OrbitalMartian

Why Linux Noobs Should Start With Arch

2026-07-15T18:35:00+01:00

In my last blost, I said that I recommend Arch as a starting point for new users in Linux. And to those who know Linux, this might seem a bit odd, but hear me out.

There are a few reasons why Arch is great for beginners and this blost is going to be me going over these.

Reason One - Learning

The biggest and most important reason is education. Seeing as Arch makes the user do everything for themselves in terms of setting up, etc, I see it as a perfect opportunity for new users to learn how Linux works and learn the different tools. Yes, things will break, but that’s part of the fun. I left it years before I tried to install Arch myself, and when I finally did, I regretted having not done it sooner. It taught me a lot, and all the problems I had along the way gave me the reason to learn how to fix them. I built myself a decent system that was fun and enjoyable to use, and I could say was handcrafted by me. You don’t get that with Ubuntu, Mint or anything like that.

While this might sound counter intuitive, a new user breaking things that is, if we just baby new users, they will never learn to figure things out for themselves, and will become help vampires (I heard this term a couple of years ago in The Linux Cast’s Discord server). Constantly bombarding online communities with “How do I fix x?”, “Why doesn’t y work?”, etc, which, while they will get an answer, most likely, it will be a copy paste job and move on. There’s no learning there. And that’s what new users need, the knowledge and confidence to troubleshoot and fix problems, or at least be able to give more details when asking for help than just “It’s not working. Why?”.

And, even with the big desktop environments, the included GUI application stores don’t work. Pacman doesn’t work in a way that Software and Discover can handle. So to install and manage software, users have to use the terminal, which turns some people away, but new Linux users should learn the command line, so they can look after their system, and get things working again, should a graphical environment fail and you be left in a black and white TTY console with no explaination of what’s going on. - This happened to me once, but now I can do a bit of digging and at least find where the issue is coming from.

Reason Two - Newer Software

One thing that Windows has over Linux is the plethora of cutting edge application versions. Many Linux distros don’t push version updates as frequently, before they have been tested. Debian for example can get very outdated, but Arch is all the latest versions of packages in its repos. Windows users always have the newest, latest & greatest versions of their software - because it’s pushed upon them - so this could be something that new users are looking for when they switch to Linux.

Final Thoughts

I was amazed by how much I got taught when I manually installed Arch Linux and then by maintaining my system for over 6 months, it was a huge learning curve but I loved it.

Now that I’ve experienced Arch, I am building my specific knowledge of Debian using the generic knowledge that Arch and the Arch Wiki has taught me.

And that’s all for this one. BYEEE!!!

I Use Debian BTW!

Old Tech, New Heck

2026-07-10T21:45:00+01:00

For a lot of people, once their computer starts slowing down, bits start falling off, operating system stops updating/supporting the hardware, they throw it away and buy a new one. This is extremely common with people who use Windows and MacOS, but also kind of fits iOS as well; so basically anything Apple. This, of course, leads to tons of e-waste, with approximately 62 million tons produced globally in 2022 - according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). E-waste is bad for the environment and for us, it can leak toxic gases, and materials into the atmosphere and into water sources, which propagates the toxicity out to every living thing, from plants to animals, leading to health issues - which, obviously. isn’t good.

Why Though?

The biggest reason is that majority of the world use devices running either Windows or MacOS (or iOS/iPadOS and Android for phones and tablets), these operating systems are well known for dropping support for hardware. This happens quite quickly, in the case of iOS, it’s 5 years before the iPhone loses the ability to update to newer versions, and about 7 years before Apple stops pushing security updates. Where people don’t know about alternative operating systems, such as Linux, which doesn’t cut off support for old hardware until it is centuries old (a slight over exaggeration).

What I Use?

I have an old Lenovo Ideapad 110 (from when I started secondary school in 2016), which has some quite outdated hardware. Windows dropped support for it and was very slow and sluggish when it was installed on it. The CPU in this thing is an Intel Celeron N3060, running at 2.48 GHz. A very slow machine even on Linux, but at least with Linux, it’s somewhat usable. I can’t game on it, I can’t render a 3d model in Blender, but I can write, I can code, and I can do basic image editing (slowly) and pixel art.

