Notes for March 6-12

Hardware week again.

Cleanup day, not just physically.

• Resumed weekly tidying of office. Considering adding a ritual sacrifice of my optimism and creativity (in the shape of a cookie) before turning on my work machine.
• Was again stung by Fedora’s insistence in kneecapping its OS by removing media codecs in a new install.
• Spent a while trying to get ChatGPT to help with creating a set of Azure Monitor queries in my personal subscription, which it was utterly useless for since it just… made up stuff (and confused Kusto queries with the simpler feature set in Log Analytics).

Some radio stuff.

• Set up a LilyGo 433MHz board to run OpenMQTTGateway, which was childishly simple to do, but doesn’t seem to immediately pick up all the 433MHz stuff I’m interested in–I guess that will require sitting down with my SDR dongle for a while and tuning a few things. Was somewhat amused to see an Acurite Grill/Meat Thermometer 01185M pop up almost immediately, though.
• Fixed some of my home automation, namely some overdue battery swaps and the LG Smart TV API integration that was broken by my having switched routers a few days ago.

Impromptu ISP veteran meetup day.

• Walked 5Km in an attempt at doing some actual exercise.
• Listened to another Oxide and Friends episode during the above.
• Took a little time before dinner to check on Steam Linux updates and fool around with emulators, with mixed results.
• Finally managed to get an Xbox controller to pair with Fedora by setting:

# head -2 /etc/bluetooth/main.conf
[General]
Privacy=device

• Cleared out a mass of duplicates from my Calibre library.
• Spent a fair bit trying to get sdf running on my iPad Pro, but scikit would have none of it.

Woke up early again.

• Had a stab at getting py-sdf (a more complete fork) to use CUDA with cupy, but numpy array type coverage isn’t there yet. Ended up starting a fork to experiment.
• Tried to install my Kontakt VSTs in Fedora by resorting to an older installer, but Native Instruments’ software is just completely user hostile.
• Learned the hard way that CAD Sketcher will only work “out of the box” in Fedora 37 if you install Blender via flatpak due to different Python runtimes (also, updated my notes regarding how to set it up in mm to edit STL files directly).
• Played around with Steam and CEMU with borg plugged into my LG Ultrawide for a few minutes of glorious enjoyment. If it wasn’t for the fan noise when the GPU ramps up, I’d likely never move it to the closet.

Wound down for the weekend.

• Tried to proactively clean up office after work to save time on Monday.
• Spent a while reading up on CUDA development and clearing my personal backlog, drafts, random organizational chores.

Decided to investigate 3D modeling options.

• Personal inbox zero.
• Got a somewhat usable modeling worflow going with py-sdf, meshview and Jupyter inside VS Code:

It can’t really replace OpenSCAD, given the massive amount of libraries for it out there, but might be a good alternative for other things.

• Practiced using CAD Sketcher to design a simple enclosure, which was somewhat of a failure. Realized I still remember a fair amount of how to use Blender, just not the bits I need.
• Collated and posted my notes on the Beelink U59 Pro.

Low-level and electronics stuff.

• Upgraded my Zigbee coordinator and routers to new firmware versions to see if I can fix the niggling issues I’ve been having with devices falling off the network¹:

cc2538-bsl.py -p /dev/ttyUSB0 -evw CC2652R_router_20221102.hex
cc2538-bsl.py -p /dev/ttyUSB0 -evw CC2652R_coordinator_20221226.hex

• Tried to unbrick another CC2652R1F adapter I had put aside a while back, first with an FTDI adapter and later using a Pi as an impromptu adapter, but openocd just couldn’t detect the JTAG interface no matter what I did.
• Rebuilt one of my ESP-01 prototypes on a clean breadboard. I have a dozen of the things and might as well make use of them.
• Looked for updated SDR applications for the Mac. Turns out there aren’t many (SDR Angel is an old fave, gqrx hasn’t been updated in a year, etc.).
• Cleaned up and posted these notes.