied as if it were. Sneaky sneaky!

You farming sneeders are just gonna have to start getting scienmatific and make all your own shid; isn’t that just great!? And you can bet your bottoms too that there will be a crack down on home made antibiotics and remedies. Ivermectin is probably up next too. GAWT DAMN IT!

Sure is funny how much concern is placed on the good things while the harmful things like fentanyl and meth just go ignored. Kinda sus ain’t it!? Oh but I guess you could argue we don't feed our animals fentanyl and meth, but this has some pretty serious ramifications. Pretty much this is the state telling you to get wrecked and let the animals die!

So now you have this on top of farms burning down, food processing plants blowing up, whole entire forests being burnt down, trains carrying toxic chemicals being derailed, fertilizer shortages, etc. None of this is very cozy, so what do sneeders!?

Thanks for reading my blog!

Since there are a lot of images with this blog post, you'll have to read it on the site today. Sorry!

I'm thinking of making a new internet grifters series. This is my first episode. Enjoy! ^.^

Happy May 1'st! Things have been moving along with the house pretty smooth so far. About a week ago I had a new roof completed by a local company with new shingles and some roof decking where needed. It all looks really good now, so I’m less worried about leaks and high winds blowing it over into a pile of sticks!

I had a little trouble with getting the right roof color, which is a green shingle roof. Everything available was brown, black, grey and rust orange. I wanted it to have a little color for the roof that would blend with the green trees nearby, so I had them special order these green shingles from IKO. It was only an additional $300, which the overall cost of the roof was about $8,000; so not bad! I was afraid a new roof would cost me closer to $20K, so fortunately that wasn’t the case here.

The roof looks great, however it’s a little darker than I expected. It looks almost black in direct sunlight since it’s so dark. Oh well, it’ll do!

Up next is to clean up the outside wall that was exposed to a nearby fire, which melted most of the vinyl. I’m thinking of just restoring it back to the original wood sided walls and have that painted with a good weather resistant white paint. There are a few rotted sections near the bottom, so I’ll have to reproduce the tongue and groove siding in those spots. Everywhere else is in good enough condition though. I did notice some rot halfway thru the sill beam in this spot, so I’m going to have a guy take a look at it and the rest of the foundation.

Meanwhile inside, I’ve cleaned up the living room, guest entry room, kitchen, and back bedroom. I used a mixture of bleach and water, and just scrub down the floors and walls, all the way up to the ceiling. I’ve also shoveled out a lot of dirt, dust, and mouse feces that’s piled up over the years. It’s amazing how much dirt was in that place. It’s as if the owners just never swept a day in their life; albeit the place was vacant for about 4 to 5 years…

Since it’s taking a surprisingly significant amount of time and effort to clean out each room back to some habitable condition, I plan to start camping out at the house on random days thru the week to speed it up. I went to Cabela’s over the weekend and bought a few fun things so that I can camp out!

I bought a portable propane Coleman stove and ice chest. Can’t wait to cook on it!

I also setup my bed and “thinking” chair in the guest entry room. I forgot to take a pic of it, but I figured it’s better to keep it there than in my parents shed outback. Just need to buy some new pillows for it and I’ll have a cozy place to sleep over the weekends!

I now have power in the house. I don’t yet trust the breakers enough to flip everything on, so I just keep the front half of the house switched on so I can keep the porch light on while I’m away. I’m about to have some time off from my wage cage and plan to hangout out here and clean it up. I called up a well repair guy to take a look at the well, which I haven’t tested yet. I’m afraid I’ll mess something up since I know nothing about wells. I’m sure it’ll need some repair work since most of the equipment looks old and some of it rusted.

Also I found these old timbers with cut nails in em in the house when I was inspecting things more closely. There are only a few and they have strange cuts to them that don't line up with anything in the house, so I'm thinking that when the place was built, they must of salavged timbers from an old barn or cabin from the time. Pretty cool!

That’s all I’ve got for now.

Thanks for reading my blog!

Note: This list of resources is localized to just the USA (and possibly the state of Texas.) I’m not familiar with other countries outside of Burgertopia.

This is my list of resources that I used for buying a house. I was mostly focused on buying an older home in the country instead of something modern out of personal preference, so this might be reflected here.

First off, I think we’re all familiar with sites like Zillow or Realtor.com. These are alright for finding property, but they never provide enough information.

