So instead of a long-form essay post, I thought I would give you a peek of some of my little (or big) projects going on right now.

Catppuccin theme

I have been having fun customizing my desktop because…why not? In my quest for a beautiful desktop, I found out about the concept of ricing, or heavily theming/customizing a Linux desktop. I found the Catppuccin theme, which is a pretty palette that can be applied to a lot of different applications. I proceeded to apply it everywhere I could: Firefox, Thunderbird, kitty terminal, GTK, Discord…the most annoying thing though is that one of my most-used applications, Standard Notes, has a bright white theme as the default that really throws off the whole vibe. I looked into theming for Standard Notes, made a repo for my Catppuccin port, and got to work. It’s…not working yet. We’ll see.

Cybersec course

I recently found out about a Cybersecurity course for women via a Reddit post. It is presented by Eva Georgieva who is certifiably awesome. We had our first class this morning and I am so excited to dig into these OSINT/Security Analyst/Pentesting tasks. What do you think? Do I look better in Blue or Red?

Hebrew

To give the techy part of my brain a break (why am I always dreaming about python functions and file formats? Why did I have a nightmare about going crazy because someone had too many processes open and my CPU was spiking?) I am learning Hebrew. Someone I love very much speaks Hebrew and it is important to me to learn this language. I’ve been trying for awhile now and I am finally far enough up the learning curve that I am starting to see light. Some of the methods I’ve tried: A college textbook, Duolingo, watching this fun show…and then I got frustrated and gave up for awhile. It’s not an easy language. Then I found the key: Music! I found an artist I really like (אלון עדר), and have started learning the words to his songs. One song I really like is קצת אהבה לא תזיק. The name of that song means “A Little Love Won’t Hurt” and it’s pronounced “Ktsat Ahava Lo Tazik”. Good song, but the video is intense. I’m learning the lyrics and everything is starting to click. I’m glad I learned the alphabet at the beginning, even though they have a habit of leaving out these little dots that tell you what vowel sounds go with each letter…so much for “sound it out”.

LibreTranslate

Of course, even with my efforts to branch out to language, all roads lead back to tech. I found an open source project called LibreTranslate that is pretty impressive, even compared to the offerings of the big G. I played with it a lot, found some bugs and opened some Github issues, and currently have it running on my home box. It’s almost ready to go live as translate.rio.pink, but those language models are kind of huge, not sure my lil VPS has the disk space. Anyway, keep an eye out for that.

Keycaps

Also related to my Hebrew quest, I decided to get keycaps that have both the Roman and Hebrew alphabet on them. Guess what, they’re all ugly. So I found wasdkeyboards.com, which allows you to submit a design for custom keycaps. I made some cool ones with both alphabets. I also made a cute escape button and numpad enter with my cats on it, and of course that special key next to the left CTRL gets a cool Arch logo. Looks pretty good:

I decided I needed a cool spacebar, so I’m commissioning an artist, Ayeola Omolara Kaplan, to create a design with a special meaning for me. She is amazing, y’all. She made me an incredible work of art for my music project, and the process of working together with her to make it was a joy. She is brilliant, she truly inspires me.

Anyway I started looking around for other things to make the keyboard even cooler, and I found artisan keycaps Just what I need, something to spend more money on. Yay!

Dragon Age: Inquisition Playthrough

Dragon Age: Inquisition is the best game ever. No arguing, there’s no comment section for a reason. I’ve played it 3 or 4 times, and I get something new out of it every time. However, it’s been quite awhile since I played so I decided to start a fresh game. It is so good. I am finding myself chasing down every side quest, reading every sign and parchment, and talking to everyone. If you know anything about Bioware games, you’ll know about the romance options; when I started this playthrough I planned to try Iron Bull, but I just did the Red Jenny quest and I think Sera’s the one. If you know you know.

If it all sounds like a lot, it is. I also have a job. I don’t really know how I do all this, but I guess some people watch Netflix instead. No judgement, I just couldn’t support them after they cancelled GLOW ;_;

(Oh, and I’m going to get that goatcounter thing to work…eventually.)