Notes for January 23-29

Partly offline week.

Decided to cut down on social and screen time to avoid the utterly depressing stream of farewell posts from laid off colleagues and acquaintances.

Did not tidy the office this week, for a change.
Dealt with personal e-mail, including arranging for a replacement of the package Royal Mail lost.
Waited for a technician to come round due to the inexplicable failure of one of my landlines last Saturday (during another technician’s visit to the building). Was a no-show, got a text to the effect that the fault requires someone else to come round within 3 business days, so I’m making plans to cancel that service and route around the damage.
To let off some steam, I decided to reach into the parts bin, dig out a 32MB(!) SD card and a Raspberry Pi 1B from 2011 (likely the first I ever bought) and flash bmc64 on it. Not terribly useful, and not a nostalgia trip (I’m a Sinclair ZX81 veteran), but it was a good 20 minutes well spent at the end of the day to build what is essentially an educational toy. Felt tempted to port Basilisk II to circle, probably would have taken a swing at it if there was SDL support.

Awfully cold day. Woke up with a sore neck, spent most of it squirreled away in the office with the heater on.

Dealt with personal e-mail, set up a couple of mailbox categories for 2023.
Fiddled with runc to see if I could use it as sandboxing duct tape for uwsgi. The requirement for a rootfs is an annoyance, and I don’t want to reinvent the Docker wheel, so I’m back to fiddling with cgrulesengined and the like. They’re still being shipped as OS packages across most distributions that matter, and I can automate their setup with minimal fuss.
Added cgrulesengined and cgconfigparser to my cloud-init setup.
Futzed with Pimox a little to see if I could understand why Proxmox VE does not apparently support cloud-init for LXC containers, which is annoying.

Added more things to my “3D printing projects” backlog.

Finally received my missing Royal Mail package (a Titan Aero extruder for my Prusa).
Researched suitable extruder mounts and short-listed one for printing out and doing a test fit.
Got my MacBook 12” main board to boot again thanks to a replacement USB-C port I ordered on eBay weeks ago. Started designing a case for it around a massive aluminum heatsink.

Very busy day. Zero actual fun was had.

Friday, 2023-01-27

Feeling a cold coming on, which is perfect to do research and reading.

Finally managed to watch the first episode of The Last of Us in the evening. Seems promising, although I pretty much loathe zombie movies, even if fungi are the new brain viruses.
Rebuilt the back-end for my little Preact app.
Spent some time investigating mini server options. The best fit for my needs seems to be the ASRock DeskMeet B660. The Ryzen version has only one M.2 slot, and I can’t get Ryzen CPUs that match what Intel can offer in this range, so I’m going to start putting together a new machine with an i7-12700.

Couch potato day.

Read The Economist.
Re-learned that Cmd + . issues Esc in iOS, which is such a massive throwback to my Mac OS 6 days that it is absolutely insane that I forgot about it for this long.
Spent a while debugging a stupid sqlite3.PARSE_DECLTYPES mistake.
Did more hardware component research.
Wrestled with a few unreasonable YAML files and fixed a bug in some of my deployment scripts that could have been prevented by Kubernetes picking just about anything else as a configuration file format.

Family day. Brief outing.

In an attempt to be optimistic about building a compact PC with a minimally viable discrete GPU in 2023, decided to order a bunch of parts off Amazon.
Helped one of my kids publish a Godot game for his first game jam. The overall ease of the entire process is pretty amazing, but the best thing was watching him go through the end-to-end creative process.
Did some more Proxmox research to plan for migrating LXD containers onto a new instance.
Tested an Azure deployment template for a new project. Am a bit annoyed at API drift over the past year, and need to upgrade a few portions of it.