4x13/notes for reading

Spring 2025 anime, pt 2

2025-07-01T15:00:00Z

The season has concluded. I review the shows discussed in my previous blog post after the split.

Lazarus
Gorilla no Kami
Shoushimin Series s2
Sentai Daishikkaku s2
Kapekisugite Kawaige
Your Forma
Nazotoki wa Dinner no Ato

Lazarus -- really underwhelming, but about what I expected from a netflix anime. A season 2 could maybe redeem this series but I'm not interested in watching one and I don't feel it's getting one. 5/10

Gorilla no Kami -- the main character was cute and the basic premise was okay, but it's ultimately pretty forgettable. There's nothing it really does well. The story was kind of lame too. 6/10

Shoushimin Series, s2 -- compared to s1 there was a lot more going on! I enjoyed season 1 but felt like it was a bit lacking. The second go was really fun to watch. Characters grew, new scenarios were resolved in satisfying ways. 8/10

Sentai Daishikkaku, s2 -- I really liked season 1 of this show. Season 2 was even better! I can't wait for season 3! 8/10

Kanpekisugite Kawaige -- pretty much everything I said the previous entry still holds true. If you really miss Frieren, this may scratch that itch, but it was pretty hollow and very forgettable. Too many worn-out cliches. 6/10

Your Forma -- dropped. 2/10

Nazotoki wa Dinner no Ato -- this show actually grew on me a bit. It was better than some of the recent detective shows. The main characters are pretty annoying but their dynamics work well, and the mysteries are fun to see solved. 7/10

On tablet computers

2025-06-19T06:30:00Z

Got a "free" tablet when buying my wife's new phone. Galaxy Tab A9, 8.7" display, 128GB storage, 4GB memory. I had never intended to buy a tablet and a few days into owning it, I don't feel I need it.

It's decent for watching media from my media PC in bed via jellyfin & reading manga and PDFs. But that's it.

A few others on Gikopoi have tablets collecting dust. I think I'll send my tablet out to one of my stores to serve as a POS. I do not recommend buying a tablet unless you read a lot of PDFs or comics or need it for running a business.

Oaking Experiments, 1

2025-06-01T16:30:00Z

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.

The basic recipes in play are UJSSM and TFFV, blended together. So the ingredients are sugar, yeast, and corn (majority), bran (minority), the grains being added for flavor and yeast nutrient. I understand that proper mashing with enzyme action would provide more authentic tastes, but I am socially and geographically distinct from the places that produce authentic whiskys.

My first experiment was ~1.3 liter of 65% product, majority being UJSSM hearts from a stripping run, with minority factors being heads and tails to taste, along with some TFFV stripping. I added more heads and tails than I normally would to a finished spirit with the assumption that the oak would neutralize off-tastes.

Toasted 20g of oak chips in the oven at 180*C for 90 minutes, wrapped in tin foil. After cooking, I let them cool to room temp, and I could see, smell, and taste a difference. Threw them into a jar with my blended spirits with plenty of head space.

2 days later, there was already a huge improvement. Compared to regular "white dog" hearts, there was a lot of good complexity with a lot of off-tastes negated. I finished aging off with a tiny dash of vanilla extract (less than a tsp) and a tiny dash of barley malt syrup extract (maybe a tsp). Dilute down to 45%.

Despite the minuteness of the vanilla and barley syrup additions relative to the total product, they definitely supported the oak in balancing out spirits that would not have been very good on their own. This spirit is good unmixed, and better than whiskeys in my price range I'd tried in the US -- for $1 a bottle.

Future oaking experiments will involve buying proper wood boards, cutting them down, boiling, toasting, then charring. Oak chips are not easy to char and are easy to overdo, hard to do for long periods due to the surface:mass ratio they offer. I feel like an oak stick, charred and toasted could do something even better if it were given the time. Oak chips do their job almost too well.

More experiments will follow

Reading Philosophy

2025-05-25T19:45:00Z

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.