To figure out who owns the property, you can look this information up on the county appraisal districts web site (the county in which the property is located.) Most appraisal districts provide an online property search that ties into an ArcGIS map service. You can see lot lines, property tax records, deed types and change of deeds, as well as the property owners name and address. There is also often a county appraisal of the properties value including the build year and type of construction.

The below links are PDF’s that you can download which describe property improvement codes. Whenever you look up a property on an appraisal district, you’ll notice that it has these codes in the property description. I'm not sure if these codes are localized. I found quite a few sources, but these two were the best ones that I found in my state.

• Link 1
• Link 2

You can use the county appraisal to get a more realistic idea of the properties value compared to the inflated market values seen on MLS listed real estate.

Of course the seller will over value their house, so this gives you a better idea of what to offer when contacting their Realtor. You should understand though that the seller may be wanting to turn a profit and that they would quite likely be insulted if you offer at the counties appraised value, so there’s some middle ground to aim for. In my opinion, you shouldn’t ever accept the inflated asking price of a house if it’s significantly higher than the counties appraised value, but also keep in mind that the owner could have remodeled the property before the county has appraised it. Always take a look at it in person first!

Something else to note, the county can only appraise what it sees from the outside. They won’t know what’s inside that could be of value. This is in part why many people live like trash in the rural parts; it’s to reduce their property tax which is based on the appraised value.

If you can get the name and address of a property owner, you can then look up the owner to create a profile on them:

• Are they over 60 or younger?
• Does the owner presently live on the property or not?
• Does the owner live out of state?
• Does the owner own any additional land around or nearby the property?
• Is this a recently new owner or the same owner?
• Are the previous owners related?
• Was there a recent change in surname on the deed?
• Does the deed indicate a lien on the property (i.e. vendors lien) or do they own it completely?

You can use all of this information to figure out the situation of the owner to see if they’re out to scalp you or if they’re genuinely trying to sell the place.

https://www.historicaerials.com/viewer

This site is dope! You can go over old aerial archives to see what your county use to look like. It usually only goes as far back as the 1950’s, and some places are just blotted out. It’s useful in determining the age of a house and getting an idea of when additions were built or when it was constructed or moved to its present location. You can also use this site to estimate the age of a roof before learning later in the owners disclosure after signing into a purchase contract.

Maybe not all that important, but I think it’s great for historical research if your into that kind of thing.

https://opportunityzones.hud.gov/resources/map

Opportunity Zones might be worth noting if the property you’re interested in is located in such an area. I recommend reading on these to get an idea of what an OZ zone is.

Opportunity Zones are an economic development tool that allows people to invest in distressed areas in the United States.

Their purpose is to spur economic growth and job creation in low-income communities while providing tax benefits to investors.

Opportunity Zones were created under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (Public Law No. 115-97). Thousands of low-income communities in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and five U.S. territories are designated as Qualified Opportunity Zones.

Taxpayers can invest in these zones through Qualified Opportunity Funds. - IRS

Source

A link on OZ’s from Forbes: “Opportunity Zones: The Dire Risks For Investors And The Communities”

Another one about a few months later from Forbes: “Opportunity Zones: We’re Doing It Wrong”

And there are some politics behind it too: “Wyden Launches Investigation into Opportunity Zones” -- “Wyden requests information from organizations involved in the Opportunity Zone program, given the continued lack of transparency and reporting requirements for Opportunity Funds.” Source.

I have noticed though in OZ areas, people are suddenly selling their properties. Usually it’s because of some investment company planning to transform the area by bulldozing the neighborhood and replace it with newer housing, highways, solar farms, wind turbines, etc. It’s sad to see historic neighborhoods get wiped away, but sometimes it’s for the best if you’ve seen the conditions some of these rat traps are in.

Honestly, I don’t know what to say about em. It sounds like a tax subsidized gentrification program to me, so take that however you will!

https://loan-calculators.org/payoff

If you choose to buy a house on a loan, then try out this loan payoff calculator to get an idea of just how much you’re going to be spending on it with that interest rate and for how long. This was one of the better online calculators that I found because you can play around with the monthly payments to get an idea of what you can and can’t afford.

If you have a low credit score and you’re below the median income range in the US, which is between $50K to $90K a year, then most housing will be out of your reach. You could look into getting a USDA loan since a conventional loan might not be possible, but the USDA loan program is much more strict on the properties condition and location too. You would also have to fall below an income limit specific to your state in order to apply.

