Hacker-Blog

Day 5: Nice flex

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I gotta say, I’m highkey so excited to see that today’s lessons are in flexbox. I LOVE flexbox, and whenever someone asks me to teach them how to build a website, it’s my go to because it’s so pleasant and easy to work with that once I help them get set up they can usually manage it from there. (Even if they think I can’t, I can mostly just nudge them toward a certain part of the code we wrote and then get that “Oh!” as it clicks for them.) That said, I’m definitly no expert, and it does have some quirks that trip me up when I’m trying to do anything more advanced with it, so I’m really looking forward to building a more technical understanding of how it all works.

Day 4: Box Model, Block, and Inline

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A lot of this is also refresher, although I will say maybe 25%~35% are things I never read the technical aspects of so much as simply grokked (no, some moronic billionaire is not going to steal this word from me. I learned it the proper way from being raised around old gamers & devs, and I will continue to use it for its correct definition: to naturally intuit something. My culture is not Muskrat’s costume!) or built an understanding of slowly over time by getting my hands dirty on projects. Which is a good reminder that there truly are things to be gained by paying attention even to the parts that I initially want to write off as easy or below my current level. I will also say that I have always written off border-box. It doesn’t make sense to my brain, I would rather fine-tune each part of the box until I’m happy with the whole element than fight with unexpected size changes to my content level. Maybe it comes from being able to measure ems (and other such distances) pretty accurately by eye, so working out the outer parts of the box just feels more natural. Reading today’s lessons, I’ve decided it would be a good idea to step outside of that comfort zone and gain some practice with doing things the other way, at the very least to see what all the fuss is about. If the upcoming assignments don’t have me do this, and I suspect they will, then I suppose I’ll spin up a test page and give it a go myself.

As a sidenote: Outside of div and span, and ofc many of the text elements, I’ve never been very good at remembering off-hand which elements are block vs inline, and I’d like to work on that, too.

Final assingment for this section is to go back and style the recipe page using what’s been taught in the course so far. I’ve decided my challenges here are going to be 1) Use border-box 2) Use ONLY elements/attributes we’ve covered in the course so far

The idea behind the second rule is that I’m not just jumping way ahead in the styling, which would not only be too easy but also give me less to do in future assignments where we revisit the page again, making those lessons increasingly pointless because I’ve basically done everything to it by that point. Since I made the earlier assessment about my intuitive/experience-based knowledge vs my technical knowledge, it will also give the latter a chance to keep up with the code I’m using in a way that scales better as I work my way through the course.

For this purpose I’ve decided I should be keeping notes on the actual code we cover, and a wiki is the most obvious way to handle this. I searched around online for linux package based options, but that got frustrating/annoying almost immediately and also there’s the whole “no rabbit holes” rule, so I defaulted to Zim. Basic, easy to use, and offline/personal is the name of the game here after all. As a bonus, the wiki idea will also allow me to track other things, not just html. For instance the git commands I have to keep returning to the chapter for can now live in the wiki with a brief reminder of what they do, so I can easily flip to them while working on projects.

So now I’m off to quickly review the lessons and add the specific code/commands that’ve been covered so far before I crack open the recipe book repo and start editing.

Final update: Page is looking as good as I can get it with the limitations I set for myself. It was pretty tough, especially not being able to use positioning to get the index link on the right hand side and having to figure out an alternate solution to getting it to display where I wanted it without just breaking on page resize, but I’m actually really happy with how it came out. I do wish I had overflow in my toolbox though, so I could make the box scroll instead of the entire page, and text-decoration for removing the underline on the index link would also be nice.

Day 3: CSS Exercises

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Yes, chronologically it is day 4, but since I spent all my time yesterday figuring out an OS that can carry me through the rest of the course, and didn’t touch the lessons at all, we’re counting it as day 3. And day 3, unfortunately, starts with a confession:

I had to go back and reread all the Git lessons to get everything set up and clone the CSS exercise

Trying to remind myself that once upon a time I used to have to look up html & css codes all the time, and now I can build a site verbally without stopping to look up a single code. (Did this recently, someone I knew wanted a site, and they also want to learn how to code, so I told them all the code to build & design a 3-column flexbox layout while they typed it all, and every time we go to edit the site, I give them more hints and less straight-up code.) So yeah, the same will happen eventually but it’s hard not to feel dumb for not remembering any of it when it was only like 2 days ago.

Roughly 45 minutes later (after subtracting my break and time spent debating transportation arrangements w/a friend), and I’ve got the intro done. Not much to say except there were some things I would’ve coded differently if I wasn’t explicitly told to do it that way, not a bad thing just a note that it forced me out of my usual preferences.

