OrbitalMartian

Updates Recently

2026-06-04T10:50:00+01:00

This blost is going to (hopefully) be a longer one, but only because I’ve got a lot of little things to share, that would be worthless in their own individual blosts.

Website

Let’s start where we left off on this blog, I had just completed a rewrite of my CSS for this site, streamlining the colour setting and just general colour management (light and dark mode). Since then, I have since made some updates to /bookcave/ where I have been doing more reading, I have updated the data which is stored in a .yml file in my source.

The next change, is that I have moved the host of my website - so yes, that means a URL change. My website is/was hosted on Vercel at orbitalmartian.vercel.app. I have been very fortunate to be the first Polymathsian to try out the new Polymaths Pages which is a free static web host for Polymaths members only, a wonderful work from Amin.

Being the first to try it out, I came across a couple of teething problems, which Amin was all too happy to help get sorted (all of these were small configuration issues but now they are all sorted) - after my problems were solved, another user managed to breeze straight through and get logged into the system.

So, my new site is orbitalmartian.polymaths.page. There is no guaranteed uptime or stability, and this is a Beta service; Amin only put this together earlier today and of course, a new thing is going to have issues.

AuroraIV

Logging In

AuroraIV is my Lenovo Ideapad 110 laptop, running Arch Linux. I have written many a blost about the software (mostly desktop environments/window managers) on this laptop, but today, this section is going to be about the setup as a whole.

The way I used to login to my laptop was: 1. Power on laptop 2. Wait for SDDM, Ly, Gdm, LightDM (whichever I happened to be using at the time) to load 3. Select the desktop environment/window manager I wanted to use 4. Enter my password 5. Wait for the desktop to load.

This was time consuming as this Ideapad is running off a Intel(R) Celeron(R) N3060 (2) @ 2.48 GHz [from fastfetch]. So it takes a while to do a lot of things.

I have heard of people just booting straight into the TTY, so I decided to try that. I have got my ~/.xinitrc file setup to have the following.

# ~/.xinitrc

exec bspwm

Now, my process to get logged in is: 1. Power on laptop 2. TTY loads pretty much instantly 3. Enter my login credentials 4. Run startx 5. BSPWM loads in front of my eyes and I’m off to the races

This is a much more productive way, as it is a heck of a lot faster.

Window Manager

The last blost that I did about my desktop environment/window manager journeys was Chirp Chirp Chirping My Desktop, where I was using Budgie 10.10.2. I loved using Budgie, and it was running Wayland as well so the future thing. There was a part of me though, that missed the good old days (not that old for me) where I used tiling window managers. I have always loved tilers and always end up back to one, BSPWM.

It wasn’t my first window manager, but once I found it and got into it with a nice config, I haven’t really looked anywhere else.

So, in typical Orbital fashion, I moved on from Budgie and went back to BSPWM (as you can tell from the last section). I’ve got a cool config, which is in my dotfiles. Feel free to give it a try if you want.

Clean Up

I also have spent some time trying to clean up after myself. I am notorious for installing a load of software, using it once as a test then never using it, but keeping it installed.

I have been through as much of my system as I can, and I have reduced as much as I can. I had twenty desktop environments and window managers installed at one point, now I’m down to four (KDE Plasma, BSPWM, Sway and dwm) which is a lot better than it was.

Reading

In the last week or two, I have gotten back into my reading. I have read The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams, from 70 odd pages to 144 pages in just over a week, which is great progress for me. I hope to finish it in the next couple of weeks and carry on the progress to try to clear up my backlog of books to read… before I get anymore books.

Drawing/Painting/Creativity

In the last week, I have been feeling very creative, so I’ve been starting to do a bit of pixel art to keep my brain relaxed.

I have also done a ton of work on my aircraft addon, the Hawk T.1 for FlightGear, where I have done a lot of work on the 3d model, systems (code) and I have painted two liveries, which I am very proud of.

In the next month of so, I am hoping to clean up a couple of issues and hopefully get it into the default hangar repository so that people can download it directly within the FlightGear launcher.

