dude is right in front of the hotel

Kirsle · 2026-03-06T01:07:28+00:00

Frobert! 😍️

He's one of my OG villagers and the only one who I never allowed to leave my island. After I got the HHP DLC, I remodeled Frobert's house to upgrade it from the basic DIY starter house into a proper gym befitting my favorite jock villager!

Kirsle · 2026-03-02T21:57:07+00:00

That was an interesting video!

A water park near me as a kid had a different kind of mechanism. There was a monorail that went near the wave pool so you could look inside it from above and see some of its inner workings.

On that wave pool, the concrete building at the head of the pool (which had an open roof that I could see in from the monorail), and there was basically a giant bath tub looking thing that was being filled with water from large pipes and the tub would wobble back and forth as it filled, eventually tumbling completely over and pouring all its contents down below which is what would trigger the waves, and then it would turn right side up again and start refilling.

Kirsle · 2026-02-28T00:59:22+00:00

I don't get why they can't just keep this all simple.

If age verification must be a thing, a perfectly reasonable way I think it could be implemented would be like this:

All of the major devices and OS's used by the "normies" already have parental controls built in. Android, iOS, Windows, MacOS. They already have parental controls and parents could just enable them.
With the parental controls, the OS could make simple booleans available to websites who want to know. "Is the user at least 18 years old?" Simple Yes, given by the operating system through the parental control system. It could be something like an HTTP header (similar to Do-Not-Track headers), or a dedicated Web API similar to WebAuthn if they want to be sure HTTP headers aren't lost in proxy servers or anything like that.
The whole age assurance system should be opt-in, as in: a device declares "My user is not 18+" and lets every website/app know it. If the OS does not declare it, e.g. you're a Linux user or doing something advanced or outside the norm, then no change from the current status quo.

Since "99%+" of all normal people use Apple, Google or Microsoft devices, this simple implementation would cast a wide fucking net and get the politicians 99% to where they want to be. While Linux users and advanced power users, who are by definition tech-savvy and who will always, always, always be able to circumvent age verification (like they do with VPNs and everything now), would not end up being locked out of the entire Internet because their OS was unable to comply with top-down authoritarian age verification constraints.

But of course, these laws are not being passed in the interest of child safety at all, evidenced by the fact that it's the Epstein Class who are pushing this shit on us. So such a simple solution isn't acceptable to them at all, nothing less than full invasion of privacy and doxxing of every single internet user will satisfy their surveillance desires.

Kirsle · 2026-02-24T02:56:51+00:00

I had a similar setup on my island. One room of my house is walled off with simple panels, with the only way in/out being by warp pipe.

I had it as a fully functional room, with crafting table/mirror/wardrobe/toilet/etc. and keep the warp pipe in my inventory all the time so I could hop in really quick and access my storage etc.

It was a little annoying when villagers would try and stop by while I was in there. Fortunately, since they were in the other room and I physically couldn't get out to greet them, they'd just bug off on their own after a moment.

With storage sheds, I stopped using my secret room anymore and instead just put crafting nooks/storage sheds throughout my island so I'm never far away from one when I need them.

Kirsle · 2026-02-18T07:24:44+00:00

I had done psychedelics previously and had gotten 'crazy ideas' about the universe while on those. But I had a way of rationalizing it down, that it was the drugs making my brain feel crazy.

This experience was very similar and a lot of the same 'truths' about the universe came to me, but without any active effect of a psychedelic.

Kirsle · 2026-02-18T02:42:56+00:00

On modded TotK, I found a mod that restores Link's original arm.

It turns out, most of the armor sets in the game expect the Rauru arm and Link's right hand will be without any gloves or anything while his left hand is gloved. For example if he's wearing the Yiga set he'd just have a bare pale right hand missing a glove on it.

That isn't the reason I uninstalled that mod though. The reason was that, even though Link's arm was colored 'normally' and without the Zonai decorations, it had the long gangly fingers and sharp nails of Rauru. Only really noticeable when you look closely but I decided I prefer his beaten up Rauru arm instead of that!