And, you might ask, why use something so old? And the reason is, it works just fine, a bit slow at times, but for my main tasks, it is just perfect. I have never had any issues with the running of this laptop. The hardware is all still completely functional, there’s some cosmetic damage on the chassis here and there, mostly on the corners from when I took it to school for two years. Software has of course caused problems every so often, but that’s the nature of the beast when you’re a kinaesthetic learner (learn by doing) and spend hours tinkering with things, which inevitably breaks things.

What Can You Do?

The problem of e-waste is a big thing, as mentioned earlier, it’s a worldwide problem, not a local one. When your hardware is no longer support by the operating system on your computer (your desktop, your laptop, your server, heck even your tablet), you can switch away from the proprietary garbage dump that is Windows and install Linux (any distro will do, for beginners though, I recommend Arch - I will write a blost specifically about why soon). This will breath new life into your device and allow you to save money on both hardware and the software licenses. Plus once you come to the Linux side of the world, you will never want to go back (unless you plan on playing some massively multiplayer game with certain anti-cheats who see all Linux users as hackers - we’re not, I promise, I have zero idea how to access your network drives storing all those Linux ISOs).

For other devices, such as Apple, I don’t really know what to recommend (apart from not buying them in the first place). Maybe someone in the Fediverse comments of this blost can suggest how to stop Apple iDevices from becoming e-waste just because Apple drops support.

End of Blost

And that’s that. There’s not much else to say. Let me know your thoughts either by email or in the Fediverse comments. BYEEE!!!

The Switch (And Not The Nintendo Kind)

2026-07-09T22:05:00+01:00

I have been using Arch Linux full time since 30^th November 2025, where I wrote this blog post, talking through all my install steps and what I experienced. It’s been a fun time and a really enjoyable way to learn more about Linux and system management. BUT, I feel that the time has come for me to move again. I have run a poll on my Fedi account and the options were:

Stick with Arch
Back to Fedora
Retry Debian

As with any sort of poll about Linux distros, everyone is going to choose the one they use, so it’s interesting to see the outcome nonetheless, even though, after posting it, I had already made up my mind on what to do and where to go.

Debian.

I wanted to make a change, and I felt like going for something more stable and tested than Arch. And that’s where Debian comes in.

My History With Debian

I first tried Debian, a good few years ago, I think it was around the time that Bookworm was released as stable. I didn’t have much luck, ending up with my operating system completely gone after a reboot or two. I think this might have been a GRUB issue thinking back on it, but back then I didn’t know what I know now. About a year ago, I tried Debian again, which was fine. I used it for a while, but then I managed to create a Frankenbian, where I tried to install an app from the testing repo and then turn the repos back to stable, which, as you can expect, broke things.

Why Switch?

I was getting a bit bored with Arch. Same old, same old. It’s a shame, because I was really enjoying it.

I wanted a different scenery for my distro so chose to move back away from Arch and use something a bit more stable (in terms of packages)/

I know that this move is going to be controversial with some people, but I don’t care for the politics of which Linux distro you use, it’s silly. Use what works for you. And that’s the most important thing, if something works, why change it? Just like the good ol’ saying:

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

As of writing this blost, I have Debian all installed on my laptop.

Experience So Far

My experience with Debian so far tonight, since installing has been very positive. My Pentium laptop is running Gnome Wayland very smoothly, and that’s with both Gnome and KDE Plasma installed. All good so far.

In terms of desktops, I went for Gnome and KDE Plasma, because I like them both. KDE being my first experience on Linux. I am going to test KDE after finishing this blost and see whether that runs any smoother or slower than Gnome on this laptop and then I’ll make a choice for what I stick with for the foreseeable future (probably not that long). I will undoubtedly end up installing a tiling window manager (BSPWM is my go to) at some point, but maybe I’ll use the distro hop as an opportunity to make the switch to a Wayland tiler. maybe

I think that there’s nothing more to be said, without repeating myself, which I could happily do and then this blost would be thousands of words long, but that’s a bit pointless, so that’s that.

I hope this has been a nice read, thanks for sticking to the end of my ramblings. BYEEE!!!

