Rui CarmoFollowing up on my display hackery, I upgraded my SK1’s firmware to the latest iteration, which didn’t really fix its display (it now displays thumbnails, but all the responsiveness bugs I mentioned in my review are still there).
The upgrade essentially patches a few things in Klipper, replaces the proprietary binary that talks to the display, and adds a bunch of weird pauses to the existing printer macros (which I mostly merged into my “better” configuration).
LXC and flatpak Still Don’t Get Along
I also spent a good while trying to get flatpak to work inside Proxmox LXC again. That mostly consisted of fiddling with apparmor settings, but this is clearly one of those “if you search for it on the Internet you find yourself complaining about it” things, so here’s another hit.
The trigger for this round was that I couldn’t upgrade gstreamer inside a Fedora LXC, because (for some ungodly reason) it required cap_set_file.
I have no idea why this is actually required by gstreamer (I can make a few educated guesses, but they don’t really make sense, and it never happened before), but an interesting thing was that dnf doesn’t surface that error message, so I was only able to figure out what was happening by manually downloading the RPM and using rpm to try the upgrade.
Either way, this effectively means running a modern Linux environment (with recent GUI apps) will soon be impossible inside Proxmox LXCs without some sort of overhaul. I don’t see the Proxmox team looking into this (it’s just another thing that they haven’t attained parity with regarding LXD) and I have no more time to investigate, so I just took the plunge and decided to set up Bluefin as a “default” remote desktop, replacing my vanilla Fedora container1.
Back To Hardware
Finally, I picked up my 6DOF SpaceMouse project again. Since I actually got an MPU-6050 instead of an MPU-9250, that breaks one of the assumptions I had for the design, but I’m going to plow through and try hacking at it in CircuitPython.
Translating accelerator readings into accurate motion estimations is a bit trickier than I expected, but the HID stuff (i.e., spoofing an official SpaceMouse) was almost trivial, so I’m sticking with that approach for now.
Simplifying Things
While delving into Arduino and CircuitPython stuff, I found myself actively avoiding using VS Code and going back to Textastic, Sourcetree and a couple of standalone terminals. Part of it is because I have far too many extensions installed (I haven’t split them up into task-oriented profiles), but a lot of it is mental overhead and a need to really understand what is going on when I do builds.
In return I got a very nice, low friction editing environment for everything else, and I’m quite enjoying it.