stephvee.ca

Early Efforts in Sticker Making

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 07:45:29 -0400

I’m teetering on the brink of middle-age, and I’m dealing with that like any Mature Adult would by … uh, making stickers for my laptop. Lots of them.

(I might have overdone it a bit.)

How, you ask, am I making said stickers? Well, I’ve been thinking about getting my own cutting machine for that purpose for a while now. My lovely mom found out a couple of weeks back, and decided to buy me the Cricut Joy Extra I’d been eyeing for my birthday! Thanks, Mom.¹ It has so far been one of the best gifts I’ve ever received in my increasingly long life, holy shit.

… I wasn’t too sure about it at first, though.

First Impressions

The initial batch of stickers I made were borderline disastrous, to the point where I wondered if we’d have to return the machine. Luckily, it was just user error on my part; I dove right in without consulting any Cricut guides on the web, and had no idea that adjusting the cutting pressure of the blade was even possible.

My first attempt. Note the irregular edges and occasional tearing.

The resulting kiss cut stickers I made were difficult to peel off and frequently tore in places because they simply hadn’t been cut deep enough. I ended up having to touch up the cuts on that first batch with scissors, which defeated the purpose of making stickers with a precision cutting machine in the first place.

Fortunately, after learning how to increase the pressure of my machine’s blade and changing my sticker type to die cut, I am much happier with my Joy Extra’s performance. It cuts perfectly now, each and every time!

Die cut stickers illustrated by yours truly.

A few of the stickers I made during my first two runs were, um, “sourced” from the internet. The rest were quickly cobbled together by me in Affinity, often using existing drawings of mine. Now that I’ve set up my machine to make perfect cuts, I want to spend more time refining my sticker designs. I have no intention of ever selling them, but I do like to take pride in my work – even if it’s just something I’m doing for fun in my free time.

Tips & Tricks

If you’re interested in getting into sticker making yourself, here are a few things to keep in mind (assuming you decide to go with a Cricut machine):

Cricut’s proprietary software, Design Space, sucks for actually creating your stickers. You’re better off creating PNG stickers with third-party software, such as Affinity or Inkscape, and then importing them into Design Space.
Don’t buy Cricut’s “Printable Sticker Paper” if your inkjet printer cannot handle stiff, thick sheets of paper. You’ll have better results with Cricut’s slightly more expensive “Printable Vinyl” (or a comparable thin vinyl product by any other company).
Use a sacrificial piece of vinyl to create test stickers before committing to a full sticker sheet; tweak your machine’s cutting pressure with it until it’s perfect.
Don’t forget to click “Use System Dialog” when you’re on your Print Setup screen in Design Space; this will allow you to adjust the print quality of your inkjet printer. Always use the highest quality setting when you’re printing your stickers!
Your sticky cutting mat WILL get covered in fur if you have pets that shed. You can use the off-cuts from your vinyl sheets or a lint roller to remove the fur from the mat.

After I’ve spent a little more time with my Cricut, I’ll write a longer sticker creation guide for my /hobbies page. Until then, I’m going to enjoy spending the final year of my thirties learning more about the sticker making process, personalizing all of my tech devices, and resolutely ignoring the passage of time.

Caution: I'm messing with automated visitors in plain sight as an experiment. 🤭 To avoid false positives, human visitors are encouraged to ignore the link in this box.

✍️ Footnotes

I showed her how to set up an RSS reader and follow my feed when she last visited, so hopefully she’ll see this post. ❤️ ↩

🤖 This feed is for humans only. Scraping data from this feed for any purpose (such as LLM training) is strictly prohibited.

Monthly Rewind: March 2026

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 06:26:39 -0400

March was another insanely busy month at work for me, but I still managed to squeeze in some time for my website. I wrote three new blog posts, made a new recommendation, and found a handful of interesting links to share. I also restored my full-text RSS feed, removed my Bluesky comment links, and added in a few new anti-bot features to discourage scrapers.