There’s also the FHA loan which is less strict than the USDA loan, but I don’t really know much about it other than Realtors don’t seem to like it very much and you have to pay mortgage insurance premiums on it despite whatever you put down at closing. You also wouldn't be allowed to do many self repairs with either loan unless you have two years building experience experience with the FHA.

One last loan option to consider is the VA loan. Of course you would have to be a veteran to get one, but they're much more nicer than any other loan out there from what I've read. It is possible to buy a house that a veteran is selling along with the VA loan, which could be a good opportunity; it's just not very common.

You should also take note that you’ll very likely won’t be able to buy a fixer upper home on a loan anymore. I tried going this route myself with a 10 year fixed rate conventional loan on a fixer upper house, which I planned to pay off within 3 years. Its appraisal didn’t meet approval, despite me having more than enough cash on hand for self financing repairs. With this in mind, you can better estimate an appropriate cash offer on a house in need of major repair where the owner might mistakenly think their shidbox will pass a lenders appraisal.

Conclusion:

My personal recommendation is to just buy what you can with cash and avoid dealing with debt, unless maybe you're old and gonna die soon anyway. I know that it’s a pretty difficult thing for people to do these days, and you won’t get the nicest house out of it unless you’re loaded in cash, or possibly even a house at all. But you need to get for real given your financial situation. While you might see people driving around in their Range Rovers sipping on Boba Tea and living in their $800K McMansion on a 100 acre ranch, you shouldn't forget that those are the lucky few that made it in the debt based lifestyle of serfdom. Most debt serfs don't live like that and you quite likely wouldn't as well.

The only time I believe that a loan could be considered for primary housing is when you’re financially well to do and know that you can pay it off within 5 years tops; it’s a gamble, but the odds should be in your favor. Mortgages can quickly devolve into financial servitude as you will become indentured to your job and the economy, signed off by your fear of loss. Sure, you could always just sell it, but you'll do everything in your power before resorting to that and by that point you will have lost more than just a house.

In this contract signed by your fear are undisclosed terms that you’ll have to accept whether you like it or not:

• Your mobility in both job and housing options becomes restricted.
• You will undergo re-domestication to a prescribed faux culture & job centered lifestyle.
• Marriage is dissuaded in place of casual unproductive promiscuity.
• Egregious restrictions and limitations are applied to the rearing of offspring.

Debt is the surest road to contemporary serfdom. If you can't afford a house and aren't in line to inherit property, then take the nomad pill! Just stay away from a debt based way of living as much as you possibly can, unless you don't aspire to much in life beyond getting high, stuffing your face, watching porn, and playing vidya all day.

Thanks for reading my blog!

So I’ve been planning on buying two kitty cats in the next couple of months! The reason for two is because I have to work thru most of the day and won’t be home. Two can keep each other company while I’m gone. It’ll have to be later in the year though as I get my house cleaned up, fixed up, and livable.

I haven’t yet decided whether they would be indoor or outdoor cats. If indoor, then they would need to be hypoallergenic. I would also need to fix up the back yard to where they wouldn’t be able to escape, but still have a place to roam outside and get fresh air and sunlight.

I think that if I go the indoor cat route, then it would need to be a short hair cat of some kind, otherwise they’ll get hair friggin everywhere! As for outdoor cats, I don’t care if they shed like crazy or if they’re non-hypoallergenic.

Personally, I’m not very fond of animals in the house. I leave some exception for animals like turtles, fish, reptiles, and gerbils. But cats and dogs, yeah I don’t really know… I think cats could be alright, so long they’re not misbehaved little freaks that routinely make a habbit to shid, piss, and vomit all over the place; otherwise, outside they go! I’m pretty sensitive to smells. Pungent musky odors in the house are not cool. I don’t mind it from a barnyard though.

As for cats, I could go for just about any one of them! Here’s a few pictures of the cats that I like.

Norwegian Forest Cat

I like their pointy ears. Very pretty. Not sure how well they would handle indoors though. I get the feeling that they're more of an outdoor cat and wouldn't appreciate being kept in a house or small backyard.

Ragdoll cat

I hear that Ragdoll cats are really chill. My grandparents had one, but she was a psycho! I was an annoying kid though, so it was probably my fault. One problem that I can see with a Ragdoll is that they’re kind of expensive! I'd hate to spend big bucks on a cat, just for something bad to happen to it...

