Imagine you’re back on your childhood and have these two friends who have been your best friends forever dating all the way back since the last winter, and nobody could ever replace them …at least until the summer.
One believes Barbie is the shit, the other is stuck in Hello Kitty. You’re done with that and already had your first gang banged pregnancy scare from the Polo team.
Each friend argues for the other to abandon their fanatism of their chosen brands of brainwash, or else they’re gonna kill each other. There’s no room for the other’s plastic beliefs.
One day the bickering between your stupid friends escalates to the point one is throwing rocks at the other in the head, leading to bleeding and early onset alopecia, while the other went low, and pulled hair from other regions, and let’s just say they won’t be needing a bikini wax… maybe ever.
You sit with both friends and hear their ridiculous arguments, they make no sense to you because they’re batshit crazy but you understand where each is coming from thus you understand it’s an irreconcilable difference, and understand that they’ll never see eye to eye, and much less they’ll see eye to that third eye on that slithering appendage you’ve grown so fond of.
So after another round with your spiritual councilor… and three other councilors now from the football team, calling for god, at last you finally have your cum to Jesus moment, and decide to intervene: you enlist your mom to go talk to them.
You tell you mom to make them see that both Barbie and Hello Kitty can’t hold a candle to the candle stick you succumb to your knees to prey on— I mean pray to.
But what exactly do you tell your mom? To force them to abandon their stupid ideas and make them super sluts, believing in only the almighty dick that moves thee world? Or at the very least moves so many right-wing-family-values-down-low congressmen, or senators, and of course moves you up and down on it. While I do think your idea is better, and I applaud your conviction; maybe they won’t be as well-receiving as you have been to men when you try to force your own thing onto them.
Wouldn’t you agree that the inability to compromise of each side and forcing their belief system onto the other is what got them into this mess in the first place? And now you’re trying make your mom meddle when it’s not her fucking place to do so.
Right? You must be able to understand this very basic logic.
Now, replace the friend that loves Hello Kitty for Gaza, and the other bitch for Israel. You are the protesters in the US trying to make the government (your mom) go fucking meddle. The rocks are the missiles, the pussy punches are the underground tunnels.
What’s the goal? What do you expect to happen? Religious people believe for real in ghosts. As it is, they’re unreasonable, but it gets “better”.
Religions generally are authoritarian hierarchies, have a fixed perspective, they rule with fear, they are violent, intolerant, misogynists, they shame people and isolate them which leads to exile, suicide, etc. They waste people’s time, strip their rights, or in some places strip people out of their living breaths. And that’s on secular industrialized nations. Can you even begin to imagine what it would be like in a piece of land that’s not considered a country by anyone, with murderous leaders in one side, and a criminal leader trying to get a superhero moment on the other; so hopefully his pending trial is forgotten.
When I was watching students protest on the news earlier today I was dumbfounded, or rather founded many dumb on screen… whatever. Don’t you have something better to do than force your leaders intervene where it’s none or their fucking business? What do you think it’s going to happen.
You have a aspiring self-obsessed dictator who also happens to be a serial rapist and serial liar. Proven to cheat whenever he get the change serial lying rapist running for president and your giving talking points to the crazy party with this stupidity.
If you want to help, don’t try to impose your will by walking around outside on campus and call yourself an activist. Get on a fucking plane and go fight the fight if you truly mean it. Otherwise just go back to class or to Tik Tok to finish training the AI that will replace you.
Back when I was playing with VoIP, I got a Cisco phone on MercadoLibre, an eBay-like site focusing on Spanish-speaking American countries. It thought it was too cheap so I thought nothing and just ordered it. It was used, but used enterprise gear tends to be better than cutting edge plastic-wrapped consumer stuff.
I’d have a fucked up enterprise-class device, no manuals, and maybe even a missing cable over it’s sealed-box consumer counterpart any day. Not the point though. The point was that this specific phone was insufferable. To this day I have not been able to set it up except for once briefly hooked to a memory-hungry controller hacked virtualized server with a license soon to expire.
Looking to make it work, I searched for a hardware controller of sorts. One of these ASA-, IOS-router things. One with a perpetual license. Without a clue of knowing what would work. Instead, when I stared at the blank search box on eBay, I just entered “cisco server”. Groundbreaking, I know.