Writing, is as always, a passion, and I try to write as much as I can, whenever I can. I havne’t done much, but I have been keeping my feet wet with it.

Conclusion

Life has been busy, work has been busy, but I always have time for my hobbies (reading, tinkering, writing, pixel art and creativity in general) to relax the brain, and keep me calm and sane. I wanted to save all of these updates for this one blost.

No this isn’t a Month Review for May, which is coming, but I just need to write it all up - it’s coming!

But, I think there’s nothing else to be said, so, that’s it for this blost. I hope you enjoyed, I’ll see you in the next one. BYEEE!!!

Week Notes - 19

2026-05-13T20:40:00+01:00

Hey folks, I am writing these week notes on Wednesday, the week after. It’s been really busy at work so there isn’t a lot going to be too much going on in here, but we’ll see.

📚 Reading

This week, I got back into my reading, really enjoying the book once again, after a slump where I read nothing for a whole month.

Day	Pages Read
Tuesday	12 pages
Wednesday	4 pages
Thursday	6 pages
*TOTAL:*	*22 pages*

Although it isn’t much, 22 pages is still more than the last few weeks.

📝 Writing

This week, I wrote two blosts.

April 2026 - I take a look back over the last month, it was a great one.
Spicing Up My Website - I’ve made a few changes to my website over the last few weeks, this is a rundown of them all.

I haven’t gotten round to doing any work on my novel project but I have some ideas for it.

👀 Watching

🎥 Movies & TV Shows

I enjoyed a couple of things this week. I started the week watching Expedition with Steve Backshall on Netflix, which was a very enjoyable watch, I do recommend. Once I finished this, I started watching Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls - another film that I am enjoying. I didn’t finish it this week, but will definitely be finished next week.

▶️ YouTube

I watched a few videos on YouTube, too many to list here.

👂 Listening

🎙️ Podcasts

I listened to 11 episodes of Wolf359 which has been fun. I liked it, a lot.

🎮 Gaming

Over the weekend, I enjoyed some flights in FlightGear. But I also got round to playing some Stormworks: Build & Rescue.

I don’t have anything else to say for this week’s week notes, so I’m going to end it here, have a good one. BYEEE!!!

Spicing Up My Website

2026-05-09T11:15:00+01:00

In the last week, I’ve been putting a bit of time into spicing up my website. I’ve neglected the aesthetics for so long and now I’m looking to get it looking pretty.

Now it’s been a while since I last worked on the CSS for my website, so I had to reacquaint myself with the code. In the last month or so, I’ve been through and cleaned up the codebase of my website removing a ton of old, unused CSS files, so that made it a lot easier.

I recently changed to using light theme on everything, and after having purely used dark mode on everything. In doing so, I found a number of issues that I had completely missed in my website’s light theme. To fix this, I made a simple change which I should have done from the off.

How my CSS was formatted before

:root {
    --color1: black;
    --color2: white;
    --color3: blue;
    --color4: red;

    --lcolor1: white;
    --lcolor2: black;
    --lcolor3: blue;
    --lcolor4: red;
}

@media (prefers-color-scheme:dark) {
    # CSS for the dark theme - using color.
}

@media (prefers-color-scheme:light) {
    # CSS for the light theme. - using lcolor.
}  

How my CSS is formatted now

@media (prefers-color-scheme:dark) {
    :root {
        --fg: white;
        --bg: black;
        --accent: blue;
        --bg2: grey;
    }
}

@media (prefers-color-scheme:light) {
    :root {
        --fg: black;
        --bg: white;
        --accent: blue;
        --bg2: grey;
    }
}

# CSS for the site, written once, not twice, using color.

This change was needed to make both the light and dark themes have the same aesthetic, which is a big thing. Previously, I was having to write out the CSS code for each element that I was playing around with in both the dark and light theme sections, which where I was using only dark mode, I often missed out the light theme styling. Now, I only have to write the CSS once, with the colour variables being set within the media queries, which has really simplified things.