Page Down! Send Admin!

2026-06-27T09:45:00+01:00

A couple of weeks ago, Amin, the best Fediverse admin to walk this Earth - the Fedi admins on Mars are extremely good at what they do - setup a static web hosting service for members of Polymaths Social. I got an account and was the first user to try and login, being the first, I encountered some small teething problems, which were to be expected.

Polymaths Pages (that’s what it’s called), is a Beta/Alpha, test thingy, so I was expecting some hiccups here and there. Amin has been encredibly helpful throughout all the problems. As soon as something went wrong, I PM’ed (private message) him and told him what I saw the problem as being; whether through Fedi or Signal, and I always got a very speedy response, especially for international communication, with a traveling avocado.

All of the problems were server side problems, but I did my best with limited knowledge to try and make life as easy as possible for the avocado extroudiner. I am hoping that what I am about to write is going to be a chronological account of the problems and how it got resolved.

Day One - Thursday 4th June

Day one was an interesting one. I was the first person to try and get logged in, and as such, I encountered all of the problems with user permissions and groups. I spent a couple of hours going backwards and forwards with Amin via Signal about the issue and slowly, but surely, the various issues and misconfigurations were resolved, and by the end of it, I was logged in.

Day one led to everyone else being able to login first time without any problems.

The first error message I was encountering was:

orbitalmartian@polymaths.page's password:

Which shouldn’t have been there, because the users were setup in a way that it use SSH keys to verify the identity of the user, as well as checking whether the current user and device are authorised to access the server by comparing against authorised_keys.

After this, I saw a related issue, but a new one.

Every time I went to login, it would tell me:

orbitalmartian@polymaths.page: Permission denied (publickey)

This problem was caused by the file authorised_keys having been named incorrectly - as authorised-keys . This didn’t solve the problem completely, because there was the same error message again. The problem, so it turns out, is that the owner of the directory was set to root, where it should be caddy .

I was then logged in, no problems whatsoever, until…

Day Eighteen - Sunday 21st June

In the seventeen days prior to the eighteenth day, I was happily plodding along, making changes to my website, and deploying it to the server and it being visible on the web, no problems. Until I pushed my changes on this Sunday.

I ran my deploy script and SSH’ed into the server, I could see that all the files were as expected in the server but when I went to view my website, I was given a 403 no access error. I sent a PM on Fedi to Amin and explained the situation, to whit, he got to work investigating the problem. An investigation that would take three days to get to the bottom of, but it was a simple problem to resolve.

Over the course of the three days, there was discussion in a Signal group chat about rsync copying reduced permissions from my local build. It seemed to be that the files on the server needed to have 750 permissions, so the command chmod -R 750 /var/www/<username> was given out as a fix to the problem. This seemed to work once, and then the very next day, the same problem occurred.

The group chat suggested to use --no-owner and --no-groups flags on my rsync command, which didn’t seem to fix the problem or make any difference. Another suggestion from Daniel was to add --chown orbitalmartian:caddy flag to rsync. This also seemed to have no effect.

On the third day, Amin noticed that the very first solution was the correct one, but the permissions needed to be 755 rather than 750 because the file ownership of child files wasn’t always the same.

Leaving the correct command to solve this problem being: chmod -R 755 _site/ locally or chmod -R 755 /var/www/<username> on the web server.

This solution has fixed the problem now. And apparently will make things easier for everyone in future.

As always, aliens are the ones who get experimented on by humans (or a sentient avocado in this case), but at least it’s for the greater good of Polymaths Pages.

I hope that when I go to build this blost, I don’t discover anymore problems, otherwise this post will be getting an update 😆. Hopefully this blost was enjoyable, I’ll catch you in the next one, whenever that may be. BYEEE!!!

Red Arrows Take To America

2026-06-21T10:40:00+01:00

To support the celebrations of 250 years of America’s declaration of independence, the RAF Red Arrows have transited across the Atlantic Ocean to take part in displays over there across the US. So, I am following the route they took over the last 3 days in FlightGear in my BAE Hawk T.1.

The BAE Hawk T.1 can only travel about 700mi on a single load of fuel, with no air-to-air refueling capability, the route has had to be planned meticulously to ensure safe transit.

