Status Report Jul 2026

Can't believe I am gone for half a year. Well, I did say I am a lazy person.

What's happened in my absence? For starters, I decided to replace my now 4~5 years old PC with a beefier setup. I also got 2 of my 4 (or 3?) wisdom teeth removed. And I am going to travel for the first time in my life soon!

The PC

I built my first ever PC tower back in 2022 because I wanted more power than a desktop 2070S. But the crypto heat was still strong, I settled for a combination of R5 5600X+3060Ti at the time. Also, I paid a small fee to have the shop build for me out of the fear I'd break something.

This machine is fine. Stressing on that, it is just fine. It doesn't run game crazily well, but it does its job well. I could play most games I wanted with relative ease, I may have to sacrifice some graphic details for fps, but it's not too much of a big deal. Until I made the call to switch to Linux full time.

Man, Nvidia is really a headache here. I also learned something new during my unhappy relationship with Nvidia using Linux - GPU can indeed fall off the bus. Why? I don't know. But I sure as hell know it's annoying because the damn gpu will just get dropped any moment, even when I am not gaming. The whole PC will crash, or it will freeze. And it will reboot.

Then I decided enough was enough. I saved some money and bought my current setup. Since ram is so gosh darn expensive, I decided to shop my parts at Pinduoduo, and not locally, since it will add ~10% overhead for a worse setup. I also am forced to build my own PC this way. But in the end the result was beautiful, and I learned that building a modern PC wasn't so scary after all.

Wisdom Teeth

This is the scary bit. Earlier this year, I had enough of my bad breath. My mom said it could be due to having cavities in my wisdom teeth. So I thought, why not remove them? I got nothing to lose, and I really, really want it fixed.

Long story short, I decided to give CKJ(a dental clinic chain in mainland China) a shot. My mom helped me select a trusted dentist, and helped me make reservations. Once I'm there, they took a few X-ray scans for my mouth, and suggested I remove both decayed teeth at left side first, because they are more problematic than the right side. I said why not? Boy did I know little what will happen in the following week.

The surgery was fairly smooth, the anaesthesia was strong enough to numb my pain, and I only feel something moving in my mouth. It was quite lengthy, I didn't count how long, but probably 20~30 mins. The fear was real though, I couldn't help but clench my fists when the dentist is performing operations on my wisdom teeth.

The nurse showed me how bad the cavities were after the surgery and I was glad I had them removed after I saw them. I even took pictures of them! But I am not inclined to include them here because they are too scary and unsavory.

I had hotpot the night I had surgery, because I underestimated how long I needed to recover. The swelling created a larger-than-usual blood clot in my lower wisdom tooth area, and it had me worried. Because it was thumb sized. I read online it is a bad type of blood clot formed due to irritation or something. On the third day I went back to check up, they helped me remove it, and gave me extra gauze and medications to help. Well, it was still forming large blood clots, so I decide to just live with it. I couldn't eat solid food for a few days after that, and resorted to eating liquid food like jelly and congee. The blood clot became much smaller afterwards, and I don't feel painful when I move my jaws. So I started eating more solid food in the following days.

The blood clot eventually detached on its own, and I felt relieved as I spat it down toilet. The holes closed nicely and I am glad I don't have any more complications. I will seek to remove my remaining wisdom teeth this month or next month in anticipation of my upcoming trip.

Japan Trip

Oh yeah this one is a big deal. I have never traveled overseas. Never. The best I did was traveling to mainland China with my mom and grandma. My gaming buddies suggested we go to Japan later this year. I thought why not? I have an okay job now, and I can set aside some salary to save for the trip.

I've never been to Japan so I don't have any clues what'll be "interesting" in the trip. But I want to eat eels, yaki niku, as well as crabs! We will also go to Mt Fuji. The rest? It's a mystery...

End

Well, that's all for this status report. Of course there are more to life than what I wrote. But I don't want to make this post too long. Oh, one more thing. I changed my blog url from the old blog.karsten.ws to sudo.karsten.ws because I think it's cooler. I wanted to grab shorter handles like sudo.sh, sudo.me or sudo.dev but apparently they are all not available.