Among the results, nothing seemed familiar, but there was a few that caught my attention. These were for the C200 line of servers. A dual CPU 1U hypervisor.
It looked cool, it has a lot of crevices and intakes in the front but it still looked flushed and sleek in silver tones. It looks a little like Xserve in a way. I knew that was not what I needed but fuck it, ADHD had already taken over. The VoIP craze was over, enter the hypervisor era.
The shipping was more expensive than the server itself. I learned a lot on the thing, soon more servers followed, as did the quest for clustering and hypervisors during which at some moment I landed on Unraid.
In the divine guidance temples Unraid is known as a figure god, y’know, like those you find on taxi cabs “for good fortune” and stuff. It’s not for that though, it’s the DIY demigod, which means a half god whose godmother is Demi Moore. You can’t make this stuff up.
Following the DIY spirit, they told me that I should have a picture more representative of my server for Unraid for its self-identification, a thing on Unraid. So I designed my first server drawing.
It’s loosely-based on the C200, I wanted it to be visually simple like the rest of the icons that come with Unraid, but at the same time have some way for it to be either amazingly detailed — which is sort of the opposite of simple — or unique or both. What do you do.
And then it hit me. Add an LCD screen. Because from afar it looks like a black line, I can get away with murder adding all sorts of things in there.
The display itself was based on this Sony stereo system that I somehow lost. I have no idea how because you just don’t lose something that big.
For starters, it came with two pairs of speakers and a weird amplifier thing that sit next to it that had no buttons, no nothing on it. It just connected to the main unit with a really short ribbon cable and required its own power cord. I don’t remember much anymore but, Sony systems have their LCD readings on this light blue color, almost like silvery and the LCD panel tends to have some orangy lines that cross the whole length of it. They look like heating elements, so I assume that’s what they are. I don’t know for sure, but since these devices are manufactured to be sold around the world it makes sense to keep the displays at a certain temperature so when they actually are energized it doesn’t shatter or stays unresponsive from being unable to move or whatever it happens there. Remember that LCDs twist/reorient some crystalline material in a tiny vessel so it obstructs or allows light to shine through.
This is it:
The display:
You can order it with a switch and a storage server, if you want (these were among the earliest versions):
Later I started them using them when asking for help in support forums to get some use out of them and to show like I care and I’ve done research and I’m not just asking “it broke now what?” expecting for things to be handed to me. Well, sort of, I use an existing design I usually end up modifying it beyond recognition or creating new stuff for the occasion and many times I get so in it that by the time I finish I feel as if all the time it took for me to be happy with the design I had spent writing a really long post even though I hadn’t written a thing yet and I end up scrapping a lot of things because of that. Not the designs though, just the posts.
I didn’t know… I like designing random diagrams this much. It’s feels therapeutic. Time just stops.
Once, on the pfSense forum, I was barked that my drawing couldn’t be read on dark backgrounds. This is when browsers started detecting OS theme on Linux. Windows and macOS were still a long time from doing that.
I updated the designs: a white border was added on what essentially is a design that details only borders. That’s bordered borders–if you got lost. The white allows for any color to be seen in any background but since the designs themselves are only visual aids, black had to go, it’s too bold and distracts from the objective/purpose. I changed it a shade of gray that without the white contrasting border itself can be put against full black or full white backgrounds and still be seen. Clearly.
Next followed a little perspective, shown in the first image of this post and I was only getting started.
At that time though, those were the highest of my skills. I started struggling to align two boxes together, so I think I’ve managed to learn a little something.
It’s so weird because I can’t draw on paper to save my life. I read or heard just in the last two days that this isn’t as weird as I think, but fuck it, to me it is super strange. What can I do. I guess the sooner I accept it it’ll stop being weird, huh? So…
[ shutting eyes tight ]
…
…
…
[ look around with one eye open ]
No, still weird.
So what’s this about, again?
I just scrolled up, and realized I’ve been going on and on with no explanation or goal whatsoever. It happens.
After those drawings I started experimenting and sometimes I’d daydream designing things. I’m a huge geek so servers, mostly, that I’d like them to exist, so I’mma put ’em out there for some big corporation to steal and hopefully make them.