Site Changes

The styling is not the only thing that has changed around here, I have done a few other things to do with the layout, which I think makes my site look a lot cleaner and nicer.

I’ll quickly list the changes and then go into some detail about each one and why I decided to make the changes.

Created an about page.
Updated the homepage - added a small about section with basic information.
Created a more page for the navbar.
Removed the custom monospace font as the overall site default font.

Let’s get into the first one. My about page is pretty self explanatory. It’s a page, that is about me. It gives the reader a bit of background around me and what I do with this site. And the page also has a ton of information about the site itself.

The next one is much the same as the last one, a short and sweet little bit on the homepage with a brief introduction to me.

Next, this one will take some more explanation. My navbar was previously like this:

Home  Blog  Contact  ARAT  Blogroll  Bookcave  FlightGear

As you can see, this was a lot! So I devised a simple and minimal way to reduce this, but keeping the access to the pages. I did steal the idea from Joel, where you define the extra links in _data/more.yml and pull the data into the page “dynamically” when the site gets built. I then replaced all of these links in the navbar with More, which makes it look a lot less cluttered and much nicer.

Now, my navbar looks like this:

Home  About  Blog  Contact  More

Now, this next one changed a few things. Removing the custom font I was using was already on my mind, but I finally did. I was using a manually imported to my website and selected within the orbital.css file.

I was using JetBrainsMono as the font for my whole website, because I love the font, but I thought about it and it meant that actual code in code blocks would not stand out as much from the main content of pages, so I decided to remove this custom font. I have included the same font that Joel uses because the default font looks cool. My site now has the mononoki Nerd Font. I have also increased the font size to make it a bit clearer.

Other Stuff

I recently found out about Tiny Pixel Bears by Sylvia which as a pixel artist, I found to be very cute and so I made one, which is now on my homepage.

And that’s all of the changes on my website of recent. Hope you enjoyed, I’ll catch you in the next one. BYEEE!!!

April 2026

2026-05-04T14:00:00+01:00

April has felt like a short month, but I also feel that I have achieved a lot in that time.

Also, this month review is going to look a little bit different. I’ve added emojis to eat heading and a new section at the end. Both of which are ideas I’ve borrowed from Joel’s April Summary. So this is going to be fun.

📖 Reading

Not the best month for reading, but I’m getting back into the flow of things.

Date	Pages Read	What Book?
9th	5	The Robots for Dawn by Isaac Asimov
26th	10	The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams
27th	12	The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams
28th	4	The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams
29th	6	The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams
30th	2	The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams

📝 Writing

I didn’t get around to doing much writing this month, but I wrote two blosts.

Title	Date	Overview
March 2026	2026-05-01	I take a look back on what I achieved through the last month.
Week Notes - 15 & 16	2026-05-25	I look back on all that I achieved in the two weeks I was off work for the Easter holidays, w15 & w16.

🎮 Gaming

I did a ton of flying in FlightGear as always, and spent many hours working on the Hawk T1 add-on which has been a blast to fly and make.

👂 Listening

🎵 Music

I listened to a bit of music over the month on YouTube.

🎙️ Podcasts

I listened to bits of a couple of The WAN Show episodes, but sadly, I only fully listened to one, I need to listen to the rest of them.

I do really want to get back into some other podcasts, such as Wolf 359 which I need to finish.

👀 Watching

▶️ YouTube

I have been watching a lot of YouTube videos of various creators, genres, etc.

🎥 Movies & TV Shows

I was watching Young Sheldon on Netflix and when I finished the series, I spent some time watching some movies. I started off with Paul - a movie about an alien. I then watched Beverley Hills Cop: Axel F - a new (2024) entry to the Beverley Hills Cop franchise. After that, I watched Top Gun - the 1986 classic, which I until now, have never seen before. After Top Gun, I watched The Adam Project - a movie about time travel.

It’s been fun just watching movies in my spare time.

✅ Goals

I’m going to try something I’ve seen in Joel’s month summaries - Goals, let’s see how this goes.