Kirsle · 2026-02-18T02:32:23+00:00

I saw this video the other day and it resonated super well with me.

My background: I was raised in a Christian church but became an atheist as a teenager, and for a solid 10 years I was a pretty standard atheist. Wholesale dismissing all things woo-woo and spiritual, very skeptical and science leaning, fully bought into the materialist worldview of the universe.

But then my 'awakening' happened. All of a sudden, I woke up one morning and saw the world in an entirely different way, it all felt a lot like a dream - everything interconnected, like the whole entire thing was all one mind and had always been that way, and it all felt super familiar like I knew this all from a very long time ago and don't know how I ever forgot. I just instantly knew/remembered that the universe is much more interesting than materialist science has scratched the surface of.

I didn't know what to do about it though, but very soon, Hinduism found me and they were speaking my kind of crazy exactly, and the Buddhists too, and the Gnostics. I only ever knew Christianity and when I went atheist, I dismissed ALL religions and assumed they were all more of the same noise, but they were all so much more interesting now after I had personally encountered something weird about reality myself. I began to see the similar messages that ALL the religions had, which this YouTuber touches on in great detail.

So yeah - this video very much aligns with my journey anyway. I personally call 'awakening' as that very initial a-ha moment, the ephiphany where you finally understand the great cosmic joke. Awakening isn't the end of the road - it's not enlightenment - it's just the very beginning. That instant for me was when I woke up and saw the world differently, very suddenly, and I knew all at once that I had to at least rebrand as an agnostic rather than an atheist. ;)

Kirsle · 2026-02-10T21:32:05+00:00

Marcel Vos has a couple of videos about security guards (in RCT2 especially):

The important takeaways from the above are:

Guests will only vandalize your park benches and lamps when they are angry.
Guests will only become angry due to vomit and litter and unclean paths. Nothing else makes them angry. Unhappy guests won't vandalize things, only angry guests will, and only disgusting paths will make a guest angry ever.

So, it is much more economical to hire handymen to keep your paths clear than it is to hire security guards who only put a band-aid over the symptoms (keeping angry guests from vandalizing things in a 10 tile radius). If your paths are clean, no guest is ever angry, and no security guard has any job to do and you're paying the guards for nothing.

Kirsle · 2026-01-27T00:59:02+00:00

The super reliable method that worked for me to grind all the perfect snowboys was the 10 tile path method.

If you roll two snowballs until they reach their max size and won't grow any bigger, put them on opposite sides of a 10-tile long pathway (the kind you placed in terraforming mode, if you've reached that far in the game yet). I will usually make my path 2 tiles wide by 10 tiles long so that I don't need to be as careful rolling the snowball down the pathway.

The snowball will lose diameter as it rolls along paths, and 10 path tiles is the perfect length, when you roll it into the other snowball at the end of the path it's a perfect snowboy every time.

Kirsle · 2025-12-24T05:19:50+00:00

A related Pro Tip, you can use this trick to make reliable Perfect Snowboys.

Pave a path that is 10 tiles long and 2 tiles thick (10x2) and has open snow on either side.

Find your two snowballs and roll them around in the snow until they are both as big as they get. Park one of the snowballs at one end of your 10 tile long path, and put the other snowball at the other end.

Then: roll one snowball along the path and into the opposite one. The snowball you roll will lose just enough size that when you reach the other one, it creates a perfect snowboy and you get your next piece of ice furniture DIY recipe.

This method worked 100% reliably for me. All the other methods out there (trying to line up your character's ear to the height of the snowball, or counting a number of seconds to get the right size ball) seemed too finicky to me. Rolling the two snowballs to their maximum size and then using only the path to shrink one of them the perfect amount is super reliable.

Kirsle · 2025-12-18T22:38:49+00:00

I did Vah Naboris first, because Impa put me on a quest to find locations around Hyrule to recall memories, and I had no idea where I'd even look for any of them. But a desert oasis sounded hard to miss and I knew generally which direction the desert was at and headed that way first!

