Bruno Miguel

A blog where I ramble

I recently found out I have stage two high blood pressure, the level just below a hypertensive crisis. My blood pressure is between 160 and 165 (systolic) and 100 and 108 (diastolic).

I should've known. For a few months, I felt a few chest pains occasionally, but I attributed them to fibromyalgia and the stress it has brought into my life. I was wrong, so very wrong. If you feel your chest hurts, see a doctor ASAP. Don't be a dumbass like me.

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I'm a Football Manager player. You probably already read a blog post I published about this game series. Despite playing the game for years, I haven't done a true journeyman save. I've had saves where I start in the lower division available in a country and take the team to win the Champions League, but not one of these. I attempted to do one a while back but stayed at the first team I managed โ€“ task failed successfully.

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We've started watching โ€œHis Dark Materialsโ€ TV show. We're on the first season, with two more to go. So far, we're liking it.

#Ramblings #Entertainment #TV

Black and white painting of a camera on a wall Image source

Eduardo wrote an excellent piece for EDRi about Portugal's disastrous attempts at data retention laws. Here is a snippet:

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Hackerman

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I was watching Shiza's Twitch stream around an hour ago, and at some point, burnout came up in the conversation. This made me think about what I've been experiencing, and it's eerily similar to burnout, although it's not the same thing, and there's more to it.

You may know this as brain fog. Covid brought this issue to the spotlight. The difficulties concentrating and lack of mental energy are severe issues in chronic pain (and we now know that it also occurs with COVID-19), and they're hard to deal with. But, at least to me, the worst part of brain fog is the cognitive impairment.

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My heart rate has been wacky, and one of the last medical exams I did picked up on that. No wonder: I'm always stressed because I have my life fsck'd up, I'm in pain 24/7, and I don't know if I'll ever be able to get it on track and stop feeling a ton of pain. To see if it's something potentially severe or nothing to worry about, I'm wearing a Holter monitor for the next 24 hours. This is the cyborg phase of my life.

I'm joking, but I'm a bit concerned. I hope this is a mild arrhythmia and nothing more, as my doctor suspects. I don't need any more health issues in my life.

#Ramblings #Health

Screenshot of Firefox

Screenshot by DR333AD, released under the CC-BY-SA-4.0 License

I just stumbled on an article titled โ€œIn 2024, please switch to Firefoxโ€, which offers three compelling reasons for you to switch to Firefox. Being a Firefox user since it was called Phoenix or Firebird (I don't recall which one was the first one I used), I can say it's a terrific browser.

Don't worry. You can import your bookmarks, history, and passwords from your current browser into Firefox.

#Firefox #Browsers

Blog post cover showing neons spelling No music, no life

Image from Unsplash

I created the following playlist for an online collaborative newspaper a couple of years ago. I was one of their editors in the TV & Tech section, but music has been a passion of mine for pretty much my entire life. My father passed me the love for music bug very early. There are photos of me listening to music with headphones when I was two or three years old. Later, in my teenage years, I had musical training for most of that time.

My love for music continued, so I decided to share some playlists focused on EDM on the website. The idea got the Music section editors' approval, so I created and published a few. This one was one of the last ones. I hope you enjoy it.

You can listen to it on Invidious, Youtube or use the embed video from Invidious below.

#Music #EDM #Playlist #Mixtape

FM24 screenshot of one of my saves One of my saves on FM24, using the game mode that allows you to create your own team. I started on the lowest Portuguese division available in the game.

I've been playing Championship Manager and, after that, Football Manager since 1995 or 1996. The name change was due to a fallout between Eidos and Sports Interactive around the mid-2000s, with the latter launching the Football Manager series after the event and the one that became successful. The new Championship Manager and its inferior gameplay disappeared into the annals of history.

My first game of this franchise was Championship Manager 2. A neighbor knew my parents had bought me my first computer, asked me if I had some floppy disks, and then made me a copy of the game.

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