Himalayan cat

I like the contrast of their blue eyes against the smokey fur coat. They look like cozy cats for sitting on your lap.

Persian cat

They sound like a nice house kitty. Also, I like their white fur. They look like they would shed a lot of hair around the house though.

Orange tabby

I like the orange coat Tabby's. They make me think of Garfield and would look great on a farm. Had one of these once with a stubbed tail. She was a feisty cat and very independent, and sometimes grouchy.

I don’t really know where to find these cats, aside from the Tabby. Tabby’s are easy to find here, but I rarely see the others. I guess Craig’s List? I’ve heard of FaceBook Marketplace, but I really don’t want to create a FaceBook account. I know that you can often find cats for sale at Flea markets. I also have a few phone numbers and know a few people that I could call, and just ask around that way.

It’ll need to be two cats, and preferably female. However, if I opt to do outdoor cats, then I would prefer at least one male. Maybe I could do both, two indoor cats and then two outdoor cats for catching rodents? Of course the males would have to be snipped, or else they would just run away.

This is starting to sound like too many cats now...

Thanks for reading my blog!

A rebuttal to "The Free Software Foundation is dying - by Drew DeVault"

The Free Software Foundation is one of the longest-running missions in the free software movement, effectively defining it. It provides a legal foundation and organizes activism around software freedom. The GNU project, closely related, has its own long story in this organization as the coding arm of the Free Software Foundation, taking these principles and philosophy into practice by developing free software; notably the GNU operating system that famously rests atop GNU/Linux.

Today, almost 40 years on, the FSF is still kicking!

Their achievements are unmistakable and deserving of gratitude and admiration for their decades of accomplishments in establishing and advancing Free Software! The principles of software freedom are just as important today as they were yesterday, and the products of these institutions continues to remain necessary and useful – the GPL license family, GCC, GNU coreutils, and so on. Nevertheless, the organizations behind this work are evolving.

The Free Software Foundation must begin concerning itself with the following challenges:

• Applying free software philosophy to artificial intelligence
• Developing, publishing, and promoting copyleft licenses for AI training models
• Fostering a relationship between Free Software ideals and ethics in AI

The FSF is gradually making ground in these regards with their Artificial Intelligence Project Team, demonstrating that the foundation is investing its resources into the right initiatives.

In its role as the thought-leaders of free software philosophy, the message of the FSF has a world wide reach. The organization’s messaging is clear, concise, and forward thinking. Broadcasting the “GNU/Linux” success story of the open source movement has cultivated an audience of “advocates” rather than “users”; furthering its cause. The community resources and organized FAQs provide a useful entry point or reference for the community. The message however isn't strictly limited to the FSF site itself, but has also been spread thru many community events and technical conventions across the globe.

As for conspiracy theories floating around the FSF and Richard M. Stallman, well, it’s no coincidence that many people struggle to receive their crass and often times crude approach. Do you, dear reader, know the difference between the subjective and objective, fiction and reality, lie and truth? Many of the deluded and terminally mad assume that a subjective theory can be manifested into an objective truth by the mere practice of group affirmation alone, despite all protest of the later. The GPL family of licenses are essential for the future, but still few people haughty and ill tempered refuse to heed those which advocate for it on the subjective grounds of their contemporary politics.

There is still much work to be done, seeing that over 1 million npm packages use a permissive license while fewer than 20,000 use the GPL; cargo sports a half-million permissive packages and another 20,000 or so GPL’d. Does this mean that the free software movement isn't healthy? This one gets an emphatic “no!” – thanks to the open source movement and the near-equivalence between free software and open source software. There’s more free software than ever and virtually all new software contains free software components, and most people call it open source.

The FOSS community is now dominated by more people than ever before! The broader community is enjoying a rapid growth in adoption, but the message doesn't always reach these people. The FSF has succeeded where it has, but isn't able to go at it alone. This could mean that some projects in the community could be left to form insular, weak institutions among themselves with no central leadership, and leaving the overall FOSS communities vulnerable to exploitation from commercial attacks on the free and open source software brand.

