Notes for January 08-14

It wasn’t a bad week overall–managed to finish a few projects that had been lingering for almost a year, and got a few more things done.

Getting back into the swing of things:

• Picking up on Sunday’s source spelunking, did some more serious tweaking to my MiniDexed case and decided to redesign it to use heat inserts to ease maintenance. This implied lowering the bottom by 2mm and other miscellaneous tweaks.
• Tested some Zigbee power plugs with power metering (and, in the process, realized my office UPS takes down my Mac when power fails, which is something I definitely need to fix):

• Finally got the SSD I ordered for the Orange Pi 5+, plus pigtails for a Wi-Fi card, but ended up not upgrading it since I had to do some standalone tests with the board still booting from the SD card.

Busy day with an outing.

• A bit more more work on the MiniDexed case, including printing out a test version to see how it would go together with some snap fits.
• Spent a while catching up on my reading.

Pretty decent day.

• Got the SSD installed on the Orange Pi 5+ and moved Armbian to it, to great effect–the board is now much more responsive when running OnnxStream, so I can start using it for some more machine learning experiments.
• Looked at sushy again and upgraded a few dependencies, but didn’t have time to do much else.
• Printed the “final” MiniDexed case, and decided to go with a two-color scheme:

I used Sunlu PLA+ for the bottom half of the case and Eryone Galaxy Black for the top and knob.

Late night meetings, so I took a pre-dinner break to do some tinkering:

• Tried Armbian kernel 6.1.x and 6.7.x on the Orange Pi 5+, with dismal results (wouldn’t even boot). Recovered by mounting the install image and manually copying the boot partition across.
• Installed Proxmox-Port and portainer on it and did some LXC migration tests.
• Also, learned the hard way not to have nodes offline when adding a new one to a Proxmox cluster (took me a while to realize I had to effectively patch corosync.conf).

Slow day in many regards (plus another outing)

• Decided to revisit running Windows ARM in Proxmox and got Windows 11 working on the Orange Pi 5+ with a few tweaks to the settings.
• For extra kicks, migrated the VM to my Raspberry Pi 4 and back without any issues.

Family/shopping day, so not much time for tinkering.

• Cleaned up the OpenSCAD code and published the MiniDexed case sources on GitHub.
• As part of my Orange Pi 5+ testing, set up a Jellyfin server on it and pointed it to my NAS.

As it happens, there is now a very passable Apple TV client (Swiftfin), which is pretty good but seems to have trouble with HDR content and subtitles–I’d say the whole thing might be a decent alternative to Plex in a year or so, but only if they can deliver some serious polish on the player (the Android client also had some issues with HDR content, by the way).

Rainy, lazy day. Loads of TV, reading and a bit of cleaning up.

• Updated a bunch of random Wiki pages (including my AI and Music pages).
• Did a bunch of automation, including a few tweaks to ground-init.
• Soldered a set of power strips to rewire my server closet and did a first pass at cleaning up the cabling. I hate messing with my uptime, but it was getting a bit out of hand.
• Tested my office UPS and queued up an order for a replacement battery.