Jag Talon – Page 2 – Software, photos, travel, and other interests.

Week 1: All over the place

July 20th, 2022

↗ Lo-fi version

I’ve been learning a lot of random things recently. The other week, I signed up for an electronics course on Ohmify and bought a bunch of components and tools so that I could follow along. I’m having a lot of fun trying out the different activities on that website. I just started so I’ve only made simple circuits, so I have a lot of learning to do! I also need to get a drawer for all these components that I got online because it’s a bit of a mess right now.

Touch sensor with a transistor.

Not quite clear on what my end goal is with learning electronics, but I’d like to learn how to tinker more with computer hardware so I’m starting with the basics. Semi-related: I got an open source hardware trackball called Ploopy! I didn’t get the DIY kit so I didn’t build it myself, but I’ve been learning how to customize the firmware. Just last night I got to map one mouse button to CTRL+TAB and then another one to CTRL+SHIFT+TAB. It feels like AutoHotkey, but built-in to the device!

Ploopy trackball and a screenshot of C code to program the trackball.

I’ve also been playing some DOOM II! I initially installed it on the Raspberry Pi 400 for fun (I wanted to see how well it ran), but I ended up getting hooked. I definitely didn’t expect DOOM II from 1994 to hold a candle to the latest iterations like DOOM Eternal.

I bought the game on GOG, extracted it using innoextract, then I ran the WAD file on LZDOOM. It worked like a charm.

A screenshot of DOOM II running on a Raspberry Pi 400.

I’ve been going back to kettlebell class at my gym as well. It’s been a while since I last went, so my stamina isn’t as good as it used to. I’m still struggling in class, but I feel like I’m slowly improving at least. The summer heat isn’t helping either.

Finally, I’ve been continuing to read CAPS LOCK which is a book about how design is tightly intertwined with capitalism (so far I’ve learned: building trust in the government [design of documents and money], nudging people to spend more [design of credit cards and apps], and standards for increasing efficiency [bar codes])

💬 [email protected]
Hello again, Linux

June 25th, 2022

I’ve been running Linux on my laptop for a little over a week now, and so far I’m really impressed with it! It’s probably almost a decade since I last used Linux (outside of Windows Subsystem for Linux and accessing remote machines) so I wanted to see how well it works as my main OS.

I moved to Windows from macOS in 2020 because it gave me more hardware options (I wanted a laptop that was more repairable), gaming options (a lot of games that I want to play run on Windows), and it still let me do my design work. Windows meets all my needs to be honest, but it makes me uncomfortable to use an OS made by a surveillance capitalist so I’m curious about an alternative and I wanted to see if Linux would work for me.

I downloaded Fedora and installed it on my Dell XPS 17.

Hardware Support

Thunderbolt works as expected. It looks gorgeous on my 5k LG Ultrafine monitor, and I’m able to run both the built-in 4k display and the 5k external display at the same time. That’s a lot of pixels! My Wacom tablet just worked out of the box. I didn’t have to download anything for it to work which was really impressive. Bluetooth and WiFi work flawlessly. I can use my Bluetooth mouse with no issue.

It unfortunately wouldn’t let me install the Nvidia driver from the app store, but I believe all I had to do was run sudo dnf install akmod-nvidia in the terminal to fix it. I can now right click on an app and run it on the Nvidia GPU.

Fingerprint reader doesn’t work, so I still need to figure that out.

Wacom support is built-in.

Gaming

I downloaded Steam, enabled the Windows-compatibility option, and installed DOOM Eternal. It wasn’t working at first—it said that I didn’t have enough memory in my video card. So I lowered the quality a bit and it ran perfectly. I played 4 hours of it in Nightmare mode, so I’m pretty impressed with the speed as well! I have yet to try other games, but I’m hopeful based on the reports that I’m seeing about the Steam Deck. I’m really amazed to see what Valve has done to make Windows games work.

DOOM Eternal main menu.

Software

I expected to have some issues with the available software, but it wasn’t actually that much of a hassle for me. Maybe I just don’t use that many apps to begin with. For 1Password, Zoom, Spotify, digiKam, Mini vMac, Telegram, Thunderbird, Sublime Text, and Signal, they work the same way as their Windows and macOS counterparts. Figma doesn’t have a desktop app, but there is an unofficial Linux version that works just fine. For Dropbox, I’m using an app called Maestral.

There’s a built-in app in GNOME for recording the screen, but it doesn’t record it in GIF format. A little app called Kooha is able to do that though. I’m also pleasantly surprised that Fedora also comes with a simple backup tool that I’m using to backup to my Rsync.net account.

I do wish there was AutoHotKey. And Excel. And Krisp. And Em Client.

What I’m most impressed with is that Fedora comes with virtualization software and it’s super easy to use! So I’ve been running Windows on there when I need it.

Programs installed on my laptop.

I’m not sure if I want to go Linux full time yet, but I’m excited that I’m actually using it! I think it pretty much meets my needs, but it does take a bit of work to get things working. I’m hopeful, so we’ll see what happens!
Visiting Iceland

June 16th, 2022

Last week the design team went to Iceland! It’s my first time going there, and I’m absolutely in love with the beauty of the country. I’ll let the photos speak for themselves.

At first we toured around Reykjavik.

