Notes for March 27-April 2

This was a both a much worse and a much better week than usual.

Another round of layoffs, this time affecting more close friends and acquaintances.

Family event, overshadowed by yesterday’s events.

Bashed out some ideas in Node-RED.
Decided to start reading Accelerando again, which now feels oddly tame when compared to the ChatGPT hype fest that is percolating out of every single online source.

I had to laugh at the Moscow Windows NT User Group becoming sentient and the weird resonance with what Microsoft is doing with OpenAI in real life.

Mood improving slightly.

Got both Copilot and API access to GPT-4, so played around with both in VS Code during my free time to see if the novelty wears off quickly and I can get back to more useful hobbies.
Futzed about indecisively with what to pack for a weekend trip.

Finally, some good news.

Hacked together and printed a minimal enclosure for my M8 Headless so that it wasn’t just a PCB wrapped in Kapton tape:

OpenSCAD files will eventually make their way to GitHub, as usual.

Rather a rushed day.

Packed my cheap keys and my iPad mini, negotiated the ungodly mess that is LIS airport departures and flew to Faro for the weekend.

Had an amazing dinner at Forno Nero.
Since I didn’t bring my usual dongle, did a token effort at getting YouTube to work on the hotel Samsung TV, but it wouldn’t do TLS (either because Samsung, being Samsung, stopped maintaining those models’ Tizen browser, or because the kneecapped hotel mode settings on the TV didn’t have the clock set).

Not an overly foolish day.

Did a token effort at messing with the hotel NFC keys, but I foolishly took the spare blank I always carried with me out of my travel kit, so no dice. Nice indoor pool though.
Traipsed around Faro on foot, woefully under-prepared shoe-wise, so I developed epic blisters.
Got a mid-afternoon HomeKit alert that my house was offline and tried to figure out why. Two out of three Tailscale nodes were down, but I was able to see two Gigabit ports were… Off?:

Back home, with one of the kids toting a silver medal in the national Math Olympics–multiple layers of win for this weekend.

Went about the house trying to sort out why the Vodafone SmartRouter I spent months designing a replacement base for (and which I “upgraded” to last month) decided to disable two of its Gigabit ports and cut off access to most of my infrastructure. No conclusions, merely suspicions about the Vodafone IPTV set-top box and IGMP, even though nobody was home.
Started drawing an updated home network diagram. I think it’s time to go all out and start doing VLAN trunking.
Investigated cheap managed gigabit switch options to see if I can engineer my way around future failures.
Decided to order a couple of TP-Link TL-SG108Es to replace the dumb ones I have been rocking for a few years, which should make for a fun Easter Break project. And before you ask, 2.5GbE isn’t cheap enough yet.