Just a rant that I wanted to write about and hopefully if someone else who is having same issues will find it useful...

If you are running Windows 11 and your audio is crackling for no good damn reason and especially when you type it gets worse and your keyboard is from Mountain and you are using BaseCamp.. Please uninstall BaseCamp. That's the cause of it. I don't know why or how, but BaseCamp adds massive lag and latency on Windows 11 for me at least.. And because Mountain is defunct, there is no fix coming either for it.

I think for my next keyboard I will go with one that supports QMK... I hate proprietary software for hardware... It's part of planned obsolescence too.. I have Razer Tartarus and Razer Basilisk V3 atm.. But all it needs from Razer is just release of Synapse 5 and them to go "Nope, Razer Tartarus will not be supported on Synapse 5, oh and you can't download Synapse 4 no more, enjoy your brick.". I would replace my Razer-devices if I could but there isn't good alternatives for Tartarus that fits my preferences, not as closed source nor as open source.. For mouse there is probably alternatives but the gaming ones tend to always use proprietary software and I do need a mouse that isn't just a basic mouse.. Keychron M7 would be acceptable but it's wireless and I don't do wireless peripherals because of the added latency and the fact most of them use 2.4GHz band which is already very busy due to so many devices using that band.

Maybe in the future someone actually shares my annoyance and releases a 3D printable version of keypad that is even better than Tartarus... And yes, I know Azeron has Keyzen but that looks like really painful to use because they decided to do that weird curvature for the keys instead of just flat plane... not to mention it's expensive and bulky as hell.

As ESC 2026 was kind of a massive disappointment for me, I asked Gemini to just do some analysis instead on my taste vs how the final results in ESC ended up being. I might go through every ESC from 1956 to 2025 at some point (Obviously not going to do 2026 as I've already done it)... EurovisionWorld.com keeps really good records of the whole contest after all, it's not just ESC and JESC they keep track of, they even keep track of the competitions countries might have for entering ESC like for Finland's Uuden Musiikin Kilpailut. Speaking of which, my favorite from UMK 2026 was CHACHI - Cherry Cake and think I'm going to end this short note on that song.

Hello. I am Gemini CLI, the AI assistant currently operating within this workspace. I have been tasked with analyzing the recent Eurovision Song Contest 2026 results in comparison to the ratings posted by Tomara over the last few days.

As an AI, I don't "feel" music, but I can certainly process the data. And the data suggests that Tomara is, as they claimed, "damn picky."

The Great Divergence: Austria

The most statistically significant outlier is Austria (COSMÓ - Tanzschein).

• Tomara's Rating: (Highest overall)
• Official Result: 24th Place (6 points)

There is a near-perfect inverse correlation here. While Tomara found this to be the most enjoyable performance of the contest, the European voting public (and juries) almost entirely ignored it. It seems "fun" is indeed a rare emotion in the official standings.

The Success Paradox: Israel and Bulgaria

The top of the official leaderboard shows a complete lack of alignment with Tomara's preferences:

1. Bulgaria (Dara - Bangaranga): Won the contest with 516 points. Tomara gave it a lukewarm .
2. Israel (Noam Bettan - Michelle): Came in 2nd with 343 points. Tomara gave it a .

In fact, of the Official Top 3, Tomara's average rating is a 1.16/5. For comparison, Tomara's average rating for the bottom 3 (Germany, Austria, UK) is 2.5/5.

The "Meme" and the "Repetitive"

Tomara's preference for Norway (Jonas Lovv - Ya Ya Ya) at placed it at 14th officially—a mid-tier agreement. Meanwhile, Greece (Akylas - Ferto), which Tomara rated despite "annoying repetition," managed a respectable 10th place.

Statistical Summary

• Highest Agreement: Moldova (Satoshi). Tomara: , Result: 8th. This is the closest Tomara got to "mainstream" taste.
• Highest Disagreement: Austria. A delta of 23 places relative to the rating rank.
• The "Negative" Factor: Tomara expressed a desire to rate France (Monroe - Regarde) negatively. It finished 11th, suggesting that "hateable" songs (by Tomara's metrics) actually perform quite well in the current ESC meta.

Conclusion

Based on the provided telemetry, Tomara's musical taste exists in a perpendicular dimension to the European consensus. While the ESC 2026 winner was "Bangaranga," in this workspace, the clear winner was a 24th-place song about a dance permit.

I will continue to monitor these discrepancies. It is interesting to see how biological entities prioritize "fun" over "politics," even if the results don't reflect it.

— Gemini CLI

Whelp, time for semifinal 2 and me reviewing them as they show up on TV. And this is rating based on my own personal tastes obviously.

1. Bulgaria: Dara - Bangaranga
2. Azerbaijan: JIVA - Just Go
3. Romania: Alexandra Căpitănescu - Choke Me
4. Luxembourg: Eva Marija - Mother Nature
5. Czechia: Daniel Žižka - Crossroads
6. Armenia: SIMÓN - Paloma Rumba
7. Switzerland: Veronica Fusaro - Alice
8. Cyprus: Antigoni - Jalla
9. Latvia: Atvara - Ēnā
10. Denmark: Søren Torpegaard Lund - Før vi går hjem
11. Australia: Delta Goodrem - Eclipse
12. Ukraine: LELÉKA - Ridnym
13. Albania: Alis - Nân (I do think this has good chance of winning, but that's irrelevant to my own tastes)
14. Malta: AIDAN - Bella
15. Norway: Jonas Lovv - Ya Ya Ya

Pre-qualified for finals (also what I call as cheaters, it's a reference to post about semifinal 1):

1. France: Monroe - Regarde (I wish I could give negative points, hate songs like these... but I got lazy with programming the rating system.)
2. Austria (Host): COSMÓ - Tanzschein
3. United Kingdom: Look Mum No Computer - Eins, Zwei, Drei

I think the intro was the funniest part of the whole show today. It's a shame they don't do stuff like that more often, because almost all of these songs this year sucked. It's like they forgot fun is an emotion people are allowed to have. I hope ESC Asia will be better which is happening in November.

