Notes for July 1-7

It’s a new fiscal year at work, and the mood is still extremely sour due to both layoffs and the usual amount of reorgs. I spent a lot of time and energy actively avoiding thinking about all of it outside working hours–along with US politics, warfare, and other heavy topics.

That way lies more burnout, so I reset my expectations for what I wanted to achieve this week. I let the returning heat swaddle me and did less–personal projects gave way to more reading (am on my third book this week), leisure, and a fair bit of writing and note-taking.

There were a couple of curiosities, though:

• While investigating the Tulip Creative Computer, I discovered that the LILYGO T-Deck ESP32-S3 exists and has LoRa variants. It looks like a Beepy but with an older Blackberry keyboard.
• I wrote some Rust to try my hand at it again and came back with the usual scars from fighting the compiler. The lure of using it on embedded systems via embassy is strong, but cargo and the entire build process are a constant turn-off.