Hi all, it's Eir. I've been wanting to write a "normal weblog post" for quite some time, feeling guilty or embarrassed by how many posts on this weblog are just health updates. But I could never come up with a solid topic to write about. I've had this idea floating around that we could write about games again - I have a few thoughts to share on some games, but I also had in mind that Sunny could be the one writing that post. But I'm not sure if Sunny even wants to do that. I might have put that expectation on them by mistake.I think gaming related posts are indeed in the near future, but for now, I want to write a normal weblog post for once. I'm gonna be reflecting on... just how we've been doing, and what our life is like now vs earlier this year, aside from these health things. How this year started My wrists got bad enough to close my Figura commissions last year in October, and that was still in effect. I was relying on my wrist braces heavily, but my main focus was on getting st

Hi I just wanted to let yall know that, somehow, i left a major security issue in my site? I just disovered it? Apparently anyone could enter anyone else's account just by entering the username and any password? Because I accidentally compared the entered password to its own hash instead of to the saved one? This also meant that, if any of yall found it, you couldve edited any of my posts or images, deleted them, or made your own? (yeah i dont have my own scared emote yet, I'll do that eventually) So uh! It's a good thing I fixed that huh?? Wow. Anyway yeah um for reasons I am doing a bit of work on the site again after all this time. Feel free to chime in with anything you'd like updated or fixed.

Wow. It's been a while since I was able to even see my site or blog, let alone write in it. The tech issues I mentioned last time have only continued. Tech So I had ordered a few items to upgrade the server box - new SSD, new CPU cooler, PCIe ethernet card. The first one doesn't seem to show up in lsblk. The second one was incompatible with the motherboard. And the last one needed drivers which thankfully I was able to get in the end.But because I had to stay with the current CPU cooler, I had tried to take it out and put it back in, and... the end result wasn't great. One of the pegs holding it in completely broke off and refused to reattach. No matter what I did, I couldn't get it to sit right. I ended up having to ship my PC off to a repair person who thankfully lives close by.After a few days of troubleshooting back and forth, and waiting on an order, he installed a new CPU cooler, a Cooler Master, and some new thermal paste. He managed to deduce by running Linux Mint off a flash d

Hi again. In a recent post I mentioned having internet problems. It turns out that was only the beginning. While I've had spots of usable internet here and there, the internet has been largely unusable at my house for about a week. I complained previously about my mom buying new modems. I was right that those weren't the issue. But the real cause is much much worse. We had a technician come over today - the second in a week - and he was very competent and detailed in explaining our situation. It turns out the coax cables in this house are extremely old - a model called RG54 I think - which predate the nineties. They're thinner, less shielded, and more vulnerable to various kinds of damage. He explained to us that this is one of the main underlying causes of our problems, as it leads to uncontained voltage traveling up the coax cable and hitting the modem. This causes the modem to lag and freeze, even on local connections between devices on the same network, or fail device logins entire

tl;dr: My nitter instance is up and running again, better than ever before! So, nitter is a pretty awesome project. It's a frontend for twitter that doesn't require an account, is very lightweight, has simple and customizable themes, no ads or tracking, loads way faster, and doesn't lock NSFW posts behind an account. Mr. Divorced Eel tried as hard as he could to kill off nitter. And unfortunately, he succeeded. The original author of nitter announced it was ceasing development because of all the effort becoming increasingly necessary just to keep the project functioning. I thought that was it, but I noticed PrivacyDevel's instance was still up. I'd seen it before in an issues thread back when NSFW posts were first account-locked. I remembered it used a different method for authentication, and indeed, it still worked. So when I created my own nitter instance, I based it off PrivacyDevel's fork. This worked great for a while... but again, the divorced eel himself saw to it that no fun is

I just did something really cool! So it's currently 3 AM and I've spent last night and today working on this to cope with a stressful situation I was in. Autistic hyperfixation does wonders in a slump. Anyway, announcing the Eircast! This is something I've setup using Owncast, an open source self-hosted stream service. I can't exactly show you in this post because it's something I give out whenever I use it. Essentially, I can stream from OBS to this Owncast instance, and have it hosted on my site in a secret domain only accessible with a randomized access key. It's different every time I stream. Then, I can give a link to my friends, and they can immediately tune in! Why am I doing this? Because currently, Vesktop isn't able to perform hardware acceleration for streams on Linux if using an NVidia card. This has been a huge detriment for me as I've found out my streams are nigh unwatchable by my friends. There's constant lag, low quality, freezing, and stuttering. Movies are out of the

(Yes I stole this awesome title.) So!! You'll never guess what happened a few days ago. The SSD on my main computer started corrupting! It started with one of my partitions suddenly becoming read-only. When I popped up some utilities to check on my disk, they said my partition had an "invalid superblock" and "bad magic number." Naturally, I panicked. Pretty much immediately, I stopped using my main OS for fear of further damage to my stuff, then ordered a new SSD (NVMe!) on Amazon. The wait, spent chilling to youtube on a garuda linux live usb and checking for the package every fifteen minutes, was agonizing. Finally, it got here, I put it in, and with the help of an awesome new friend who offered their help, I started copying my old SSD over to the new one. That's when I noticed: There were errors. Specifically, read-write errors. When I copied my windows partition, there were only 24... sounds pretty standard for windows, honestly. But when I copied my windows-linux shared partition.

So, I showed my site to my friend, the lovely Ally, today. She found an SQL injection vulnerability and promptly (after she warned me to back up my stuff!!) deleted every post on my blog. Oh my stars. I actually got so scared. Seeing everything disappear like that. And not only that, but me editing stuff live trying to fix the vulnerability but having to learn on the fly. Hhh! Overwhelming!! It's all good now, though. I had to restore from a backup, but all of my posts are here once again. Nothing seems to be lost, the vulnerability was patched, and I learned my lesson. Always use prepare instead of query for SELECT, so you can use bindValue!!

Lua! Lua! Lua lua lua! I haven't touched Lua in ages. But today a friend told me the original Lua in-browser demo was taken down. And indeed, it's just been replaced by links now. So I had a funny idea. What if I made my own? And so I did! It uses sandboxing to remove some unsafe functions and libraries, like require and io, but it works nonetheless. I'm pretty sure it's safe. I screwed with PHP a bit to get it to work. PHP is pretty cool, actually. Okay, full confession. I made this under the silly idea I'd be able to substitute Unitale guides and stuff to link to it instead of the old one. Not that I'm "in" the Unitale community anymore, but still. Hey, either way! At least I was able to complete this little project really quickly, and I had fun doing it.