2026-08-01 08:00:00
Sam from TheTangentSpace published a post a few days ago about his participation in the Blaugust Festival Of Blogging. I remember this from seeing the #blaugust hashtag in previous years, but I never participated, so I thought this year is a good time to change that!
Sadly the founder of the challenge, Belghast, passed away just a few weeks ago, but the challenge lives on in his memory, which is really nice to see.
What exactly is the challenge about? From the introductory post:
For anyone arriving here for the very first time Blaugust is a month-long event that takes place each August which focuses on blogging primarily and has started to include other forms of serialized content over the last several years. The goal is to stoke the fires of creativity and allow bloggers and other content creators to mingle in a shared community while pushing each other to post more regularly. Above all the goal of Blaugust has always been to prove to folks that they can in fact sit down every day and create something fresh and then share it with the world. Posting regularly builds a community and in this era of AI-slop content, our voices are needed even more than we ever have been at any point in the past. Our hope is to create a nurturing environment where Veteran bloggers can help those just getting started and the cross-pollination of ideas can create something truly spectacular. Your blog gives you a permanent foothold on the Internet that you own and have complete control of, and that is a really good feeling in the midst of shifting trends.
Sounds good, I'm in!
Ideally one would write 31 posts in 31 days of August, but I'm not entirely confident that I have that much to say, so I'm going for the Silver Award, which is 15 posts in August. I think that's a nice goal.
So if you feel like participating, consider yourself invited. There should also be a list of participants available online somewhere on Nerd Girl Thoughts, but I haven't seen it yet. I hope it goes live soon and I'll link it here when it does. The community chat is on Discord which I find disappointing. I'd really prefer an open platform where I can at least read along without having to sign up with my birth date and phone number and who knows what else, but that's not happening here. And I'm not going to sign up for Discord any more than I would for Facebook or X or Truth Social, so sadly I'm going to miss out on this aspect of the challenge. At least the blog posts will be visible for everyone.
Ok, that's it. First post done already! Easy peasy.
If you're participating, send me the link to your blog, I'd love to read your post!
Talk to you soon :)
2026-07-31 08:00:00
Only the good die young
All the Evil seem to live forever
That's taken from the Iron Maiden song Only the Good Die Young from the Seventh Son of a Seventh Son album. I've been thinking of this lyric a lot recently as I keep seeing good musicians and actors, people who spent their lives bringing joy to others, die relatively young, while all the horrible people in the world seem to thrive and live forever. It's kind of depressing to watch and think about. So maybe let's not think about it too much and listen to some music instead, because while the world might not be so great right now, one thing I'm sure of is that fifty or a hundred years from now art will still be there and still bring us joy and happiness, while the monsters and the wannabe dictators of our time will be nothing but footnotes in the history books.
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2026-07-24 08:00:00
The Amiga turns 40 this week. I had an Amiga 500 as a kid, some time in the early 90s. And I remember being made fun of for having an Amiga, because PCs were supposedly so much cooler and better and whatnot. But the first time I visited a friend who had one of those amazing PCs and he proudly showed me his games with their EGA graphics colour palette and the PC speaker sounds I thought, are you kidding me? This is the thing you're going on and on about? Have you even seen an Amiga? I was truly underwhelmed by that. At the time it was released, and into the early 90s the Amiga was leaps and bounds ahead of the competition in terms of sound and graphics, and the more I learn about the history of Commodore the more disappointed I am that the company went the way it did. They were far ahead of the competition at the time, and had things gone differently they could be where Apple is today.
Unfortunately it wasn't meant to be, and Commodore turned into one of those companies that flourished for a while and then slowly withered away. It is what it is, but one can dream about what could have been. Maybe it's time to play some Amiga games this weekend.
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2026-07-17 08:00:00
You know what, I was kind of busy last week with my OCC project, and I was also building a website for a friend who is opening her own doctor's office, and so I completely forgot that my blog turned three years old last Thursday! Well I actually didn't completely forget, but I was convinced that the date of my first post was July 19th, while it was actually July 9th. Whoops. The human brain is weird, I still remember the birthdays of people I haven't seen or spoken to in 25 years. But then other, much more recent things completely slip my mind.
