MechanicalRuby

Hello, world!

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 00:00:00 PST

Hello, world! I finally have my own website! And there's so much to do.

My own site!

I started working on this a while ago. I saw so many other people with awesome blogs, writing about things they cared about- and I've always craved some sort of semi-public outlet for that type of thing, but I never took the time to make one. Now I have one!

I don't really know what I should discuss in my first blog post, so I'll just talk about myself and this website generally:

Programming

I used SvelteKit for this project. It's great for static sites, and I've really enjoyed how effective Svelte is through its simplicity. I started working on a similar web project using Astro, but I quickly found myself using Svelte exclusively for all the components and ... I just ended up switching to SvelteKit because of some weird problems I had with Astro.

Programming the site was fairly straightforward, but I struggled with project management. I never realized how difficult it could be to get important tasks done without planning. So it took a couple of weeks for me to make time, and actually get everything to an acceptable state.

It's not perfect- there's some rough edges and some things I can improve. For example: I'll have to manually update every page when I author a new blog post. I know how to fix this, but I'm quickly learning it's best not to overcomplicate things until it's absolutely necessary.

I'm exploring project management systems in my free time, so that'll probably be what my next post is about. And the site should look a little different by then.

Design

I think my visual design skills need some work...

I always thought I was okay as a graphic designer but apparently not. There's something wrong about the heirarchy or whatever. It feels a little off, despite being fairly minimal.

I'd love to give this site a more creative, asymmetric design with lots of stickers and a spacey background. But I'm not going to waste any more of my time editing the site. I'll do that LATER!

So ... I like the design for what it is. But it doesn't look exactly how I'd love it to look, so I'll take some time to personalize it in the future. I really don't want my personal website to end up looking soulless and basic for too long.

Conclusion

So yeah, things are still pretty empty and unfinished around here right now. I made dark mode styles, but there's no button or autodetection yet. I have projects I want to show off, but they're not exactly in a state to be shown off yet.

I'm hoping this is the beginning of a productive and creative era for me. I spend so much time working on things that never blossom into tangible, finished products. And I can't wait to finally share more!

(Next on the list: add an art section.)

The first redesign

Mon, 25 Aug 2025 00:00:00 PST

I finally spent the time I needed to bring my website up to my basic personal standards. I wrote some stuff about myself here and there, added outbound links to some other sites I like, and removed a lot of junk code!

Partially because I read this and I felt a little guilty about leaving my site in the state it was. But it still took a while.

The theming continues to be the hardest part for me. As a programmer, I highly value simple, utilitarian design. But as a creative I also feel like my personal site shouldn't be so cold and plain. At least now I have a clean base to build off of! Instead of junk!

Everything got a lot easier after I stopped trying to make everything huge for fat fingering on your phone. Phones are pretty big these days, and even if they're small ... touching what you want is generally pretty accurate. So I reverted to plain bullet lists, and more plain HTML in general.

I also took the time to read the PS Vita browser spec, so hopefully my site renders properly there. It's CSS2 compliant, but I don't know if things like flexbox are added as the 'partial CSS3' support it mentions? So I'm avoiding that for now. I hope it works!

A dubious Switch modchip install

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 PST

I finished the Switch modchip installation at the end of January, but I guess I'll tell the story of how it went before I update this page with other stuff. It went alright?

I collected all the materials and went through the literally painful process of disassembling the Switch, which involved slowly wrenching two of the soft, easily stripped tri-wing screws away from the backplate before being forced to pry open and destroy it. My right thumb had a blister from trying to remove those devil screws.

In the end, I did a respectable solder job, but I decided it was slightly ugly- one of the joints (top of SP1) was pointy and I had to clip it flat. So I tried to reflow that joint!

The solder stuck to the other side.

I panicked and tried to swipe a gap between the two capicitor pads and ... in the end, it was hot enough to have two of the SP1 caps come off the APU.

After I cleaned up the mess, I was rather upset at the fact that I had turned a working solder job into a disaster. I would have to purchase and install new capacitors and that could take weeks, the Switch would have to stay disassembled while I wait for parts, I don't have the requisite skills, super stressful.

Then I read on Reddit that some people had one or two caps missing and it worked perfectly fine. I tested continuity and SOMEHOW the solder was making solid, seperated connections to the bare pads. So screw it. I'll just reassemble the console.

And it worked. It still works.

I don't know how good this is long-term but I don't care anymore. Now I can develop and run homebrew for this thing! Yay!

Python for static site building

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 00:00:00 PST

I wish my posts would stop being meta commentary about developing the site... but I think this is at least slightly better than being a glorified changelog.

I hate needless complexity.

I started my blog using Svelte / SvelteKit and found it to be easy to start with! But over time, I found it somewhat unwieldly for my use case. I don't want to rely on a JavaScript runtime like Node.js to build my site, since all I'm doing is serving JS-free text-only content.

Once I examined what my needs were, I realized that all I need is a script that glues HTML files. Header to content, content to footer. That's it.

So I wrote that. I used Python, both for its excellent package ecosystem and its (relative) portability. I could easily edit and build my site on my Android phone! I considered C since I've been writing a lot of that lately, but besides the ugly implementation I'd probably end up writing, things like Markdown parsing and code highlighting would be a massive burden for me.

Python has tons of ways to make it easy to compile simple sites like mine. I use:

mistune for Markdown content parsing
python-frontmatter for Markdown frontmatter parsing
and sooon enough, pygments for code highlighting

Far from the 100~ Node modules that get imported as soon as you initialize even a more lightweight static site generator like 11ty. My site repository shrunk from 180 megabytes to 78 kilobytes!