If that actually happens, I’d like to point out that this whole site is licensed CC BY-SA v4.0 International, GPLv3 if it involves code. I encourage everyone to take whatever you want from my site(s), just don’t be a dick and come suing me for it later. Not that that’s gonna work in my country where it’s not hard to find a government office with a pirated copy of Office or whatever. That’s how much we they’ll care. But, y’know, better safe, specially since other people may still become target of these abuses.
I’m too lazy to hunt every design I’ve made, let alone export them. So I’ll keep posting updates and little batches of inspiration. After all, I’m not real designer, I can’t just design on command, I kinda have to wait for it. That’s also weird. It is, right?
I don’t know.
Anyway, I wish you all the head in the world—maybe I can get on that. Later. 🙂
While making a wrapper self-contained macOS app for a script, I went searching for some basic guidelines for light vs dark icons.
The host OS is High Sierra, there’s no dark UI in High Sierra so it’s only the menu bar, it was going to be quick. However, ADHD led me on that familiar journey so far off from where I started landing me on this page, with a little video showcasing that synthetic world Apple thinks we live in.
It’s about macOS’ design. At minute 7:35 (7:29… 7:— for context) the presenter says: “…and gives you this new look for free.” Keyword: (for) free.
I’ve been exposed to US culture long enough to know that whenever the word “free” is thrown around, it does not mean without cost, gratuito, pour rien, gratis or how we say in my totally-native-Japanese-and-not-the-lousiest-translation-I-found-in-the-Dictionary-app ただで, 無料で.
I won’t say it out loud because the wound is too Kyoto-fresh not because I know shit how to pronounce it and stuff. Bashful geisha emoji.
Free in English, I think all English but mostly North American, is emphatically saying that there’s a catch, or a chance for you to “beat the game” and happy US citizens and to an extent regular1 happy Canadians might try, and that’s fine if it’s like a happy hour, where even if you lose you have a blast but this if fucking Apple.
1: Regular Canadian happy’s US counterpart is not seen in the wild, it is very rare. It’s often confused with happy US citizen, or vacationing US citizen but they all have they same trait: stress. Regular Canadian happy’s US counterpart closest related species is coital US citizen. But so are every other counterpart in the world.
sensei v. — teriyaki muchas gracias
There’s no winning Apple. They forced the world into evergreen apps where all dev effort goes unpaid but it’s amazing for their marketing of purchasing once stays in your account forever. So we developed the most egregious and insidious tech in regards to privacy and addition.
And when that got old, we moved into subscriptions, to pay for the most basic, shit we’ve always have available on a recurring basis. e.g; Evernote, mail clients
You cannot escape it either, because these shitty devices need to be contacting the mothership if you have device tracking on, and now that macOS has a T2 chip and Activation Lock in it, it means there’s only one way of officially developing software for Apple devices, sure you may use your own shit before you get to it but nonetheless you’ll eventually will have to get to that point: Xcode.
Xcode, which happens to be an Apple product, along all of those other products policing what code that doesn’t make Apple’s own built-in code (i.e; apps) look too bad even thought they have unlimited reach over anything unlike your code so you can have Apple’s blessing (literally) to get published. After paying the fees, of course.
Apple welcomes every developer to run their web apps in its capable Safari browser. Mind you not extensions because those have to be written in Xcode too now so customers can conveniently find them all grouped with tens, even dozens others in a single leeching-developer-infested den in the app store where, when seen as a group, makes you reconsider using Safari.
Can you imagine if Apple wants to charge for design packs too? In-App Developer Purchases. Isn’t it already enforcing some stupid design guidelines? Which — to be fair — ain’t misguided; but Apple is since it has had no Jobs.
A long long time ago, I can still remember, how that music used to make me smile ♬ wait no– that’s not my story. Let’s start over…
A long, long time ago, I deployed my own searx(sic) instance. Listed it and everything…even forked it! The idea behind it (the fork) was to contribute in the only way I could so far—design.
Quick design recap: I’m not a designer.
