Notes for February 20-26

A bit of fun was had, largely by dint of catching up with hobbies.

US holiday. Took the day off as well.

• Punted on tidying office, put my work machine in a shelf instead and spent the day on my Mac.
• Reviewed list of personal projects, which is in an XMind mind-map that currently feels very much like this:

• Took some time to relax, deal with some Swift multicast madness and create Platypus wrappers for some of my utilities:

• Did some more research for a future project.
• Fixed a Nintendo Switch joy-con.
• Added the final piece (a missing SSD heatsink) to borg and did a few stress tests by running a set of Stable Diffusion prompts in imaginAIry. Am quite impressed that I can absentmindedly RDP to it using my LG Ultrawide and things are still fast.

Mardi Gras. Short (non-Carnival-related) family outing.

• Upon returning home, decided to celebrate by dressing up as a couch potato and trying to drum up the courage to dabble in music again.
• On a whim, hooked up my LG 5K2K to my thin client setup as a second display and enjoyed a very nice 3440x1440 GPU accelerated experience, although it is clear at this point the Pi struggles a bit with both the extra display and what borg can throw at it–and crashes if I overclock it. Time to start researching fanless Celeron mini-PCs with dual HDMI and see if it’s worth replacing the Pi with one in six months or so.
• Tried out pygwalker, which is a pretty neat way to explore my home automation metrics.
• Briefly poked at building a new Klipper accelerometer module.
• Installed the new PrusaSlicer alpha and began migrating my settings across.
• Printed a couple of LEGO pieces in PETG.

Ash Wednesday, also known as “Monday” this week.

• Filed #28 in pygwalker because I can’t really use the charting with the current default labeling.

Mild chaos.

• Scrubbed some SuperSlicer settings and imported them into PrusaSlicer for testing.

Relatively quiet day, spent mostly catching up on things. Hard to believe the war started a year ago.

I checked on NEXTSPACE (which I tried last year) and was sad to see the developer (an Ukrainian) hasn’t committed anything for a long time now.

Ended the day early and caught up on personal things as well:

• Learned a magic incantation to reset a completely frozen, blank screen 2022 iPad that wouldn’t charge or show up on the USB bus: press volume buttons in order (moving away from power button), hold power button until Apple logo shows up. Phew.
• Did a few test prints with PrusaSlicer Alpha 4 to try out some of the new fancy features, with spectacularly bad results (like Klipper freaking out with 200x extrusion rates). Turns out I need to scrub the configs a little more and remove some conflicting settings.
• Realized some recent Fedora upgrade broke pulseaudio in xrdp, so I spent a while looking for systemd --user red herrings, eventually updated the xrdp-sink module and added an explicit startup item:

# cat .config/autostart/pulseaudio.desktop 
[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Name=PulseAudio Sound System
Exec=/bin/sh -c "sleep 2; pulseaudio --start"
Terminal=false
Type=Application
X-GNOME-Autostart-Phase=Initialization
NotShowIn=KDE;

• Fooled around a bit more with my ambilight-like setup and the Go binary I use to update my office bias lighting to match to what’s on my monitor. Unfortunately Wayland doesn’t make it easy to take screenshots, so I wrote a fallback that extracts the color hints from the current wallpaper instead.
• Realized boatswain exists, downloaded the source and wrestled with GNOME Builder to get an actual non-Flatpak binary and, for good measure, set ICON_SIZE to 72 because the default 32 is obviously meant for ants. Seems to work OK with my Lenovo, which opens up entirely new possibilities:

This reminds me I haven’t written about how I use the Elgato Stream Deck on Windows and Mac, but the above is pretty similar to my Mac layout, with that “off-by-one” feel you get when you’re porting code across in a hurry.

Family outing.

• Read The Economist.
• Personal inbox zero.
• Light piku backlog/issue grooming.

Catch-up day, mostly devoted to personal projects and cleaning up.

• Migrated my Takahē instance from Pimox to an Azure Standard_B2s with minimum disruption. Part of it is due to piku since it was just a git push after I had copied the data over (and this machine currently runs five other applications), part of it Cloudflare, all of it just so nice and tidy (at least for now).
• Finally replaced our old Huawei all-in-one ONT/router with the nicer (hopefully far less buggy) Vodafone Smart Router Sagem-designed model I infamously spent multiple months designing a replacement base for.
• Literally screwed a Gigabit switch to a wall to make our utility cabinet tidier.
• Cleaned up these notes for posting.