Taken at the foot of the Leshan Giant Buddha. Managed to touch the Buddha’s feet, but never got the chance to take the Gaokao exam.
Interesting Tools
Trending Clay-Style Filter
https://clayai.show/en
2webp
I spent some time looking around for a tool to convert images to WebP, but in the end, I just used Mac Automator to run a shell command. Reference tutorial here: 2webp
Raycast
https://www.raycast.com/
I’ve been a longtime Alfred user, but lately Alfred workflows haven’t been actively maintained and are getting hard to find. I rarely use universal actions anyway. Saw Miaoyan recommend this tool—looks like a solid Alfred replacement. Giving it a spin for a while to see how it feels.
Learning
Calligraphy
I’ve actually had a calligraphy habit for a long time, but slacked off earlier this year. Recently sorted through my old copybooks, so getting back into daily practice today~~
My practice sequence for Chinese calligraphy is Regular Script (Kaishu) -> Semi-cursive (Xingkai) -> Running Script (Xingshu). Not sure if that’s the canonical path, but that’s how I’m rolling with it.
For English calligraphy, I chose Italic script. The copybook I bought after starting work was from a different publisher than the one I used in high school/college, and the results definitely didn’t look as nice. Highly recommend Yu Peian’s copybooks. Dug up a practice sheet from 2014 on Facebook—pretty sure I can’t write that neatly anymore.
Advanced Mathematics
Lately, I’ve had the urge to relearn college math. I remember sitting in university lectures thinking I already knew everything because we’d covered it in high school. Looking at the problem sets now, though, it literally looks like alien runes. Higher math is quite an amusing beast.
HTTP/2
Recently, I’ve been migrating all requests on my blog to HTTP/2. Everything went smoothly except image assets hit a roadblock—mainly because I’m using Tencent Cloud COS, where you either need an ICP license or a CDN. Neither option is straightforward to set up.
Reading
Sleep Quality
My sleep quality hasn’t been great, and I never take afternoon naps. So I wanted to tailor a routine based on some proven advice. Found this really solid guide: Sleep Quality