I keep mentioning this post after post, I’m aware. But it’s for a good reason; I have been designing more stuff lately and thus posting here and there’s more about it, pretending to be a designer carries too much responsibility of which I want none. Thank you, next 🎅🏿✌🏼, no designer title for me. The thing is though, I just zen out while I’m on the artboard and sometimes something good comes out of it. That’s it. If it’s good enough to help somebody else, why not share it with them and let it be good for them—Right?
I liked the design I made, of course, I’m biased. But just as the list of designs I’ve done for other individual/organizations, I’ve never delivered any of them partly because of embarrassment and because it wasn’t code but mostly because it wasn’t code and I didn’t know exactly if that’s a thing (sharing non-code assets in GitHub repos. Plus I fear using Git because I don’t want to upload the wrong thing. The nomenclature is so ambiguous I rather stay off doing things by hand.
Anyway, my instance started getting blacklisted, I think, because searches were starting to take forever, and during hypervisor maintenance I just never turned it on again.
Fast forward to this week when I wanted to bring it up, but before doing so I stopped by the project to check how behind I was, it turns out, enough that I missed the redesign window, there’s little chances my submissions would be considered at all. That said, searx can be deployed by anyone, and I don’t see why anybody would be bothered to be given an few more options for their homepage logo—if they’re not using their own brand, of course.
Because at the end of the day I didn’t make it for me, I made it for searx. I respected their accent colors, plus added one of my own and a third with neither. Since with searx comes with a couple of these images, I thought they were automatically selected in response to the browsers’ own response to the system’s brightness/time-of-day/or-whatever setting.
That ain’t the case. So I scratch the first two I had designed and for a minute I thought about trying a neutral color, visible on most backgrounds, like gray, cyan, magenta. But those are sort of my go-tos already and I wanted black because I wanted it to be bold without being too loud (like cyan or magenta), so I just added a contrasting silvery border and gradiented the sh*t out of it so it looks “metallic but like it’s just a coincidence it ain’t really trying, y’know, maybe if you squint and take some molly” that’s was the explanation I’m told I gave. I don’t remember like that but whatever. To finish up the not-really-trying-but-behind-the-scenes look, it has subtle shadowing and highlighting so it jumps from the screen, but still looking flat, that’s the not-really-trying part I suppose.
All three colors are visible on just about any background.
In addition to the logos, I also created favicons in even more color combinations, they’re all pretty common so there should be something for everyone. I had a little bit of fun with the names so just ignore that. They will be renamed favicon.(ico|png) in regardless, so…yeah.
Normally I use Firefox, but I tested in Chrome and saw for the first time ever the tab’s loading animation circling the logo, it looks very cool.
Below is the original searx logo. It was designed back in the day during the great depression…I got after realizing that Google had came out with something that didn’t suck8, Material Design. I knew it was going to be the next Ubuntu orange the first time I saw it.
Just to clarify, orange is not a good color, it has never been. It just so happens that Ubuntu, like Google, had a big enough user base than anything less awful that the normally hideous things surrounding it, and like Google, it too had an allegedly free entrance fee, thus their stuff get amended into the bible and to a country’s constitution or whatever their equivalent is.
searx logo is OK, I think, for most people. I like the rounded font. The R could be wider but overall I think it could more condensed kerning1. I do have a personal issue the big X which is double the size of the R before it, it triggers my OCPD. I’m fine with an “X marks the spot” kind of situation, if some spot was indeed being marked with the X, then by all means, but in here, it’s so much bigger (and in color) that it kind of breaks apart the word into “sear X”. If keeping the giant X was crucial, I’d also add a second X in the proper size and (a closer) color to match the rest of the text, blur a little the giant one to make it seen out of focus or something, like some sort of shahow or projection from the X in the front. That’s just me though.
I’m probably not making much sense, fake designers rarely do.
Gray is a solid color choice for dynamically “lighted” pages, or whatever they’re called, and the gradient is nice because it’s subtle, kind of showing somebody out there was classy enough not to go with a contrasting gradient. Of the little shadow I’m not sure though, because it screams Material Design.
1: Look at har with them fancy words. Honestly I’m not sure if that’s the correct term for how squished together the glyphs are.
Designs
↓ DOWNLOAD HERE ↓
To get the files click on this link then enter your social security number and other fun details like maiden name, and in less than 48 ho…just kidding!— It’s a direct, tracker-less link to a fileserver3. Alternatively, they’re on Github (github.com/vitaprimo/searx).
