Jae's Blog Creatures and blogs.

I made my first public website back in 2012. It was hosted on some free hosting provider that was injecting ads into it (and since then closed down). The website itself was a weird amalgamation of hotlinked images I found funny, random flash games and whatever text I could write at that time. Of course, to add authenticity, the website would use whatever default font your browser was using and the background was a repeated image of an Amstrad CPC computer.

It’s not until 2020 that I started to blog properly. Before that, as I couldn’t really afford some static domain name, my website was basically jumping from host to host, with most versions being lost to time nowadays. I didn’t maintain a proper blog, just a collection of random files hosted haphazardly.

The switch to proper blogging came with me finally using Hugo to build a website. Before that, I would jump around CMSes randomly, spending a few months on Spip only to switch to Grav for a few days, to finally end up with a fully custom website again.

Between 2020 and 2025, I bounced between Hugo, other generators and even a fully custom one, only to finally settle in 2025 with WordPress. Why WordPress? It’s simple. I don’t have to worry about updating a framework, having a CI pipeline break or whatever. I just focus on writing, click a large “Update” button once a month, and done. Even backups are automatic on that thing, it’s great!

So in case you’re looking to start a blog, but don’t know where to look because there are too many options: just go for the simplest. Nowadays, hosting is cheap; and more than that, one click installs are very common (for instance, at Hetzner). Managed hosting is also possible through WordPress.com and other hosting providers (and even of other CMSes if you really don’t like WordPress).

While this might be a tad more expensive than having a statically generated blog on GitHub/GitLab/Codeberg pages, this is definitely easier; and trust me, the less you have to worry about, the easier it is to write. You can see that explosion in blog posts fairly well; in 2024 I only published about 12 while in 2025, the number went up to 75 (and it might be even higher this year).

I have said some stupid stuff in the past on my blog(s); for instance, being weirdly vocal about Matrix’s implementation of E2EE and recommending it over Signal while being also weirdly defensive of Matrix online; but I’m glad those posts are still around (even if with a large “MAY BE OUTDATED” warning).

Re-reading those makes me realize how much I’ve grown as a person in the past six years, and how I managed to finally put my emotions under control to take more measured actions. I can also definitely say I must have been really annoying back then. I had opinions and I wanted the whole world to hear about them. Nowadays, it’s different; I don’t even know if this post will reach anybody at all, and frankly, it’s alright, I’m just some purple creature.

So yeah, if you want to start a blog, just blog.
And keep your old stuff around, it might be hard and even painful to read, but it’s important to see how much you’ve grown.

Also, to encourage the use of Signal, I’ve created a small group chat dedicated to this blog.
This is in no way a substitute for the comment section, just a more direct and instant line of discussion.

If we have a few places in common, be it online chats or the virtual worlds of Resonite, you’ve probably noticed that I’m appearing less and less often. There’s a pretty good reason for that: I’m just so tired.

2025 has been something for me, I got a radio license and callsign, joined the Resonite Team, started to hang out more with friends, went to Eurofurence, but most importantly, in December, I finally got diagnosed with ADHD. Funnily enough, it came after seeking advice for something totally different.

As a result, I got a plethora of pills to take in the morning, but that allows me to finally do something. By that I don’t mean groundbreaking stuff, I mean chores, doing the dishes, cleaning the kitchen after a cooking session, etc. Yes, it’s boring, but honestly, it’s been great so far. I don’t need other people to push me to do something anymore, I can just do it.

I was warned about some side effects including possible hypertension, loss of appetite and others; but so far, the only one I’ve encountered happens in the evening. Of course, there’s no such thing as infinite energy, so starting 17:30-18:00, it all comes crashing down. Can’t do much, just really tired.

That’s why I’m not around much anymore. I’m just trying to find a new rhythm, one in which I wouldn’t be as tired as I am now. That translates to going to bed earlier, eating better, cutting back on some things and doing others slower.

While we’re on the subject of sleep, let’s talk a bit about it. Before getting the ADHD medication, my sleeping schedule was usually from around 2AM to 9AM, about 7 hours of sleep, which seems to be an alright amount. Nowadays, I go to bed way earlier, between 21:00 and 22:00, waking up still around 9AM, so more between 11 and 12 hours of sleep. Quite a drastic change which I’m still getting used to. While more sleep doesn’t always translates to more energy, this time, I just feel like it’s necessary. At some point, I gotta learn to listen to my body and get some rest when it needs some.

There’s also the work thing. At the moment, I basically have two sides: the purple thing that makes CI/CD and code for Resonite; and the other, darker, purple thing that writes CI/CD all day for companies and does trainings for GitHub and GitLab amongst other things. Needless to say, work kinda never stops for me, when I’m done with one, the other is here and I keep doing the same things, just for different projects. This is not healthy in any way, do not do this. This is why I started cutting back and setting proper limits starting about a week ago.

For instance, Sundays were always off-limits for me, now all the weekends are. While I was already doing that before, daily walks are now mandatory (from 45 minutes to an hour of just existing outside). Cons as well are strictly off-limits for work stuff (I’m also too lazy to setup proper development environments on my laptop, so complete win). Nowadays, I might answer or open a GitHub issue or two on weekends, but that’s about it, other personal projects and activities take precedence. For instance, I’ve been having lots of fun being a NCO for the World-Wide Check-In on the Brandmeister talkgroup 91 for DMR radio.

