Update @ 6 Mar 5:32AM: I initially published this last night without checking that the images were properly loaded 🙈 😅 It had something to do with the script I had that ran before I committed any .md or .mdx files and changed normal quotes ('' "") that existed in the file into smart quotes (‘’ “”). The script was looking at Markdown-rendered images (ones I type like this: ![<alt text>](<url> "<title>")) and changed the double quotes in the part that was meant for the image title—which served as my caption—into smart quotes 😭 😅

Now this post should render as I initially intended for it to be… 🤞

If you wanted to know what it looked like before, I flagged it as an issue in my repo just so that in case I didn’t fix it immediately now, I would at least have it in my TODO 😂 Now it’s just forever (?) preserved in my Closed Issues¹ 😛

Thank you to those who let me know that my published post had the images not rendering properly! (Hallo Mike and James 😁)

Now… onto the rest of what I initially wrote 😂

I started playing FFXIV again after around 3 years of hiatus 😂 It’s been more fun for me to explore now because I have the benefit of playing it on the PS5, AKA I have a way bigger screen now to take in all the content and story and shenanigans that come with playing FF :))

And something I just discovered while playing with the PS5 controller: there are mini haptics when your character/WoL runs!! 😆 It was a joy to discover the first time I booted the game up and I was in a voice channel with friends 😁

The last part of the story I got to follow was after the Endwalker expansion. I kinda need to review though, as I am within post-Endwalker content still and I didn’t really complete all the other post-EW content before I took a break. I think I kinda overwhelmed myself then because I was trying to get more levels with all the non-combat classes in the game, which were the Disciples of the Land and Disciples of the Hand. There were so many things that you had to craft, gather, buy… It became such a chore that it was part of the reason I lost interest for a while 😅

Part of the reason for picking it up again was because I learned another friend recently started the story. So I wanna help them out with any of the dungeons and other group things with our other friends in our Free Company as a way to pay it forward, since they also did that for me when I first started out, back when I was also still streaming :))

I saw the Lunar Eclipse on March 3! I took a few photos with my measly (lol) iPhone camera. Here are some of my takes:

I’m happy I got to see it from our building’s rooftop. I would’ve loved to have gone to one of the free telescope viewings that were organized all over the metro, though. But I didn’t wanna leave the house, so… 😆 This will have to do for this year’s lunar eclipse that’s visible in the Philippines 😁

I had sooooo many things to do the past few days. It’s been exhausting.

You know the feeling that you wanna do so many things? And while there are ways to be more empowered about it, sometimes life events find a way to drain the motivation or the energy out of you. And some days, it’s hard to combat the down days, and you really just have to take a step back and rest.

(Doesn’t really help that news isn’t really the best thing to tune in right now, but I am doing what I can to be up to date with current events, and I am not happy with how things are going in certain situations. War is never okay, people dying is never okay. At the very least, I stand by that stance. But I don’t have it in me to participate in the online discussions with this as I am not as informed and don’t feel like it’s my place to talk about those things anyways.)

I’d like to think at least I still have some fight in me, and that eventually things would settle down a bit to the point that I could at least do something meaningful with the knowledge and experience I have. I also know that the efforts I’ve done so far wherever—at work, with extracurriculars, personal stuff—are being recognized by the people who matter to me, which is nice. I just need to shake off the feeling of wanting a bit more external validation and learn to be happy with my efforts because I did it.

Some days, this is easier. Others, not so much. But I’m managing.

… Okay, a little vulnerability here and there is fine too 😛 I’d rather keep the super personal posts here to a minimum, as a way to exercise some restraint especially as I have a tendency to overshare. I mean, I guess if I do want to do it, I would need to know what the consequences of those are, and be ready to face them.

I haven’t caught up with my manga chapters 😪 I think the format I have now on my website is being stretched to its limit, and I do have some fixes I wanna eventually work on in relation to this, like…

• fixing the way my manga updates get pulled into places like my Now page
• fixing how “Last Updated” dates are saved in my website
  • right now with the way my auto deployments work, the server rewrites everything from scratch, so even some of the files I didn’t intend to have an “updated” date get updated… 😅 I realized it after I saw the date in my Now page kept incrementing as I made updates to my other manga updates, but I wondered if the date there should be different instead 🤔 I haven’t had time to think about this yet, so for now I just reverted the change I did before. 😆

And aside from that, there’s also a lot more other issues as TODOs I have listed for my website that I have yet to get back to. I don’t know when I’ll be able to get through them all… I wanna lessen the number soon as the state it’s in now is kinda overwhelming me too 😅

I just saw this on my Facebook Memories post:

Just to add some commentary about the mirror selfie: it’s amusing to me how this is pre-Meta Rayban glasses (as I still was using my Go Pro and a neck mount to record my rides akin to a dashcam on cars) and also this features an old bike I had, when I was still on my starter folding bike.