Blog Posts

The Scraping Problem is Worse Than I Thought

In which I discuss my rationale for bringing back my full-text RSS feed, and my frustrations with the ever-worsening scraping problem.

New OS, Old Memories

I recently installed Kubuntu on an old laptop that was crippled by Windows 11 and collecting dust. I’ve been having so much fun playing classic games on it!

My Cat Has Dementia

A sad post-vet visit update on Mr. B: he’s definitely showing signs of feline dementia. 😿

📝 Find more of my recent posts in the /blog archive.

Recommendations

SimCity 3000: Unlimited
by Maxis
GAMES • SIMULATION • 2024

Two years ago, Maxis released a port of their classic 1999 city simulator on Steam. If you were a massive fan of the original game, like I was, then I highly recommend checking out this port; it’s a faithful recreation (right down to the aspect ratio) that includes some brand new scenarios and building designs to keep things interesting. If you never played the original game, you might still enjoy it – just don’t expect to be wowed by the dated graphics or the clunky UI.

👍 See my /recommendations page for more stuff worth checking out.

Bookmarks

Acting Ethically in an Imperfect World

tante.cc – Tante’s excellent response to Cory Doctorow’s defensive comments about his personal use of a local LLM for spellchecking purposes.

Library Reads

libraryreads.org – Every month, librarians across the United States recommend their top ten adult fiction and nonfiction titles. Worth checking out (see what I did there?) if you’re looking for something new to read!

UFO Timeline

ufotimeline.com – A nicely-designed timeline of UFO-related events and information, going all the way back to 1561!

🔗 Check out my /bookmarks page for more interesting links.

Miscellaneous

I recently learned that Google (which has been blocked from crawling my domain for months now) has been using my Bluesky data for its AI-generated summary about me and my site. As a result, I’ve deleted all of my blog-related Bluesky posts, have removed links to my Bluesky account from my site, and am currently in the process of trying to poison the well with false information. I didn’t give Google permission to crawl my site, so I sure as hell am not giving them any more legitimate data to work with via my Bluesky account. Hardly anyone followed me on Bluesky in the first place, so I’m happy enough to use Mastodon as my sole social platform. At least I can actually block Google from accessing and indexing my Mastodon profile!

And speaking of poisoning the well, I’ve been working hard these past few weeks to make my website as unappealing to scrapers as possible. I won’t explain exactly what I’ve been doing, for obvious reasons … but let’s just say I’ve caught dozens of robot “visitors” that are clearly scraping my site in bad faith. I hope the humans behind these bots enjoy their tainted data sets!

Anyway. That’s all for this month – until next time. 👋

Caution: I'm messing with automated visitors in plain sight as an experiment. 🤭 To avoid false positives, human visitors are encouraged to ignore the link in this box.

🤖 This feed is for humans only. Scraping data from this feed for any purpose (such as LLM training) is strictly prohibited.

My Cat Has Dementia

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 11:52:58 -0400

If you read my earlier post about my elderly tabby cat, Mr. B, you’ll remember that he’s had some concerning behavioural changes recently: persistent yowling that’s unrelated to food, along with occasional litter box accidents. Since that post, I’ve also caught him pulling out clumps of his own fur (to the point where he has given himself a little bald patch on his back).

My husband and I took him to his vet for a checkup. His blood work is perfect, he has no physical signs of injury or disease, his skin is healthy, and he has no mats in his fur. Given that his yowling immediately stops once I find him and scoop him up into my lap or bring him into our bedroom at night, his vet reckons that he’s likely in a state of cognitive decline. He’s basically forgetting where he is, and getting stressed out about that – which would explain the yowling, the litter box accidents, and the fur-pulling.

There’s not a whole lot we can do, beyond providing lots of reassurance and giving him activities that will exercise his brain (puzzle treat toys, that sort of thing). The vet techs at the clinic also suggested adding motion detecting lights along the wall of our staircase leading up to our bedroom, to help him find his way when he gets lost at night.