I love my job(s), if I could tell my smaller self that I would work on computers and actually enjoy it, I think she would explode with joy. However, it took me some time to understand that as much as I like it, it’s still work. I need to have some downtime, do something else for a bit, otherwise, as I say so often, I might as well just lose it.

So, sorry if your bug patchset or feature request has been lingering for a while; it might take a bit longer, but you’ll at least have the satisfaction that I have a healthier approach to it. If not, well, too bad, I’m not changing these new rules. You’ll also notice my activity is now more concentrated within the day (Helsinki time) instead of being at outrageous hours.

Of course, I’ll blame the Finnish winter for part of this, being in a near-constant state of night is tiring, that’s why I try scheduling my daily walks when there’s some light (originally planned to say “sun”, but weather is mostly grey mush these days around here). Also we’re in that moment in which days are finally getting longer, and soon enough, it’ll finally reach some more reasonable rhythm (at least for me, not being a native of Finland).

As a last thing, if you’ve recently asked me how I’m doing, you probably heard back “Honestly great”, or “Doing good” instead of the usual “Tired”. Well that’s the thing, I’m not tired all the time anymore, just at the times I honestly expected to be. I’m sure the overall situation will improve in the future; hanging out more AFK with friends already does a lot. In any case, that diagnosis was definitely a net positive.

To all the non-furry readers of this humble blog, brace yourselves.
I’m very tired from the end of the year, and couldn’t get myself writing more technical stuff, so a socks review is what you get.

Recently, I was looking to replace my old socks, bought on SocksDreams years ago, those started to really show their age, as well as not being really that soft to start with.
To this end, a friend recommended me Angy Paws, a company basically by furries, for furries which offers a ton of designs.

Sadly, when I ordered, tons of designs were out of stock, so I ended up buying the classic striped purple and black ones.

First, the shipping, Angy Paws being based in Australia, I was expecting the socks to take some time to arrive, the site even estimating them to arrive around December 25th. Well, to my surprise, shipping was extremely fast, doing the trip from Australia to Finland in just 10 days. Shipping itself was around €20 which isn’t the worst I’ve paid.

So, what’s in the box? Upon receiving your socks, you’ll be greeted with of course your items, but also a business card to exchange for a business card, and a small (and a bit corny) care card on how to wash the socks and remove the tags.
Overall, bonus points on the packaging for being entirely customized. I saw an option to have more discreet shipping as well, but not it’s not for me.

So now, the most important thing: how are the socks?
Being straightforward, those are probably the most comfortable socks I’ve ever worn. The previous socks had the issue of being too large for me, meaning those would slide off with some time.
Those are tight enough that they don’t slide, but also not too tight that they are uncomfortable. Same with the arm warmers, they fit correctly, not much else on that front.

Overall, I’m giving the whole experience a nice 10/10, which means I’ll 100% be back once more designs are back in stock.
And if you’re looking to invest in socks, look no further and give Angy Paws a try.

For the first time in a really long while, I have good news to report from the frozen wasteland also called Finland.

As of today, November 24th 2025, the Finnish Red Cross Blood Donation Service will give the same questionnaire, regardless of the gender of the person wanting to donate blood.
The question about gender will also be removed altogether. Doing that is a pretty good step in including everybody, and a welcome change in today’s environment.

You can read more about this on their official website. Also donate blood if you can, you’ll literally save lives.

To give a more complete timeline, the restriction of blood donation for gay couples was removed back in December 2023, which the blood donation service requested in 2022.

Over the past half year, I’ve had the pleasure of Collaborating with Bellingcat as a contributor to their OSINT (Open-Source Intelligence) challenge platform.

For those who aren’t aware, Bellingcat is an independent investigative journalism group based in the Netherlands that publishes investigations using OSINT about war, human rights abuses and the criminal underground (this description is shamelessly stolen from the Wikipedia article as they describe it well).

This all started back in March 2025, when I published this challenge in their Discord community. The premises are simple: find where that scan was taken.
Just a few minutes later, already three people managed to find the location; a few days later even more. This challenge seemed well-received, and I was contacted by the Producer of Bellingcat to create a few more challenges for their Open-Source Challenges Platform.

All the challenges took half a year to collect, design; and over 6000 km of travel was needed within Europe.
Though I’m a bit sad some scans didn’t make the final cut (some of the ones I originally planned turned out worse than I imagined), the challenges turned good overall.

I want to thank Bellingcat for this opportunity to collaborate, and I encourage anyone to check out the Open-Source Challenge platform, and even donate to them. The challenge scans will be made available within Resonite in 6 months time from now.

I have pretty exciting news: I have joined forces with Yellow Dog Man Studios to work on Resonite.

See you in the next post.

Another day, yet another chain message.

This time, it claims that Discord has “partnered with a Generative AI company” that created a bot that they “sneak into every server”, which “scrapes art/images on the server to train their AI”.

