Been quite all over the place this month. For a good moment I thought it was gonna be a month where I did everything but work on the Vectorizer, but no surprisingly I had enough time to do practically everything I wanted. Including helping out my parents, finishing a huge milestone in my Vectorizer project, dipping my toes into another Linux Distro, and even doodling a little.

Let's get to the news shall we?

~~Fanart Mention~~

Got some new fanart from @Twoeliz last month, and it's a super cute drawing of Harriet! (formally Rathrie)

Thank you for the kind gift Twoeliz, you're too kind! If my setup wasn't still in shambles I'd immediately draw fanart back.

I promise you I'll do fanart of you as soon as I'm back from my hiatus. Mark my words!

If anyone would like to see more fanart of my characters I've made a whole playlist collecting them

Feel free to notify me of any fanart you've done, so I can show them off here. Maybe we can create a tag so I can easily search for them?

~~The Family Stuff~~

Don't want to go too in detail with this stuff, but to cut a long story short-ish:

My mom invited me over for a weekend, but I ended-up staying for a whole week instead. Every time I thought I was done, my mom would just drag me back in with something new she just remembered.

Then after everything was done I was finally able to go back home and rest a little before going back to working on the Vectorizer. A week later I had to repeat the whole song and dance again, but thankfully not as long.

Overall, it was still a fun time, and it gave me an excuse to practice my Excel script-foo to create an interest rate calculator, and organize a time tracker I made using Google Forms.

Just fun ghetto coding

~~The Tech Stuff~~

I already said it a few times, but I finished a major milestone for my Vectorizer project this month!

Now the Bash script has been fully ported to Rust, and it's so much cleaner by comparison.

Though, I'm still not done with this project just yet. I want to at the very least implement the ability to convert ".ora" files to vector because no one (including me) would ever use the old folder method. The only reason why I even bothered coding the old folder method is because it's useful in a pinch

[It was also a good coding warm-up]

Ideally I'd have the ability to convert ".kra", ".psd", and ".csp" files, but I need to decrypt those and that may take a while to do. Just gotta take baby steps with this.

~~The Linux Stuff~~

Haven't had the time last month to set up a new Linux rig. I've just been tinkering with yet another distro in the last few weeks of the month, and forming a plan for what my next rig will be like.

For one, I've been trying-out OpenMandriva Linux for the hell of it. Someone recommended it, and since I was going to restart from scratch I thought why not go all the way.

And I've gotta say...it's surprisingly good. To give an example: my old Core2Duo machine I use to test these new distros has an unusual issue with the graphics card.

[The PC in question]

For some reason it just locks-up Linux after 5 seconds of use in anything but the bare-bones tty mode (it's one of the very few driver issues in Linux). However, OpenMandriva is the first distro I used where I didn't need to patch Linux with the correct drivers. It just worked!

[Arch, Debian, and NixOS all needed to get the proper drivers patched in]

The distro comes with KDE Plasma installed by default, which isn't my favourite desktop look, but I'm surprised at how snappy it ran on my old tinker PC. Last time I installed it my Core2Duo PC would beg me to end it all, but this is perfectly usable. Call me impressed...Still gonna gut the entire distro to do my own thing, but I legit wouldn't mind recommending this distro as an alternative to the usual Linux Mint.

So, now my next plan for my rig is to use OpenMandriva with DWM as my desktop look. DWM is a very unique desktop as you need to physically code everything you want in the source code of DWM which is written in C.

I mean I'm gonna rewrite my entire Vectorizer code in C when I'm done with the bare minimum...why not get a head start learning C with this desktop look?

I love being masochistic

~~Conclusion~~

Overall, pretty busy month last month. Wonder if this month will be the same. I am expecting to finish the bare minimum for the Vectorizer this month which will open the flood gates for a bunch of other side-projects I have on my list below, and a few that were too small to include.

That's all for now. Hope my ramblings weren't too long this month [I put those fancy tilde titles there for easy skipping], and as always:

See you next post!

To-Do before I go back to drawing:

>Finish the bare minimum for the Vectorizer

[65% complete!]

>Add more features to the Vectorizer

[0% complete]

[Keeping this separate because this is more of a long term goal]

>Remake my entire Linux setup

[5% complete]

[Long way to go with this one, but it shouldn't take me nearly as long]

>Transfer the new setup to my main rigs

[0% complete]

>Create my Neocities website

[0% complete]

[Gotta put my portfolio somewhere. Even if Newgrounds is perfectly fine]

>Attempt to fix a broken TV

[0% complete]

[It only has a broken backlight]

>Hack my PS3

[0% complete]

[Mostly just a bonus thing to do]