Notes for... September

I’m starting to bounce back from the last couple of weeks, but am still not fully there yet. Work remains far too much of a rollercoaster (mostly because I care too much, to be honest), and I’m still trying to find my footing.

I’ve become (too) intimately acquainted with the SK1’s extruder of late, largely because trying to print carbon fiber filament has led to a bunch of clogging–I’ve had to disassemble the toolhead six times in a day, and… well, let’s just say I’m not happy with the entire process.

This and the fact that the printer now suddenly refuses to connect to my Wi-Fi in any stable manner (likely because there are more 2.4GHz access points around) has caused a number of delays in physical projects, but I’m still plugging away at them–and the rest, too.

I decided to take it slower. Trying to get models running in SBCs is fun, intricate and somewhat rewarding, but not a marketable skill when working in a company where people buy H100s by the truckload (most people don’t get why I’d spend time on it), so I’ve been focusing on having a bit more fun.

That means I’ve yet to spend any meaningful time with Llama 3.2, and instead started dabbling with image generation again (using FLUX.1, which is all the rage now).

I’ve also looked into the status quo of audio and voice synthesis, but I’m not sure where I’m going with that–I feel the need to do something with music, though. Feels like a waste not to.

I’m trying to extricate myself from the Neovim rabbit hole I got myself into when I recently decided to “upgrade” to it, and will be posting some notes. But, in general, I’ve been pushing myself to get back into coding–consciously focusing on small things, quick returns and fun rather than banging my head against fancy toolchains and libraries since my return to work prevented me from doing anything else.

Heck, I’ve even written some more Hy, simply because three days after I last mentioned it it finally reached 1.0 and I wanted to make sure none of my older code was broken.

With Autumn encroaching and my having to work both earlier and later, I decided to take my bias lighting to a whole different level. I had a pretty nice Ambilight-like setup going for the past three years, but I needed more cold/warm white light to help me focus, so I dug around for some cheap Zigbee 2700-6500K, 18W bulbs (that also have RGB, but very dim) and some cheap light bars to put behind my monitors.

Everything else is still completely chaotic outside the line of sight of my camera and I really need to do something about the mess piled up on my electronics station, but at least I can now work in a well-lit desk without having to turn on the main lights.

Again, the best way to rekindle an interest has been to revisit old favorites–I’ve decided to re-read the Culture series by Ian M. Banks and persistently wheedled out as many bugs as I could from my Bazzite setup, which has been a decent way to unwind–I can now fire up Steam Link on any of my devices and have almost exactly the same experience on RetroDECK hosted on the AM18, and the focus required to do that has been a good way to keep my mind off things.

And, of course, I keep writing stuff. Notes, drafts, reviews, you name it–the quality is still somewhat uneven, but trending upwards.