I also haven’t taken mirror selfies as often as I did before. I’m realizing more now before I turn 30 that I really have to actively take care of myself, and that means I should change some of my eating habits and my lifestyle. That’s a bit more difficult to do as a remote worker and having my default as being a homebody that doesn’t like moving around much… but I’ve been trying new things so far (like kendo!) to get back into the groove of things.

Recently when I do manage to go out, I try to look good in the mirror to give myself a pick-me-up. Sometimes it works, sometimes… I need to change my mindset 😅

Okay, I think that’s enough yapping for now. I hope I find some more time in the coming months to continue making various changes in my website, and maybe even document a bit more thoughts on various topics that interest me. Life lately has felt a bit too fast these past few days, but I know eventually it’ll settle and I’ll also manage in whatever way I can.

Here’s the video so you can watch it for yourself (it’s just under 9 minutes so it’s not too long):

Watch on YouTube

Trying it out with my own old boarding pass

I normally don’t keep around boarding passes from my flights anymore as the recent flights I’ve had would just have the boarding pass itself on some flimsy paper that is similar to ones for receipts, and I haven’t really acted on the “keep boarding passes in a journal” task I’ve had in the back of my mind since the time I’d be flying more frequently than I did when I was a child, but after some scouring through my stuff, I eventually found an old boarding pass I could use as my way to verify how this works.

I took a photo of the old barcode I had from an international flight in 2025 from the US back home, cropped the photo so it only had the barcode visible, and sent it thru the same PDF417 scanner Rainbolt used in his video.

This was the result, with some info redacted just so I don’t have my full details laid out here:

M1SENIRES/CHI*** *****E###### SFOMNLPR 0105 137Y034B0129 3##>############ PR N

Immediately, I saw all the things he pointed out:

1. The code to note it was a direct flight (M1)
2. My full name based on what’s printed on the boarding pass (my first name is kinda long so it was cut off but it still had most of it there)
3. An E because I have an electronic ticket issued
4. The booking reference number for my flight (6 characters total)
5. The airport where I came from (so, SFO)
6. The airport I’m going to (MNL)
7. The flight number (PR 0105, because I rode with Philippine Airlines then)
8. When I flew (137 which pertains to which day in the year I flew, and 137th day was May 17 which checks out)
9. My seat class (I’m guessing Y means economY)
10. My seat number (034B which checks out)
11. My check in number (0129 so I guess I was the 129th person to check in?? 😆)
12. My passenger status (3 which when I searched online, I learned this meant passenger and baggage both checked in¹)
13. Then I don’t know what the other stuff exactly meant, but just redacted it for safety
14. Second to the last, could be just which airline I’m on (since it just says PR)
15. Then last, whether I’m fast tracked or not (in this case, it’s N, so No)

While verifying how to interpret the information from this barcode (as I particularly didn’t know what the stuff after the 10th item was initially) I also encountered this post from James Cridland also sharing why you should cover up your barcode.

A reminder to self and a reminder to all

Don’t share any information shown on your boarding pass online, ever.

I knew about this already before just to exercise caution, so whenever I’m flying, I’d clip my boarding pass in my passport as like a bookmark to the front page with my details so it’s easier when boarding. Sometimes it’s too long though, so I fold it in such a way that you’d only see it was a boarding pass, but the rest of the details are hidden within the closed passport.

Now with this newfound information of how easy it could be to just get your data from extracting the barcode² from a photo, I’ll make sure to cover even the barcode and only show it to airline staff once needed.

I learned about how much data is included in boarding pass bar codes, and wrote about it. Essentially: Don’t share any information shown on your boarding pass online, ever.

Yeah. Simple enough.

I caught up with the men’s and women’s single figure skating performances from the Winter Olympics 2026, which reignited my want to have my own pair of ice skates so I could skate freely whenever I want to (this despite living in a tropical country all my life).

It took me a while to catch up, honestly. Because I watched both the short programs and the free skates of every single athlete so I could appreciate more who won.