Additional assistance is always welcomed by the FSF to fulfill its mission. To better promote free software ideals, I call for the following:

1. Welcome more leaders! Richard Stallman and other leaders of the FSF deserve the utmost of respect for their unwavering commitment and leadership of the organization. For over 40 years they've lead the FSF thru all manner of perils and success, proving that the principals in which they stand upon are sound. As free software adoption has grown, the leadership must also grow too so that it may continue in adequately cultivating the many developing projects and communities, or else they may be at risk of capture by subversive influences that call for the reformation of the founding leaders of the organization and its core principles.


2. Fortify the institution: The FSF leadership is faced with the challenge of preserving its mission while also integrating a myopic generation consumed by all manner of corrosive polarizing and fundamentally incompatible ideologies. While more leadership is needed to match the growth of FOSS adoption, the institution will be besieged by bad actors in sheep's clothing. Do not mistake words for action; pay attention to their words, but pay even more toward their actions.


3. Improve outreach: Technical conventions, mailing lists, and wiki's are all fine ways in spreading the free software message, but have also fallen out of popularity over the past 20 years. More receptive avenues can be found among the influencer streaming markets, alternative social media platforms, and online tech sub-cultures. Even if this means venturing into proprietary spaces.


4. Embolster the GNU project: FSF and GNU have worked hand-in-hand over decades to build up the organization. The GNU project has made for a shining example for other projects to model themselves after as a source of experience. The GNU project represents a large part of the free software brand today, and is necessary for the Free Software Foundation to embolster a continued close working relationship to demonstrate a working example of its overall success for others to see.


5. Keep kicking ass, bros!

The Free Software foundation can continue to be a uniting force despite the coming challenges it faces from many sides. The FOSS ecosystem is flourishing, and the FSF is the only organization capable of stepping up to the wheel and direct its coming successes in the name of software freedom.

And now, a message from /g/

>See, Drew, rational people don't want people to be put in a certain position based on how they look. Rational people don't care whether the competent people in appropriate roles look similar or dissimilar to them.

>YOU are the one who cares about what they look like. You are the one who throws merit, content, and substance in the trash so you can collect social credit points among other lunatics and idiots just like you while thinking you're a good person contributing good things to this world. No, you and your ilk are the problem in this world. You're the ruiners of all things good. You are not good people at all. You are people with a world view warped by ideology, you are the zombies and NPCs of this era, meaning you have no awareness of your irrationality and consider what you do a good thing.

>Just like all people like you in the past that participated in all kinds of societal insanity. They too thought they were doing a good thing.

Conclusion:

So I wrote this as a sort of contrarian rebuttal and tried keeping it close to the source. This sad dude is really preachy, not forgetting to mention a negative Nancy; so the rebuttal comes off kinda cringe and low-key cultish. I'm not actually this obsessed over the FSF!

I do have an FSF and GNU sticker on one of my laptops I got from a booth one year at LinuxFest. ;-P

Thanks for reading my blog!

So a fren in IRC tried out the recent Pale Moon browser update, version 32.1.0 which has better support for Google webcomponents, and said that it’s finally working again with sites like GitHub. It’s been awhile since I’ve last used Male Poon, and that’s simply because it just stopped working for most sites. After they kicked Toby from the project, it just nose dived from there; but I’d already stopped using it by that point and moved to Brave.

I did some testing with this version and it seems to actually be functional! I’m able to use sites like YouTurd, GitHub, GitLab. Odysee, and Twitch. Preddit as well as various basket weaving forums seem to work too. I’m sure it’ll still run into trouble with online banking and retail sites, but it’s at least graduated from text based browser levels of incompatibility, so conratz Pale Meme!

Here's a demonstration of Pale Moon attempting to load YouTube, before and after:

Scrolling thru a product list on Amazon or Newegg is still pretty rough. Same for scrolling thru a video list on Youtube or Odysee. It really struggles to handle multiple images. I don’t remember it being that bad. I haven’t tried the browser on more corporate-y sites like Azure, Cloud Flare, Teams, Cisco Websex, or Shatpoint. I don’t want to set off any alarms here at work; I’ve been trying to fly under the radar, and running a non-Edge meme browser might bring some unnecessary attention.

So yeah, I think Pale Moon is back in so far as an alright shid poster with some compatibility to finally render modern sites!

Thanks for reading my blog!

♫ I’d rather be caught livin’ cozy in muh shack,

A shack inna woods instead of in da hood,

No cotton-pickin’ paper money held up inna bank,

Prepped for the Feds end with silver in the tank!

