Notes for June 12-25

The past two weeks were a bit of a blur, what with work, work-related concerns, allergies and other minor ailments–but rather a large amount of time spent in Hyrule after hours.

Everything is slowing down for Summer, so things I want to keep track of are fewer and farther between, and to be honest I’ve been growing somewhat sloppy with notetaking as other things took priority.

Brief outing, in another miserable attempt at doing some regular exercise while running errands.

• Spent a good while in the evening playing with SuperAGI. The harness is cleverly implemented, but the results are were just hopeless.

Bank holiday (although I attended one work call–such is life).

• Personal Inbox zero (mostly paying bills).
• Did some tax stuff.
• Poked at implementing OpenAI function calling in a toy workflow. It helps with building more complex harnesses, but when the base model decides to ignore context altogether, there’s not much to be done.
• Dumped out my notes on the ultralight stack for lightweight ARM machines (a by-product of my dipping into thin clients again).

• Sorted out how to provision an Azure VM that automatically joins a Tailscale network, and published azure-dev-bootstrap, which I’m now using as a development sandbox template.

Highly unproductive day on all counts (professional and personal), as I wasn’t feeling very well.

Various outings and errands to try to get myself back into shape.

• Slowly getting around to upgrading my KP3S Pro to Klipper. Printed a 3D Touch mount for it and ran the required wiring through the external looms, but stopped short of assembling it or plugging it into the main board. I was also quite amused to see that Kingroon are now selling a brand new model with Klipper baked in.

• Since I’ve been increasingly annoyed with Joy-Con wear and tear and somewhat flaky Bluetooth connectivity to the Switch when docked, I got an 8BitDo Ultimate 2.4GHz/Bluetooth controller. I liked it so much that I instantly ordered another. This is highly unusual for me, but it does several things right:

• It supports both Bluetooth and 2.4GHz modes (the charging dock has a dongle inside).

• It supports both Switch and X-input modes (to the Switch, it looks like a Pro controller via USB, and it works very well with emulators on the Mac).
• Besides Hall effect joysticks (which are arguably drift resistant, but so responsive), the buttons and control pad feel perfect.

It also supports multiple controller profiles (although right now I have no use for those, or for macros).

More toing and froing for routine tests.

• Assembled the 3D Touch and a new fan nozzle onto the KP3S and did a few test prints (still haven’t wired the 3D Touch in, since I only intend to use it with Klipper).

• Did a bunch of cleanups to old pages in the site. I’ve come to terms with the fact that converting all the old markup will likely never be “done”, but there are things I want to keep updated that just have to be converted (like Infoviz), and it looks like I’m getting there.
• Cleaned up my notes on my new desktop machine.

End-to-end spring cleaning round the house (and 40^oC outside), so all hardware-related hobbies were postponed.

Good thing I integrated my heat pump with Homekit a while back.

• Spent some quality time in the office poking at old code and musing about what to do next. I’m somewhat fascinated with the idea of having a small, lightweight, low-power machine that would be able to run a minimal UNIX desktop–think “pocket computer from another timeline” (80s-inspired). Or, even better, think Mini vMac in custom hardware and somewhat modern connectivity.
• Decided to play with and Lite XL and got this terminal plugin to work on the Mac.

The terminal emulation part is very barebones, though. Might make for a fun side project for the kids.