We’ll give these things a try and see if they help keep him settled. I do worry about him being on his own when my husband and I are at work … so we might also have to set up a radio for him when we’re not in the house, or something along those lines.

‟Mother, I request uppies.”

It’s the diagnosis I was afraid of, but at least it’s not something that will necessitate subjecting him to surgery or any other unpleasant procedures. Also, while he may be confused at times, he is still capable of learning new things. For instance, he has recently discovered that if he stands outside the entrance to my home office and yells at me incessantly, I’ll scoop him up into my lap while I browse the internet or work on my website. If I don’t get up right away, he comes in and paws at my thigh. He never sought out my lap much while I was sitting at my computer in the past, and now he wants to be up in my lap all the time! It’s incredibly sweet.

Dementia is a progressive disease with no cure, so I know things will get steadily worse for him over time. For now, at least, he’s physically healthy and seems content enough when he’s not lost and yowling. A time will come when I’ll have to make a very difficult decision on his behalf, but I think we’re (hopefully) still a long way off from that.

Caution: I'm messing with automated visitors in plain sight as an experiment. 🤭 To avoid false positives, human visitors are encouraged to ignore the link in this box.

🤖 This feed is for humans only. Scraping data from this feed for any purpose (such as LLM training) is strictly prohibited.

New Operating System, Old Memories

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 12:19:15 -0400

I have an embarrassing confession to make: I’ve been alive for approximately four decades now, and I’ve only just recently installed Linux on a personal computer. I know, right? I’ve had the nerve to call myself a “computer nerd” this whole time. Such a poser!

In truth, I’ve always doubted myself a little when it comes to “serious” home computing. I’ve never built my own computer from scratch, never attempted to set up a home server … that sort of thing. For a very long time, I filed Linux under the “it would be cool to try, but I’ll probably just screw it up” subcategory of self-defeating thoughts. I also never really felt much of a need to try out Linux up until now; I used Windows from 1996 to 2024, and then switched over to MacOS when Microslop started shoveling Slopilot into everything.¹

Fast forward to the end of last month: I came across the Folkmoss’s blog post on the digital products and services she’s using in 2026. She mentioned there that she’s running Kubuntu now, which was not a Linux distribution I’d heard of before.²

Well, I looked into it, and realized it didn’t seem all that challenging to install at all! My husband and I had a cheap Windows 11 laptop that was literally collecting dust in my husband’s office, so I figured I may as well give it a go. Worst-case scenario, I’d end up bricking a throwaway “burner” laptop that we’d only bought for travel purposes.

It was a painless process, fortunately. I followed this guide (using Rufus rather than YUMI) and had a test instance of Kubuntu up and running on the laptop in an hour or so. I liked it so much, I decided to wipe Windows 11 from the laptop completely and do a full Kubuntu install. It was so simple to do! I’m not sure why I thought installing Linux would be too difficult for me. It helps, I guess, that I started off my Linux journey with such a user-friendly distribution … but still, I feel like I was misled over the years by social media chatter about how finicky installing Linux can be. The hardest part was waiting an excruciatingly long time for Rufus to do its thing.

First Impressions

Mmm, ASCII art.

The laptop was pretty sluggish before I installed Kubuntu on it. Even after I removed most of the Windows 11 bloatware, it often stuttered while opening new windows – especially if Firefox had more than a few tabs open. The laptop is not even all that old: it’s an MSI Modern 15 - B12M that we purchased brand new while it was on sale back in early 2024. It has 16GB of RAM, above average integrated graphics, and a 12th generation i5-1235U processor – solid low-mid range specs that should be able to handle basic productivity tasks with no issues. We only bought it because I needed access to a laptop for an exam I had to take while we were on vacation, and we weren’t sure what security was going to be like at our hotel.