New

Make a pixel bear for fun - inspired by my blog.
Listen to Wolf 359.
Redesign footer on website.
Add an introduction to the homepage of website.

In Progress

Finish The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (68/200)

Week Notes - 15 & 16

2026-04-25T11:15:00+01:00

This week’s week notes are going to be slightly different than my previous ones, it’s going to contain two weeks worth of stuff.

For the last two weeks, I have been off work for the Easter holidays, so I’ve managed to do quite a lot.

Reading

Books

I didn’t do much reading over the last couple of weeks, only 5 pages over the whole month so far.

Web

I have read a number of blog posts over the two weeks, from all sorts of blogs.

Gaming

Over the two weeks, I spent a significant number of hours flying in FlightGear.

A large number of these hours were also spent working on my own aircraft add-on for the sim. The BAe Systems Hawk T.1, I have very much enjoyed spending many hours on this one, really really productive two weeks on this project, I’ve had it on the books since January.

Writing

These last two weeks, I haven’t done any writing, I was spending so long in FlightGear, that I didn’t get around to doing any writing.

Other Stuff

I found SmolFedi, a small lightweight Fedi client written in PHP. It’s been a blast to play around with the demo instance of it, I am now going to look for somewhere to host my own instance of it. It may still be early days for the project but Adele is doing a great job with it all.

And that’s about all for this one, I have got a couple of other blosts in the works, but this one is late as it is, so there we have it.

Hope you enjoyed, I’ll catch you in the next one. BYEEE!!!

March 2026

2026-04-01T21:40:00+01:00

March is officially over and we’re into April. Here at OrbitalMartian, we don’t do April Fools pranks, we just go about with life normally. So let’s take a look back at what I got up to in March. I have a feeling that this is going to be a shorter one, but it’ll be worth it anyway.

Linux Stuff

Over the course of March, I was using Arch Linux, as I have been since November 2025, and as my desktop environment, I started off the month with KDE Plasma and later in the month, I switched over to using Budgie. I have thoroughly enjoyed using both of these but I always fall back into my yearning to mess around with my configurations and use tiling window managers, so April may see my return to tiling.

Reading

This month was a real bummer for my reading. I just didn’t have the motivation for it.

Date	Pages Read	What Book?
1st	17	The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams
21st	1	The Robots of Dawn by Isaac Asimov
22nd	5	The Robots of Dawn by Isaac Asimov
23rd	4	The Robots of Dawn by Isaac Asimov
25th	4	The Robots of Dawn by Isaac Asimov

As you can see from this table, my reading was right in the toilet this month and was spread across two books, because I was trying everything possible to get the motivation to read again.

I have got to admit that my in progress reading pile is currently sat at 4 books at various stages of progress.

Writing

During the course of March, I wrote 4 blosts.

Week Notes 08 - the last time I wrote my week notes :D
KoulDE I Use Plasma - when I started using Plasma.
Apollo v1.0 Release - The Launch - the release announcement for my text editor’s v1.0 release.
Chirp Chirp Chirping My Desktop - when I started using Budgie as my desktop.

Watching

I’ve done a bit of watching things this month, I have been watching Young Sheldon on Netflix which has been fun and I’m really enjoying the series.

Podcasts & Music

I have listened to a small part of one The WAN Show episode (I can’t remember which one), but I really need to get back into finishing whole episodes.

I have also been enjoying some music that I used to listen to a lot, but haven’t for a few years, which is great fun to rediscover things from the past.

Gaming

In March, I played a significant amount of FlightGear, to the point I actually spent a lot of time working on my own aircraft (the Hawk T.1), which once I’ve got a bit more done on it will be getting its own blog post about.

I also bought two things on Steam this month:

Flashing Lights DOT DLC - fresh from the developmental press, it was newly released at the time and is a load of fun.
Brick Rigs - basically Lego Stormworks mixed with BeamNG - a lot of fun playing around with some cool workshop vehicles and destroying them.

