Because of this, after looking for some icons to put in my Miyoo Mini Plus, I decided to just make my own following the same style guidelines found in Arcticons.

Simple lines, 1 px thick and dots at 1.5px if needed in a 48x48 grid. and the icon itself being no more than 44px wide or long, at most.

That’s pretty much all I do when designing icons for the project, and it works out well. Except when it doesn’t, but Donno is there to help. 😉

Earlier today I shared the first bits of progress on my Mastodon profile. I used the Silhouette White Icon Pack by Dreambrace to know the resolution and style the icons should follow. There’s a repo with the available icon packs for Onion-OS in case you’re interested!

After sharing that progress, Donno, the creator and maintainer of Arcticons, allowed me to make it part of the project in a repository under the Arcticons-Team mantle! You can access the repo here.

After getting back from work, I ended up doing a many more icons, but there is still quite a way to go! According to the website, there is a total of 55 icons in Onion OS. So we are a third of the way or so.

Arcticons are made inside of a of 48px square, so I had to generate the square-shaped PNG files, and then add empty space to fill the ideal resolution for the Miyoo Mini Plus of 120x130px. I used ImageMagick to generate a blank slate ot that size and then put the icon in the top center, whic worked out great.

I’ll admit I was a bit lazy and ended up using ChatGPT to generate a code to do this for me, I did some modifications to it but still, better to just be honest.

#!/bin/bash

# Check if Inkscape and ImageMagick are installed
if ! command -v inkscape &> /dev/null
then
    echo "Inkscape could not be found. Please install it first."
    exit 1
fi

if ! command -v convert &> /dev/null
then
    echo "ImageMagick could not be found. Please install it first."
    exit 1
fi

# Create output directory
mkdir -p icons

# Generate duplicate entries sharing the same SVG
cp -v sfc.svg sufami.svg
cp -v sfc.svg satella.svg
cp -v md.svg segacd.svg

# Loop over all SVG files in the current directory
for svg_file in *.svg; do
    # Remove file extension for the output file name
    base_name=$(basename "$svg_file" .svg)
    
    # Convert SVG to PNG (preserving aspect ratio)
    inkscape "$svg_file" --export-type=png --export-width=110 --export-height=110 --export-filename="${base_name}_temp.png"
    
    # Create a new PNG with dimensions 120x130 and place the icon image at the top center
    convert -size 120x130 xc:none "${base_name}_temp.png" -geometry +5+0 -composite "icons/${base_name}.png"
    
    # Remove temporary file
    rm "${base_name}_temp.png"
done

# Delete duplicate entries
rm -v satella.svg sufami.svg segacd.svg

echo "Conversion completed. Check the 'icons' directory for the PNG files."

So yeah, that is going to be a bit of work, during the following days I’ll add more entries to the repo, and feel free to contribute as well if you want to.

This is day 48 of #100DaysToOffload, and post 16 for #WeblogPoMo2024.

I have been working for my University during the last few months, but I don’t really have to do a lot of the time, so I recently picked up on my oldest hobby, origami.

I love origami, and I’ve been meaning to talk about it almost since I started this blog, but I’ve not put much effort into even trying. But since I had done quite a lot of folds lately, and had already taken a bunch of pictures of them, all I had to do was put them together and organize them a little bit.

This is not a tutorial, Jekyll’s documentation is pretty decent on this topic, so I’ll just share the small changes I did for my use case.

My _config.yml file had these lines added

collections:
  origami:
    output: true
feed:
  collections:
    origami:
      path: "/origami.xml"

I am using the jekyll-feed plugin, which should already be used by your blog if you provide RSS feeds!

After doing those changes I created an origami.md file in my website’s root directory that served as a template. It has some metadata that is not really that important but this is the main thing. You can always access my website’s source code too.

<div>
 <table>
  <tr>
    <th>Model</th>
    <th>Author</th>
    <th>Tutorial</th>
    <th style="text-align: right">Photo</th>
  </tr>
{% for origami in site.origami reversed %}
  <tr>
    <td><a href="{{ origami.url }}">{{ origami.title }}</a></td>
    <td><a href="{{ origami.creator.site }}">{{ origami.creator.name }}</a></td>
    {% if origami.tutorial %}
    <td><a href="{{ origami.tutorial }}">Yes</a></td>
    {% else%}
    <td>No</td>
    {% endif %}
    <td style="text-align: right"><img width="210px" src="{{ origami.image }}"
    alt="{{ origami.description }}" title="{{ origami.description }}"></td>
  </tr>
{% endfor %}
</table>
</div>

Now all I had to do was create files inside a directory named _origami, add some metadata in YAML format, in between dashes, and call it a day. Like the following example.

layout: origami
header: Owl by Nguyễn Hùng Cường
title: Owl
creator:
    name: Nguyễn Hùng Cường
    site: https://www.flickr.com/people/blackscorpion/
tutorial: https://youtu.be/DExjwwnKCAY
date: 2022-05-05
description: "An Owl with a great 3D look, really smooth and clean looking."
image: /assets/img/origami/owl_nhc.jpg

So, anyways, its pretty simple to do. I wanted to get back into writing since it had been a while, so this is pretty much it. Thanks for reading!

