Notes for June 24-30

I spent most of my free time this week mostly talking to people, since I would like to have a bunch of things sorted out before Summer sets in (the season itself appears somewhat indecisive since it’s been raining for a couple of days now, but I know what I want).

But I did manage to scrounge enough time to read and make a little progress on my personal projects, even if I got sidetracked into doing other things almost every time.

After my recent stack consolidation I resumed a couple of old projects, but am increasingly annoyed at phi3:instruct since I still haven’t gotten the prompting sorted out to the point where the model can do RAG with multiple tools reliably.

So other than taking a stab at revising text and generating form letters automatically, there wasn’t a lot of progress this week.

Despite neglecting my home automation setup (which is actually good news as that largely means it just works), I realized that even though I have things set up to store only a year’s worth of telemetry data from all the sensors, that has ballooned to 10GB in a single SQLite file.

There’s nothing really wrong with that (the Pi 4 can cope with it just fine), but I wanted to explore the data a bit and avoid filling up the 32GB SD card, so things escalated really quickly and ended up leading to my setting up a local Kusto instance to fool around with the data in a way that is better aligned to what I do for a living, and which will hopefully lead to some interesting insights.

I finally took some time to tweak Bazzite a little more on the AceMagic 18 and somehow found myself deep into the night streaming a GameBoy emulator onto my G Cloud, which was probably one of the most gratuitous uses of compute and network resources ever, but helped me sort out a few things:

• Input mappings in game streaming are still a tad buggy (Moonlight can’t reliably map an Android device’s accelerometer to a streaming server)
• Streaming from Linux is still a little buggy – perfectly usable, but annoyingly susceptible to what I suspect are Wayland vagaries.

In the meantime, I think I’ve perfected the art of pinning or rolling back Fedora immutable spins, and am quite liking the ability to “bisect” setup or compatibility issues by rolling back the entire OS without any impact on my personal data.

This week the enclosure kit for the TwoTrees SK1 that I reviewed in March arrived in the mail, so I spent a couple of hours patiently assembling it even as I took care to avoid putting my back out while moving the printer (which is now considerably heavy).

I am tweaking the config for it and will have a post (and photos) out sometime soon, but so far I’m quite happy with the fit and finish (it’s all sheet metal and a few additional extrusions, plus some very nice tempered glass), and am already pondering what new filament to get now that I have more environmental control.