Rui Carmo
August 8^th 2022, at late afternoon · 1 min read

Unity and Microsoft cloud partnership ※

This makes such an overwhelming amount of sense that I’m worried it may be an outlier amidst Unity’s various recent announcements.

Still, the mention of Digital Twins and other things that dovetail likely with Azure are worthy of note, and I’m curious as to the impact in the Xbox ecosystem, but I know enough not to ask and have a ton of other things to worry about in telco consulting land right now.

But it does explain why they were recruiting Azure skillsets recently. Might be a very fun gig, if you can get it.

Rui Carmo
August 4^th 2022, at breakfast · 3 min read

Miscellaneous Summer Updates

The past few weeks have been a mad dash towards an as yet unspecified (and as yet completely unscheduled) summer break, so although a lot has happened most of it will pop up in retrospective posts somewhere down the line. There are, however, some odds and ends worth pinning to dates, so I’ve bundled them together here.

Material Science

After a few weeks spent with my revamped printer, I can categorically state that eSUN PLA+ is likely the most challenging material I have ever tried to print with.

It might be the lack of a heated bed, but the matte white is just infuriating to deal with and I just can’t get decent prints out of it. Cooling makes no difference. Swearing at it makes no difference. Slowing down speeds seemed to help, but it was just a fluke.

3D printing is a fun hobby, but it can be an extremely time consuming one. I’ve been sampling various brands, and all have drawbacks. For instance, SUNLU silk grey PLA curls up for no reason whatsoever and has utterly bad layer adhesion.

I tried using it for a bearing holder hoping its smoothness would decrease friction, but it just desintegrated the very first day of use, even when printed at 0.1mm layer height.

So I replaced it with Amazon Basics PETG (which is still looking like the best filament I can get for general usage), and am thinking of returning the unopened spool of silk copper I bought on a whim given I am unlikely to be printing decorative stuff.

RGB All The Ceilings

My office light gave out in the past few weeks, and rather than replacing the dinky little fluorescent tubes in it (which are, weirdly, the same size used in aquarium lighting), I decided to splurge on a Zigbee enabled, 60x30cm Paulmann LED panel.

More conservative folk would have picked the white-only variant, but since I have been quite happy with the RGBW strips I use for indirect lighting (which have 5 LEDs per element), I decided to go with RGBW rather than a plain tunable white one on a whim.

Although I don’t see myself going all out on lurid disco-like ambiances, the tunable white mode works great, and via zigbee2mqtt you can configure the panel to reset to a specific mode when it’s powered on via the wall switch (I have the hue set to 320, which seems to maximize light output from both sets of “white” LEDs).

I had zero trouble binding it to my zigbee2mqtt setup, and although the drama (and earsplitting din) of drilling into concrete ceilings is not one of my fondest recollections, I am tickled pink (pun intended) with the results.

Going Ambilight

I have been sticking to my decision to write more Go, and since I’ve found myself again doing late night meetings and missed my ambilight-like setup under Windows but didn’t want to actually install a Windows compiler I decided to do a quick cross-platform hack (which I added to the original page for easy reference).

If Go does one thing right, it’s cross-platform–I haven’t found anything simpler than setting GOOS and rebuilding to get a working executable…

Solar Smokeping

I had to help troubleshoot a relative’s solar panel installation out in the middle of nowhere, and ended up doing it by packing a Z83ii loaded with Smokeping and Tailscale off into the wilderness, into which I remoted to set up monitoring targets for the (somewhat flaky, but mostly working) NOS LTE connection and all the LAN devices I could find.

Initial suspicions were focused on the Huawei router, but I ended up taking a close look at the SMA equipment controlling the solar panels atop a shed and the TP-Link powerline adapters the installers decided to use instead of running dedicated Ethernet wiring between the cottage and the shed.

In the process (which was a throwback to the days I was doing Ethernet MAC spoofing to debug spanning tree) I ended up going all the way from running iptraf via SSH to Wireshark via RDP and digging into the SMA protocol (of which there are a few implementations out there), but after three days of monitoring and some remotely directed plugging and unplugging of things it was pretty obvious the powerline connection was the problem – not because the adapters didn’t work (they were at their limit, but still within acceptable signal levels), but largely because the janky cheapo power supply from the NOS satellite box fuzzed out everything else.

A little judicious re-plugging of things into different extension cords straightened that out, but now that I have the Z83ii back I fully expect the LTE connection to drop out occasionally since it doesn’t have Smokeping keeping it open.