Under water that is... with the fish... cold. ♫

The Ballad of CozyBroz

Yeah, das rite bros... Landlord Chad here, wat up?

So this is a more comprehensive blog detailing what all I went thru to buy muh house. It took a long time, but everything has worked out in my favor so far.

Going back, this all began late October. I saw the house show up on Zillow, and it met some of my criteria.

• Location location location!
• Style and age
• Some acreage or potential acreage nearby.

I drove out to take a look at it and find that one side of the house is a disaster. Melted vinyl hanging and some windows damaged; not good. The rest of the house looked alright though, and there was no visible fire damage to the structure, other than the vinyl. I scheduled a walk thru and the inside of the house looked to be in good nuff shape! Nothing at all like the pictures of the other houses that I’ve posted on here before. The property also has a beat up metal barn in the back and a well pump house.

The seller was asking for $100K, which was a bit too much in my opinion so I haggled them down to $90K, figuring that I could try and get it financed. Still, $90K is way too much for the property given its age, location, and depreciated condition. I figured that it would be a stretch to see if it could finance, and their Realtor seemed to think it would. If it worked, then fine nuff with me, I don’t care! I can pay that off in like 5 years so long I’m frugal with muh money; and if it didn’t, then I could use that to negotiate a lower offer in cash.

After a month and a half, of course it failed the appraisal and didn’t finance. The lender seemed a bit upset too, as if I would dare even try to get them to finance such a dump; or at least that was the impression I got from em. Oh well, so be it!

I submitted a form of termination and told their Realtor that since I couldn’t get it financed, that I could give them a cash offer, but that it wouldn’t be nearly as much as what the seller was asking for. The Realtor was disappointed and said that the appraisal didn’t seem right, and asked if I could try another lender. I didn’t really want to since I was getting tired of it, but I have nothing to lose and agreed to try another lender.

After another month, of course if failed the second appraisal too. The lender was also kinda sus and kept calling me bud and buddy. “What’s up bud,” “how ya doing buddy?” Maybe he was Canadian or something?

Also during this time, the insurance agent dropped out on the home owners policy because they didn’t like the melted vinyl and said that I would have to find a provider that would sign for a builders risk policy. I kinda figured that would happen, but wished they were more on the ball with it than deciding two and a half months later!

I don’t actually hold any crypto. Instead, I've just been saving cash. Thought picrel was sorta related to topic. Trying to pad things here.

It’s now January and I’m pretty much fed up with talking to lenders and insurance agents and I wasn’t about to go for round three. The place is obviously in no condition to be financed, which doesn’t really matter much to me either way. This has been more or less a stall tactic to whittle down the asking price and patience of the seller for the long game!

So I terminate the contract and submit a cash offer of $57K. The Realtor puts the house back up on the market to see if they can reel in a better deal, which by this point they’ve missed the boat in selling over priced shid shacks innawoods. About a month goes by and the Realtor asks if I can go any higher. I bump my offer up to $60K and tell him that’s as high as I can go due to what I have in the bank that’ll go toward repairs. The seller accepts a few days later and we sign a new contract!

I quickly call up an insurance agent that I’ve kept waiting on the sidelines for a builders risk policy and get insurance coverage squared away. During closing, there was some delay in processing the wire from the sellers bank. After 24 hours, I was getting mega pissed off thinking they made off like a bandit because they were behaving as if they hadn’t received the funds while my bank said that it was certainly sent! And before any of you ask, I did wire the funds one day in advance to avoid any delays; So essentially, not my fault!

Eventually it cleared, but by this point I was sus as shid and began to wonder if everything wasn’t a setup. I did verify the Realtor's license way back and he was on the up-and-up as well as the property tax records, but I didn’t ever verify the dang Title Company! But it all cleared up and a week later I got my deed and verified it with the county recording office.

Sometime soon I can finally get chickens and schizo larp; it'll be fun bros!

Now that the house is mine, I’ll begin the much needed repairs and restoration ASAP! It’s gonna take a little while to get it back into shape because I don’t have that much money left after buying the place. I did plan to do many of the repairs myself for the outside, but after seeing some recent bank collapses followed up by a bank run and the fed assets balance sheet shoot up even higher to cover for retard depositors and soon to be moar inflation, I’m just gonna blow it all now bros. Nowhere is safu, except for maybe boomer rocks.