I did initially just start watching because I kept seeing reels of Ilya Malinin from USA’s video of him doing a backflip while on ice and also Kevin Aymoz of France skating to Judas by Lady Gaga with a floor slide (?!) and I wondered who was gonna win. After watching all the skating for the men’s single figure skating, I definitely think Mikhail Shaidorov from Kazakhstan deserved that gold, and Yuma Kagiyama and Shun Sato from Japan also deserved that silver and bronze, respectively. All their performances were captivating to watch, too. I think I’ll try to catch their next competitions in the future.

Same goes with the women’s single figure skating! Everyone was so cute and pretty and some of the performances were very emotional too. I found myself tearing up for some of the performances. While trying to catch up to all the performances of the women ice skaters—as I was doing this in between work this time around, which made it harder to binge—I saw social media blow up and everyone was fawning over Alysa Liu’s gold performance.

After learning more about her, I definitely did root for her in the recording I watched when it was her time in the ice. USA’s Alysa Liu definitely deserved that gold!! And also kudos to Japan’s Kaori Sakamoto and Ami Nakai for their silver and bronze. I super loved Ami’s reaction when she eventually realized while in the kiss & cry that she got onto the podium 😆 All the coverage about the women’s single figure skating was a joy to watch.

I’m still trying to catch up to the pair figure skating event, and I also don’t really know what the difference is of this one with the “team event - figure skating”—I just see and hear it mentioned but I haven’t really searched more about it yet—but eventually I hope I get to see the full performances of Japan’s Riku Miura and Ryuichi Kihara since I also see lots of reels featuring them, particularly the one where Ryuichi helps Riku off the podium by carrying her in her arms one-handed.

I attended a dear friend’s wedding and had lots of fun being there. I have an updated appreciation for infinity dresses that have long cloth for tying around for the top portion to have different styles with just one dress. I also now realize I need to restock my makeup kits so at least I can be ready for events like this in the future. I don’t really know how to do everything for face makeup—particularly putting on false eyelashes, the right stuff for “contouring” the face, knowing the right amount of brow makeup, to name a few—but I think my knowing how to apply on nice layered eye makeup and my eyeliner skills would be enough for times when I’m simply a guest to an event and want to look my best. 😁

This week was pretty busy, work-wise. We’re encouraged more to utilize AI in the things we do as designers, from doing research to making designs and prototypes faster.

While I do see the benefit it can bring to me as a UX designer, I am still very cautious about how I make use of AI, and I especially recognize that it makes me feel I’m getting more complacent based on the output (because of how much and how “fast” it can output stuff). I did briefly talk about this in last week’s weeknotes, and I have 2 things I have to add:

1. I recognize that AI LLMs can help speed up the process of producing more output in a faster state than if done manually by a single person.
2. While there is a lot of output, vetting it and double checking if it makes sense or if it fits the context feels like added tasks that I didn’t initially want to do myself, or feels like more work sometimes (especially if there’s a lot to go through).

I definitely still need to learn more how I could make better use of this new fancy shiny tool, in a way that helps me hone my skills more rather than make it more dull… but as of this moment, I’ll leave it here as I’d rather future Chi would worry about this than present me.

I haven’t really continued the work for adding stuff in my Anime list yet as the format I have set up so far is now feeling a bit more tedious than intended. I’m thinking maybe I’ll explore using a CMS (like TinaCMS?) for my personal website to maybe make this easier for me, but … I’ll need to do more research on that, and I don’t know when I’ll have time to do so.

Lastly, before I end this post, we recently announced at Friends of Figma, Philippines that we’re holding Figma Slides Party again next month! All the spectator tickets have already been taken (so far) and we still have some slots for presenters. I still have yet to collate the data properly so I can properly reach out to those who are presenting, which I may just continue on with later, or… maybe tomorrow after work hours as I’d rather just rest before the weekend ends 😅

Okay, that’s all. I might end up buying Final Fantasy XIV Online on the PS5 just so I can get the benefit of better graphics 😛 I did initially buy it for the PC, but… I’ll crunch the numbers a bit more before I make the purchase 😆

Maybe this time around I can update the note in my Contact page for my WoL from “on hiatus” to “active” 😁

I know its’s already past 12 midnight as I’m writing the draft of this, but I figured better I write this draft now then post it once I’m done—hopefully before the week ends… so the title still makes sense 😆—than forget about it the next day. :))

I finally finished putting together this post I had about creating a responsive progress bar component in Figma, which I initially wrote last week but only uploaded now because of reasons I shall explain here: I wanted to have moving visuals to aid the things I’m writing because… It’s kinda hard to explain the “responsive” part of the component I made if I couldn’t show how it functioned 😅

But, in order for me to do that, I’d have to upload multiple videos in my Mux CDN project. I’m already at 9 out of the 10 free videos allocated for my account, and… well, I just thought about it for a bit and eventually bit the bullet and got a pay-as-you-go subscription.