Ah well.

MicroPython Family Fun

A bunch of family shenanigans (trips, birthdays, visiting relatives) have also been a priority, and with summer school just ended, I did what every technically-minded parent would do and started farming out some of my hobby electronics projects to my kids.

I have nothing but praise for MicroPython, but having it on someting like the WaveShare RP2040 Zero takes things to another level and makes for some pretty impressive turnaround times for prototyping. My eldest is already looking at using Arduino C++ instead for performance reasons, and I mist go on the record to state I had nothing to do with that.

Well, at least not outside of genetics.

Rui Carmo
July 22^nd 2022, at breakfast · 1 min read

Analyzing iOS 16 Lockdown Mode ※

This seems like an eminently sane thing to have on.

I would much rather use it than a corporate profile with Microsoft Defender, but I need the latter for work access and there appears to be no way for both to coexist right now.

Rui Carmo
July 20^th 2022, at breakfast · 1 min read

Butterfly Keyboard Settlement ※

This is but a drop in the bucket and US-only (not to mention entirely too late), but it is something. Of course, brand confidence is an entirely different matter, and that was eroded for years until the hardware was revised…

Good thing Apple walked back the keyboard designs to something usable.

Rui Carmo
July 16^th 2022, at teatime · 5 min read

Heat Pumping

It was somewhat of a letargic week, especially if you consider that in the quasi-apocalyptic reality we now live temperatures above 40^oC have become the new normal. So I spent some time investigating my office air conditioner.

Rui Carmo
July 15^th 2022, at dawn · 1 min read

Unity is merging with IronSource ※

This has been ricocheting through Twitter (and Slack) all week. I honestly don’t know what Unity is thinking here (okay, other than monetizing games via ads, possibly installed sneakily), but the string of weird, shady decisions on their part is becoming… a turn-off.

Rui Carmo
July 13^th 2022, at breakfast · 1 min read

DOOM inside of DOOM ※

The weird “Doom running on things” obsession that has been doing the rounds for years has just gone meta.

Rui Carmo
July 9^th 2022, in the morning · 10 min read

Reviving my ancient BQ Prusa i3 Hephestos with Klipper

While I wait for a good deal on a new 3D printer, I decided to see what I could do to improve printing on the ancient Hephestos I built from a Maker Faire kit I got eight years ago, when I was organizing the first events in Portugal (which I’m thus quite attached to). And having heard good things about Klipper firmware, I decided to give it a spin.

Rui Carmo
July 3^rd 2022, in the evening · 6 min read

Keen On Keys

A lot has been happening on the 3D printing front, but that is still ongoing to a point where it will end up on a later post, so I decided to write a little follow-up on Cheap Keys. And if the title seems familiar, that’s because I really like this YouTube channel, which covers keys of other kinds.

Rui Carmo
June 30^th 2022, at breakfast · 1 min read

Raspberry Pi Pico W ※

I’m not enamored with the form factor (it’s way bigger than the ESP32s I have been using), but am quite excited by the possibilities since I already have a few tiny RP2040 boards and can see third parties doing new twists on those with a Wi-Fi (and Bluetooth) chip.

Really great news for tinkerers overall.

Rui Carmo
June 26^th 2022, at dinnertime · 9 min read

The Xbox Series X

A couple of months ago I got a great deal on an Xbox Series X, which kind of explains why some of my free time has evaporated. Well, not all of it, but here are my thoughts on it so far.

Rui Carmo
June 19^th 2022, at breakfast · 1 min read

Spaceship! ※

This is so cool to see. I owned the original LEGO Galaxy Explorer 497 set, and it was the one I loved the most (at least until I got into Technic).

We still have most of the custom bricks (like wings and landing struts), although the lunar plates seem to have been lost in the intervening years.

Rui Carmo
June 18^th 2022, at late afternoon · 3 min read

Inverse Weekend

As it turned out the July bank holidays were too tempting to resist, so I just took a day off and am enjoying an “inverse weekend”, working only 2 days out of 7…

Rui Carmo
June 16^th 2022, in the morning

Darth Vader On A Portuguese Beach

Let's comb the beach! — I was given access to DALL-E 2 today, and am clearly having too much fun.

Rui Carmo
June 11^th 2022, at late afternoon · 1 min read

Short Break

Thanks to a serendipitous alignment of Portuguese holidays this turned out to be a 4-day weekend, so I decided to spend a chunk of it dusting and cleaning my office throughout, which entailed unplugging, untangling and cleaning all the cabling.