It felt a little wasteful at the time to buy a laptop for one trip, but I didn’t want to travel with my much more expensive (and much heavier) gaming laptop and risk having that stolen. We justified it by telling ourselves we’d use the laptop again on future vacations and for working on stuff at coffee shops. Neither of us really liked using it all that much, though, so it mostly just lived in my husband’s office. I thought about selling it, but figured demand would be so low that it wouldn’t even be worth the effort.

Well, I’m pleased to say that it feels like a completely different laptop now. I can’t get over how snappy Kubuntu is! Some programs still take a few milliseconds longer to open than I’d like, but I haven’t noticed any of the window stuttering I was previously experiencing with Windows 11. I really like the interface, especially after installing the Layan theme. I still need to learn how to get the Plank dock working, but I can content myself with the default Windows 11-esque look of my task bar for the moment.

While I haven’t really tried to put the OS through its paces yet, I’m happy enough with how it handles standard productivity tasks. I also managed to install Ruby and Jekyll on it without any snags, which means it’ll be much easier now for me to update my website when I don’t have access to my Mac Mini.³

Revisiting SimCity 3000

Coinciding with my Linux installation, a recent discussion in the 32-Bit Café forums about The Sims got me thinking about other Maxis titles I enjoyed when I was younger. SimCity 3000 – a game I sunk thousands of hours into as a teen – immediately came to mind. Assuming it would be a long shot, I checked to see if the game was available on Steam … and as it turns out, a port for SC3K came out back in 2024! Linux wasn’t mentioned in the port’s compatibility section, but a review mentioned that it ran well on Linux, so I decided to give it a go. (It was less than ten bucks, so I figured I could always just play it on my gaming laptop if need be.)

I’m pleased to confirm that the 2024 port SC3K runs more or less flawlessly on Linux. I’ve spent about 20 hours replaying the game now, and have only crashed to desktop once! Not bad at all, considering that the last time I tried to play a game on the laptop while visiting my in-laws, I maxed out at 20 FPS on the lowest game settings and crashed at least once per hour.⁴

Returning to SC3K has been an absolute joy. I’d almost forgotten how fun it is to build up huge cities from scratch, how devastating it is to watch a tornado tearing through carefully planned streets, and how annoying some of those petitioners can be. I’m still awful at raising land values to “astronomical” because I don’t like adding an unrealistic amount of parks to my zones … but I do enjoy keeping my Sims as happy as possible. Here’s some actual footage of the energy I bring to building my city (which, yes, I’ve named “Pawnee, IN”).

If you enjoyed SC3K back in the day, I highly recommend checking out this port. And if you’ve never played the game, I still recommend it! It’s a great way to spend six dollars.

Final Thoughts

I don’t think Linux will be replacing MacOS as my daily driver, but I’m glad it was able to breathe new life into a laptop that was otherwise destined to become a spicy pillow. I look forward to taking my web-building hobby outside the house, revisiting other older games from my youth, and learning more about the OS in general.

If you’ve never installed Linux before and are fed up with Microslop (or if you just have an older computer sitting around that no longer has a purpose), don’t be afraid to give it a try. Installing Linux isn’t anywhere near as difficult as you may have been led to believe it is. Take your time, follow a guide – you’ll be fine!

Caution: I'm messing with automated visitors in plain sight as an experiment. 🤭 To avoid false positives, human visitors are encouraged to ignore the link in this box.

✍️ Footnotes

Too bad, Slopya Nadella. You’re never living that one down. Feel free to pre-ban me from your Discord server. ↩
I feel like every Linux fan out there just let out an audible groan. Sorry, guys! 🫣 I’d heard of Arch, Ubuntu, Mint … just none of the other flavours of Ubuntu. I know now that there are quite a few! ↩
As I mentioned in this post, I needed to figure out a way to use Jekyll while on the go, since we usually visit family a few times a year. I could have installed Ruby and Jekyll on the laptop back when it ran on Windows 11, of course, but I really disliked the sluggish feel of the laptop and didn’t consider it a viable option for that reason. ↩
To be fair, I was trying to play The Elder Scrolls Online, which is a much more graphically-intense game than SC3K. I was able to do my crafting dailies, and that was it! ↩

🤖 This feed is for humans only. Scraping data from this feed for any purpose (such as LLM training) is strictly prohibited.