Done with the cascade lesson, and now it looks like I get to test out whether Ungoogled Chromium is a drop-in replacement for Chrome. (It should be, in theory at least.) I’m already really familiar with DevTools since I use it to bypass account walls like pinterest, download cool background images from Brave’s start page, and clean up ads Vivaldi’s blocker doesn’t catch, since it doesn’t have an easy block element option like Brave does. But I did learn that Lubuntu can play videos as long as I keep the quality low enough, which is another plus over the attempt at Budgie where they would barely play no matter what I did. (Because vbox, not because linux.) I also learned that developer.chrome.dev throws a bunch of errors when you use a decent DNS to block all their ads and other crap lmao.

If anyone’s interested, I highly recommend dns-for-family. I put it on every device as an early step in the set-up phase, and the only problem I’ve ever had with it is having to disable it to download Hamachi, which I barely use any more anyway.

Ununtu Budgie: Felt cute, might delete later

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Not strictly an Odin update, but I may seriously switch away from Budgie. Some of it is my fault: I didn’t need extras for a system that is mostly to follow the course, and I should have gone with the minimal install. But now as I’m trying to remove the bloat (and I do mean bloat! Why do I have card games mahjong etc etc?? Sorry, I didn’t know this was a windows distro yikes) it keeps locking me out of uninstall, which I have figured out how to troubleshoot but I don’t want to have to for each. and every. single. program I try to uninstall. I’ve also had to reset bashrc 3 times since I set the whole thing up, despite the fact I haven’t touched the file at all except when forced to by it getting messed up out of nowhere, and it forgets my resolution several times per session. If I were new to linux or running linux through a vm, I would assume user error, but I’ve been running linux since I was a kid and I have never had an experience quite like this before. (Oh I had crashes, but they were my fault for doing dumb things while trying to be cool and customise ALL the parts of my system without really knowing what I was messing with. But this and that are not nearly the same thing.)

I am going to try a fresh install on the mimimal option just to say I gave it a truly fair shot, but I’m also currently downloading Kylin and Lubuntu, as I looked at both Kylin Desktop and LXQT when setting up my GUI WSL, and since they’re official flavors and I’m not sure Budgie is gonna work out now seems as good as any time to go ahead and give them a try.

Update: It’s a tie (sort of)

My first thought loading into Kylin: wow. My second thought: WOW! My third thought: there’s no way this is ubuntu, I’m being trolled rn. Unfortunately while the live cd worked great, after installing and loading it back up it quickly became obvious that my PC was simply not having it. On top of that, ukui crashes often, which would get annoying to deal with the errors popping up while I’m working on project stuff, and that’s best-case scenario where it doesn’t also crash my editor with it and take any unsaved code. It seems to be a virtualbox thing, but there’s not a lot of documentation out there on running it on virtual boxes and the fixes I did find didn’t work. I played with it for a while and got it much better, but not good. So I installed it on a virtualbox on my laptop where it still has the crashing problem, mostly on boot, but runs great otherwise. I am seriously considering trying it as the main OS on my other laptop once the harddrive on that one gets fixed. The plan was to make it my Pop! box, but… idk I’m really liking Kylin. Might go with openKylin though if I do go that route, but idk yet.

Lubuntu had a similar experience of loading in and immediately taking a second to appreciate that it doesn’t look like an OS that already looked severly outdated in the early 2000s. (Sorry ubuntu fanboys. Do those even exist?) It also ran great on the live cd but I was feeling pretty skeptical at this point so I tried not to get my hopes up. Install was a smoother process than Kylin, stuck to the minimal, opened it up and it… works? lol, runs pretty great and the only thing I HAD to tweak was turning off window animations because they turned my screen into a slideshow. So unless any craziness comes up, it looks like this is gonna be my main driver for the rest of the course. Spent a while customising it and I gotta say, the amount of options on here is incredible and makes it even harder to believe I’m on an ubuntu system rn.

screenshot of my desktop

I reinstalled VS Codium, taking the time to figure out how to do it through the command line this time so that opening it by typing “codium” just works with no extra setup, but I went a different route with the browser and installed Ungoogled Chromium this time. I’ve never used it but I figure this is following along closer than my previous solution of using Brave was.

Day 2: Console refreshers

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Starting the post now and I will just add as I go, that’s probably how I’ll do most of these logs. I don’t have much to say yet, I basically live in the console as it is so none of this is new material to me. I am diligently following along with each step though, just to be a good student, and to avoid missing something that I might actually not know yet by skimming through. My only real note so far is that Tilix is ugly as sin. I miss Helix/WT/Oh-My-Posh, and it’s almost enough to make me go running back to WSL. Maybe on one of my breaks I’ll see what my options are for a nicer looking console on Budgie.