We then went to Geysir, Gullfoss, then hiked up Reykjadalur Valley to go to a hot spring.

We then went south to Seljalandsfoss, Skógafoss, Raufarhólshellir, and Vik.

The last place we went to was Blue Lagoon, although I didn’t bring my camera there. Before I left, I also got a last-minute tattoo from Íris at Valkyrie Tattoo as well!

High-quality photos can be found on Flickr.
I made a zine in HyperCard

June 3rd, 2022
I wanted to create an interactive thing where the player can play as a villain — in this case a surveillance capitalist. I thought HyperCard would be a perfect medium because it has built-in programming and art tools. Plus, it’s fun running old software!

Drawings are all my own except for the little Macintosh illustration. That came with HyperCard.

I followed the instructions on https://cancel.fm/hyperjam/ when I set it up on my computer, but if you want to run it yourself, https://system7.app/ should be the easiest way to do it!

This work was inspired by:
Visiting Philippines

May 1st, 2022

I visited my family in the Philippines in March, and here are some of the photos that I took! Higher quality ones can be found on Flickr.
Budgie Released

February 14th, 2022

I might be the last person on Earth to realize this, but I recently learned how useful spreadsheets can be in my personal life. This whole time I’ve been avoiding spreadsheets because I thought they were for serious business people who need to do serious things like projections and reports.

So I’ve been pushing myself to learn Excel recently, and I’m amazed how quickly I can make “apps” for myself through Excel vs doing it in a proper programming language. I’ve been proud of a minimalist budgeting system that I made that’s inspired by YNAB called Budgie, so it’s up online if you’d like to use it!
Holiday Cooking

January 12th, 2022
We did a lot of cooking during the holidays, and I think these were my favorites.

Ginataang Mackerel

I love making ginataang mackerel (mackerel cooked in coconut milk), but this is the first time I actually chopped and cleaned a whole fish! I used to be grossed out watching people gut fish, but it turned out to be pretty ok and surprisingly easy. It was bloody though, so we had to soak it in water for a bit before cooking.
Lumpiang Shanghai

I’ve eaten lumpiang shanghai (fried spring rolls) all throughout my life, but I’ve never actually made it myself. There were a couple of steps, but it turned out to be pretty easy, too. The hard part was probably finding the lumpia wrapper at the store.
Budae Jjigae

We’ve run into budae jjigae (army stew) online before, but we’ve never had it. It looked like such a fun dish, that we decided to try it over the holidays. It was delicious, but we think there are things that we could do to make it even better like frying the spam and squeezing the tofu beforehand.
Caps Warlock and Alarm Pup Released

January 5th, 2022

I recently released two new apps on itch.io: Caps Warlock and Alarm Pup.

Caps Warlock is an AutoHotkey script that I’ve been working on to make the Caps Lock key more useful. It adds useful keyboard shortcuts to desktop apps like Figma, Firefox, and Sublime Text. It doesn’t support that many apps yet, but I’m slowly adding features to it.

Alarm Pup is a countdown timer that I worked on during the holidays to help me take breaks and timebox tasks during the workday.

Try it out! I hope you find it useful.

Giving in 2021

December 11th, 2021

Here’s a summary of my donations this year!

I’m continuing to donate to GiveWell through the Maximum Impact Fund. This money is granted to charities that save people’s lives by preventing deadly diseases like malaria (400k deaths/year) and vitamin A deficiency (200k deaths/year).
I donated more to GiveDirectly than I did last year to give money directly to the poorest households.
I made my donations more granular this year and added a date column, too. I like that I add additional rows instead of editing existing rows because it’s less error prone.

Year	Organization	Date	Amount
2019	GiveWell	—	$1,398.50
	GiveWell (Employer Match)	—	$1,000.00
2020	GiveWell	—	$13,420.39
	GiveDirectly	—	$920.18
	GiveDirectly (COVID-19)	—	$600
	GiveWell (Employer Match)	—	$1,000
2021	GiveWell	01-01-2021	$1,000
	GiveWell	01-01-2021	$300
	GiveWell	02-01-2021	$300
	GiveWell	03-01-2021	$300
	GiveWell	04-01-2021	$300
	GiveWell	05-01-2021	$300
	GiveWell	06-01-2021	$300
	GiveWell	07-01-2021	$300
	GiveWell	08-01-2021	$300
	GiveWell	08-28-2021	$6,589.51
	GiveWell	09-01-2021	$300
	GiveWell	10-01-2021	$300
	GiveWell	11-01-2021	$300
	GiveWell	12-01-2021	$300
	GiveDirectly	12-04-2021	$4,029.23
	GiveDirectly (Employer Match)	12-06-2021	$1,000
	GiveDirectly	12-11-2021	$4,043.56
	Total		$38,601.37

Dictionary Instant Answer Redesign

November 20th, 2021

I worked on the redesign of the dictionary instant answer on DuckDuckGo, and I’m happy that it’s finally out! It was one of the first things that I got to work on as a frontend engineer 9 years ago (!!), and I’m glad that I got to work on it again as a designer.

New look of the dictionary instant answer on DuckDuckGo.

Designs of the dictionary instant answer in Figma.

Hardware Support

Gaming

Software

Ginataang Mackerel

Lumpiang Shanghai

Budae Jjigae