Initially, I was trying to look for a way to do this without having to pay any extra subscriptions, but… for now, since I have a @component/VideoPlayer.astro that makes use of the Mux Player component just fine, I figured this was fine for now. I could always just change my setup in the future if I really really wanted to.

Days after I wrote down my thoughts after I figured out how to do it—I tend to go in “rabbit hole” mode when something really bugs me and I feel like the solution’s just within reach—I also felt a bit awkward thinking about sharing it online. The whole craze now is AI this, AI that, something something designers are gonna lose jobs because AI!!! whatever. I have yet to put together a page that collates my thoughts on AI (as I have noted in my repo’s Issues tab lol), but all I know is that while AI could potentially make some jobs obsolete, UX design is probably not one of them. Why? Well… humans are stubborn beings. I’ll just leave it here for now, I’ll maybe expound on this when I get to that other task 😛

All I know is I’ve been wanting to make something like this in Figma since I started working with designs that have progress bars in them, and I’m happy I figured out how to make it work with Constraints. And I want to write about it on my blog, and share it on my social media accounts. There is a want to be perceived in that sense, but even without that, I would still yap about this eventually so I might as well just put it somewhere it makes sense, which is my personal website. 😆

This is also my attempt to write more about design-related stuff on my website (that has a .design domain as I’m writing this lmao) so at least some of the things I’m writing here about is related to my line of work. 😁

To touch a bit on reflections with the popularity of AI, I read these two articles (special thanks to Sidebar as I’m still subbed to the newsletter and occasionally I get the time to read through some of the links I open in a new tab after I go through my emails for the day):

🔗 AI is accidentally making documentation more accessible by Geri Reid

I’ve recently had to do something at work that was AI-assisted or just had AI integrated within it. After reading this post, it helped me realize that this process is getting me to write more meaningful documentation. Sure, some of it will be with the help of AI—a lot of times I write lengthy, as you can see… in other posts in my website… so I sometimes need the help to make what I wrote more concise—but I guess at the end of the day, if the intention is to make sure something is explained clearly, that’s a positive in my book, too.

🔗 I guess I kinda get why people hate AI by Anthony Super

I resonate with what’s written here since now I have more or less the same perspective on it. It sometimes teeters towards the more negative side, but I try to be cautiously optimistic about it regardless because I… kinda have no choice in my line of work 😅 It’s gonna be there and will improve whether I learn about it or not, so I might as well learn more about it and maybe I could have the opportunity to help make the whole experience better? Maybe? I’m not that smart to go deep into the research aspect of it, and back in college I took an elective on Artificial Intelligence—back when AI would just be synonymous with “machine learning” and “neural networks” and… that was mostly it, I guess?—but maybe in the future I’ll find my own way to sustainably use AI. (Those are words that might not go together for some people… but ¯\(ツ)/¯)

Last week, we also had a Water Cooler Session in Tambayan 404 that covered art fundamentals and art styles. Usually for these sessions, they’re recorded, so we’d post it on YouTube after it was done.

This time around though, I wanted to make sure the videos we upload have subtitles or captions to make the video content more accessible. I’m on Linux now mostly, so I didn’t have Da Vinci Resolve installed (it probably has some Linux port or something but I’ve never bothered to look for it haha). Instead, I made use of kdenlive, which is a “Free and Open Source Video Editor” (says so on their home page!)

I was happy there was a plugin for speech recognition and Speech to Text that generated subtitles from the recorded audio! I just had to properly set up the models that would parse thru the audio because our content wasn’t purely just English, but Taglish. I mostly just followed the documentation for Speech to Text stuff and used the Whisper model since that’s what fit our use case more.

