Notes for April 1-7

Guess what, I just kept writing notes anyway. Easter Break helped reset my expectations towards work and this week I managed to get back into the swing of things, with a fair bit of writing and documentation work done on my own time.

Spent the first day back at work clearing out my inbox and catching up on various bits of corporate hallucinations.

• Reviewed all my TODOs and reminders
• Whipped up a completely impromptu review of the D8 gamepad controller I took on vacation.
• Started cleaning up my K7 Pro Max review.
• Figured out a way to generate transparent WebM videos of STL files–which, of course, Safari can’t render as transparent, but which every single other browser does, and only seem to take up around 700KB a pop (depending on fine-tuning).
• Got a bunch of delayed packages that weren’t delivered while we were gone, and am fully expecting a reprise of my earlier annoyances with AliExpress regarding one that hasn’t yet been scheduled for re-delivery.
• Investigated more options for doing off-screen rendering of STL files in Python.

Feeling worn down by corporate inefficiency.

• Tried to get some writing back on track, without much success.
• Investigated local LLMs for voice assistants a bit further. Chanced upon Functionary, which supports OpenAI function calls.

• Fiddled with ROCm on the AM18, which didn’t really go well.
• Tried the “dumb” approach of just installing ollama with great success, thanks to it already having partial support for AMD iGPUs.
• Also had great success with xorgxrdp-egfx on the AM18:

I had come across mkdocs-material before, but hadn’t really cottoned on to the fact that it can generate static sites with all the javascript assets bundled locally, which is perfect for hosting an internal site and start keeping a private blog.

• Started documenting home infrastructure with mkdocs.
• Found another DYI 3D Mouse that uses an MPU6050 and an Arduino to emulate key presses. Still need to finish my own, which was put on hold by some work emergency or another.

Mostly work. Wrote a little more, got deep into the weeds with mkdocs-material and mermaid for generating diagrams.

• Added a home-docs repository to gitea and started committing to it.
• To my amazement, mkdocs can handle media files the way I like it and Visual Studio Code is stellar at handling content for it, so it’s even looking like a good candidate for replacing my own blog engine.

Of course that would entail rebuilding the theme and Azure deployment mechanisms from scratch, but it’s a TODO item I can get behind. In a year or so.

• Lounged about a bit and read The Economist.
• Published my K7 Max review.
• Decided to give the mkdocs treatment to the piku documentation, which is also a nice testing ground for some features.

• Spent a hefty chunk of time tweaking mkdocs to my liking and getting both the piku documentation and my own home automation docs up to snuff.
• Relaxed a bit and watched some TV.