Coding

March brought to the table an odd urge to work on an old project. My notepad app which got a 1.0 release and is on track with a couple of things left, to get a 1.0.1 release in the next few weeks. This has been great fun to get back into and I’ve really enjoyed learning a lot from it.

Closing Remarks

Going into writing this blost, I felt that I wasn’t going to have too much to say, but clearly I got carried away with myself and actually did achieve a lot during March.

So, that’s it for this one, I hope you enjoyed and I’ll see you in the next one. BYEEE!!!

Chirp Chirp Chirping My Desktop

2026-03-20T22:00:00+00:00

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been playing around with my Arch laptop. I went back around all my old favourite desktops and window managers; KDE, Gnome, COSMIC, i3, Niri, dwm, bspwm. And I also tried something new to me, Budgie. I’ve seen about Budgie before and have tried to get onto it previously, but I never did have much success in those days.

So, this time, I made sure to perservere. I installed Budgie 10.10.1 around two weeks ago and I eventually moved back to a tiler because my trackpad buttons, were not the correct way around and the settings option to set this didn’t appear to be doing anything.

I then saw a live stream by Joshua Strobl (the leader of Buddies of Budgie) where he was doing some last minute commits and releasing Budgie 10.10.2. I decided to give this version a shot, see if it fixed my problem and…

It did

As mentioned in the release announcement, the bridge with LabWC didn’t have the trackpad button configuration set, now it does. With that problem solved, I then got myself started with a couple of customisations of the desktop; namely the panel. I have set the date/time format to be %H:%M:%S %Y-%m-%d. I have added the power menu shortcut to the right of the clock and I have set the Budgie logo to be the menu icon. I also moved the panel from the bottom to the top, as something just makes it easier for me to work with all the information I need being at the top of the screen.

Other things, as always is set the system fonts to be JetBrainsMono Nerd Font Regular for all types. I do this, because I prefer looking at monospaced fonts and I love JetBrainsMono.

And of course the wallpaper, which is northern lights by Jonaton Pie on Unsplash, a beautiful photo. At some point, I plan to make my own wallpapers but for now I find ones online that I enjoy looking at and find cozy and cool.

I have been using Budgie now for a couple of days and I’m really enjoying my time using it. It runs surprisingly well on my potato laptop.

Specs

CPU: Intel(R) Celeron(R) N3060 (2) @ 2.48 GHz
GPU: Intel Atom/Celeron/Pentium Processor x5-E8000/J3xxx/N3xxx
Memory: 4GiB

In fact I was actually using Budgie when I was working on the latest commits for Apollo and making the release, it was really easy to work within.

I can see myself playing with this some more and sticking around with it. (I know, I say this alot, but there’s something really quite cool about Budgie).

Anyway, that’s it for this blost, I’ll catch you in the next one. BYEEE!!!

Apollo v1.0 - The Launch

2026-03-18T21:45:00+00:00

It’s been a journey, but I’ve made it there. I now have a usable text editor. It’s called Apollo and this is v1.0 - The Launch

Changes

New Toolkit

1.0 now uses the Qt and Kirigami toolkit instead of Gtk. The reason behind this is that I personally prefer the look of Qt apps and it allows users to theme should they wish to, which I like.

UI/UX

1.0 starts off with a fairly basic UI, consisting of simply a text area and a menu bar.

The menu bar at this time only has a File menu, consisting of New, Open, Save, Save As, and Quit. In the future, there will be other menus but I didn’t want to repeat 0.1 with buttons that don’t work, unnecessarily.

There is a padding at the bottom, ready for a new feature - the status bar, where things like the word and line count will go, alongside an unsaved changes indicator.

Features

There is a small featureset for this release, but the essentials are there.

Working text editor area
Opening and saving files
Scrollable text area
Unsaved changes dialog

Usage

Currently, the only way to run Apollo is by manually running it from the terminal. To do this.

Either download and extract the latest release from Codeberg. OR

$ git clone https://codeberg.org/OrbitalMartian/Apollo

Then ensure that the following Python packages are installed.

PySide6

Now, follow the below steps to run the application.

