Notes for January 30-February 5

Peak 3D printing bonanza.

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.

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 Amethyst to check out the new version as well.

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.

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 Mastodon bridge and got it to post its first blog notification. 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.

Nothing much to report.

• Deployed the RSS-to-Mastodon 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 my Mastodon list to RSS hack yet–fixed that as well.

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.

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 Prusa 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.

• 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.