The lesson on using Git would’ve been insanely helpful to me while I was struggling to set this page up on my own last night. At least I feel like I have somewhat of a grasp on things now. Next up is html/css so I’m excited because I love playing around with sites.

Basic stuff, but of course it would be at this point. Like a good noodle, I did the exercises instead of skipping past because “I already know all this”. The videos felt really redundant just because the lessons have you write all the things, and then the videos talk as though you’ve never seen the tags before in your life, felt like they should have come the other way round, and I have to remind myself that people who’ve had zero experience and are taking the course probably really benefit from this level of repetition. And anyway, I’m not here to critique the course - I’m here to follow it, so I’ll shut up about that. On Git commits now, but it is both my long break on the timer and almost time to get picked up for dinner, so I’m gonna have to wait on that one.

Unrelated to the course but Budgie, by virtue of being a VM, is REALLY struggling to play all the videos, so unfortunately I’m having to resort to keeping a browser tab open to my Odin dashboard on the host, clicking the button to get to my current page, watching the video, then switching back to the VM. This process is probably heavily contributing to how I feel about the videos overall honestly.

The recipe book lesson was grueling, not because of the code but the amount of searching, and the fact that Budgie was majorly not a fan of all the image stuff. I may have to assign it more memory but I’m pushing the limit as it is. Also codium locked up on me twice, and one of those times it ate a bunch of my tags in the process, which I didn’t notice until after I pushed the commit. Grr. I might call this the end of day 2, depends on what the next assignment is ig.

Day 1: Choosing an OS and setting up programs

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Hi, I’m Heathen. I’m starting The Odin Project today, and as I prepare to install an OS to use going forward, I thought it would be a good idea to make this blog to sort of log my journey through the project.

I’m currently on Windows but decently versed in both VMs and WSL, and I’ve also used Linux as my main OS/daily driver in the past, including Ubuntu, so this is not exactly an overwhelming experience. Right now I have WSL2 running Ubuntu 24.04 w/a Unity desktop on my laptop, and a VM running Pop! on my pc. Because I plan to do most of my work for the project at my pc, and Pop! is not officially supported, and also because I want to treat the pre-requisite of running linux as an assignment for setting it up, I’ve decided to create an environment specifically for this assignment instead of defaulting to an existing one.

With a new hard-drive for my homeLab currently shipping (and the intention of installing Linux on it being ~90% the point of ordering it in the first place), it seems silly to partition my current system to dual-boot so that leaves options 1 and 3, spin up a new VM, or use WSL, which I currently do have installed on my pc as well, just without the graphical environment attached like it is on my laptop. WSL is marked as the “advanced” option for this course, but ironically would require zero set-up on my end, and since again I wish to treat this as the first proper assignment, this feels like a cop-out, so I’m going VM.

I looked through the official Ubuntu flavors, as that’s what is supported for use by the project, and narrowed it down to Budgie and Unity, and I’ll have to admit I debated these options for a minute and read up on pros and cons of both. Still stuck, I bit the bullet and installed both as VMs and messed around with them enough for basic set-up. In the end I’m going with Budgie, because it felt lighter/less clunky and ran better at identical specs, but who knows, all of this could change and I could decide to simply stick with running WSL through Hyper terminal and call it a day. Time will tell I guess, but even if that ends up being the outcome, at least I completed the set-up as an assignment and got a little more experience under my belt.

The next section was on editors and I was pretty surprised to see we were only given one option, and not one I’m super thrilled about considering it’s proprietary and full of telemetry. I install Windows offline on my computers and I keep a usb stick full of scripts to run right after install that rip out all the AI/telemetry/bloatware. I often joke that Windows is a decent system once you remove all the Microsoft from it. This was a tough call for me, as I want to approach the program as a complete beginner would instead of assuming I know everything and deviating from the lessons, but in the end I was just wildly uncomfortable with the only supported editor. I went with Codium instead, there’s a good chance I still won’t receive any help if I get stuck(see note below), because it is technically not the “correct” editor, but at least this way it should still be straight-forward to follow along which will hopefully make it easier to not get myself stuck in the first place. And then despite all my good intentions, I did the same thing and said no thank you to Chrome. Instead of my goat Vivaldi, I did go with Brave to stay as close to the lessons as possible, then ran the de-bullshittifier script to yank Leo out. We’ll see how closely I can manage to follow along with these choices, hopefully it won’t become an issue down the road. sigh

Note: To be honest, I’m not planning on joining the discord unless I get severely stuck (and can’t google my way out of it) anyway, as I am actively trying to leave that platform entirely, so adding a new server to the mix isn’t exactly on my to-do list.