Plato - Republic, Phaedrus, Symposium, Apology
Aristotle - Ethics, Politics, Metaphysics, Physics
Aurelius - Meditations
Buddha - Dhammapada
Aquinas - Summa Theologica
Hobbes - Leviathan
Descartes - Discourse on the Method, Meditations on First Philosophy
Spinoza - Ethics
Berkeley - Treatise Human Knowledge
Hume - Enquiry Human Understanding, Dialogs Natural Religion, Treatise Human Nature
Kant - Logic, Critique Pure Reason
Schopenhauer - World Will Idea, Parerga and Paralipomena
Nietzsche - Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil

Wittgenstein - Tractatus, Investigations
Kripke - Naming and Necessity
Russell - Problems of Philosophy, History of Western Philosophy
Whitehead - Process and Reality
Carnap - Meaning and Necessity
Searle - Intentionality, Speech Acts, Mind
Moore - Principia Ethica, Philosophical Studies
Rawls - Theory of Justice
Scanlon - What We Owe to Each Other
Kuhn - Structure of Scientific Revolutions

The list is roughly split in two between texts that are uncopyrighted and others that may be more difficult to acquire legally, free of charge.

Begin reading philosophy shortly after waking, after the mind has began to focus: caffeine or nicotine may help here. It's better to read on an empty stomach, after a light meal, or after exercise. Read slowly and mindfully, but not so slowly as to lose track of the argument. Print is best but ebooks come second -- especially epub formatted -- using a gamepad for heavy e-reading sessions is encouraged for ergonomic reasons. Don't read in a place that's too loud, too hot, or too cold -- and read as sober as you can make yourself. Meditating after a reading session can also help to make sense of the information.

When reading a heavier text, I recommend the following technique: after you read a sentence or come across an argument that sticks out to you in some way, hand-write it into a journal with the title of the work and the page number. After reading through a text the first time, if you're left puzzled, read through it again, reviewing these notes and possibly adding more. In one sense, remarkable quotes represent the distillation of a work, and are likely what will stick with you after finishing a text -- handwriting is an easy way to help commit arguments to memory.

Read a work with friends. Just a chapter a week is enough. Seeing what passages appeal to the group can open up really good discussions - or seeing what aspects of a work puzzle or frustrate people. Your hilights can serve as great conversation starters. Something you miss out on may be easy for others to understand and vice versa -- or maybe everyone can agree a point is stupid or overly confusing.

Don't feel bad if a work confuses you. Some authors, notably Kant are notorious for their dense writing. After finishing a work for the first time, you should feel somewhat familiar with the big ideas -- rereading can help you understand how the pieces work together.

If you get 100 pages into a work and you still feel confused, start consulting secondary resources. If you get halfway through a work and you feel it's a waste of time, just drop it and move onto a new one.

Media organizing, made easy

2025-05-05T19:00:00Z

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.

Organizing audio

I suggest the use of two tools to accumulate and organize audio.

The first is yt-dlp. Youtube is absolutely full of music albums in playlists and using yt-dlp to grab albums is the fastest and easiest way I know of to grab music.

To this end I use a simple command in a directory ~/Music/inbox :

cat get-music.sh

yt-dlp -x --audio-format mp3 $1

Then if I execute ./get-music.sh youtube.com/playlisturl it grabs all the tracks as MP3 players to my inbox directory. We're halfway done.

Next, I use MusicBrainz Picard to lookup the tracks and (a) assign them metadatas, (b) rename and move tracks. I do this by opening Picard, adding the inbox folder, and scanning/looking up tracks before saving them.

My recommended way to refer to a song is in the format /music /Artist /[Year] Album /num. Song Name.mp3. This makes it really easy to find albums or specific tracks. For more advanced lookups, playlist creations etc I leave that work to media software. More on that later.

Organizing video

For Western TV and film especially, but also anime to some degree, I find that tinyMediaManager is the easiest way to organize and tag videos. Prepare by creating two subdirectories in your ~/Videos directory called "tv" and "movies". Put directories of shows or movie files in their respective places.

Just like Picard, tinyMediaManager tries to use as many clues as it can to match files with metadata, and then reorganizes ~/Videos/tv and ~/Videos/film based on that data. You may have to use a special tool to rename files if it's confused, but that's pretty easy.

Consuming content

In the same way that we shouldn't have to manually rename and organize our media files in the 2020s, we also shouldn't resort to manually digging through our filesystems to consume content.

Kodi and Jellyfin are two amazing ways to work through media libraries. Kodi is good on media PCs plugged into a TV set and jellyfin makes it so you can watch stuff in your browser, on your phone, or on tablets, especially in your home wifi network.