It took longer than intended for me to get through this video and clean up the subtitles though 😅 but at least it’s now posted! You can [https://youtu.be/vEUacRtJN6Y](https://youtu.be/vEUacRtJN6Y “https://youtu.be/vEUacRtJN6Y”), or here I’ll embed:

Watch on YouTube

Okay, I guess I have nothing much else to say. This week had me moving less, so I do need to get back into exercising… and I have to catch up on kendo, so I’m gonna get back into it on Saturday. Friday is also one of the scheduled days I’m supposed to have workouts, so I’ll do my best to do that and start my streak again 🙆

I’m going to publish this before I go to sleep (at almost 1 AM)! lolz

An added note after I initially published this: I also found this Color game really neat! 😄 I eventually made my own shareable link, and just got 42 out of 50 😛

Play the Color Game

It was interesting to see that I would consistently make the color brighter than it originally is, and I’ll just interpret that as me perceiving colors brighter or more saturated than what they originally are 😝

Okay, that’s the only thing I missed for this one, I meant to include this link in this post too. :))

This post has a bunch of screen recording videos embedded with me walking you through some steps via Figma Cursor Chat. The text is a bit small when viewed initially in the preview, so feel free to go fullscreen for any of them!

A bit of a demo

Let me show you first how the finalized component works so you get a better idea of what I mean when I say it’s responsive when you resize it:

So now I know that if I set the component to the 10% variant, the fill is actually 10% and not some arbitrary width. When adjusted to 15%, then it fills up to 15%, and so on.

Getting the component

I published the component in a Figma Community File so anyone who needs this specific use case can utilize it: Responsive Progress Bar component

Why I made this

For the longest time, when I had to deal with progress bars in designs I’m working on, I’ve always wanted to make sure the mockup was as close as possible to what it was trying to represent. That would mean, if I were showing a progress bar next to something that said, Step 1 of 4, the progress bar should be 25% filled in and not some arbitrarily adjusted width based on eyeballing it.

It was a random nitpick I kept getting that I wanted to quell for a while. I know at the end of the day, what matters more is making sure whoever you’re communicating the design to understands what the whole thing is trying to represent. Whether the progress bar is set to exactly 25% or just a randomly put together set of elements doesn’t really matter too much compared to how it works when implemented in code.

Like, seeing a progress bar represented in a design mockup? The label says it’s supposed to be 30% full but you’re not sure if the width of the indicator equals what it’s supposed to be compared to its container? That doesn’t really make or break the design, so long as the developer understands how a progress bar is supposed to work or if people reviewing it understand that, ah, yes, that’s just gonna be fixed in the implementation.

Meanwhile, seeing a coded implementation of a progress bar with the label set to 30% and is incrementing upwards but the indicator isn’t growing or shrinking based on the shown value? That’s a bug and that should be fixed. (Ideally…?)

So even while knowing that, I still wanted to make sure the components I use in my designs match what they’re supposed to represent. I don’t really like lying, and not making sure the progress bar width is set to exactly the expected percentage width feels like I’m lying to whoever is looking at the progress bar in the file.

Weird feeling, but okay…

How I did it before

The previous way I did this before was utilizing Auto Layout’s properties. But admittedly, that was a very complicated way of setting up the progress bar component. It was trying too hard to be accurate always, as much as possible.

The indicator in the progress bar was set to Fill the width, and the right padding of the Auto Layout parent Frame would need to be set to this formula: <width of the parent frame> * (1 - <the actual percentage you wanted to show>).¹ For example, if I wanted to show a progress bar that’s 500px wide and 20% filled, I would set the right padding to: 500 * (1-0.2). That would equate to 400, which is 80% of 500px, but it’s coming from the right, so it pushes the width of the Indicator layer to effectively the equivalent of 20%, which is 100px.

And if I wanted to adjust the progress bar so it was filled in a very specific percentage—say, 59%—I’d just have to type the equation within the field and it would adjust accordingly. If I wanted to demonstrate how the progress bar was filling up, then I could just click and drag from the right padding icon and set it to the fill I want.

This initially seemed neat and all at the time when I did it, but I recognize that this might be too much to ask for other designer teammates—who just need to get a progress bar in the design, no matter what the fill amount was—to have to go into the Auto Layout settings for this component and adjust it by typing a formula in the Right padding field every time you needed to adjust the fill amount of the progress bar.

It did make the component lightweight in a way though, since it literally was just a rectangle wrapped in a Frame with Auto Layout applied, and you’d only need to adjust the Right padding value to adjust it. But it’s not that intuitive to someone who’s not familiar with Figma’s Auto Layout feature, or maybe someone who didn’t know you can type formulas into the fields to get the specific number you need.

So I knew I had to try and figure out a way to make a responsive progress bar again.