I think 2023 might just be the year to spend all of your saved up cash now or forever say goodbye to it, unless the “war” really works out in our favor. Doubtful, but it’s possible.

I hope I can figure out a solar powered well pump setup. If that does become a problem in the future, there is a stream of water about a mile off and a few other sources of water nearby. I would just have to boil it if I were to drink it and accept my fate in knowing that I’ll likely get cancer from pesticide runoff as I get older. Sometimes you win some and sometimes you lose some bros.

Thanks for reading my blog!

New CozyNet video!

Enjoy!

Spring is around the corner! Spring might be my favorite season of the year, next to winter. I don’t have a whole lot planned except for moar house stuff and moar blogs. I was working on a podcast episode, which is pretty much completed but now I’m hesitant to release. It might be a lil too controversial given the subject material that I rambled on about; so I’m reconsidering the first episode. Might just can it or something, I don’t know…

Back on the house search front; I should probably have mentioned that the seller of the house I submitted a cash offer for about a month back, which I was unable to finance, did finally accept!

I’m pretty excited since this will be my first house. I just hope a tornado doesn’t blow it away or someone doesn’t lite it on fire while I’m away. I would like to share pictures of it, but then again you could easily look it up on Zillow to then abduct me and do terrible things, so I’m just going to hold off of that for now. At least until I get it restored! In the meantime, I can describe it to you in detail and provide a facsimile of the house below.

This is pretty darn close by comparison. The only difference is that my house has two large dormers and a back half that's roughly the same size as the front porch. It's also covered in vinyl and looks a bit ratty at the moment. This is what it would of looked like in its heyday.

“This quaint Lowcountry farm home in the rolling hills of Texas has been transformed by its previous owners over its many storied years into a pleasant Redneck vernacular. It's adorned by a loosely fitted unwashed cadaver gray vinyl décor, a splendid variety of unmatched vintage aluminum framed windows, and an expansive yard view tastefully decorated in a rustic faux-parolee chique. This one of a kind home in the country side can be yours for just $60,000.”

In other words, it looks like ASS! But I plan to restore it back into the beautiful home it once was. I don’t know what the deal is with nasty gray vinyl, but the place is covered in it as well as some of the linoleum floors. If you ever decide to cover your house in vinyl, then choose something with earthen color or go with pure white. Gray just makes everything look dead, depressing, and sad; no soul.

The inside of the house is so so, and will need some work too, but that can wait until the exterior is restored first. I’m not a fan of linoleum, which is used in many of the rooms. It appears that the original barn-wood floors were removed in most of the back rooms and second floor, so that’ll be a challenge to restore.

The second floor was renovated at some point and hasn’t aged well at all. It’s slathered in wood panel siding, linoleum, and a hard plastic insulated drop ceiling. The style clashes badly with the rest of the house, so I intend to remove all of that and insulate the attic instead.

First order of business will be to have the roof re-shingled, restore electrical, have the well fixed, and some of the plumbing redone and sewer possibly replaced. That alone will cost me everything that I have left, so the rest of the restoration will just move along slowly.

I’ll share pictures of it as I go along, so that’ll be fun! I’ll also write a longer blog post on all the bullshid I had to go thru just to get it. It’s been about 6 fuggin months, no lie bros! Anyhow, that’s all I’ve got for now.

Thanks for reading my blog!

The site you see before your eyes was made in VIM, and quite easily too! I’m not using a static site generator because I think it’s easier to just get it done with VIM. Buuuut, I’m not using simply VIM alone; there are a few other things at work here.

As you may have already seen, I’ve been using PHP scripts to generate some of the content that you see here. Since these scripts are centralized to a directory outside of the CozyNet webroot, this makes it easier to apply smaller changes down the road without having to touch every HTML document.

Additionally, I make use of basic HTML documents as templates and combined that with the functionality of the Marvim VIM plugin. Marvim is pretty much a VIM macro storage and recall plugin, where you can save your macro or even a selection of text to recall for later.

I wanted to demonstrate Marvim in a few scenarios so that you could get an idea of its functionality, especially with making web pages.

Let’s say that you want to slap down an image element in a document without having to type it all out manually. With Marvim, you can call up a saved example of this element with all the little bits and bobs.

Another scenario could include a table with a row and a few extra things.

As you can see, it saves on a lot of typing!