The Scraping Problem is Worse Than I Thought

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 14:43:20 -0500

This is a brief post to announce that I’ve given up (for now) on trying to outsmart malicious web scrapers. I’ve restored my full-text RSS feed, so feel free to add the URL back to your readers if you removed it last month when it went excerpt-only. 🙂

Why the About-Face?

I recently went further down the r/webscraping rabbit hole and realized that it was silly of me to even try truncating my RSS feed in the first place. I originally truncated the feed based on my understanding that Cloudflare was doing a decent job of protecting my website from most types of bots – including scrapers. I figured that if the scrapers were getting blocked by Cloudflare, anyone who really wanted to scrape my blog could simply add my feed to a reader, and then automatically transfer my data from their reader to a CSV file. Or they could just skip the reader entirely and use one of the various RSS-to-CSV or RSS-to-Markdown converters out there.

Well, guess what: modern scraping tools can bypass Cloudflare’s anti-bot features by mimicking human scrolling and clicking patterns. Full-text RSS feeds likely aren’t even all that valuable to scrapers anymore. RSS scraping still happens today, but it’s an increasingly obsolete way to scrape a website. If they know what they’re doing, bad actors looking to scrape and sell human-authored data to AI companies are able to take whatever they want whenever they want, with or without a full-text RSS feed. There doesn’t appear to be a damn thing we can do about that right now – short of shutting down our websites completely or poisoning our data.

I’m obviously not going to shut down my website, and I have to learn a lot more about data poisoning before I consider attempting it. One thing I am going to do, though, is refrain from making legitimate user experience worse for nothing. Since truncating one’s RSS feed is mostly pointless as a means of limiting unwanted scraping, I might as well reinstate my full-text RSS feed for my good-faith visitors who would prefer that.

I do still reserve the right to block any IP associated with any RSS reader that is requesting my feed at a ridiculously high rate.¹ I also won’t be turning off my existing anti-bot protections any time soon, penetrable though they may be. Cloudflare does still mitigate thousands of obviously malicious automated hits on my website every day, so it’s doing something, at least.

Speaking of, check out this known AI bot that got caught up in the AI Labyrinth:

Yes, Thinkbot, you brought me trouble. You crawled Cloudflare’s anti-AI honeypot, demonstrating that you have zero intention of honouring my robots.txt instructions. I blocked your IP address, plus all of Tencent’s known IP ranges for good measure!

It’s hard not to despair over what’s happening to the internet. Cory Doctorow reckons that scraping is “not ‘unethical’” … but anyone who’s seen their words recycled verbatim without attribution on a monetized website knows that’s not true. Anyone who’s experienced unexpected downtime on their sites because scrapers are hammering them with requests 24/7 knows that’s not true. Anyone who’s seen their unique artistic style regurgitated by generative AI knows that’s not true. The intent behind scraping is what matters, and people who scrape the internet these days seldom seem to do so with good intentions.

I don’t know if anyone will ever figure out a solution to the scraping problem. What I do know is that I’ve wasted far too much time fretting about this stuff, and that stops today. Maintaining this little website brings me joy, and I’m not going to let the data theft industry ruin that for me.

Caution: I'm messing with automated visitors in plain sight as an experiment. 🤭 To avoid false positives, human visitors are encouraged to ignore the link in this box.

✍️ Footnotes

Seriously, if your reader requests my feed every two minutes around the clock, seven days a week, I’m going to assume that it’s up to no good. It’s common courtesy to limit your reader’s automated fetch rates to no more than one request per hour. I only block IPs that exceed that standard rate by a significant amount (e.g. 30 requests per hour). ↩

🤖 This feed is for humans only. Scraping data from this feed for any purpose (such as LLM training) is strictly prohibited.