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📆 04 Jun 2026 10:50 UTC +01:00
📕 1049 words ⏳ 8 min.
🏷️#Personal

This blost is going to (hopefully) be a longer one, but only because I’ve got a lot of little things to share, that would be worthless in their own individual blosts.

Website

Let’s start where we left off on this blog, I had just completed a rewrite of my CSS for this site, streamlining the colour setting and just general colour management (light and dark mode). Since then, I have since made some updates to /bookcave/ where I have been doing more reading, I have updated the data which is stored in a .yml file in my source.

The next change, is that I have moved the host of my website - so yes, that means a URL change. My website is/was hosted on Vercel at orbitalmartian.vercel.app. I have been very fortunate to be the first Polymathsian to try out the new Polymaths Pages which is a free static web host for Polymaths members only, a wonderful work from Amin.

Being the first to try it out, I came across a couple of teething problems, which Amin was all too happy to help get sorted (all of these were small configuration issues but now they are all sorted) - after my problems were solved, another user managed to breeze straight through and get logged into the system.

So, my new site is orbitalmartian.polymaths.page. There is no guaranteed uptime or stability, and this is a Beta service; Amin only put this together earlier today and of course, a new thing is going to have issues.

AuroraIV

Logging In

AuroraIV is my Lenovo Ideapad 110 laptop, running Arch Linux. I have written many a blost about the software (mostly desktop environments/window managers) on this laptop, but today, this section is going to be about the setup as a whole.

The way I used to login to my laptop was: 1. Power on laptop 2. Wait for SDDM, Ly, Gdm, LightDM (whichever I happened to be using at the time) to load 3. Select the desktop environment/window manager I wanted to use 4. Enter my password 5. Wait for the desktop to load.

This was time consuming as this Ideapad is running off a Intel(R) Celeron(R) N3060 (2) @ 2.48 GHz [from fastfetch]. So it takes a while to do a lot of things.

I have heard of people just booting straight into the TTY, so I decided to try that. I have got my ~/.xinitrc file setup to have the following.

# ~/.xinitrc

exec bspwm

Now, my process to get logged in is: 1. Power on laptop 2. TTY loads pretty much instantly 3. Enter my login credentials 4. Run startx 5. BSPWM loads in front of my eyes and I’m off to the races

This is a much more productive way, as it is a heck of a lot faster.

Window Manager

The last blost that I did about my desktop environment/window manager journeys was Chirp Chirp Chirping My Desktop, where I was using Budgie 10.10.2. I loved using Budgie, and it was running Wayland as well so the future thing. There was a part of me though, that missed the good old days (not that old for me) where I used tiling window managers. I have always loved tilers and always end up back to one, BSPWM.

It wasn’t my first window manager, but once I found it and got into it with a nice config, I haven’t really looked anywhere else.

So, in typical Orbital fashion, I moved on from Budgie and went back to BSPWM (as you can tell from the last section). I’ve got a cool config, which is in my dotfiles. Feel free to give it a try if you want.

Clean Up

I also have spent some time trying to clean up after myself. I am notorious for installing a load of software, using it once as a test then never using it, but keeping it installed.

I have been through as much of my system as I can, and I have reduced as much as I can. I had twenty desktop environments and window managers installed at one point, now I’m down to four (KDE Plasma, BSPWM, Sway and dwm) which is a lot better than it was.

Reading

In the last week or two, I have gotten back into my reading. I have read The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams, from 70 odd pages to 144 pages in just over a week, which is great progress for me. I hope to finish it in the next couple of weeks and carry on the progress to try to clear up my backlog of books to read… before I get anymore books.

Drawing/Painting/Creativity

In the last week, I have been feeling very creative, so I’ve been starting to do a bit of pixel art to keep my brain relaxed.

I have also done a ton of work on my aircraft addon, the Hawk T.1 for FlightGear, where I have done a lot of work on the 3d model, systems (code) and I have painted two liveries, which I am very proud of.

In the next month of so, I am hoping to clean up a couple of issues and hopefully get it into the default hangar repository so that people can download it directly within the FlightGear launcher.

Writing, is as always, a passion, and I try to write as much as I can, whenever I can. I havne’t done much, but I have been keeping my feet wet with it.

Conclusion

Life has been busy, work has been busy, but I always have time for my hobbies (reading, tinkering, writing, pixel art and creativity in general) to relax the brain, and keep me calm and sane. I wanted to save all of these updates for this one blost.

No this isn’t a Month Review for May, which is coming, but I just need to write it all up - it’s coming!

But, I think there’s nothing else to be said, so, that’s it for this blost. I hope you enjoyed, I’ll see you in the next one. BYEEE!!!