Happy July!

It's finally starting to cool down in the house. The air conditioner
is starting to be able to keep up with the heat, and it's an enormous
relief. Still too warm, but not having to constantly bunker down in the
basement to not feel like we're suffocating on the air.

Haven't done much with tech or anything really the last week because it's
too hot to think or do anything CPU or GPU-intensive. Played more Starbound
as distraction- currently terraforming a planet to be entirely flat for
building on. Really need to get back to work on the notes program but that
requires it to be cool enough to think without being exhausted- getting there!
Please let the temps come down before the 4th. We're in the USA and it's going
to be a major fire hazard- we don't do fireworks ourselves because they're
way too loud for us, but a lot of people here do, even the illegal ones.
There's definitely going to be a fire in this heat.

On the plus side, we finally configured our side laptop with Debian so that
it both looks nice and works well. The challenge there is that it has a
touchscreen, so we had to pick themes and set up the panel with big clunky
fingers in mind. Wound up going with one XFCE panel on the left side, vertical
orientation, with two rows. Whisker menu, time, common application launchers in
two rows, space, system stats and logout buttons. Works like a charm. Definitely
different from what we usually go for but honestly, it's kind of nice. Might have
to go with side panels more often. Our main laptop is running i3 and i3bar so that
limits it a bit more- would look into polybar but honestly, i3 bar does everything
it needs to. 

Thinking about changing our main laptop's color scheme though. We love Nord and it's
very nice to look at, but there's just not quite enough contrast. Going to look at
other popular color schemes, see what they do well, and probably roll our own from
there. Or use a popular one if there's one that perfectly matches our needs. Definitely
want to stick with cool colors, so Gruvbox is out. Also want to keep a dark theme.
Considering Solarized but unsure if that has enough contrast. Going to need to look
around and explore options.

Wow, that makes it sound like we change color schemes and appearances a lot. We don't.
Usually we find a good one and stick with it for months unless it's not working.
Nord is sort of working but again, the contrast is a little too low. It mostly becomes
an issue in terminal. Maybe someone's made an increased contrast Nord colorscheme for
terminal? Worth a look, or trying to tweak it ourselves. Probably easier than changing
everything.