Below is my journal of the transit flight and the planning that I put into the flight, this will get updated when I complete the rest of the flight in the next week or so.

Journal

2026-06-18 Planning Today, I set about planning the route, and trying to recreate the flight plan that the Reds are using for the real crossing.

RAF Waddington (EGXW) - England
Stornoway (EGPO) - Scotland
Keflavik (BIKF) - Iceland
Kangerlussauq Airport (BGSF) - Greenland
Iqaluit International Airport (CYFB) - Canada
CFB Goose Bay (CYYR) - Canada
CFB Greenwood (CYZX) - Canada
Long Island MacArthur Airport (KISP) - US
Martin State Airport (KMTN) - US

2026-06-19 Planning Today, I got a .gpx route file setup from RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire, UK to Martin State Airport in Maryland, USA.

2026-06-20 Flying Today, I began the transit across the Atlantic, I begun the journey at Alpha Apron, RAF Waddington where I took off and turned North and headed to Stornoway in Scotland for a refuel break before flying across the ocean to Iceland. After landing at Keflavik, and a quick refuel, I got back airborne for leg 3 to Greenland. After another quick refuel break in Greenland, I got back to the skies and headed West to Canada. Into Canada with a fuel stop at Iqaluit before flying South to CFB Goose Bay. After landing at Goose Bay, I had a quick debrief and got the following statistics - I travelled 2699nm in 06:41:40 hours, across 5 legs.

2026-07-04 Flypast and Flying I had to jump a little bit ahead with my journey because of a significant downtime of the scenery server, meaning that I couldn’t fly for a couple of weeks, I have managed to get scenery for the Washington, Baltimore and New York area, so I jumped the journey to Martin State Airport, skipping CFB Greenwood and Long Island MacArthur. Today, being the 4th of July, meant a ton of flypasts being scheduled across the country. When I took off, I followed the exact route that the real Red Arrows were taking at the exact same time for a flypast down the Hudson river in New York. I landed back at Martin State where I refuelled and began my transit flight down to Jacksonville, Florida.

The journey to Florida took one hour from Baltimore. I flew at 500kts, 20000ft and made good time. Did a little display upon arrival at Jacksonville before landing and parking up. A total flight time today of 3 hours.

My Writing Tablet Progress

2026-06-15T21:55:00+01:00

Hello world! This blost has been on my mind for about five months and now I have finally got round to writing it. The last time I wrote about this tablet, was back when I first got it - Android Writing - New Tablet, Keyboard and Pen, back in December 2025. Since then, lots of things have changed in my workflow and the software that I’m using. So, let’s go through what has changed.

Applications

Let’s start off with the launcher. In my original post, I had swapped from the default launcher to Nova Launcher. I used that for months, until they introduced ads in the free version. I didn’t want to pay to remove ads so I had to find an alternative launcher to use.

I did a bit of research and discovered Niagara Launcher. I have got a pretty simple setup with this, my homepage is just a date/time widget at the top, a Vivaldi search bar in the center, and then 4 apps pinned - these being: Vivaldi (my web browser), Quillpad (my go to markdown editor), YouTube (because I can always have time to waste on videos), Collabora Office (the office suite I use).

I haven’t changed much else in terms of the apps I use, so that’s all for this section.

Workflow

While my workflow for writing hasn’t changed too much, I thought I’d rewrite it all anyway.

Blosts

When I get the urge and inspiration to write a blost, I open up Nextcloud Notes and create a new markdown file. I write my lovely work, whatever that may be, then I copy the contents of the file to the Codeberg repo for my site. I then go to Termux and pull the git repo. I have got a build script to deploy my website.

The script goes a little something like this:

$ ./polymaths.sh
---

#!/bin/sh
echo "Building..."

bundle exec jekyll build

echo "Build Complete!"

pause 0.5

echo "Deploying..."

rsync --delete-during --zc=zstd --update --progress --itemize-changes --stats -r "_site/" "orbitalmartian@polymaths.page:orbitalmartian.polymaths.page/"

echo "Deploy completed!"

pause 1

echo "Pushing to Git..."

git add .
git commit
git push

echo "Pushed to git!"

