ReduxFlakes Blog

Yeah, here we are again, a new revamp/redesign/rewrite, however, I am happy and proud of this one, so let's get to it.

For the people that have seen the older revisions of this site might have seen already that the redesign is not that huge, which is true, most of the CSS is still the same and the general structure of the site is similar. This is because the older layout/design wasn't that bad, but there were problems, mainly the code and the folder structure, which were horrid (and still are to a certain point) and demotivated me to keep working on it. This new design is much cleaner, both visually and code wise. The templates are more modular (especially with the new sidebar) and the content has, generally, better structure.

Another major change is the color scheme. I was using gruvbox, and even though I still like it I missed Catppuccin a bit, so I decided to use, and it looks great!

One of the things that hasn't changed a lot is the navigation, I think I've hit gold when I decided to do this type of navbar/menu, so I decided to stick with it, however I did some upgrades, mainly improving the design (necessary because on mobile the hyperlink hitbox was to small) and cleaning up some of the Nunjucks and frontmatter code to make it simpler to add new pages.

Different from my other redesigns, there is new features, mainly the sidebar I talked about earlier but mainly the stuff that it contains: the Last.FM widget and the to-do list that tracks the current progress of the site (spoiler: it will never reach 100%).

There's also the improved homepage and improved projects page.

Outside of working on this website, I've been working on other projects, mainly SurfScape, which I recently bought a domain for (surfscape.eu) and the Celer toolbox for Windows, which I'm sloooowly porting from WPF to WinUI 3 with surprising success!

So this is it, the long awaited redesign I promised months ago that should've been done in less than 2 weeks.

That's all for today, I'll promise that this time I'll update the site with new stuff frequently.

Thanks for visiting and reading!

I've once again redesigned the website, why? I don't know, but it does look cooler now I guess? I hope so... Anyway welcome to the new site, new features and hopefully new content soon!

I don't know what to write so you could check the changelog page to know about the new changes while you are here.

Bye bye!!

Welcome back again! I've been a bit lazy on updating this website, unfortunately there's been a lot of things happening, from working on other projects to school work (tests and presentations) and I haven't had the time to work on this website (it's my fault because I'm addicted to YouTube 😔).

Some people might already know that I'm working on an app for Windows, it's called Celer (Latin for speed and switf) and it's a toolbox for Windows 10/11. I currently don't know what to include in the app in terms of features, but the premise is that it's an app that let's you clean temp files (including browser cache), optimize (by disabling services and removing bloatware), have privacy and security preferences (like disabling Windows telemetry, a dns manager, host templates), and even more.

I'm currently developing it using Tauri which uses Rust for the backend, and I decided to go with SvelteKit for the frontend. I tried other frameworks from React, Vue, and SolidJS, but since I had used Svelte in the past (mainly version 4) I choose that instead.

Currently the app is at 7% of completion so it will take some time to release something to the public yet.

Also related to Celer, I'm working on a UI design system called Steel, my main purpose with it is to make a UI design system that I could use on all of my project, independent of dependencies or frameworks, so it would just be vanilla CSS and tokens to style the app.

Steel's main inspiration comes from minimalism, brutalist, and utilitarist designs but also design systems like Vercel's Geist and IBM's Carbon.

I already had the idea of building a UI design system and I did tried one time but got tired of it.

Steel is actually already being used since Steel is a spinoff of the design system of this website!

Even though I'm sucessfully working on those two projects (and this website), one of them didn't receive the same care.

Unfortunately I lost my motivation to work on the next version of SurfScape, the main reason was because release 3 was going to be huge, I had a lot of stuff to add but me being me I didn't make any plans and stopped working on it. That doesn't mean I'm done with SurfScape, when I get the time and have my shit together I'll start working on it again and make plans and even develop in the open to get more attention and feedback so that my motivation doesn't go away as it did last time.

Since I still don't know what I'll be doing in the future, I've decided to create a Ko-fi profile so people that enjoy my work and projects can support me monetarily, that way I don't end up in the streets (I'm joking 😎). I haven't set it up to my liking but the stuff I'll be doing on Ko-fi is post updates on a variety of miscellaneous projects, create a small shop to sell Celer and other apps in the future, and do commissions like website buttons, website development, and mockups.