How to set up this new version

The short answer

The short answer is: know your Figma constraints.

The slightly-longer-than-the-short answer is: don’t over-engineer your components! You do not need Auto Layout for everything. You just need to set the horizontal constraints to Scale and you’re done.

The long answer

I’ll do my best to not make this too long as I initially had a very rambly version set up here but chose to scrap it because even I was finding it to be too long.

The initial Progress Bar component I was editing already had some variants set up to represent the different percentages it could be filled, from 0% to 100%. The only real issue was that if I resized the component, only the parent Frame to that indicator layer resized, and not the Indicator itself. It was stuck to the same width as it initially was set up to be.

I first looked up other similar component implementations in Figma Community to see if this has been solved already by someone else. I took a peek at Ant Design components and Lightning Design System Web Components, but the former had the same initial issue as I did, and the latter’s solution wouldn’t work if the Indicator was filled with a gradient since it relied on Auto Layout and toggling the fill of sectioned rectangles that fill up the whole progress bar. It only works for solid-filled progress bars.

I also knew I couldn’t just outright replace the component in our Design System to my initial version because, again, I recognized it would be too complicated to get other designers to use it, plus everyone would’ve had to update the Progress Bar components previously used if ever.

In my previous work, we were using a progress bar to indicate the total amount of credit you had for your account. So I felt like showing a more accurate representation of how much the user had left made more sense then.

Going back to the use case in my current work, the set percentage variants were enough for our setup since we don’t have to be super particular about the fill of the progress bar.

So now I’m trying to update the existing component, but kept scratching my head as to how to set it up.

I had a feeling Constraints did have something to do with it, but for some reason it didn’t occur to me to just try and set the left and right constraints to Scale to get it to work. Initially I kept trying to attach it either to the left only or right only, or both, since I thought that by setting it up as L + R, the left side should always be attached to the left side where it is now—AKA at x=0—and the right side of the indicator would grow and shrink with its parent container.

So when I saw this behavior where the right side would just keep growing, I was stumped for a while because it didn’t make sense to me. I thought that L + R and Scale could be interchangeable, because previous observations got me to think this is how it worked. But I guess there is a reason why it’s different if you set it up as Scale or if you set it up as attached to the left and right sides; the former is how I initially thought L + R would work, and the latter meant Figma would make sure the right side of the Indicator kept its position the same in relation to the right side of the parent Frame.

The first time I figured out Scale was the answer, it was already almost 6pm—meaning I was already working outside work hours, as I normally only worked until 3–4pm—and I think I was at my wit’s end at the time. The relief I felt when I saw it work after setting it up in the correct way was just like a knot was released and I could relax now.²

Parting thoughts

I know what I did was arbitrary or wasn’t really something that would make or break any design I’d be working on. At the end of the day, what matters more in this context is for the components to serve as the designer’s shared language with developers and other people in the company. And sometimes that can be achieved by just manually setting this up instead of the amount of time and effort I put into making this work.

But despite being aware of that, the urge was still there in me to “fix” it, or set this up. And now I’ve shared it with my teammates; I don’t know if they’ll care that the component can now be resized and it’ll still communicate the same thing, that it’s filled up to the certain percentage based on the selected variant, but at least now I know that when they use it in their designs, if I see it, I wouldn’t feel the urge to “fix” it anymore. 😆

On my end, I’m also doing my best to learn to let things like this go, especially if it ends up eating more time than my actual work tasks. But for this specific case, I’m happy it only took me an afternoon to figure out 😝 At least I didn’t seem to waste too much time? haha

Whereas if I do the same things on my work Macbook… I do wonders. I’m super fast with editing things, I know which keyboard shortcuts to interact with, and the trackpad makes it significantly easier to interact with the canvas, be it zooming in and out or panning around the area.

It feels a bit weird because I wanted to have a clear separation of work and my personal + extracurricular stuff with my devices. But then again, even I don’t follow that same rule, considering I’m logged in to our work Slack on my personal phone…

I guess this is now just a testament to how certain ways of interacting with devices work better on some programs than others. I guess the same can be said for coding and writing (or typing), where it’s better to do it with a keyboard that’s better set up for long periods of typing, and the keys are in a relaxed state, with an ergonomic setup and such.

Design does need me to use the mouse more often than I normally do when I’m just browsing the web or I’m coding something on my website. There are things only trackpads can help me do, and there are things that having a nice keyboard and ergonomic mouse help me do well, too!