Setting up Kodi and Jellyfin is beyond the scope of this blog article, but I'll say that some perks are they track watch progress, share info about movies/shows before you watch them, and let you go through your media library by different metadata sorting options like date or genre. They look and act a lot like netflix, but run privately on your own media collection, so there's no having to pay subscription fees or wait for things to buffer on slower networks.

Download links

Gin experiments, 1

2025-05-02T12:00:00Z

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?

My latest gin recipe, per liter:

15g crushed juniper
5g crushed coriander
1/4 lemon peel
1/2 lime peel

Less precise measurements:

pinches star anise, nutmeg, cloves, black pepper, thyme

Citrus was removed after 1 day of maceration and the rest was chucked into a pot still and processed. Nearly got the exact same output as input after dilution.

Initial feedback on the recipe:

The waifu, sipping it "neat"

The juniper is way too strong! And the coriander is way too strong too, this tastes like a curry!

My drinker buddy, sipping it "neat" and as a cocktail:

This is the best I've ever had. I didn't even realize how much I had until I woke up the next day still buzzed to heck. It's way better than vodka.

My "new to drinking" friend, who had it as a cocktail:

Out of all the drinks I sampled, this was my favorite. The spices and smells and flavors really impressed me, and it was very smooth and drinkable overall. I would want to try drinking this again.

A third friend:

I mixed your bottle with diet coke at a 3:1 ratio. I started at 10pm and before I knew it, it was dawn and the bottle was empty. I'm surprised how much I enjoyed gin.

For gin recipe v2, what I think would benefit it would be -- stronger citrus presence and possibly more of the side spices -- BUT I don't think reducing the juniper or coriander would be very beneficial.

The base liquor for the gin was a twice-distilled (stripping, then spirit) "vodka" made from bran and sugar. The bran is somewhat noticeable in the twice-distilled stage before the spices are added and the liquid is redistilled, but not noticeable at all in the gin. In part, I think gin could skyrocket in popularity historically because it could cover "off tastes" in less distilled "neutrals".

In science, we know it's wrong to play with two variables at once, but I can't help to suspect that a proper neutral produced by a reflux still would produce a better base for future gins... that's foreshadowing for posts to come about my life in minecraft..

Three years in Indonesia

2025-05-01T06:30:00Z

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...

Notes on revisions & atom feeds

2025-04-28T19:00:00Z

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....

Solving a Gikopoi streaming bug

2025-04-28T16:00:00Z

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.

Gikopoi, part 1: the services

2025-04-22T12:15:00Z

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.

Wiki

https://wiki.gikopoi.com

A lot of people on the "alternet" enjoy reading wikis, and some of them really enjoy writing for wikis. Given that the core audience of Gikopoi really enjoy reading and writing, a wiki felt like a natural fit. However, I felt like all existing wiki softwares were overly complex, so I basically made a clone of the original wiki's software and it runs like an imageboard or gikopoi itself -- no accounts systems to impede editting, write and talk about anything you want.

It took me roughly a week or so to write the software. After the basic features of viewing, editting, linking, and reverse linking pages were implemented, I pretty much haven't touched the code. Nearly a year later and we have over 200 pages.

I'm pretty happy with this!

BBS

https:///bbs.gikopoi.com

The "core group" of gikopoi enjoy anonymous messageboards: the original game takes much inspiration from them, and it was anonymous messageboard users by the way of 4chan who first began heavily frequenting Gikopoi in the West.

It took me several weeks of work to get this off the ground. Instead of just running yet another Kareha instance, I wanted something more unique -- so I looked at modern ayashii's "tree" threads (like USENET and Reddit) and multichan's "tags" as a way to improve on the basic concept of inflated guestbooks.

Roughly 1.5 years since I began writing it, it now sits at >60 threads and >500 comments: a lot slower than other boards, but I consider it reasonably successful!

Booru

https://booru.gikopoi.com

People in text chats will eventually want to share images or other kinds of media. Sometimes they want to look back at the media they wish to share, especially if it's original content. Unlike the other two services, I did not write this software myself, but opted to use Shimmie2.

