It's back to Segoe UI for me! Yes, in another installment of The Walking Dead, Redmond emerges from the wilderness when we would have sworn we put him down! And then from some sort of parallel universe, a worm hole, or in a crossover episode does that Klingon hop over from the other side, too!

It's for the best. Late last night, I was all sorts of flustered with Cricut. Perhaps it wasn't my finest hour for long gone are the days when my late nights were nowhere CLOSE to designing T-shirts!

I set up a virtual Windows 10 environment on my Linux box that left me with a distracting, user experience. It made me feel like I was 331 lbs again! I tried to trim things down within the OS; I added a few CPU cores and could only pass out another 500 MBs of RAM—this laptop isn't exactly jacked for that sort of thing! I probably could have made it work if I pressed, as years ago, I had success with using USB devices on a virtual system (though I wasn't about going to keep my fingers crossed for any sort of Bluetooth functionality).

I was gonna run with it, until this morning when I was running APB against my phone, wiping out all sorts of bloatware nasties: Samsung, Verizon and Google. I gotta admit, it's a high to delete the Google Play Store; I mean, if there was ANYTHING that Google would frown on me deleting....I got to the point when I even blew up the MMS app (wasn't my intention). The whole thing got me asking, "what am I doing?" Just because I can doesn't mean I ought to invest the administrative overhead in doing so. It's the whole scarcity of time bit here. To what end, really?

I'm feeling pretty good: after a weekend wrestling match with Windows 10, I return to Uma. I let the fear of creating a new, Inkscape-to-Circut workflow alter what I really want to do. Of course, I never run Microsoft in a vacuum for that third wheel of Google presses his face against the glass. And YES, I've written WAY too much on this topic, so I'll end ALL discussion on it for the REST of this year because I have CAST my Google account out of my life! LET THE COUNTDOWN TO MY MARKED-FOR-DELETION VEHICLE BEGIN!

May my companion reach Suto'vo'qor to battle aside with its beta elder! Long were we travelers together.

I'm kinda stoked: I tore haphazardly through the fonts on my laptop and ths OS still seems to function! Fonts are one of those things that can get under my collar! Some rapture me in delight—like Benguiat; then there is Comic Sans, a font that ought to be pushed off my platform onto the oncoming deletion train!

For whatever reason, font removal isn't as much of a nonissue as it really ought to be—fonts are just clothes for text! Anyway, I got my inspiration from this 2019 forum post (a little risky since it's from an earlier OS).

Right now I got this:

$ du -d 2 /usr/share/fonts
4316	/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ubuntu
4244	/usr/share/fonts/truetype/liberation2
2096	/usr/share/fonts/truetype/liberation
2824	/usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu
13488	/usr/share/fonts/truetype
13496	/usr/share/fonts

(and of course, I ran this thereafter and let the hilarity ensue:)

$ sudo fc-cache -fv

...and I've got an armload of Google Fonts waiting in the wings to drop in /.local/share/fonts with some choice beauties off of DaFont and 1001 Fonts.

...which, when you combine THAT with the earlier bits on fonts and Cricut, you'll get a sampling of what's going on in my head: this past weekend I finished up my first t-shirt for my upcoming racing schedule! It came out AWESOME! I look forward to sharing it on October 31. I like its content & context, something I hope to hit for all 7 races this year. I'm already thinking of doing something similar for each month of 2022.

To everyone he meets,
He stays a stranger.
With every move he makes,
Another chance he takes...

In my last post, I wrote how I submitted to Big Tech's hegemony. It was never set well within me; my phone and laptop were no longer my own; prowlers sifted through my things. I bristled—and yet, if I'm adopting the Cricut universe (AND I REALLY HAVE), shouldn't I bend the knee to the cybernetic monoliths?

Last night, after updating, installing, loading tools, enabling a theme, and cleaning up Windows 10 with stuff like the ever-helpful community version of Bloatbox, it hit me that on a subconscious level, I had spent HOURS molding Windows 10 to look and function like Linux Mint 20.2 Cinnamon. When I took a step back and saw this, I laughed and knew what had to be done. And since Inkscape runs more smoothly on Linux, I would only need the MS/Android/iOS software to connect to the hardware and ignore the Cricut editor's limited-functionaity-with-a-high-dollar-price-tag-for-content app. I would find a way to make the connectivity work even if I had to grab a Microsoft test VM (I would later apply Cricut's iPad app).

Now, I'm not a strong Inkscape user. I've always been more of a raster graphics guy: Gimp, Photoshop, Jasc Paint Shop Pro and a litany of others. It amuses me that I spent more time with an application like Inkscape when I was 12-14 than I did in all the years thereafter. I just looked into it: CorelDRAW still exists these days; it's like a taste of a lost childhood memory, one of the few, remaining vestiges of a childhood-to-adulthood transition in a backdrop of commercial printing...

(I miss the aroma of commercial printing ink, something that once was as common as smelling supper before a family meal.)

While vector graphics aren't a strength of mine, it's gonna be in my wheelhouse soon. On YouTube, I ran across Inkscape Ultimate Quickstart Guide for Beginners: How to Use Inkscape Course + Tools Tutorials; it seems to provide a promising overview for me to explore further.

My time on Windows wasn't a complete loss for I found a fun theme for Chromium-based browsers: Cyberpunk. Run it! It flows naturally with my current site design.

And yes, I'm back on email with my own domain name, something I really enjoy! I really do prefer Tutanota over ProtonMail (CLEARLY more than Gmail). Knowing that I've paid €12 for the ENTIRE year and I'M DONE is a comfort, compared to the monthly $5 hanging over my head each month with PM.

Lastly, I share this clip off of YouTube. I ran it on my TV last night as I worked. It is mesmerizing and analogous to 2020's meditation work. This FEELS like an Expedition.

YouTube Link