Kicking off 2024

It was a fun week and a half while the holiday break lasted. Like pretty much every year, it was a race against the clock to get as much stuff done as possible, and besides all the partying and eating and visiting, it was hardly uneventful:

• For starters, both my 3D printers broke—the Y-axis belt on my KP3S Pro broke (likely because I tightened it too much while trying to track down the causes for some layer shifts I was experiencing), and then one of my long-suffering Prusa Hephestos’ Z axes wore off, so I’ve had to order a couple of replacement belts and dig around to find someone who still sells ancient RepRap-style lead screws.
• While ordering those and a bunch of other missing parts for lingering projects, I also managed to max out my “shopping” credit card, which is pretty unusual for me (I usually keep very low balances on it), so that meant postponing some purchases until next month (gotta stick to my own budgeting rules).
• Before that happened, I was nevertheless able to design and print a bunch of things I had been postponing and re-organized a key part of my office storage, but I’m a bit upset because I had a lot more stuff planned.
• In the meantime, I re-flashed my heat pump HomeKit controllers with new firmware that works better with iOS 17, and tended to my Zigbee network by re-positioning a router and upgrading firmware (it still feels weird to upgrade firmware on a light bulb, but it’s pretty amazing to have Open Source tools to do it automatically).
• I dug out my stack of ESP-01s for a couple of electronics projects (one of which involved WLED, because ‘twas the season).

Unable to print cases for my projects with my 3D printers down for what may be anything from a couple of weeks to a month, I decided to shift to homelab and software:

• Finally got both LVM and KVM working on pimox, my Raspberry Pi 4 running Proxmox, which entailed getting its SSD mounted via gparted and re-organized. This is something I needed get the local-lvm storage to work properly and calidate I can run ARM64 VMs on other boards, and was very much overdue.
• For a lark, I got Windows 10 ARM running inside it for a bit.
• Then I upgraded Node-RED, homebridge and zigbee2mqtt, a process which, as usual, entailed upgrading NodeJS in some way (now to version 18) for no real apparent reason.
• Then I went and messed about with two new single-board computers I’m testing–with mixed results as yet (since I also needed to order some NVME storage and other add-ons for them).
• Throughout all this, I also spent a good deal of time catching up on LLM and Stable Diffusion stuff (including beta-testing some very neat iOS apps and building a lot of stuff from scratch on ARM).

And now I have to somehow come to terms with the fact that I have to go back to work tomorrow. I’m not sure I’m ready for that at all.