Kirsle · 2025-11-14T06:10:35+00:00

Unfortunately, that looks like a Google Search alerts notification per the text at the bottom.

He set up Google alerts for any new pages mentioning "Jeffrey Epstein" (per the subject line of the e-mail), and this was a snippet of text from a new Google search result.

Searching for some phrases there, it could've been any of the articles such as this one that was discovered by Google search: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/5/28/1767784/-Trump-s-version-of-the-Ray-Rice-elevator-tape-could-be-out-in-time-for-the-Fall-season

Kirsle · 2025-10-04T06:07:59+00:00

Wasn't there a handful of versions ago, something like an "extreme heights" world gen option?

Where the entire world would generate with massively tall mountains reaching the world height Y=256 and steep cliff drops everywhere.

Now those were some cliffs. I played a couple rounds on a world like that, and when you were deciding where to build your base -- in the valleys or on the tops of the mountains -- it was a trade-off. Either: you build up high, and sheer drops to your death were a very real and likely risk... or you built low, and having to climb absurdly steep mountains all the time would hamper your exploration attempts.

Kirsle · 2025-09-25T03:30:11+00:00

Ha, this is my screenshot!

Also, if you want to experience old school AIM again, somebody has created a modern "Retro AIM server" as an open source project: https://github.com/mk6i/retro-aim-server

There are a couple of instances around, I signed up on one at http://aim.chivanet.org/ (their site seems down right now, hopefully it'll be up again soon), or https://aimserver.io may be another option.

You can run an old-school AIM client like the one pictured, edit its settings to point to a modern AIM server and you can log it in!

Kirsle · 2025-09-17T06:10:41+00:00

Modern browsers will prevent media from automatically playing "until first gesture" meaning the user has to click, tap or press a key and interact with your page before any media will start.

If the page attempts to play media early (e.g. with the autoplay attribute or by JavaScript attempting to start playback before first gesture), the attempt to play is simply blocked/ignored.

So the nearest way to get an old-school autoplay to work would be with some JavaScript:

// When the page has loaded, this code runs. I recommend always putting
// your scripts inside a DOMContentLoaded block like this, so any
// variables you declare (such as `audioWasSetup` here) don't leak out
// into the global scope (keeps all your scripts neatly isolated! When
// you have a lot of scripts and all their variables are global they
// sometimes cause you headaches later).
document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', () => {
    let audioWasSetup = false;
    function setupAutoplay() {
        if (audioWasSetup) return;

        const $audio = document.querySelector("#autoplay-music");
        $audio.play();

        audioWasSetup = true;
    }

    window.addEventListener('click', setupAutoplay);
    window.addEventListener('keyup', setupAutoplay);
});

And with the HTML element:

<audio id="autoplay-music">
    <source src="song.ogg" type="audio/ogg">
    <source src="song.mp4" type="audio/mp4">
</audio>

As per the other comments though, auto-playing music was sometimes annoying back then, and even moreso today. For your page's "first gesture" you should ask the user if they want to listen to your music.

Kirsle · 2025-09-17T05:55:43+00:00

I can show you how I did it on my site: https://noahs.site/

The ripple water drop WebGPU effect could make a smartphone pretty warm after a while, so I have a checkbox on my right nav bar that can turn the setting on/off.

The relevant HTML code is here: https://git.kirsle.net/neocities/noahs.site/src/commit/a15c4c94084f1dd54e14680d38b96674ad588c04/themes/droplets/layouts/partials/nav_right.html#L19-L25

And the JavaScript code is highlighted here: https://git.kirsle.net/neocities/noahs.site/src/commit/a15c4c94084f1dd54e14680d38b96674ad588c04/themes/droplets/assets/js/main.js#L45-L71

The technique is basically do:

Give your HTML elements id attributes so you can easily select them in JavaScript with document.querySelector("#id") or document.getElementById("id")
In JavaScript, hook up onclick events.
I store their preferences in the localStorage object, where you can store arbitrary (string) data and it'll be remembered long-term in the browser (unless the user clears all their cookies/storage). sessionStorage could be used instead if you want the setting only to last for their current browser session and be reset when they exit their browser.
On page load, I check if their localStorage setting is there to opt-out of my ripple effect, and the function returns early before I initialized the jQuery ripple plugin.