Boorus let posters quickly and easily to upload media, tagging it as they please, and viewers to quickly consume media and filter the content by tags. I think they outperform "traditional" imageboards at the goal of sharing media such as images or music in a community. People mostly seem to use the booru for sharing photos of their cats and food, but it can be used for anything they want.

Roughly 1 year since the service went live, there are now nearly 300 photos and mp3s uploaded. People don't always use it in lieu of alternative media hosts such as discord, imgur, or catbox, but it does serve as an interesting reference of what gikos consider sharing and archiving. I would consider it to be a success.

Events

https://events.gikopoi.com

The only service I've written outside of the game that matches up with non-game services on the original host. For those who didn't know, the original gikopoi game allowed people to create events from within the game, and had a seperate page to let the world see upcoming events, whether they be live music streams, game nights, or other kinds of scheduling that a community should gather around.

This is the only service I would consider to be a failure. It may be due to the fact that the international audience all lives on different timezones or that atom feeds / ical are relatively obscure formats -- or that giko regulars who are logged in all the time will already be there for scheduled events on their clocks and won't be able to be there for scheduled events off their clocks.

Sitting 4 months into 2025 there are 8 events created. One is a test, one is spam, two were events that never happened, two were regular events that didn't see any gain in users from the event page being created.

If anyone ever wants to share an event with anyone else and use gikopoi as a medium, and they're aware of this service, I think they could benefit a lot. Scheduled events could have a lot of merit. I could see the calendar picking up steam if giko regulars wanted to share events with people who don't regularly use the service or maybe if there were 20 or 30 regulars as opposed to 10, but at this point, it's dead in the water.

In a big picture view: I think one thing that could really benefit people is if they realized that gikopoi is full of empty rooms with stream slots that they can share with anyone to trivially chat with as they enjoy the stream. If use of ical format (built into Android, iPhone, and most mail apps) were more common, I think people would see the virtue in this service. But as of yet, the most "true to form" custom service is the least used. Maybe things will change in the future.

Matrix

The Matrix service is very underutilized but regulars who want a matrix server seem happy with having the one provided. I don't have a lot of confidence in Matrix as Discord/IRC/XMPP replacement but there is a Matrix server that exists and is available.

XMPP

Unfortunately I could not find a reasonable way to host XMPP without requiring manual account creation, which is at odds with a public chat service such as Gikopoi. However there are a small number of Gikos who wanted XMPP accounts who I could coordinate with off-site who could receive them, and they all seem to appreciate this service. I frequently talk with my @gikopoi.com XMPP friends, especially with E2EE encryption via the OMEMO standard, and I hope they can talk with each other as well, and know they can do so with strong client-side encryption.

I don't know who the intended audience for this post is. Future Gikopoi admins? Bored linux geeks? But here's some reflections and observations that have come to me from my time investments, and if any of it is helpful, I'm appreciative.

Spring 2025 anime

2025-04-20T10:10:00Z

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.

Lazarus
Gorilla no Kami
Shoushimin Series s2
Sentai Daishikkaku s2
Kapekisugite Kawaige
Your Forma
Nazotoki wa Dinner no Ato

Lazarus : this is a netflix anime. My copy is English dubbed. The premise is kind of interesting: a miracle cure against all diseases, now commonplace throughout the world, has been hacked to kill everyone who's taken it because the designer is depressed to see the state of humanity. Not very good, maybe 5/10.

Gorilla no Kami : this is what I would call a "girl anime". Loser girl suddenly becomes interesting to lots of handsome, charming, popular boys. The basic premise of this show is okay: everyone gets blessed with an animal spirit's power part way into high school, and this girl got blessed with the super fast, strong, and rare gorilla spirit. It's not great but it's kind of funny so maybe a 6/10.

Soushimin Series, s2 : the autistic high school detectives are back. Most of season 1 was dumb but detective animes are far and few between. The girl detective remains pretty adorable and the art for the show is great. Season 2 has a stronger direction and it's interesting seeing how things go on after the boy and girl detectives break up. 7/10

Sentai Daishikkaku, s2 : Go go loser ranger is doing well in its second season so far, a reverse power rangers story, 7/10

Kanpekisugite Kawaige : Another "girl anime." Fantasy kingdoms keep a saint on hand who handles all the background stuff that's necessary for keeping the kingdom running smooth. Our protagonist is a super genius and the most talented witch.... ever... just about, but her kingdom looks down on her because she's autistic and "too perfect." So she gets sold off to a neighboring kingdom where everyone licks her boots clean and the handsome charming prince is dazzled by her and blah blah blah. The art is pretty decent and this anime has some potential so I'm prematurely calling it 7/10.

