I have largely been adverse to oaking my experiments until now for the simple
reason that the "white lightning" I made is pretty good on its own with mixers.
Another reason is that oak is harder to source in the tropics -- not even as
sticks, let alone barrels. But I've finally dipped my toes into the water of
oaking, a/k/a aging spirits.
Continue reading...
Reading philosophy is an activity that can benefit all people. I enjoy
this pasttime so much that I spent many years in university developing
my skill in it. Along the way, I learned a few things, not just about
the world and the mind, but also how to learn.
Reading philosophy is important, not because it gives us values and
truths to accept, but because it exposes us to the process of developing
understanding. Difficult works that develop our abstract reasoning help
us to understand complex issues that arise in the course of daily life -
and can also help us explain our reasoning to others when facing complex
issues.
It is unfortunately necessary to be somewhat well-read in philosophy
to keep up in more formal philosophical discourse. What follows is my
attempt to collect noteworthy classical, modern, and contempotary works
on a number of topics, with special focuses on the nature of mind, reality,
the limits of knowledge, & moral teachings in a roughly chronological
order. When reading philosophy like this, you can follow chains of thought
through the centuries. After reading the texts I suggest, you should be
able to begin participating in more serious philosophical discussion -
not to mention developing more nuanced positions - and it shouldn't be hard
to find people or resources to help understand the texts along the way.
After my list of suggested texts, more general notes on actually reading
philosopy follow.
Continue reading...
2025-05-05 [Mon] 19:00 UTC
#tech
Are you overwhelmed about the state of your media directories -- particularly
your music and videos? I was for a long time, too. But we are in the 2020s and
going through the effort of manually organizing personal media collections
should be a thing of the past.
Continue reading...
I am a huge fan of a proper gin. If you don't know where to start with
gin, try Bombay Sapphire as a reference.
Decided to get back into the game, recipe and testimonials follow.
I don't feel like photos are necessary for this post because the process
begins with bottles of clear liquid, followed by bottles of dark liquid,
concluded with bottles of clear liquid. What can be gained from these
photos?
Continue reading...
As of May 1st, 2025, I've now been here for 3 years.
I'm not sure what exactly I expected before coming. For most of our
long-distance relationship, my wife lived deep in the jungle, several
hours drive away from a not-great city. So I saw a side of the world
very different from my home, but also different from where I live now.
I came here during lockdown. Spent 2 weeks in Jakarta. I got the feeling
that even if things weren't locked down, it's not the kind of tourist
destination Seoul or New York City may be. Large, dirty, gray water
sewers ran along the streets, constant traffic jams, heavy smog. The
only things that really were appealing were the malls but they sold
the same kinds of things you can find at every mall in the world.
Converted to Islam over Whatsapp, got mailed a certificate, brought that
to the department of religious affairs, got married, got a marriage visa.
The bureacracy was really straightforward and easy. The first Islamic
wedding I attended was my own. I don't really have strong memories of it
aside from thinking the ritual was a little strange, but it really made
my wife's parents happy. I had to repeat the Arabic phrase three times
before the priest accepted the marriage declaration as valid -- Arabic is
not my strong suit.
My life is pretty comfortable. There are frequent blackouts and my city
is underdeveloped, but I've made a ton of great friends. My city is safe.
People are very friendly and laid back.
If you're tired of life in the West, you may enjoy life here. The
language is pretty easy to pick up. Adjusting to a less developed city
hasn't been hard for me -- the only thing I still struggle with on a
regular basis is the oppressive heat.
Here's hoping the next 3 years are great, too...
2025-04-28 [Mon] 19:00 UTC
#meta
As it stands, if I notice minor errors in blog entries, I will update
the files and the site will update. However, the atom feed will not
inform subscribers that blog entries have been updated. This seems
like it would be more annoying than useful for most people.
I may later update the atom feed, so that pages have published and
updated fields, that update to reflect the nature of the website, but as
it stands, I feel very few people would benefit from this code change.
Die-hard blog people are encouraged to follow the blog via their feed
reader. If something feels funny to you, follow the link and see if you
still have that funny feeling. If I've made a mistake in drafting a
blog post that needs significant addressing, I'll probably make a follow
up blog entry. You can let me know via the contact page if you
think I've overseen a serious problem.
Thanks for tagging along on my blogging journey....
A rare but persistant gikopoi bug has been troubling me for years, and
today, I finally found the cause.
Gikopoi is a free chat game with streaming options. 99.9% of the time it
functions perfectly well. But once in a blue moon, people attempting to
stream video/audio results in a strange bug: others are unable to grab
the problematic stream and attempting to grab the stream results in a
silent failure. Additional open streams also become broken once this
bug is triggered. The streams are not broken from the start but become
broken within a few minutes of beginning.
- Restarting the Giko server doesn't fix it
- Restarting the Nginx web server doesn't fix it
- Restarting the Janus media server doesn't fix it
I still don't know exactly what triggers the bug. It seemed like only
certain players trigger the bug, and I couldn't find any useful data in
logs to fully understand the problem. But today, I found how to resolve
it:
In the Gikopoi server directory, a file "persisted-state" exists that
keeps a json of all users with data like their ID, name, last message,
character, etc. This is useful for cases when the server resets --
everyone active resumes playing like nothing happens.
For some reason, when streams break on gikopoi, shutting down the server
and clearing out this file makes it work again. So I'm suspecting that
streams may break if users fail to exit the game properly... or maybe
players being logged on for too long triggers the bug... I honestly don't
know. I have a saved copy of persisted-state I can compare against a new
copy of persisted-state the next time streams break.
I really enjoyed playing an old Flash game known as Gikopoi. However, circa
2021, when Adobe pulled the plug on Flash, Gikopoi's days were numbered.
What happened between then and now is a long story, but long story short, I now
host the most active Gikopoi international server, and I set up some services
to support the community, even writing a few from scratch.
This post will look at the various services that are not the actual game/chat of
Gikopoi.
Continue reading...
Three weeks into the season! As always, I grab at least 5 currently airing
shows and see them through. Most are usually crap but at least one or two end
up being decent.
Here's a list of anime I'm watching this spring. I'll share a brief progress
report. Usually my conclusions at the end of the season end up with my thoughts
at this point, but who knows.
Continue reading...
A hobby I've been getting into over the past year or so is chemistry, and part
of that involves playing around with distilling machines for purifying water
and essential oils and so on.
This is a bit of a longer article so I'm also using it for a chance to test a
"read more" function when scrolling the indexes on my new blog soft...
Continue reading...
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