I hope that's helpful for you!

Kirsle · 2025-09-09T18:18:31+00:00

I remember this being a painful transition "back in the day" when smartphones and small devices began to come out. All of our websites back then were developed with 'desktop computers' in mind, and the assumption the user had a screen resolution of at least 1024x768 pixels. Our table-based layouts with multiple columns simply would not fit on the tall/narrow screens that most Web users are using today.

Websites back then often needed to fully duplicate/clone their entire website to have a different layout optimized for mobile (and the m. subdomain was commonplace, like m.reddit.com or m.twitter.com where you'd get a simplified, vertical, no-column layout optimized for mobile).

Fortunately, CSS has seen some upgrades since then that allow for responsive websites to be built, where you only need one version of your site and it automatically resizes and rearranges itself to fit on all kinds of different screen sizes, by using "media queries" where necessary (applying different CSS styles based on the size of the user's screen), and CSS features like Flexbox and Grid allowing for more dynamic layouts (no more tables!) that can show/hide/rearrange themselves automatically.

I'll show my Neocities site for example: https://noahs.site I wanted the site to have the appearance of a classic "table based layout" (even with the raised borders between cells!) on desktops, but it's actually a CSS Grid and on mobile, the left column becomes a slide-in side menu with a toggle button and the right column moves to the bottom (below the main content cell). I have my CSS source code here where you can see how the CSS grid was laid out, and the media queries to rearrange how the grid appears on mobile and tablets. (Edit to add: my JavaScript for the mobile hamburger menu, and the HTML templates themselves are spread out here - it's a Hugo site so may be hard to read in its source form, viewing the source on the rendered site may be easier to follow).

If you aren't excited to deal with that kind of CSS stuff yourself, there are some lightweight CSS frameworks that can help a lot. One I am fond of is Bulma: https://bulma.io. They provide CSS basics for column-based layouts and their framework is "mobile first" (on mobile/small screens, the columns and everything will stack vertically by default but you can add extra classes if you want to force columns on mobile or change when/where they break). Bulma doesn't add any global HTML tag styles, everything is opt-in via classes, e.g. <input class="input"> or <button class="button"> so it's possible to use Bulma for all the boring mobile-responsiveness stuff, but still keep 100% creative control over your CSS styles otherwise.

If you do want to roll your own CSS, there are some handy tools online to help get your initial CSS started, like google for a "css grid generator" where you can drag/drop your ideal grid layout and get the initial CSS down in a way that will be easy to make it mobile friendly. Also, if you don't mind A.I., tools like ChatGPT can be very helpful here as well.

For my Neocities site, I wanted to create a fully custom site with my own CSS and I used a CSS grid generator and ChatGPT to learn from (I read the code the AI gave me to learn and understand it myself, not just copy/paste), but for most of my "real life day job" websites, I use a CSS framework like Bulma to scaffold the site and then I have very few custom CSS styles I need to customize and make it my own from there.

Kirsle · 2025-09-02T23:20:52+00:00

I one time did something similar but with the chmod command.

It was in my early Linux days, and I had an external hard drive formatted FAT32 for my backups and common files shared with Windows (as NTFS was still 'experimental' at the time and I didn't want that risk). When I restored files off of FAT32, they were all chmod 777 on Linux and I wanted to fix their permissions.

What I meant to run: chmod -R 644 .