So that's it folks, even though I haven't posted a lot I've been making stuff that my little introvert brain thinks it's cool (while it's not), anyway see you on the web! You can always find me on Nekoweb.org Discord Server, Penny's Club, or on my dead Discord server Retro Space, see you y'all!!

I finally got a drop of motivation to restart my personal website once again for the... I don't even know how many redesigns I made so forget it. Anyways, welcome to my new website, inspired by Swiss and minimalism design that I fell in love earlier this year.

My idea with the redesign was mainly to make the site bigger in terms of layout and design so that I could be more flexible but also because up until now my websites didn't really offer anything other than some blog posts and some basic pages, so I wanted to have a platform of some sort where I could share anything I wanted.

Another thing I wanted to do with the revamp was to test other hosting platforms, now this website started on Neocities which I really do love and I'm gonna keep using it but in recent years there has been a "competitor" (more like an alternative) called Nekoweb and you know what that means, this website is now available there as well (depends on where you're reading this, on Neocities, Nekoweb, or even my RSS Feed)!

So that's all for this revamp, there's been a lot of things happening this year, some good like joining the OSM community back in April, some great like the release of the new website or the spike on my YouTube channel, and some really horrible like the passing away of my childhood dog that died at the age of 17 (the same age that I have now) because of a tumor which left me really heartbroken, R.I.P Lia (2007 - 2024) fly high great friend and life companion!

~ Redux

Since I moved to Pixel OS last month I've been quite happy with my phone. I was on HyperOS before and even though the experience was miles better than MIUI, I always had privacy and security concerns with the amount of questionable services and applications HyperOS has pre-installed (this also applies to any ROM with GApps). The reason why I went to Pixel OS, was really because of the consistency, minimalism, and the Android stock experience It offers. However not everything is perfect. Pixel OS (at least on my phone, Lisa) is known to be perfect but always has a weird bug every major release, from audio not working, battery level not showing, the phone getting to hot, etc.

When I flashed Pixel OS (Android 14) everything seemed working, the phone was cold, battery drain was a lot more tolerable than on any HyperOS/MIUI release (excluding EEA region, which is the only official region that does maintain a quite stable battery), until I plugged my earphones trough USB-C and I got no sound. Fortunately the solution was just to update the firmware to a specific version, which I did, and since then I had no issues with audio, heck, I even have Viper4Android working (sometimes with legacy mode off most of the time :D). There is a caveat though, the firmware update in question fixed audio but also broke VoWIFI which lucky me, I don't care/use at all.

After a month of usage, I'm still pretty happy with it, I still have some UX issues but that concerns Android in general (like gesture navigation glitchy in landscape for example).

Some people might know that I'm more of a vanilla custom rom type of guy than the next guy that likes all the Google Goodies pre-installed, especially with the release of Android 14, which now comes with a huge amount of AI services pre-installed which I'm not a fan of.

Everyone is also aware of the big privacy concerns Google has in it's name. From tracking every move you make online, to cancelling your entire Google account just because you sent a photo of your son naked to a doctor and their "smart AI" systems thought it was CP.

Now you might be asking how do I configure my LineageOS, so here it is a rundown of the things I install, do, and what not.

Firstly I go trough the setup wizard and I disable save location, enable download GPS data from network and also LineageOS telemetry since I really like the project and that's a simple way to support them.

The first thing I install is microG. Now, there's many ways to install microG, from installing the APKs one by one as user apps and allowing the permission, to flashing a Magisk module or a package trough the recovery. However, just recently, LineageOS finally added support to spoof microG packages, so if you want, you don't need root to fully install and setup microG on vanilla Lineage anymore! (you still have LineageOS for microG which I also adore and used for quite a awhile).

The next step is to install an F-Droid client to be able to install most of my apps. My clients of choice are Droid-ify which is minimal, beautiful, and works nicely (even on HyperOS/MIUI) and the other one which is now my default, Neo Store.

I also set a custom NextDNS profile to block trackers system-wide. I also install Mulch System Web View for a more hardened and more up to date web view (the pre-installed one is good enough and receives updates frequently as well). I also have other apps that I install which you can find on my /gear page!