What this script does is build my website using bundle exec jekyll build, which builds the site using Jeykll into the _site/ directory; converting the markdown files into html files with all my “fancy” CSS.

Then it pushes it to the polymaths.page server with rsync --delete-during --zc=zstd --update --progress --itemize-changes --stats -r "_site/" "orbitalmartian@polymaths.page:orbitalmartian.polymaths.page/" - I must admit I don’t know what all of the flags do exactly, but it’s the instructions I was given for pushing, so I am not going to argue :D.

And then, last but not least, it adds all changes, commits them (opening the commit message in my default editor), and pushes to the Codeberg repo for my website.

I have added some progress messages, which just inform when each section is starting and then finishing. I want to add some error messaging for if any section fails to execute, with a different echo but I don’t know bash that much.

Other Writing

For my other writing; novels, etc., I use Quillpad - all of the files are synced through Nextcloud as well, but I just like to have a seperate app for my novels and for my blosts. (I’m odd like that)

For my novel writing workflow, I simply open Quillpad and open the Markdown file then start letting the creative juices flow onto the page.

Conclusion

Overall, I am still happy with my choice of tablet and setup/workflow. Of course, things are subject to change… this is me after all, I can’t stay on one thing for long. BUT for the most part, my workflow on this tablet has stayed largely the same over the 6 months that I have been using it.

And that’s it for this blost, I hope you enjoyed the read and I’ll catch you in the next one. BYEEE!!!

May 2026

2026-06-05T22:10:00+01:00

May is a busy month for me at work, but I always get up to a few things at home.

🌐 Webdev

This month, I had a little marathon of working on my website.

I worked on rewriting the CSS, to make my life easier to manage colours. I also did work on cleaning up the navbar, making it much more readable, no matter the screen size.

📖 Reading

Date	Pages Read	What Book?
5th	12	The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
6th	4	The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
7th	6	The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
11th	8	The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
13th	5	The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
14th	4	The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
15th	4	The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
18th	2	The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
22nd	4	The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
27th	1	The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

📝 Writing

Title	Date	Overview
April 2026	2026-05-04	My month summary for April
Spicing Up My Website	2026-05-09	I go through all the changes I made to my website.
Week Notes 19	2026-05-13	Week notes for W19

🎮 Gaming

FlightGear has, as always, been my main play of the month. I completed a five hour training sortie in the RAF Super King Air aircraft, which was fun. I also spent more time working on my Hawk T.1 aircraft addon, including adding display smoke.

Here’s a video of said smoke - https://youtu.be/OQ37L3GpO9U?si=0uYoe8Mep1HDpEEn

I have also done two new livery paints for the Hawk, which I think are actually quite decent.

👂 Listening

🎙️ Podcasts

In May, I listened to the first ten episodes of Wolf 359, I have listened to a load of episodes before, but I lost track of where I was, so I started again, and am really enjoying the listen.

👀 Watching

🎥 Movies & TV Shows

This month, I have done a lot of watching on Netflix. I started off the month watching Expedition with Steve Backshall, which was really enjoyable and opened my eyes up to all the undiscovered places on Earth. I then watched Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, a funny comedy, enjoyable and relaxing. I moved on to Vacation which again was another comedy film, it wasn’t as enjoyable as other films I’ve watched, but it was still fun. Next up was Bad Boys, funny, enjoyable, all the way through. After this, I watched the other 3 movies in the Bad Boys series, where I then watch the 2004 film Starsky and Hutch, before starting Fubar, a series about a soon to be retired CIA officer and his daughter, also a CIA officer.

Creativity

I have recently got back into doing pixel art. I am starting with a reference sketch of Grogu, which has been super fun and relaxing so far. I hope to finish that and then get back to my last project of pixel art aircraft.

✅ Goals

New

Redesign footer on website.

In Progress

Finish The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (144/200)
Listen to Wolf 359 (10/61).

Completed

Add an introduction to the homepage of website.
Sort posts’ tags and make it a lot cleaner.
Make a pixel bear for fun - inspired by my blog. - I DID IT

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!!!