Notes for January 02-08

This is an abridged list of the non-work things I accomplished this week.

US Holiday break, so very slow day.

• Cleaned up office, desk and shelves.
• Sorted through my lingering hardware project boxes and prioritized what needs to be redesigned/soldered in the coming weeks.
• Upgraded MicroPython on my Adafruit Macropad and set up a dedicated Gitea repository for macros.
• Built a little Rust toy project.

Spent a part of the morning running various errands, and later:

• Mounted a new G10/FR4/fiberglass build plate on my Kingroon KP3S Pro. Also tightened down the Z-axis on the Kingroon KP3S Pro and re-aligned it.
• Drafted a Mastodon list to RSS Node-RED flow and set it up in staging to share with friends.
• Printed a Gridfinity MK8/V6 printer nozzle box in Sunlu PETG on my Prusa.
• Upgraded the house zigbee2mqtt instance to 1.29.0, which regretfully is still buggy where it regards letting random devices drop off the network.
• Tried Logseq and didn’t like the fact that it cannot cope with iOS filesystem providers and seems to be headed down the proprietary/paid syncing service route.
• Hacked a minimal ag replacement for a-Shell:

#!/bin/sh
# Drop this into ~/Documents/bin and chmod +x it
if [ $# -ne 0 ]; then
  find . -type f -exec grep -in "$1" {} \; -print
else
  echo "usage: ag <string>"
fi

Brief outing to pick up a repaired Intel MacBook.

• Completed one Oxide and Friends podcast episode during outing.
• Set up MacBook admin account and sane defaults before handing it over.
• Added reblogged media to Mastodon list feed generator and deployed it in production behind the new piku cache feature that I added over holiday break.
• Printed two better nozzle boxes in Red PLA on the Prusa.
• Tried to figure out Azure Functions output bindings in the new Python v2 progamming model–there is still no sample code for queue, blob and table bindings, and those are critical for my use case.
• Tried to tune Sunlu PETG on the Kingroon KP3S Pro
• Backed up SuperSlicer settings to Gitea.
• Backed up Prusa Klipper settings to Azure.

More errands, some music stuff in the evening.

• Completed another Oxide and Friends podcast episode.
• Tested disassembled MacBook 12 “adorable” logic board (not working again, looks like bad connector). Ordered a new USB connector from eBay.
• Upgraded my M8 Headless firmware to 2.7.8 (using Windows, because UART support is broken on Chromium). Wrote little ditty on it over lunch.
• Fixed Kingroon KP3S Pro start G-code in SuperSlicer.
• Repackaged sunvox for the Pi 4 and contributed patch upstream.
• Finally printed a useful piece with Sunlu PETG on the Kingroon KP3S Pro.
• Began designing a Gridfinity 4mm hex bit holder in OpenSCAD.
• Bought SAGA Synth and noodled with it.
• Updated my Bitwig install to 4.4.6.

Vodafone turned a scheduled intervention during the wee hours of Friday into a several hour long fiber outage, which in turn nearly turned this into a fully offline day. Fortunately, I quite like working on the corporate remote desktop from my iPad, and have friends in networked places.

• Updated my feedback to Apple on Stage Manager.
• Tried Sunlu matte white PLA (which I term “the PLA from hell” since it prints badly and is so chalky it clogs my machines). Promptly clogged the Kingroon KP3S Pro extruder and decided to disassemble the whole thing over lunch.
• Changed Kingroon KP3S Pro nozzle to a Chinese CHT clone.
• Removed Kingroon KP3S Pro PTFE-lined heat-break and swapped it with an all-metal one.
• Successful “faster” 0.2mm layer height print on Kingroon KP3S Pro with CHT clone nozzle, red PLA (still with Marlin firmware).
• Draft printed a cross-section of the 4mm hex bit box for test fitting. Cleaned up OpenSCAD file and adjusted tolerances.
• Got Sunlu matte white PLA from hell to print on Prusa.
• Found long-missing alcohol spritzer, wiped down a new, textured, black G10/FR4 build plate and replaced the green one on the Kingroon.

Weekly outing for shopping. Still managed to get some stuff done:

• Added preliminary Markdown support to blog table renderer.
• Updated site builder dependencies, regression tested.
• Asked E3D about an order and why Royal Mail still shows it as uncollected. Apparently Royal Mail cannot do its one job, even after strikes ceased.
• Enabled Redis caching on test Takahē instance, updated post.
• Futzed a bit more with the dash shell inside a-Shell.
• Tidied up piku issues and PRs a bit.
• Tried to get a test Elixir project going on arm64.

A quiet day spent reading most of this week’s edition of The Economist, having a family lunch and other stuff:

• Printed a few Nano-SIM adaptors on Kingroon KP3S Pro at 0.1mm layer height.
• Tested new backup Huawei LTE router with Vodafone SIM, got 70Mbps downstream indoors (which is OK if another fiber outage happens), tested manual failover from fiber to it.
• Printed hex bit holder with Sunlu matte white PLA from hell on Prusa (twice, at at 0.4 and 0.3mm layer height, because 0.4 had bad layer adhesion).
• Removed akkoma LXC from pimox, started setting up new test environments for piku.
• Hacked together a small .stl viewer with ThreeJS.
• Wrote long form addendum to 2022 and sanitized these notes.