pullstring
this could've been a button
avanier's journal
Latest posts
vexations
cue the grawlix
renaissance
This site is 7 years old and has gone through many iterations, from its Jekyll-powered days to a short-lived Squarespace trial to its never-ending redesigns after being liberated from template-/platform-specific restrictions and granted full creative control via transition to a custom static site generator. Something that hasn’t changed is its purpose, which is to be a place to document my…
oasis
Like many people, I rely a lot on the convenience of search engines not just to find sites and documents but also for little things like converting units and currencies, checking the time in other places, getting the local weather forecast, looking up word definitions, etc. But with AI now being prevalent in pretty much every major search engine, I find myself wanting to detach more and rely less…
medeu
Earlier this year, I went to Kazakhstan and one of the highlights of that trip was a visit to Medeu where I went on a cable car ride with friends up to Shymbulak. It was very foggy and the day’s atmosphere reminded me of Playdead’s Inside. That day I filmed and edited this mini, minute-long vlog of sorts that I thought I’d share today. All shot and edited on a phone. The sounds are just ambient…
gaia
Yesterday, I went to see the Bangkok Art Biennale’s Nurture Gaia exhibits, which brought a welcome end to the past three months’ AI-generated photography exhibit* at BACC. Here are some photos I took, all of which were taken with a phone.† The full exhibit features 76 artists from 39 countries and runs until February 25, 2025. If you’re in Bangkok, you should definitely check it out.
saturdays
I like Saturdays. It brings a much needed pause from a whirlwind of a work week. It’s also the day I go through a little reset ritual.
40wpm
We had a touch typing class in university — a mandatory course what with computer literacy being a core skill in this century — and the minimum speed to achieve to pass was 40wpm, which was a trivially low bar to jump over. I remember that class being just plain leisurely, like riding a motorcycle to keep up with cyclists. I could’ve powered through the tests to try and break personal bests (and…
totes
Playing around with multiset rewriting today using Tote. Here are some small sequences I made during work breaks hehe.
images
This evening, I’d like to share how media files are organised and rendered on my website.
italiano
In today’s entry, I will write in Italian without any notes or dictionaries. My grammar is far from perfect and vocabulary is quite rudimentary but I want to see where I’m at after having been casually studying it on and off for months. In the spirit of making mistakes in public to improve, here goes nothing.
spot
In an unfortunate coincidence, both my laptop and phone have defective pixels. My phone has a permanent thin waterfall of white pixels cascading down the vertical axis of the AMOLED display. My laptop features a black spot of dead pixels in the upper left corner of the display and it has been growing every day. At the time of this writing, these are more of a source of visual annoyance that just…
files
This is a post about how I organise my computer files.
vertigif
CSS has a media feature called prefers-reduced-motion which detects if the browser is set to minimise motion in web pages. This is beneficial for users who have vestibular disorders as visual stimuli can induce motion sickness.
wallpaper
I have a bunch of images I’ve collected from the internet over the years that I find æsthetically pleasing or inspiring. The trouble is, many of these could have looked great as wallpapers if they weren’t low-res or in portrait orientations. And so, inspired by mood boards, I figured why not use these as wallpapers by selecting a couple of images and scattering them on the screen.
barless
I recently removed the status bar from my laptop’s dwm setup.