Notes for January 30-February 5

Peak 3D printing bonanza.

Monday, 2023-01-30

Felt feverish, insanely tired. Unsurprisingly, realized I got a cold.

  • Tidied the office.
  • Went through my personal project backlog and pruned a few things.
  • Ended the day early and spent some time doodling with music stuff.

Tuesday, 2023-01-31

Took part of the day off to nurse my cold, ended up spending a couple of hours in my blissfully sunny living room for a change.

  • Cleaned up my personal ~/Development folder a bit, archiving older projects and making sure only the ones I should be focusing on are readily available to avoid distractions.
  • Upgraded my MacBook to macOS Ventura 13.2. Nothing blew up, but nothing improved much either. System Preferences, in particular, is a buggy mess.
  • Upgraded zigbee2mqtt to new point release. Some sensors still dropping off the network, probably need to start debugging router firmware.
  • Reinstalled to check out the new version as well.

Wednesday, 2023-02-01

Got back to work. Was pleasantly surprised to receive most of my new server parts (except for the DeskMeet B660, which is, worryingly, yet to be shipped, even as I clean up these notes).

  • Resumed investigating how to automate cgroup resource limiting without going fully medieval on /proc.
  • Ran a number of tests on my cloud-init template to set up a nice sandbox that can also be useful for isolating apps running inside Piku.

Thursday, 2023-02-02

Busy day and family evening, so not much time to tinker.

  • Since Twitter decided to turn off free API access, I fast-tracked my RSS to bridge and got it to post . I expect it will have bugs, but as far as a quick and dirty 90-line aiohttp hack goes, it’s pretty decent.
  • As a direct result of the above, ended up fixing a long-standing bug in cron expression validation in Piku that had eluded me for a while and that was due to a reentrant call.

Friday, 2023-02-03

Nothing much to report.

  • Deployed the RSS-to- bridge in production. Yes, I know it’s a Friday, it’s less than 100 lines and non-critical.
  • Spent my lunch break fixing a double glazed window latch.
  • Filed some photos from 2008 I found in a relative’s old USB hard drive.
  • Went through my Drafts folder and noticed I hadn’t posted about yet–fixed that as well.

Saturday, 2023-02-04

A semblance of personal productivity, with actual tangible outputs.

  • Personal inbox zero.
  • Read most of this week’s The Economist.
  • Wasted some time chasing after a D3.js bug in an old custom chart I wanted to re-use.
  • Resumed a couple of my 3D printing projects that are in the fine adjustment stage: i.e., taking 2mm slices of pieces with incorrect dimensions, printing them out, and double-checking tolerances.
  • Published the first version of my replacement base for the Vodafone/Sagem ONT “Smart Router” that Vodafone Portugal provides to their fiber subscribers.

Sunday, 2023-02-05

CAD and 3D printing day. I think it’s the first time I had both printers going non-stop.

  • Tweaked some tolerances in yesterday’s 3D models, printed a final version of the ONT base and started planning for re-wiring the LAN closet.
  • Had another run-in with the Sunlu matte white “PLA of death”, which this time clogged my so badly it forced me to completely disassemble the extruder and actually drill through the clog.
  • Decided to step up replacing the extruder altogether with the Aero Titan I got last week and start designing an X carriage mount for it. Fortunately, I have all the original BQ Prusa Hephestos STL files (they’re still available online), so it’s mostly a matter of plugging holes and placing new ones.
Yellow for plugs, red for new holes.
  • Printed out some rough drafts of other printer parts (extruder mount, fan shroud, etc.)
  • Also printed out two sets of parts for a modular spool holder for which I had ordered some ball bearings a month ago. Pro tip: you can fine tune things by squirting WD-40 into the bearings and then fitting the roller with a heat gun.
  • Cleaned up and posted these notes.

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