That's all, I hope you liked my way of setting up LineageOS. If would like to see how I setup NextDNS or what is my full mobile workflow, send me an email and I'll write a post about it, have a nice day!

I've started creating personal websites back in 2020 when I got interest in developing software, especially around the web. I remember watching a crash course of 2 hours about the basics of HTML. At the time I started making random niche websites about Discord bots that I developed, since I was really interested in Python and creating Discord servers & bots at the time (both interests have changed drastically now 😜). I remember that if I learned how to write HTML, that would then help me share my projects to people, however I had no concept of personal sites and even more about the indie/open web like Neocities and personal blogs since I really didn't care or rather know about digital privacy which is something most people on Neocities are interested on!

Fast forward 1 year, I started getting into the weeds of CSS (a path you can't go back btw), and that's when I first searched about personal websites and portfolios. That would get me into various YouTube guides about creating the perfect portfolio and how to make your layout look great. That's also when I find out about Dribbble and Behance where I got inspiration about web design (that to this day I still use).

In 2023 is when I found out about something called Neocities, I don't remember how but it got me interested. All these sites hosted on this free platform as like a type of social media but at the same time more amateur and personal, I loved it! I still recall the first website I visited, that being OpenBooks.

So that's when this website was born or rather it's first version, you see, my idea with Neocities was to host a secondary website in the type of a web portal, and then have my personal website hosted on GitHub Pages. Some might remember about Eversoul which was the name of that first version of my "personal website". It was short lived and renamed to other names until I landed in the now known SurfScape. In the mean time I created a second website on Neocities which you might guess it's this one, and you are right. So when I "closed" or rather rebranded Eversoul, I had deleted my main website hosted on GitHub since I had a free domain for a year which expired so the logical idea was create one from scratch and host it on Neocities.

Everything was fine for some months on my personal website, the same couldn't be said with my web portal that had suffered 3 rebrands, the main issue is that the project was just to ambitious for me and not only that, I have a lot of procrastination so you might see what happen, the web portal would be empty for 2-3 months straight without any announcements and when I got the hype to work again, then my personal website would became "abandoned" as well.

I also have the issue with always messing with design and decide to redesign the entire thing one day and then rapidly get tired and push a half-baked website. You might say that SurfScape is currently like this but I found the main issue with that happening, I'm now learning to work on a project and that project only until it's stable or complete for me, which is why I finally have my personal website alive again!

Since the website is much more mature I will be finally blogging again after almost a year of a break. I'm not saying that I will be writing every day, week, or even month, but I will try my hardest to be consistent and have new content at least 4 times a year (I hope that number will grow).

With all of this talking, I wanted to talk a bit about future projects that I'm working on or rather planning, one of those being a redesign of SurfScape (again) that will finally use SurfKit. As some people voted, the design will be similar to Apple's website and iOS UI with a touch of Material 3, some people might be with their jaws dropped after reading that, but yeah, SurfScape will convert to the minimalism side and the current web 2.0 gradient and glossy design will be dropped off. But that does not mean SurfScape will become a corporate website, this change will actually help make SurfScape more community driven since SurfKit will come with support for themes where you can create your own theme for SurfScape with it's own colour scheme, this also means SurfScape will finally have options for Light and Dark theme. In terms of the layout, I still haven't planned that but you could think of it as a notebook of sorts? Will see in the future I guess 😁.

So this was a bit of a story about my start on creating website and some updates about the stuff I do. I hope this is not my final post on this website 😔.

Thank you for reading and checking my website!!

Hi, welcome to my blog! This is an introduction post to talk about me and the new redesign I made to the site.

I always tried making a blog but for some reason I simply couldn't, I mean I tried 10 times but probably because I procrastinate a lot, I fail to do so.

Anyway, this is my last attempt at making a blog and a website as a whole. I'm a person that gets tired easily, which results in making things from scratch, sometimes from the ground up, resulting in a nice but empty website because of a lack of content.

With the new year I decided to change myself...by procrastinating less, smart right? So I decided to focus more on content then design, you can actually notice it, the website is pretty basic but that's the point. Most of my inspiration came from the post A Brutally Simple Site from Kev Quirk where he talks about Brutalist Web Design which sums up everything that I said, raw content instead of complex designs.