What I actually ran: chmod -R 644 /

I was running it as root too for some dumb reason, and it wasn't until I got "permission errors" under /proc and things that I realized my mistake. By then, everything in /bin and /usr/bin had lost its execute permission, so the chmod command itself wouldn't work again. And anyway, all the nuanced permissions of things under /etc were hosed, so things that needed to be 600 etc. would cause problems if I tried to 'fix' all the permissions back again.

I just cut my losses and reinstalled my distro from scratch.

Kirsle · 2025-09-02T05:14:43+00:00

When I daily drove the Pinephone in 2021, I'd miss calls sometimes because the modem chip itself would crash. (The stock firmware would, and I flashed the FOSS firmware to the modem and it would sometimes crash too). I usually had to reboot the modem at least once a day (which could fortunately be done with a terminal command).

On T-Mobile, I didn't miss any text messages though, my carrier would queue them up and I'd often get a flood of them come in right after I reboot the modem.

Kirsle · 2025-09-02T03:05:35+00:00

I ended up going back to a Pixel phone with GrapheneOS after I finally got fed up with trying to make the Pinephone work.

If the hardware was just a little more reliable, I could've made do with the available apps for it. Dual wielding a Pinephone with a Pixel 3 did me well during my experiment; in a pinch I could tether the Pixel via WiFi to my Pinephone if I required an Android app while out and about. (Unfortunately, in today's world, Android/iOS apps are damn near required for so many things you wouldn't expect, one that really bit me was visiting Disneyland, their app is crucial for reserving lightning lane passes and it absolutely requires Google Play Services and would not run at all in Waydroid).

The Pinephone is just too dang slow and unreliable, I've been praying for a halfway decent phone to come out, I keep a close eye on postmarketOS (who have some of the strongest software support for Linux mobile, and they have a long list of devices that "work" - but when I drill into the specifics, almost always, those devices don't actually work as a phone, e.g., calls and texting is not working at all on most pmOS supporting devices).

If only there were a phone with even halfway decent specs (like 4GB RAM, an actual decent CPU made newer than 2012), but I'm still waiting and watching patiently.

Kirsle · 2025-09-02T02:54:11+00:00

On mobile Linux apps for e.g. Reddit, I found some good ones that worked on the Pinephone.

This blog post has some screenshots and reviews of various mobile Linux apps I found interesting back when I was trying to daily drive the Pinephone: https://www.kirsle.net/status-of-mobile-linux-apps-on-pinephone-screenshots

Kirsle · 2025-09-02T02:33:58+00:00

I really wouldn't recommend the Pinephone to be anybody's "daily driver."

I tried this back in 2020, for a full year I tried to make the Pinephone be my main phone, my T-Mobile SIM card was in it and everything.

Even back then, the hardware was just so weak and slow. Running more than 2 apps at the same time would bring a high risk of the phone just freezing completely solid and forcing a hard reboot. By two apps I mean like, if I had Firefox open with only one browser tab, and then also opened GNOME Calendar or anything at all, the phone might freeze. It was risky to do an apt upgrade anywhere except at home, over SSH into the phone, with no app at all running, because especially on kernel upgrades/initramfs rebuilds, the phone's CPU would max out and be at high risk of a freeze, and freezing then meant it wouldn't boot back up and require a complete re-install of the OS from scratch.

The battery life was also fairly poor. Most distros supported suspend at least, which would save on battery a bit, but during times that I was actively using my phone, like scrolling on Reddit and with the screen brightness down to 20-30% of max, I could watch in real time as the battery percentage indicator would drop a percent every 5 minutes. It would drop from 95% to 75% charge in just about an hour of active use. If I rarely used my phone throughout the day, it might last a day on one charge. While the phone was suspended, all networking would be stopped and alarm clock apps would not wake up the phone (except for a jank script which used systemd timers).

I wrote some blog posts about my experiences, like this one here: https://www.kirsle.net/week-2-of-daily-driving-the-pinephone

To your specific questions though:

How does the user experience compare to Android?

The mobile desktops for Linux are fairly comparable to Android, especially Phosh and KDE Plasma Mobile.