Your Forma : another detective show, set in the future with androids and magic clothing. I tentatively call it another girl anime. The art is pretty good but it's terribly forgettable. This is going to wind up as a 5/10

Nazotoki wa Dinner no Ato : another detective show and girl anime. Protag is secretly a crazy rich Asian but hides it from the other police to try and fit in. She's pretty incompetent but her new handsome butler also ends up to be a genius when it comes to solving crimes so he feeds her the answers so she can show off what a great cop she is to her equally dumb but prideful and rich man cop coworker. It's kind of funny at least so maybe a 6/10, still pretty forgettable

If you want dumb fun, I think Gorilla no Kami is where it's at. Go back and check out Shoushimin Series and Sentai Daishikkaku and you'll know whether or not the seasons 2 are worth your time. If swords and sorcery fantasy politics girl anime is your thing, give Kapekisugite Kawaige a shot. Otherwise this is a slop season.

My second still

2025-04-18T14:40:00Z

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...

My first still was a New Years present to myself -- waifu ended up with an entry-level Chromebook at a similar price point (~$100). I made several tweaks to it, namely:

I added a long arm between the boiler and condenser,
I added an L-shaped joint under the condenser,
I replaced all silicon components with PTFE-wrapped cardboard

To provide coolant to the system, water circulates from a bucket using an aquarium pump.

My main complaint with it is that the condenser is way too small -- and I don't feel especially motivated to change things there because (a) "worm in a tub" condensers are fairly inefficient, (b) the piping used by the system requires frequent thread tape checking and replacement, (c) adapting the current system to work with a liebig or shotgun condenser would be way too much work.

With the current condenser, coolant cannot be fed into the system at too high a rate or the bucket overflows, because the worm blocks the outlet port. So what ends up happening near the end of a "water cleaning" run is that I need to start replacing the bucket's water more and more often. Which is honestly not the end of the world, but it is a little annoying.

My second still was largely purchased for its boiler -- more on that later -- but for now, let's look at what else makes it different:

Vertical, rather than horizontal
Different latching system for the lid
Handles can move up and down
Triclamp attaches a tower condenser to the boiler
Silicon tubing connects the two sides of the condenser
Condenser has water-in and water-out tubing
Silicon tubing leads out of the condenser

Let's attack those points one by one.

One -- I don't intend to use this condenser in the future, and I have plenty of space in my home, so vertical or horizontal is not an important factor. If anything, the tower being vertical is inconvenient: during a test boil today, the boiler shook violently and the tower shook along side it. My other still is essentially anchored to the ground so violent shaking never occurs.

Two -- I think the different latching system could be a plus. And if there's ever an issue with the clamp, I could always solder on another kind. The only drawback is that there is silicon I can't remove (yet?) from inside the lid, which serves as the gasket.

Three -- The handles being able to move would not be something I care about at all, if it weren't for the boiler being prone to shaking when warming up. When the boiler begins rocking back and forth, the handles clang against the sides of the boiler. I may have to wrap these in fabric... This could be a nice feature if you fell asleep waiting for the boiler to heat up, but I see it as a bug.

Four -- These boiler uses a triclamp to attach the condenser to it: finally, we get to the meat of things. Triclamps are the golden standard in the world of distillation because many columns and accessories (sight glasses, plates, various kinds of condensers) are designed to work with them. Throw a piece of PTFE in between two pipes, screw the clamp tight, and now you have a strong connection. Unscrew the clamp and parts can be easily cleaned and stored. No more mucking about with thread tape.

This is the single thing this new still does well. I basically wanted a boiler with a triclamp connection and looked at the condenser as being a bonus.

But one thing I still have to complain about here: I contacted every distributor for this still that I could find online asking what size of triclamp it uses. Every one ignored me, except one who answered "maybe 2 inch?"

It turns out that maybe 2 inches is also maybe 1.5 inches. Sigh. So I placed an order for a 2 inch - 1.5 inch triclamp reducer and now I gotta spend a few weeks waiting on that. So if you're intending to buy this still: now you know!

