The Bunnies Are Loose

Easter break was a bit different this year, but we still managed to pop over to the countryside for a (wet) couple of days.

Quality sleep, alas, eluded me, but my heartbeat went down almost 20bpm on average, and there was definitely a lot less to worry about.

It’s still impossible to predict exactly how many (and what kind) USB cables you’ll need, even in what should be the prime of the USB-C age. This is because pretty much all the power adapters are still USB-A–so during our trip I queued up a couple of orders of tiny USB-A adapters.

The Radxa Zero is still an amazing pocket server–I’ve been running an entire XCFE desktop and PlatformIO on it, which is frankly excessive, and it works great at only 5W of power. But I really should have been using it with CLI tools, since the tendency to just go overboard and treat it like a full-blown desktop is overwhelming, and quickly leads to slowness–but if I had brought one of the RK3588 boards, that would have been completely overkill¹.

Without it, my iPad Pro would probably be all I needed² (besides the Kindle) if I hadn’t (unwisely) decided I would do some ESP32 coding in the middle of the countryside–yes, you can do that on the Radxa Zero. No, it’s not that fast. But it works, and SyncThing backs up everything to my home NAS just fine:

Plus, of course, with Tailscale the vast majority of things I need just work as if I were home. We live in an age of unparalleled ease of connectivity, at least until you consider the enshittification of online services and, of course, things like the xz supply chain security issue that has been making the rounds this week.

(A part of me is gleefully following the inevitable systemd jokes and the reverse engineering of how that was out in place and how it works – it might be the biggest RCE exploit ever pulled…)

I eventually relaxed, got to reading, and found out that The Bobiverse is pretty great. Nothing like the idea of Earth seeding the galaxy with Von Neumann probes piloted by an uploaded startup engineer to almost renew my faith in the technology industry.

Also, the weather sort of helped, largely by dint of not helping at all–there’s nothing like the boredom of being stuck inside all day to make you spend some time creating Shortcuts to automate stuff (in my case, housekeeping for text snippets).

Finally, I did some experiments and confirmed that video is… the future. I was going to add an STL viewer to my site, but after a couple of experiments it dawned upon me that generating a 360^o video loop of a simple model and embedding it was 1/3rd the size of the JavaScript needed to render the results, let alone downloading the STL itself:

And it works better over RSS, too. And in mobile. And in just about every single scenario I could think of as long as I keep the videos on the small side.

I had already been quite happy with the various slideshows I generated for my posts, but this settles it–expect a lot more video tags in this site.