$ cd src/
$ python apollo.py

KoulDE I Use Plasma?

2026-03-06T18:20:00+00:00

I have been a Linux (sorry GNU/Linux) user for a good few years now, I believe I first installed Linux on a device in 2021. And I have been enjoying every second of that time.

And after a couple of years floating and jumping between window managers and desktop environments, I feel like I’ve come full circle once again. That’s because I have gone back to KDE Plasma.

The History

My first Linux “distro” was KDE Neon where I spent a couple of months using it, before moving over to Kubuntu. The beginning of my Linux life was on Plasma. Since then, I have been all over the place; from i3, BSPWM, QTile, dwm, Gnome, Cinnamon, Hyprland, Niri, Sway, and pretty much every other window manager and desktop environment. I found myself working well with Tiling Window Managers, but there was always something in me that felt like I wanted more. Alongside a couple of small issues that sometimes got on my nerves.

New-Old Me

As of a couple of days ago, I have reinstalled ˋplasmaˋ and am using that. I am enjoying it (I always say that).

You may be asking why, and you would be interested to know the answer.

I just get a certain feeling when using a full desktop environment that you don’t get with tiling window managers, but there is also a little part of my mind that wants to using a tiling window manager, so I might sit on this for a while and have a little play around with some cool tilers.

But for now, Plasma is my home, maybe temporarily, maybe permanently, only time will tell. That’s it for now, I’ll catch you in the next one, BYEEE!!!

Week Notes - 08

2026-03-01T11:05:00+00:00

I missed last week’s week notes and so here is this week’s.

Reading

I haven’t done any reading this week sadly so that’s a shame. I do need to do some more reading next week, so hopefully next week’s notes will have a bit more in this section.

Gaming

This week was a week off so I had time to do some gaming most days this week.

This is a table of my favourite flights from this week.

Start	End	Duration	Distance	Aircraft
2026-02-14 17:30:40 UTC (KJAX - Jacksonville International Airport)	2026-02-14 20:23:35 UTC (KJAX - Jacksonville International Airport)	Total: 02:52:55, Flight Time: 02:48:30	373 nm	Britton-Norman Islander BN-2
2026-02-15 15:30:42 UTC (KJAX - Jacksonville International Airport)	2026-02-15 18:15:39 UTC (KJAX - Jacksonville International Airport)	Total: 02:44:57, Flight Time: 02:39:10	619 nm	Beechcraft Super King Air
2026-02-16 12:57:26 UTC (KJAX - Jacksonville International Airport)	2026-02-16 19:23:28 UTC (KJAX - Jacksonville International Airport)	Total: 06:26:02, Flight Time: 04:34:40	1071 nm	Beechcraft Super King Air
2026-02-18 16:20:34 UTC (KJAX - Jacksonville International Airport)	2026-02-18 22:57:24 UTC (KJAX - Jacksonville International Airport)	Total: 06:36:50, Flight Time: 03:17:30	745 nm	Beechcraft Super King Air
2026-02-19 18:04:23 UTC (KJAX - Jacksonville International Airport)	2026-02-19 21:27:59 UTC (KJAX - Jacksonville International Airport)	Total: 03:23:36, Flight Time: 03:20:40	800 nm	Beechcraft Super King Air
2026-02-20 15:04:01 UTC (KJAX - Jacksonville International Airport)	2026-02-20 20:52:17 UTC (KJAX - Jacksonville International Airport)	Total: 05:48:16, Flight Time: 05:10:00	1279 nm	Beechcraft Super King Air
2026-02-21 16:56:11 UTC (KJAX - Jacksonville International Airport)	2026-02-21 21:50:53 UTC (KJAX - Jacksonville International Airport)	Total: 04:54:42, Flight Time: 04:01:10	942 nm	Beechcraft Super King Air

Writing

I have spent a little bit of time writing some blosts, none of which have been published yet.

Other Stuff

I did some work on my Nimrod R1 FlightGear aircraft add-on.

That’s it for this weeks Week Notes. Have a good one. BYEEE!!!