Notes for February 27-March 5

Playing catchup at various levels.

Long day.

Did some research on image formats and AI-driven compression optimization.
Got reacquainted with the Novation Circuit Tracks, which I fiddled with for a bit in an attempt to start having fun with music again.
As a direct result, decided to succumb to gear acquisition syndrome and get something cheap to use as a dedicated DAW workstation.

Early day, brief outing.

Realized (belatedly) that Go multicast just doesn’t work on Windows at all like I need it to. Scrapped parts of my ambilight code and wrote another plain UDP fallback.
Played around with WASM to see how far I could go with a little test project.

No fun whatsoever was had in this day.

Another day with late night calls.

Did some fiddling with borg–upgraded the NVIDIA drivers and migrated another container over.
Tweaked sizing for my Takahē instance from Standard_B2s to a Standard_B1ms, since CPU load is insignificant and I’ve set “lazy mode” on it and most co-located services, so it’s all running off cache and only spawning workers as needed.

Woke up at 5AM. Took the time to reorganize a few things.

Made a first pass at setting up a dedicated DAW box using a Celeron N5105 and… Windows. Not entirely happy with the results performance-wise, especially given the OS overhead, so I installed Fedora on a secondary SSD and… it was overwhelmingly faster, even before realtime-setup and other tweaks.
Discovered Barrier still doesn’t work well with Wayland, which is a blocking issue for my current multi-desktop setup. Current workaround is to remember to log in to a standard X session in Fedora, which is sub-optimal.

Moderate fun was had.

Personal inbox zero.
Spent a fair bit of time fiddling with Bitwig and various VSTs. No actual music was made, but it was fun.
Figured out how to run Spitfire Audio’s VST installer under WINE (it needs the dxvk package, which you can get via winetricks).
Hacked a workaround for stale connections in my home Snapdrop instance.

Cleaning/rest day.

Read The Economist.
Spent a while unglamorously picking fluff from vacuum cleaner rollers with tweezers, which I sort of regret not having left until a work day since it was so cathartic.
Did some electrical work to wire a set of chargers under a secondary desk, including an Anker 737 120W brick that can fast charge two modern iPads or one laptop.
Got m8c running on our Anbernic RG351MP, which means I now have a new music travel toy.
Printed some 3D models for kids’ school projects and taught sanding techniques.
Zoned out on Bad Gear videos.
Realized that a Fedora update broke PAM inside one of my LXC containers, and the only fix that restored the ability for a test user to ssh in (or for root to su into it) was commenting out pam_limits:

sed -i -r 's/^(session\s+required\s+pam_limits.so)/#\1/' /etc/pam.d/*