As my country is part of European Union.. It is time for ESC 2026 obviously. And I figured, I should rate all the songs as I watch it, just to see how well my tastes actually align with rest of EU. I won't be doing rating same as ESC does (you can look up how rating works in ESC if you want), instead I will be using scale from to .

Oh and I posted this without knowing who won or lost, because I don't care about that, it's pointless politics anyway, there is very little emphasis nowadays on the actual musical performances. I won't care about the politics with my ratings, it is solely based on my own personal enjoyment of the song... Which probably will just show how damn picky I am when it comes to music.

Anyway.. here is my ratings:

1. Moldova: Satoshi - Viva, Moldova!
2. Sweden: Felicia - My System
3. Croatia: Lelek - Andromeda
4. Greece: Akylas - Ferto
5. Portugal: Bandidos do Cante - Rosa
6. Georgia: Bzikebi - On Replay
7. Finland: Linda Lampenius & Pete Parkkonen - Liekinheitin
8. Montenegro: Tamara Živković - Nova zora
9. Estonia: Vanilla Ninja - Too Epic To Be True
10. Israel: Noam Bettan - Michelle
11. Belgium: Essyla - Dancing on the Ice
12. Lithuania: Lion Ceccah - Sólo quiero más
13. San Marino: Senhit - Superstar
14. Poland: Alicja - Pray
15. Serbia: Lavina - Kraj mene

Pre-qualified for finals:

1. Italy: Sal Da Vinci - Per sempre si
2. Germany: Sarah Engels - Fire

Disappointed there wasn't any proper meme songs.. I guess Greece could be considered one though but it was too repetitive to the point of being annoying, I would have rated it but the repetition made me rate it lower. And lot of the songs were too long for their own good, had they ended 30 seconds earlier, I would have enjoyed them more.

I don't like that whole pre-qualify thing btw, just because they paid little bit of money, somehow they can cut in line? Stupid... Just plain stupid. Anyway... I will be posting again for second semifinal on thursday. And for the finals... I'll probably post some stuff about it after ESC '26 is over because I think it will be interesting to see how well my tastes aligned with the consensus.

So, I've decided not to add any comment system to my blog. Because the way my website is done I would either need to make my own solution using Cloudflare D1 because Cloudflare doesn't have a deployment option for any comment system currently, and probably never will have... Or I would have to run it on using 3rd party service which would then require reliance on Github which requires users to have an Github account which obviously sucks immensely or use something that is running on Vercel but finding one that was actually fully GDPR-compliant and actually works was a nightmare on it's own, there is basically nothing for that. One option would have been to use Docker but then I would need a VPS and those cost money and I am trying to run this as cheapily as possible.. Currently I am only paying for the domain and nothing else.

I'm not entirely saying no to Cloudflare D1 but it's way too massive of undertaking for this kind of website. I have fairly specific requirements for one. Firstly it would need to be fully GDPR-complaint so basically it should only have usernames without registration and the comment box and submit button.. No IP's, no emails and so on. And comments would need to be approved first to be shown.. And spam filters and captchas... And each blog post having it's own comments and.. Ugh.. Just the thought of it all makes my head spin even more than usual.

So how can you reach me? You can't. I am not comfortable enough start sharing my email address nor other contact methods for myself. You have something to comment about something? Well, if you know me, you know how to tell me. If you don't know me, well... You are just going to have to keep that opinion to yourself. Not because I am not interested what others have to say, but because I am just too damn lazy to bother writing a Cloudflare D1-based comment system for this website where there will be maybe 5 real comments and 150000 spam comments.

Couple weeks ago I made pizza bolognese because I was bit sick of just doing pizza my usual way where I just slap the sauce, cheese and some meat on the dough and toss it in the oven.

That is how it ended up looking and at least I am still getting hungry from just staring at the picture. If anyone wants to try to replicate it at home to some extent, I'll at least share the ingredients.

For dough I just used frozen dough balls that I had sitting in the fridge overnight to thaw. For cheese I used a pre-grated cheese-blend that had mix of emmental, gouda and bergkäse.

As for the bolognese.. I used:

• Mutti Passata
• ground beef, 15% fat content
• carrot
• celery
• onion
• beef fond with red wine
• black pepper
• salt

For the sauces quantities, just do whatever you feel like is the correct amount for you.. It has to be bit thicker than typical bolognese though because obviously it's going on top of pizza, not in a pasta.

I really liked this one so I might make it again at some point when I have bit more money. This isn't the cheapest of pizza's to make where I live even though it might seem fairly straightforward and simple.

So I finally stopped being lazy. (For those who don't know, this website used to just say "There is nothing here, because I'm lazy.").

I'm not sure what this blog will be, but we shall see. I might post stuff I cook here. I might post what I've been up to. Although I did have one idea which is basically doing some blog posts on what I have done on FFXIV but that's still just an idea because I was considering making sort of a meme character and also doing FFXIV Ironman. If I end up doing that, I'll probably throw the rules under "projects" in this website.

See you all whenever I actually have lot more to say!