So, social media has been quite useful for humanity, however, it has also become a big problem among people of all ages and demographics. Personally, I have been affected by it differently as I grow up and develop my thoughts and lifestyle.

The first contact I had with social media, was MSN Live Messenger, I used to talk to people I knew, play online games and of course, ping them constantly until I had an answer from them!

But I was just a little kid, and I only talked to family or friends from school. I was still inside this little bubble where I had no real idea of how big the internet could be. I also had a Club Penguin, but despite being in a multiplayer environment, the social aspect of it flew over my head at the time.

It was not until middle school, that I got an android device, I got Whatsapp, and got engaged into looking for apps and customization. At one point, I created a Facebook account. I was not allowed to have one, and I felt incredibly guilty the moment I did it, so I actually did not use it for years.

However, after I got permission to use it, I ended up pretty addicted to it, I joined different groups and follow random pages that were popular or that I heard from classmates at school. Some of them were fine, others were a little bit to edgy, and I was constantly distracted by memes and mostly useless posts. As I grew up, I started to delete old groups and follow more meaningful topics for me. And of course, due to all of this, I was feeding Facebook with personal data and ad revenue.

At some point I realized how problematic this was for my life. I managed to stay with good grades and keep up with real life shenanigans. But I still felt attracted to my phone and to Facebook.

I would like to say I stopped using Facebook because I started to use my phone and social media less. But no, looking back, the reason I did, was because I started to learn English, and I joined Reddit. I had heard of it for a long time, and it was actually pretty amazing. I started to see how most of the memes I saw in Facebook where born there, I got interested by the sense of anonymity and separation. How nobody cares about you, but the content being shared in the subreddits.

I joined a few communities related to my interests, Doctor Who, Origami, but I also joined a bunch of places full of toxicity and gossip. Yeah it was nice to see how news and memes came out here first, seeing how Youtubers got ideas for their videos and stuff like that. But at the same time, I started to be surrounded by politics, debates, conspiracies and a lot of weird things that I was not really interested in seeing, and yet, there I was. I am probably going to clean up my subreddit list one of these days, or just start from scratch with a new account. It is kinda amazing how powerful reddit’s Karma can be, I have a decent amount, and only because of that I have doubts about getting rid of my account, even though it has no real value.

At some point I also had a Twitter account, but I successfully deleted it. I have to say I only had it to participate in Giveaways of app codes and such, and I actually won a couple times, but well.

Anyways, after I grew aware of how most of social media disrespects my privacy, I ended up looking for alternatives, and I found Mastodon, which a social media app similar to Twitter, which can be self-hosted, so all of your data stays with you. Or you can join instances hosted by people you are willing to trust. The point is, there is no single centralized server where everything you do is tracked. At first, I decided to join a bunch of instances, since I did not know how federation actually worked back then. I have found some nice people, and I have been inspired to do things to improve my life, like making this website! Thanks to it, I have a way to share my thoughts without having unwanted eyes all over my data. Of course, anyone could scrap this and make some profile to identify me, but well, I am saying this willingly, without having to abide to any terms of service. Even if Netlify or GitHub, where this is site is hosted, have anything against me, I can at least keep all of my information locally and host it somewhere else.

Detox Day Log

Anyways, the original reasoning I made this post was to share what I was going to do during this day. Besides writing this blog, I have spent quite some time contributing some icons to the Arcticons Icon pack, while listening to podcasts on YouTube and AntennaPod.

Being honest, I opened Mastodon for about 4 minutes until I remembered which day it was, and I also opened Reddit for 8 minutes because I forgot again. But other than that, I have avoided social media, enabled Do not disturb, deleted some apps. I even decided to leave Nova Launcher, which has been my choice for years, and tried out Olauncher once again! I hid all of my those distracting app icons and ended up with a pretty sick looking setup, if I do say so myself.

After some though, I’ve also requested my data from Reddit. There is no way to export my data from the usual settings menu, but it can requested via this link. I’ve decided to finally delete my account. Having a history and social media points is not that important, and some peace of mind should be quite good.

After listening to the latest episode of Darknet Diaries, which is about the problems someone got because of having a good Instagram username. The fact that an account can be that valuable is mind-blowing! Thankfully none of the usernames I’ve used are worthy enough for someone to harass me because of them.

Finishing thoughts

So, I started writing all of this yesterday, during Detox Day, and this final words are done a day after. I hope this movement takes off, in my case, I did not found a lot of movement in my country and language, although that might be because Facebook and other common social media I don’t use are more common here. Anyways, I found myself having a decent time, but I have to admit I spend quite a lot of it on YouTube, but it was not that bad, since I mostly use it as background sound and, as previously stated, to listen to a few podcasts and long videos that are only available there.

I deleted my Reddit account, funnily enough, the exported data only occupies a couple megabytes, since it does not include the images and videos, just csv files and hyperlinks. I think I will keep most of the posts and comments there since they don’t contain any compromising information. This is mostly about getting rid of social media and less about gaining privacy, although it is a nice plus. I’ve also exported my Instagram data, and I might delete it sometime soon.

The journey has been difficult, but I am happy with my progress. This has been day 51 of #100DaysToOffload