Notes for July 15-21

This was a very productive week in personal terms (and otherwise), partly because I paused my reading spree and partly because I decided to clear out my To-Do list as quickly as possible.

• Resumed my regular cleaning of my desk at the start of the week, which resulted in a (short) bit of Zen-like calm.
• Removed the battery from my pre-release Keychron 11 Max and moved it permanently to my standing desk.

It works fine via USB, and makes quite a bit of difference ergonomically (I now have two of those in daily use, which is definitely a first world problem).

With 37^oC being forecast for next Monday, I decided to grab a handful of Demos D1s ESP8266 I still had in stock, flash them with my custom firmware and pop open all the heat pumps to add them to HomeKit.

Having working thermostats in nearly every room makes a bit of a difference.

• Splurged on Amazon Prime Day on stuff I probably don’t really need (except for the ASA filament).
• Spent a few evenings trying to get my TwoTrees SK1 to work properly again after what I believed to be a calibration attempt gone wrong. I later realised that the Y axis shift I was seeing was due to the cable chain preventing the print head to home properly with the new enclosure on.

I still have to finish calibrating it, but at least now I know why it was failing.

I decided to do a bit of actual hardware maintenance:

• Shut down both my Synology NAS and rogueone, opened them and dusted them off with a neat (and surprisingly powerful) air blower I had gotten a while back. Much more effective and satisfactory than compressed air canisters.
• Took that opportunity to finally add a Crucial 2TB SSD to the DS 1019+ to act as read-only cache–I should have done this years ago, since it made a few services I run on it (like Gitea) an order of magnitude faster…

• Found an ancient Fedora 38 LXC inside my Radxa Zero while revisiting an old project and brought that kicking and screaming into the Fedora 40 age. Still sad that I can effectively run what amounts to a VM inside the machine I use as a development sidecar for my iPad, but hey now it has Nix inside too.
• Installed BasiliskII on the Radxa Zero and built a complete System 7.5.5 image to recover a few old files (essentially the Mac version of the archive spelunking I did a few years ago).

I already have a Raspberry Pi running MacintoshPi, but this one I can access via remote desktop…

I also spent a little time playing with gpt-4o-mini (it’s already available in preview in Azure Open AI) and planning the next steps for moving all of my gpt-3.5-turbo services over to it (which will involve a few prompt tweaks). The price per token vs the overall quality makes it really hard to justify using local LLMs, but I hope we’ll see enough improvements in inference speed to flip things around within a year.

I’ll get back to that next week–but first, I have a fair amount of soldering to do, since a chunk of the parts I was waiting for finally arrived.