Pokemon hacks and Terminal journals

This was a good week for the tinkerer that lives in me. Despite the stress that comes with the chaos of holiday shopping, wrapping up work things, and completely ignoring my running training plan, I still managed to sneak in some fun. I found so many cool things that inspired me. So much so that I already have notes on what I'm going to write about next week.

in this issue:
👾 Pokemon Lazarus
🍣 Omarchy
💻 jrnl

👾 Pokemon Lazarus

I have been a fan of Pokemon games ever since they first came to the U.S. I vividly remember going to Toys "R" Us with my dad and picking out the Pokemon Blue cartridge for my Game Boy Pocket. None of the recent Switch releases have managed to capture that original pixel art magic of the originals. There's something about that top-down pixel style that just feels right to me.

As much as I enjoy the new gameplay mechanics in Pokemon ZA, I really just want a modern game in the classic pixelized style. Enter Pokemon Lazarus. Pokemon Lazarus is an Emerald ROM hack project by Nemo622. The Greece-inspired region has a bunch of new quests and because I'm emulating it on my phone the casual play on the go vibe is exactly what I was looking for.

🍣 Omarchy

A few months back I wrote about how easy it was to install ChromeOS Flex onto my laptop, and while I still think it's perfect if you need to turn an old hunk of junk into a perfectly usable Chromebook I eventually hit the walls of what it's capable of. I couldn't even edit my website without using some kind of VM in the cloud. To install Google's new Antigravity IDE or even Android Studio on ChromeOS Flex, you must enable the built-in Linux environment. It's nice that it is even an option but it just made me think, "Well f*ck it, let's just install Linux then." So I did.

The last time I installed a Linux distro (Arch btw) it took me the better part of a day to configure everything. This time around, I was feeling lazy so I just went with Omarchy instead. Omarchy is based on Arch and the popular tiling system Hyprland but everything is already set up and good to go out the box. Within 20 minutes I had a fully functioning computer again. Essentially, all you're doing is running a bunch of scripts to install a basic setup put together by David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH on social and the creator of Ruby on Rails). The beauty of Omarchy though is that it's still basically just Arch. So after another 10ish minutes I had removed a few pre-installed apps I didn't want and added a few that I did. I've been using it now for a little over a week and I don't think I'm going back.

💻 jrnl

I struggle with the concept of journaling. I've tried a bunch of different methods but only a few have stuck. Like adding one picture a day into my Google Journal app or "highlight journaling", which is the practice of writing down one important thing that happened to you every day. I've never been able to really commit to writing down all of my thoughts and feelings. Mainly because I'm worried that someone will open up my notebook and be able to read everything (which is the plot of at least two Disney channel original movies I think). This got me thinking that I wish there was some kind of encrypted app that doesn't rely on a subscription or me owning a Pixel phone. And of course that thing already exists. It's called jrnl.

Jrnl is a simple command line app that lets you write directly in your terminal of choice. It stores all your notes as a plain text file and then uses AES encryption so that no one without the password can read it. The best thing: it's open-source! Switching to a different app is easy too as there's an option to export your notes in JSON. My favorite feature is its simplicity. There is no real formatting other than the title you give your note and there's no way to add images or videos. It's just text in your terminal.

🆒 Special thanks to Cool Supply members! 🆒

Abstronautica, Taylor Cash, Ben Sorensen, Daniel Hernandez, Becca Farsace, Charles Malave, Dean D, Jacob Mitchell, Justin Oster, Jonathan Potopovich, Ali Rabbani, Airton Zanon, Ben Murphy, and Tristan Onfroy! ❤️