For now, I’m resigned to the idea that I’ll just have to sometimes mix my device usage like this, and be thankful that my access to a Macbook isn’t as restricting as it could be in other work setup situations. And I still do take note on separating time for work tasks and time for extracurriculars.

That’s all! That was a random thought bubble that I just wanted to lay out somewhere. My blog or my personal website² is the best place for this 😁

Anyways! Another week has passed. It’s now February. January was A Month. Truly. And this week was… also A Week in its entirety, man. Started off okay, but… yeah. I’ll just keep to other social media accounts for the mushy shit, don’t wanna “pollute” this place too much yet with my negativity reflections that may hint that I need to take a break, or just re-learn to relax.

Anywho, I did have some stuff I wanted to share for this week’s weeknotes.

I was initially amused with seeing other friends on Facebook posting a weeknotes-esque thing on a regular basis. I was thinking to myself, “Wow, they’re also doing the same thing I’m doing (right now)!”

Then I noticed a pattern between the weekly update of two friends. They were both following an acronym to use to head the sections they would post about—R.E.P.O.R.T., which I eventually learned (after a quick Google search) that it meant: “Reading, Eating, Playing, Obsessing (over), Recommending, Treating”. Apparently it’s from a TikTok trend making use of the photo slideshow feature there, though I guess videos can pass, too.

I find it amusing that sharing a weekly update is something that does become trendy from time to time, albeit for some there might be some criticism included because of what it propagates, but I don’t really care about that if the person doing it is in it for the fun. Like, you do you.

I recently started kendo. I attended my first session, which was more of an orientation for beginners, last Saturday and I’m attending the next one tomorrow. Initially I was thinking I wasn’t gonna get a shinai yet, but after the session, they were taking in orders, and… I figured it would be a good way to get myself to commit to attending more classes, because I’d have less excuses to not go. 😆

Though funnily enough, I ended up winning a free shinai during the Welcome Dinner the Metro Kendo Club organized that same night after practice. There was a game organized by some of the members—both of them my friends 😆—and all beginners were invited to participate to join. The goal was to be the first to give the correct answer, and the questions all revolved around the things we just learned that day, with some coming from the welcome guide that includes a list of Japanese terms normally used in practice. Some basic ones like how to count from 1-10, to things specific to kendo like れいrei¹ to bow, そじsoji for the act of cleaning the dojo usually before and after practice, and I forgot the rest of the questions asked :)) It was also funny during this time that our senpai was giving us clues through the form of coughing then saying the word, since he was right behind us while we were all standing (it was in a restaurant and there wasn’t much room for us to all be standing while doing this activity 😆). That’s how I eventually won the challenge when I guessed the word soji, and also because I associated the word with my friend’s cat whose name is Soju. 😝

I didn’t really get to take much photos then, but it was a nice experience nonetheless and I’m looking forward to attend the next sessions. Hopefully the lessons I learn here too help me get more physically and mentally fit, as the concepts in kendo seem to also be applicable to daily life challenges.

Speaking of physical fitness, I also recently started exercising again after so long. Personally, this was something I planned to do again last year, but… I let life take over instead of the other way around, and ultimately I just really didn’t set aside time for it. It’s gonna be a hard habit to (re)form again, especially now that I don’t go out as often as I used to given I work fully remote, but I’m trying to not put too pressure on myself and just remember to do it, then I can focus on the rest of the day. (I’m actually supposed to be exercising today… I’ll do it after I publish this post hahaha)

I also recently realized as I talked to a friend about our personal websites that… I don’t have my design portfolio yet on here. 🙈

I’ll just… queue that in the list of things I wanna add on my website. It’s not really a priority right now, honestly :)) Also kinda shy with some of the work I’ve done before, not really knowing if it’s worth posting or something… But I guess there is merit to me documenting these again and giving them a spot in my website with its growing list of pages. 😁

Okay, I shared everything I wanted to share again today. So far I am enjoying putting these together, whether someone else reads it or not. The audience of this may very well just be future me if I decide to look back at past posts in the future.²

Since December 2, 2025, I’ve been opening my PC and booting into my Linux partition every time. I’ve never had the need now to log in back into my Windows partition to do something.

It’s super fast to open my PC now

Man, what have I been missing all this time! I just turn my PC on, and after a minute or so, I can start using it! 🤯 Revolutionary feature. 😆

Back then on Windows, I’d have to press the ON button on my PC, then I walk around for a bit or just use my phone as I wait for everything to load. Sure, I could minimize that boot load time by lessening the number of startup apps, but even then, I’d still be spending time opening the default apps I use, which still takes time.