Because the primary source of this is chain messages (that are basically chain emails 2.0), the claim is in 99% of cases complete utter bullshit.

“But Jae!”, you tell me, “how was I supposed to know?”. That’s the part where you have to do something hard: actually use your brain.

Disproving the whole scare is extremely difficult, and I’ll show that under your very eyes, right now, exclusively on this blog.

First, go on a search engine, Ecosia for instance.

Let’s see what we want to verify, we see that the company is called “Domo AI”, the platform in question is “Discord” and any kind of partnership for a company that size would be announced on a blog, right? Well, let’s input the terms “domoai discord” to get started simply.

Hmm, the first result seems to be an invitation to their Discord, however, would you look at that, the second one seems to be their official website with a blog post. Intriguing, isn’t it? Let’s take the initiative and click on it.

Oh, wow! This seems to be right on the spot, there are even Discord screenshots, let’s start reading then.

So they got featured in Discord’s app directory huh, must mean they have a partnership. Let’s do CTRL+F and search for “partnership” then, that should pretty much answer it.

Clicking the link on the top saying “Blog” brings us back to a list of posts, confirming this one is the most recent.

Goddamn, fooled again. The Discord blog must surely have something then, let’s go back to our trusty search engine, look for “Discord blog” and go there.

Hmm, I don’t seem any mentions of Domo AI on the front page, maybe if I use the search bar to look for “Domo”, it will yield some results?

Aw, dangit! No partnership there either.

I think it’s safe to say, concluding from the data we gathered through this very hard experiment that took us a whooping 10 minutes: the things claimed in those chain messages are utter bullshit.

• Claim: “Discord partnered with a Generative AI company”: bullshit
• Claim: “Discord will sneak a hidden bot on your server”: bullshit
• Claim: “The bot will scrape any image sent in a server it’s in to train itself”: bullshit (more on that down below)

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Now time for a Q&A:

• Q: It was that easy?
• A: Yep, I’m as surprised as you are, chief.

• Q: So, what is Domo AI exactly if not a hidden bot?
• A: Domo AI is a Discord app, meaning it’s a bot any user can add to their account. More than that, apps explicitly need an input to work with, they can’t just scrape anything they can. Apps also explicitly show what permissions they need when adding them to your account.

• Q: But how do I prevent people in my Discord guild from using AI stuff I don’t want?
• A: Easy, go in the settings of the guild, to “Roles”, there go to the @everyone role, search for “app” and disable “Use External Apps”.

• Q: But if it’s misinformation, why did the bot show up when banning it?
• A: You can ban any bot or user without it being present in the guild. See screenshots below, this test guild is empty, only containing me, yet the ban list can have any bot when banned from a userID.

• Q: What’s the issue with this? Even if it’s false, it’s better to be careful.
• A: Here is the whole issue, trusting random sources with information such as this one, even with the best intentions is a terrible practice. All information you see, especially those massively relayed should be verified in some way. Not doing so puts you in a position where you could easily believe disinformation if shared the right way. Even if it “seems real”, take time to search for it, and verify the claims from a direct source, there are a lot of news that “seem real”, but then are completely false, this is how disinformation spreads.

• Q: But <search engine> is rubbish, and I can’t find anything.
• A: Scroll up this post and read again, clearly what I did flew on top of your head.

• Q: You should be less aggressive about this.
• A: No.

• Q: You should STOP trying to prevent me from spreading MISINFORMATION!!! You are ANNOYING and GAY!11!!
• A: OK.

Addendum: looking at it again, the blog post from DomoAI is dated from last September. Looking on Archive.org, there hasn’t been any other blog post since, meaning someone went back on the blog, read it, and either completely misunderstood what was written or decided to willingly spread disinformation.

I have at least 10 posts for this blog in the pipeline, all of which are blocked at the draft stage right now.

So, that’s what it’s like to have writer’s block huh.

Recently, I needed to purchase a new backpack because my old one, some Lenovo one, seriously started tearing and having other issues.

I scoured the web for a bit until I realized HELLOTUX, the ones behind the official Fedora merch, also conveniently make a backpack.

Shipping went really well, it took around a week for the package to arrive to Finland (shipped from Hungary).

Overall, the quality of the backpack is great, and I recommend to anyone wanting to get cool stuff from your favourite distro to get it from HELLOTUX.

As for me, I can finally put the old one to rest, I might have done some horrible things to that poor thing, namely accidentally pouring Pho on it once.

If you’re a Fedora fan, remember that the code FEDORA5 allows you to get €5 off any Fedora item in the basket.

It’s no surprise that I hate how search engines have evolved over the years. Going back 10–15 years, those were really useful and gave you the information you wanted, when you wanted.

Nowadays, results are only slop and ads, which completely defeats the purpose of a search engine.

Well, time to change this. Back a few years ago, I made a small search engine PoC. It never really worked, and the only part that was well-made was the front-end, which someone else made.

I’ve started drafting for a new search engine, that will not be reliant on other indexes, no AI slop, and fully EU-based.

I’ll keep you peeps posted at milestones of development. Expect a proper announcement later, when it is started properly.