Rui Carmo
June 9^th 2022, in the afternoon · 1 min read

Xbox on Samsung TVs, and more... ※

With the upcoming availability of xCloud on Samsung TVs, I’m reminded that Apple explicitly locked themselves out of this due to their preposterously insane requirements of having every streamed game reviewed and packaged independently.

With Game Pass eventually allowing you to stream games you purchased (i.e., technically off-catalog), that requirement sounds even more out of touch… And I can’t help think that Apple shot themselves in the foot here in more ways than one.

Good thing I decided to get an NVIDIA Shield and sideload the Android app nearly two years ago…

Rui Carmo
June 6^th 2022, in the evening · 1 min read

WWDC 2022 keynote announcements ※

I’m just going to go out on a limb here and say this was the best WWDC keynote yet if you use an iPad.

After all, we got much better filesystem and window management features (including massively improved external display support and scaling adjustment), full iOS 16 parity and… a weather app.

Who knows, next year we might even get a calculator!

Rui Carmo
June 4^th 2022, late night · 4 min read

Weekend Updates

Since last week I got something like 15 little packets from AliExpress, so I finally have all the parts for my electronics builds and can get to finishing them.

Rui Carmo
June 2^nd 2022, at breakfast · 1 min read

Rediscovering the Mac ※

Federico realizes the Mac is, after all, a better computer than the iPad because (surprise) it is less restrictive about what you can do.

This is not even news, and somewhat cringe worthy, to be honest.

Even though most of the stuff I write here is actually written on an iPad mini (which is still the first computer I pick up in the morning and the last I put down before bed) and I do use it routinely for coding and accessing remote machines, I see the iPad as the modern equivalent of the Newton – a very personal (single user) computer that can help you manage most of your life (communications, notes, entertainment, even many creative activities) but for which Apple has failed to build software able to raise it to its full potential.

I endure it, but would swap it for a Mac tablet without a second thought.

Rui Carmo
May 31^st 2022, at breakfast · 1 min read

Check Your Mailbox Using The AirTag Infrastructure ※

This is genius. I’m quite curious as to whether this is feasible to do for tampering/presence detection (like whether someone has opened an utility closet and the like).

Rui Carmo
May 28^th 2022, at night · 9 min read

Build Updates

Following up on my recent post on hardware projects, I managed a fair bit of progress in the intervening days.

Rui Carmo
May 24^th 2022, at teatime · 1 min read

Azure ARM Virtual Machines Preview ※

This has been a long time coming, but it’s here “now”, and is just one of the ARM-related announcements at MS Build (the other is Project Volterra, a Snapdragon-based ARM developer workstation, but I already have plenty of those…).

Since these are based on Ampere (not really a surprise to anyone), the core-to-RAM ratios are pretty nice for server applications, and I expect a lot of interesting solutions to be deployed on them.

Rui Carmo
May 21^st 2022, in the morning · 5 min read

Notes on Fedora 36

Sometime during the past two weeks I decided to install Fedora 36 on my Lenovo, and this is my usual roll-up of notes and sundry. Most of it was OK and unremarkable (which is good for technology these days), but (spoiler) there are always a few odds and ends that could be better.

Rui Carmo
May 18^th 2022, at breakfast · 1 min read

Turing Pi 2 Kickstarter ※

I want to like this, seeing as it would make a lot of sense (such as things are) for me to get one, but with compute modules being sold out everywhere, ready access to vastly more powerful cloud (and local) resources and little time to tinker beyond a couple of hours a week, I just can’t justify it–especially since I gave away my Raspberry Pi 2 cluster last year, and just haven’t missed it.

But it would be really nice (budget permitting) to fill one with NVIDIA Jetsons since those would let me tinker with PyTorch in earnest (even if more slowly than a consumer-grade GPU).

Guess I need to become a YouTuber or something.

Rui Carmo
May 18^th 2022, at breakfast · 1 min read

Google keeps legacy G Suite alive ※

The way Google handled this whole affair was bewildering, and bordering on the incompetent–and surely worth an award of some kind for worst product management strategy ever.

Like many others, I switched away (in my case, to a mix of consumer Outlook and iCloud, to diversify providers and lower risk) and all I needed was to keep personal mailboxes, but I could have spared myself all the hassle.

I don’t think Google, actually likes having customers, but as an engineering-driven organization, I suspect that is just a backlog item.