Now I still have some startup apps set up—it’s just my default browser (Zen), Vesktop, then I open Telegram and it’s done. My default apps are all set up.

I don’t remember how long it took to get everything loaded back when I was still on Windows, but I just know that now with Linux I don’t even have to worry about that. Everything I need gets loaded quickly.

Coding now feels more seamless, it makes more sense

Back in Windows I had to deal with wsl2 and was also technically using Linux within Windows for my coding needs anyway, so now that I’m actually on Linux and I’m just doing things the same way I’d do them on my work Macbook (which is just straightforward, no need to install any other settings or needing to struggle with Windows specific hiccups) it just feels right. Things just run. I don’t have to really think about things too much.

It doesn’t feel as daunting to use Linux anymore

I remember around 10 years ago, when I was playing around with the idea of having Linux installed on my laptop in college then, I knew I wouldn’t be able to do the things I normally could do just fine in Windows before. Mostly this was due to the supposed steep learning curve I thought I needed to go through to deal with Linux quirks, and back then the only Linux distro I knew about was Ubuntu (and Lubuntu 😆).

Windows to me 10 years ago felt a bit like how I feel now with my Linux setup on CachyOS. I can just install whatever I wanted on my PC to try it out, and if I didn’t like it, I knew how to remove it.

I guess I can chalk this up to experience and me gaining more knowledge as I got older, since I was less knowledgeable about how computers worked back in college—since I was still learning about them—versus now that know a bit more than before. I also think Linux has improved its overall “onboarding flow” and it’s made it easier for more people to hop on the Linux train.

Gaming is good, maybe just need some extra settings but it’s alright

I don’t really play any games that need any finicky Windows specific settings, and thankfully having a console at home means I don’t always have to game on my PC. (But, for the record, I totally can, and I do 😆 I just have more options now 😁)

I’ve played Umamusume: Pretty Derby on my Linux and it’s been a good experience, more or less feels the same with when I’d play it back on my Windows partition. I’m happy to also see that Cyberpunk 2077 is something I can play while on Linux, because back then, this was something unthinkable for me. Linux had the air of being just for coding, or just for work, not for fun and games. Maybe there were some fun stuff that was done thru open source projects… but not like how it is now where there’s now way more things to explore and tinker with.

More and more people are talking about Linux

Maybe discoverability also improved for some of the other programs or apps that can run or do run on Linux platforms. I just hear about it more now online and within my circles. Back then, I knew maybe 1 or 2 people who were Linux mains? But now it feels like that number has grown to maybe more than 5 😆 It’s still not a lot, sure, but definitely an improvement!

And with more and more people talking about how to get into Linux, what distro is best for what use case, Valve and Steam pushing the envelope for gaming on Linux with their Steam Deck updates and such, and just everyone else continuously making and building cool shit people can use, it feels nice to be part of this wave of people adopting this piece of technology that has been a part of all our computing history.

I hope more of my friends consider going into Linux. I know it’s not for everyone, and there is a learning curve to using it, but so is a new Windows update or a new Mac update. At least now Linux is catching up to that idea of having everything set up and just having them work out of the box.

It feels fun and refreshing to not have to struggle just to open a single program. I hope more people experience this joy, and hopefully Linux just gets better and better that more and more people will consider trying it out, like I did a few months ago 😆

Update: it works! Here’s the post on Mastodon (via social.lol):

I’ve now subbed to Echofeed Pro 😁 Though I guess for the meantime that just means my posts get auto posted on Mastodon and Bluesky, and… no where else for now. Maybe when I have the time in the future, I’ll explore the web hook option for other things maybe 🤔 Don’t really what I’ll do with it, but that’s for future me to figure out 😝

Been thinking of subbing too, but I wanna try it out first as it is before I set up the rest :)) Been manually formatting my posts on different social media platforms I’m on when I have a new blog post, I’d rather not think about it too much (because… I sometimes overthink it and feign posting because of whatever reason my brain came up with at the time).

Update: This initial test worked! Though at the time I didn’t know that I could set up <summary> tags in the feed.xml yet 😆 Now that I’ve gone through Echofeed’s Help Docs for Variables… I kinda feel a bit silly for taking this long to figure it out 😅

The more updated version (and the one with the format I want) can be seen in the next blog post!