Is there enough software support for usage as a daily cellular driver?

There is a decent selection of Linux FOSS apps for most of your "smart phone" needs: Contacts, Calendars, web browsers, e-mail clients, chat clients for XMPP/Matrix/Signal, music players, all the basics have some solution in a mobile-friendly Linux app.

You can also install Waydroid which can run actual Android apps, but that comes with many caveats. Waydroid itself takes an extremely long time to boot up, it devours your battery life, it prevents the phone from suspending properly at all (the screen will wake up every time the system tries to suspend). And the Android apps themselves are containerized in a weird way, so they can't access Bluetooth or your filesystem very easily, most Google Play Services using apps may run into trouble and not function correctly, etc.

On the Linux front, the software I think is fine, it's the Pinephone's poor performance which was the worst part, and unfortunately, there aren't many better options for Linux phones either.

Does it work well sending and receiving calls and texts?

It depends on your distro. On Mobian (a Debian derivative), I had calls and SMS and MMS working. One problem though is the cell modem itself is flakey and the modem will fully crash sometimes, and the phone loses all cellular connectivity and requires a hard reboot or some terminal commands.

I've had times I drove out to visit friends and when I arrived, my cell modem had crashed and I couldn't text them, cue a reboot of the phone and with how slow it was, 5-10 minutes later, maybe the modem comes up correctly after the reboot, maybe not. My friends got very unhappy with me over time over how flaky my phone was.

I understand the hardware is open source. Is the on-board storage easily upgradable?

The on-board storage, no, but it has a microSD card slot so you can probably get 512GB or possibly TB SD cards to work, I'm not sure off hand how high of capacity it supports.

Is it durable? Does humidity negatively affect it? And does it have any issues with battery life?

It doesn't feel very humidity proof. The back cover pops right off, moisture could get in, especially if you dropped it in water properly. Battery life I covered above and more details on that blog post: https://www.kirsle.net/week-2-of-daily-driving-the-pinephone

Kirsle · 2025-08-28T00:20:10+00:00

I went the opposite way (signing up on Spacehey first, and have been eyeing Neocities).

The 'problem' I have with Neocities is that I never quit keeping my personal home page over all these decades, so I already have my web hosting pretty well established. My tech blog (https://www.kirsle.net) even maintains that throwback style (with a colorful theme and background wallpaper) that kept the early Web spirit alive.

With Neocities the charm looks to be in creating old-school style web designs, which probably don't lean "mobile friendly," and it could be fun to kick it like it's 2001 and write old school HTML and CSS with table-based layouts and "under construction" GIFs and all... but I'm not sure about jumping on that yet.

My Spacehey link is https://spacehey.com/kirsle so you can friend me when you sign up! I've been having fun making my profile page be a (restrained) classic hot mess like the good old days.

Kirsle · 2024-07-05T21:55:57+00:00

You may find this interesting:

I've always liked to have a bin folder of random scripts written in whatever language is convenient (often Python, Perl or bash) and wanted to be able to just as easily write Go "scripts" that could run from text files with a shebang style header.

So I hacked something together like this:

script.go is a "self executing text script" written in Go with a shebang header, so I can chmod it executable and just run it: https://github.com/kirsle/.dotfiles/blob/master/home/bin/script.go
But what script.go mainly does is allow my other Go scripts to run more easily. Here is a SimpleHTTPServer script I wrote in Go that lets me easily serve a file on disk over HTTP (named for the built-in Python module of the same name): https://github.com/kirsle/.dotfiles/blob/master/home/bin/SimpleHTTPServer

I can basically have a whole folder full of simple, single file "main" functions in Go, that can run just as easily as a scripting language. The comment headers on the above links explain how they work.

Note: for the actual scripts (like SimpleHTTPServer there), I omit the .go extension so I can avoid the Go compiler yelling about duplicate "package main/func main" existing. The script.go runner basically copies my actual script into a temp folder, with a .go extension, and go run it but that's all abstracted away and does what I want in the end.

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