Either way, three years of blogging! I just started this one day on a whim, but it has unexpectedly turned into one of my longest running projects and one my favourite hobbies, too. And thanks to obsessively versioning everything with Git, I can go back and look at how the website looked on day one.
It wasn't great, I just used a default Hugo theme and I had no idea what I was even doing (as evidenced by the fact that the posts date shows up as July 5th, but the commit is from July 9th and that's also the date that shows up on the post today... no idea what's going on there), but it was a start. Three years later I'm building a website for a doctor's office, so it seems like I learned a thing or two along the way. So here's to year four, let's see what's going to happen!
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2026-07-10 08:00:00
This past week I've been writing a lot, first the Walkman post and then my IR sensor project. I've gotten some really nice feedback on both; the Walkman post in particular seems to have resonated with a lot of people, which is interesting. I wasn't even sure if writing a post about it was worth it because it was such a basic fix. But now I'm glad I did.
I'm sure if you have a blog, you know the doubts that sometimes creep into your mind. The feeling of "should I even write about this", "who even cares about what I have to say", "this is silly" etc. I have these thoughts too; a lot actually. But the answer is always "yes, I should write about it, even if I think it's silly" because you never know, your silly post about an old Walkman might brighten up someone's day, and if even one person enjoys it, it was worth it.
The lesson I keep learning is to not listen to the doubts and the negative voice in my head and just do it anyway. The voice lies. So thank you to everyone who's getting in touch with me, I truly appreciate it! On to the links.
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2026-07-09 08:00:00
Since the coding part is now done, I decided to solder the Arduino and IR sensor on a bit of perfboard, and then put it in a case. I don't have a case though; but what I do have is a 3D printer, so I'm going to try my hands at designing one.
This was interesting because I've never really designed anything before. I've always printed out models from Thingiverse or Printables, or if I needed something custom I kind of crudely put something together out of basic shapes in the slicer.
Today I thought now is the time to do it right and get into actual CAD design, so I downloaded FreeCAD. And boy does this thing have a learning cure, let me tell you! This is definitely not going to be a tutorial, because I really have no idea what I was doing there. I just watched a few tutorials and then started clicking around, and in the end I think I ended up with something halfway decent, even though I'm not fully happy with it. But hey, first try.
Anyway, here's the Arduino and the IR sensor, soldered on a piece of perfboard. I decided to put the filter cap in after all as per the datasheet, because why not.
For the case design I took inspiration from this iPod dock, which I really like with the rounded off corners. It also has an IR sensor at the front.
The board the Arduino sits on has a certain size, so that determined the size of the case, which I made 5.5cm square and about 2cm tall.
After watching some tutorials and a lot of false starts and swearing and banging my head on the desk in frustration, I finally came up with this:
It's not perfect, but I think for a first try it isn't bad. Here's my dusty trusty 3D printer building it:
Have I mentioned that I find 3D printers absolutely fascinating? You start out with nothing and then half an hour later you have an object in your hands that simply didn't exist before. Mind-blowing.
So here's the case with the Arduino board inside. It's definitely not perfect, I especially don't like how the USB port is just kind of sticking out of a round hole, but making this opening the right shape for the USB port and getting the position right is beyond my CAD design abilities at this point. Next time.
Overall though I think it turned out quite nice and from the front it looks decent. I made it in black so you can't see the inside through the hole in the front, which you would have been able to had the case been white (the first prototype I made was white, and that was the thing that was bugging me the most). Having some IR-transparent black plastic covering the hole like it is on the iPod dock would be ideal of course, but I don't have this kind of material, so a hole will have to do.
And so with this, I'm done! I know that wasn't a very difficult project, but it still went surprisingly well. I think what took the most time was writing this all down, otherwise that would have been a one afternoon project. But it's also fun to document everything, and I enjoy the writing just as much as the actual work. Maybe I should do this more often.
So now it's only Thursday, and the OCC still runs until Sunday. What am I going to do the rest of the time?
I think I'll play some games on Windows 98 to unwind and relax.