How to install

Step 1: Download the marvim.tar.gz file from this link. You’ll need to use the 0.4 version. The 0.5 Beta version is busted crap and won’t work, so don’t even bother with it!

Step 2: Extract the contents, tar xfv marvim.tar.gz.

Step 3: Create a “plugin” directory within your ~/.vim directory, mkdir -p ~/.vim/plugin.

Step 4: Copy the marvim.vim file into the ~/.vim/plugin directory.

Starting up VIM will cause the marvim plugin to auto-generate a ~/.marvim directory. Based on the file type from which you'll save a macro, it will create a corresponding directory for that file type that will contain the macro templates. So for example, if you’re editing an HTML file in VIM and decide to save a selection of text with marvim, it will store that selection in ~/.marvim/html.

How to use

I’m just going to repeat what’s on the VIM plugin site here. It’s pretty simple to use!

Store a new macro to the repository:

1. Record the macro as usual into the q register (i.e. qq..<macro keystrokes>..q)
2. Press the save macro key <F3> (default) in normal mode.
3. Enter the macro name when prompted after the prefix (a prefix will be provided based on the filetype.)
4. The macro is now store in the repository.

Save a template into the repository:

1. In visual mode, select the area you want to save.
2. Press the macro save button <F3> (default) while in visual mode.
3. Enter a template name when prompted (a prefix will be provided based on the filetype).
4. The template will be saved in the repository.

Recall a macro/template by searching:

1. Pess the macro find key (default) in normal mode.
2. Enter a search string when prompted (a prefix will be put by default, which can be modified)
3. Press <Tab> or <Control-D> to auto-complete until you find the macro.
4. Press enter to execute and load the macro for further use in the q register.

Replay the previously loaded macro on multiple lines for each line:

1. While in visual mode, select the area you want the macro to run on.
2. Press the macro find key <F3> (default) in visual mode.
3. The macro in q register will be replayed for every line.

Conclusion

I am aware of other methods in editing web documents, but I still prefer VIM. Since I don’t intend to make any major overhauls to the site design, this has worked out pretty well and I suspect that some of you could also benefit from this approach.

You can register multiple macros to various keys to create a pretty fluent web editor out of VIM. As I’ve already said, combining this with PHP scripting and document templates goes hand in hand.

Thanks for reading my blog!

This one is another big post with a lot of images in it, so to keep from bombing your feed reader, just click the link to the site instead.

There’s a lot in this blog post that might not translate well into a feed reader (i.e. code / scripting), so I recommend reading it on the site itself.

See you there!

Is it just me, or are the chocolate candy tasting kinda crap these days?

Last week was a BUSY week for the site. Seeing the rise in traffic, I spent a lot of time tightening some things down security wise since I saw people in the logs poking around at stuff. I was being lazy and didn’t really care about it until now, but man am I glad that I at least completed the comment captcha form before then!

About 1,442 unique visitors for 2023-02-08! I'm sure there's some bot traffic in there, but it's a lot more than the usual 230 avg. So far the VPS handled it well.

The IRC was bustling for awhile too. I also updated the KiwiIRC web interface and gave it a really cool welcome screen.

Anyways, after shilling my video “Boomer was here” in a few /WSG/ threads, it eventually made its way into the Tweeter normie sphere which saw a lot of eyes and brought lots of traffic. I’m glad to see that it made people laugh and happy!

For any new readers here, welcome to the blog! So, like the first paragraph of the front page says, this is just a place where I post random things. I mostly post about tech stuff, some housing stuff because I’ve been looking for a house, interesting threads that I find on the boards, and mundane things like the choco chip cookie recipe. It can all be quite random and sometimes spur of the moment. Hypothetically speaking, it is completely possible that I might just out of nowhere bring up a topic that nobody asked about.

I do have some things in mind that I would like to write about, but then I get easily distracted by other things and then forget what I was doing or become disinterested. But I’ll get back to it soon™. Just wanted to make this post to say thanks for all the comments, I’ve read em. And also...

Thanks for reading my blog!

Happy valentines!

This one is another big post with a lot of images in it, so to keep from bombing your feed reader, just click the link to the site instead.

I've also cleared out the old feed items, so we're starting fresh! Don't worry about missing out on anything, it's all still on the blog page. This feed is really only intended as a notification service, so the contents are temporal and will be rotated like a log over time.

New CozyNet video, featuring elevenlabs speech synthesis!

Enjoy!