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Meta
writing about writing
Hey! Two posts from me within a month of each other? Unheard of. Suppose I’ve got a writing itch and I’m all out of Gold Bond. Continue reading
ChromeOS To Go: Thoughts on ChromeOS Flex
You might have used a Chromebook, Google’s funky, moderately dystopian cloud-centered take on the netbook formula. If you owned one, you likely needed a lightweight, cheap little laptop (with pretty solid battery life) for school, light office work or entertainment. As most of these things are done reasonably enough in a plain old web browser, pitching a lightweight operating system specifically for that purpose isn’t too farfetched.
As the Gentoo-based operating system that runs the Chromebook, ChromeOS, is quite lightweight, it should be able to run well on anything that could run Chrome. It shouldn’t be too bad for an older computer, either: although aging, even a sufficiently specced 15 year old machine – 2010 as of writing – can totally run Chrome just fine.
There’s also a whole niche of Chromebook-inspired Windows laptops that came out in the mid-2010s, immediately stifled by stiff storage requirements and an operating system not designed for them. Out of the box, they’re effectively ewaste. But they have modern guts! They’re rocking UEFI, some Celeron with a generic Intel case badge, and typically fanless, with some amount of power efficiency! This makes them an excellent candidate for the ChromeOS experience.
I’ve used ChromeOS Flex on and off on secondary machines of mine, and I think it is pretty neat! I think it fits these cases pretty well, especially for users who aren’t as technologically savvy and just want to extend the life of their computer hardware. I’ll discuss this a little more later, but I think it’s worth some history first – because despite the somewhat recent arrival of ChromeOS Flex in 2022, this is not the the operating system’s first rodeo on non-Google licensed hardware.
The New HTTP Order
Happy new year to all our faithful blog readers! January is always the time for reflection and looking forward to the future, and while I do the personal talk on my personal site, I want to discuss the future of you connecting to this here site network here today. I’ve beaten this drum before, but I’m about ready to puncture a hole in it today, because I’m pretty sure there’s not going to be a drum to beat in the next few years.
I am seeing the death of the HTTP-only connection coming in the next year or two, and I am pissed. I will have to force HTTPS on somnolescent.net, something I have resisted at every turn so far, if we want to remain accessible to the wider Web. Think this is hyperbole? Here’s a nice throwback to ring in 2025—have a steaming hot marf rant to keep you warm in these winter months.
the number of the bulb: i don’t know how i got here
Hey! Been a minute, because it’s always been a minute when I write these. Can you believe it’s almost 2025? I guess I can. Merry late Christmas and happy New Year.
I have to say I’m doing alright, despite the fact that the sun sets by 4 pm. As always, I had set a vague goal and then didn’t reach it and instead did something else. Wisp hasn’t been published yet, fwd 2.0’s still missing some content, I totally said I’d post that novella and then I didn’t.
I’m not too bugged about it, though. I’d like to think I took an unexpected turn and am going down a different street, and I’ll get back to whatever I was doing later.
Merry Christmas!
Caby here to wish the other folks at Somnolescent (and anyone else who might see this) a very Merry Christmas! I hope today has been and continues to be good to you, and I wish you deepest thanks for how much more wonderful you’ve made my year. I’ll have something longer out sometime later this month but Cammy encouraged me to create a blogpost to show off this year’s festive group pic,,,
Oh, you want to see the picture? Of course, here you go! Continue reading
The Number of the Bulb: Cammy’s Greatest Hits
It’s almost midnight here, but that doesn’t mean I can’t still say it: happy Thanksgiving to all our American readers. I had a quick check of what I’d posted on my cammy.somnol journal this time last year, and evidently, I wasn’t a happy camper, but this year, I’m feeling significantly more content. Actually, this might be the most comfortable and pleased I’ve ever been during the holiday season. 2018 and 2022 were ruined by, ahem, suboptimal family situations, 2019, I was in Ohio getting shoved into closet doors, and 2020 and 2021 were stressful for the reasons it was stressful for everyone, but 2024? This year is ending quite nicely.
As I get older, I realize that I’ve largely left behind a pretty angsty, negative legacy as mariteaux, full of “people aren’t doing [x] correctly” and “[x] sucks” and “I’m working on this deficit in my personality”—at some point, a boy’s gotta be a little happier, and I’ve got a lot to be thankful for. I’m gonna ramble about all the things that have gone well for me and all I accomplished this year and am proud of, while it’s late and I’m feeling good and full of alcohol.
A Site Update Tracker (and Making somnolescent.net Slightly Less Obscure)
One of the things the group and I realized over the past year is that it can be a little difficult keeping up with everything we get up to. I used to write monthly (and eventually seasonal) recaps here on Letters about everything that was going on, but I eventually stopped those out of fatigue and a lack of things to write about. That didn’t mean that things stopped happening across the site network, though–it just meant the main way to let people know what was going on around here dissipated, and I imagine a lot of cool stuff has gone unnoticed as a result.
No longer. Right on the homepage of our top-level site, you can now check to see all of the recent site updates across our site network. Better yet? There’s a feed for your reader, if you’re into that sorta thing. And if you wanna talk about any of this stuff, there’s a place for that too now! Let me fill you in one last time…
touching grass
Hey! So 2024’s about three quarters of the way over and I fell off the face of the Earth again. My bad. Continue reading
Lighthearted fun with Minecraft Coder Pack
Back in the day, the only way to mod Minecraft was to open up the jar in WinRAR, delete META-INF, and then drag all the modded files into the jar.
Of course, this method has been obsolete for nearly a decade after the introduction of Forge (and now Fabric), but that’s what I grew up doing. Looking at all those seemingly gibberish .class files while trying to install the Aether mod for the umpteenth time made me wonder how I could make my own Minecraft mod.
I never figured it out, until now! Kinda. Continue reading
MoriHime Album Release
Alas, it’s finally freakin’ here. My fictional band MoriHime’s debut album is officially out!!!! Featuring J-pop inspired tunes within a variety of different styles. Varying from power-pop, nu-metal, j-rock and even eurodance.