Five -- Silicon tubing connecting the two sides of the condenser is probably the strongest argument against buying this still. Yes, if you are only boiling water in this still and nothing else, silicon is probably not a big deal. But if a more universal still is desired... you're probably going to need to solder on some stainless or copper fittings yourself here. Which is inconvenient.

Six -- The condenser having tubing for in and out is the one thing that could make this new pot still condenser better than my old one. I could pipe water in and out at max speed without worrying about flooding. When I was done with my water-vinegar cleaning run today, I blew hard into the out-tube to drain most of the water out, then set it outside to drain. Don't be fooled by the shape of this condenser: it's certainly a pot still, but this is an upgrade past a regular worm in a tub.

Seven -- The final point relates back to silicon tubing again. I positioned the end of the tube above the center of a glass jar during my test / cleaning run today. It did not move as much as I thought it may have, but if I were intending to use this more seriously, it would also need to go.

Honorable mention is the thermometer glued on in between the two sides of the condenser. I don't know what purpose it serves. If you want to know if there's vapor in the condenser, put your hand near or on the big empty tube on the left that pretends to be a reflux column. At least its battery can be replaced?

Atom feeds added

2025-04-18T13:45:00Z

Per the complaints of several long time Gikopoi regulars, I've moved ahead and implemented Atom feeds for this here blog.

Stay tuned more conveniently with a feed reader.

https://4x13.net/blog/index.atom

Giko blog review

2025-04-17T16:10:00Z

This is just a brief review of known Gikopoi blogs that exist on the internet. If this post hurts your feelings, then I hope it motivates you to improve.

Akai.gikopoi.com

This is a really great blog. There is a strong focus on text and the headers & footers don't take up a disgusting amount of space. Frequent updates, open source, cute icons, and there's even an Atom feed. Tying the blog into the author's game and including trackers for life milestones make it even better.

The design will be polarizing -- my wife, who is not a "techy" finds the design frightening and unpleasant. I think it's a breath of fresh air.

Verdict: 9.2/10 -- just docking points so you have motivation to work harder -- I believe in your potential!

Shaddox.neocities.org

If akai.gikopoi is extremely web 1.0, Shaddox.neocities is extremely web 2.0: there are lots of gradients, animations, advanced CSS, and JS enhancements in play here. Both sites are iconiful but Shaddox's modern presentation gives off a more professional smell.

In contrast to akai's blog which covers a bit of everything, Shaddox's blog focuses more strictly on "otaku culture". The use of images in articles such as in his tutorial on "general streaming" are delivered to strong effect. Waifus and radio improve the reading experience.

Despite the slow release schedule, every article so far is quite high quality, and it's easy to get alerted to new posts thanks to the built in RSS feed.

Verdict: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ -- open sourcing the code would be an easy fix towards improving this blog's rating. A favicon could also add some more personality to this already quite delightful blog.

Temple-moss.neocities.org

A different kind of web 1.0 blog than the akai project. Text and background colors clash, the date format is European for some reason, and the only image is way too big. Updates are few and far between and there is no way to subscribe to new posts. This guy could spend a bit more time on his blog.

Verdict: 👎 -- you have a lot of soul, invest more of it into your work!

Progress on the blog

2025-04-17T11:15:00Z

I've been doing some work on this blog script, now it can do the following:

parse markdown in article entries
generate indexes for year, month, and tag

The code is still rather janky and I need to add pagination for indices, but I'll cross that road when I come to it. If anything, I intend to work more on style and get started on the atom feed, and maybe start working on some actual articles.

This static site builder sits at 161 lines per sloccount.

Speaking of code, I need to put this up on github...

Hello World

2025-04-13T16:20:00Z

Hello world!

I've decided to restart the 4x13.net blog after a break of approximately ten years, inspired largely by the blog of my friend Akaines.

A number of things I hope to write about:

music reviews, contemporary and vintage
various projects and hobbies that interest me
discussion about books
looks into Indonesian life as a migrant
reflections and accomplishments

Hang tight until the blog is finished developing. Things will be a little bumpy. There will be an atom feed, so feel free to subscribe once it goes online. Source code and all content will be released into the public domain.