↑ DOWNLOAD HERE ↑
SVGs and PNGs are included for each, as well as the original AFDESIGN (Serif Affinity Designer) file. SVG though the more arguably the more desirable neutral format, buf it doesn’t support many properties that aren’t a problem for PNG files. PNG files, on the other hand, we know they’re raster files in the end (despite some tricks Macromedia/Adobe Fireworks files had back then) so the whole document resolution was bumped up from the regular resolution of 72dpi to 400dpi.
Original twist
These are the first three new logos a year two years ago:
Refresh
On the (very late) December 2022 refresh4, kerning was tightened and hard corners on the letters’ quadrants were softened where possible for a roughly slanted/skewed rounded rectangle look/fit. The exception is the X because, well…it’s an X.
Favicons
The first three were eventually discarded. The designs are fine but they’re hard to be discerned on a tab icon where things are too tiny for shadowing tricks to work their subtlety.
strawberryupstream offspringgo cloverssex on the beachsatinwordpress tutorial cliché
3: BTW, if nothing of that raised an alarm for you, please get off the Internet and seek urgent Gullible Online+ON Help, it’s in the online aisle at help place. The + symbol is pronounced “more”. Ask anybody working there, if somebody says “oh, honey!…” and looks at you concerned, you’re on the right track. (…and that’s pity, not concern.)
4: two years later according to GitHub’s commit dates; SEARX is deployed straight from GitHub making it the safest indicator for this.
Domain name change and status of registration
Person switch
Among my mental ill, there isn’t Dissociative Identity Disorder. Speaking on behalf of a domain name/organization, the second person is needed. It’s a little jarring, though.
Originally SEARX ran under our actual domain, vitanetworks.link, and it was properly registered on the searx.space instance directory.
There even were some unfortunate times were it had to be taken offline which served to make us learn that instances reappear after they come back online.
Unfortunately our instance spent too long offline, it seems, so it was removed for good. On top of that, we’ve been switching publicly-accessible services to our email domain, Antipostal.com, solely because it’s more memorable than the real domain’s domain name.
Accessing the searx subdomain in any our subdomain will connect to the same instance. So far it has not had issues loading, but if there’s some sort of domain awareness/expectation, things might be bound to break.
We’ll abstain from registering again, since we already did once, just out of respect only as we already “took a number” ; it doesn’t mean that the instance will be closed, hidden, segmented, etc.
In the queue
Our edge security is blocking so much stuff, namely most image search engines, that there was some urgency into getting SEARX back online, plus a whole lot of supporting stuff needed to be created for it thus this last time it was skipped delving into SearxNG5, but we do want containerize the instance so its connections can be better managed by the network once it’s singled out, because as opposed to our last instance, this time SEARX is running on a shared host.
Additionally, morty appears to be running; the web tools show all connections are made through SEARX. But on SEARX, there’s no morty service (or filtron, though it doesn’t matter on this one because HAProxy handles that)
5: I have this script that I use to setup systems, vprep, it’s very useful to me. Scratch that, it’s extremely useful to me and I absolutely need it. I started writing in originally as smaller individual scriptlets right the minute I learned what a Bash script was, so you can bet it was rudimentary. I’ve become much better at it and I’ve rewritten it a lot of it more efficiently very differently as a new script that will eventually get the old name when it’s ready. In the meantime as a private joke of how I would never do such a thing because how lame it is, I named it vprepng. It made me laugh to myself every time it showed up in the VS Code palette menu thingy. But when I saw searx did the same thing, but like for real, yeah… that wasn’t the best. This is a project I really look up to. 🙁
Sensei’s Temple Announcements
Tantric tempura ki sightings and tantric tempura ki focosasibi anrikho will be cancelled on Fridays this month because of COVID restrictions. In their place we’re adding a brand new Zen the virus away workshop that is completely effective for COVID treatment. It has had a 100% treatment rate where it’s been met. Attendees will be required to wear a mask during the first 15 minutes of the Sensei’s teachings, or about the required time needed to achieve the basic virus free7 technique that has been passed for millennial.
