Notes for December 9-22

The past couple of weeks have been somewhat unusual, with everything except work slowing down as the holidays approached.

However, halfway through Friday afternoon, I set my out-of-office message, shelved my work laptop, and enthusiastically checked off items from my to-do list.

I took advantage of the additional quiet time to run a few tests, read a couple of books, and slowly refine a few drafts–one of which is in handwritten form.

This is because although my handwriting hasn’t yet graduated from being an OCR stress test, I have been trying out a Supernote Nomad (which I used to draft this very post) and a full review will be forthcoming in a few weeks.

So far I’m quite enjoying the experience (the UX is very polished, the writing feel is easily the best I’ve felt in a while, and I’ve found myself jotting down notes and diagrams effortlessly), and have started gathering a few resources on their software and data formats.

Thanks to a reader (Hi Ben!), I obtained a FriendlyElec kernel build that enabled both KVM and ZFS on the CM3588. This enabled me to restore my Windows 11 on ARM backup and get it running after making a few tweaks (the RK3588 doesn’t have uniform cores, so it helps to explicitly set CPU affinity):

I am now waiting for FriendlyElec themselves to come back to me regarding whether those files will be generally available (and how) to update my earlier posts…

Besides that, the TerraMaster NAS I got recently is being thoroughly tested and I should have something on that up soon. For now, until I can fill all the HDD bays, I am just moving experimental workloads onto it, including a fresh 9Front installation that I plan to experiment with in the future¹.

While printing a new Christmas tree topper, I have inadvertently clogged the TwoTrees SK1’s hot-end, prompting me to replace it with a Bambu spare I acquired months ago. That is now working fine, although I am becoming far too adept at dismantling the SK1’s extruder to remove bunched up filament–I think that the machine suffers from heat creep and there is too little room for the filament to retract when fully enclosed…

The KP3S is still ticking along–I spent a little while redesigning the Radxa Zero enclosure for a new model I am now reviewing, and printing on it while the SK1 was offline remains a nice, straightforward experience.

I might actually enjoy this holiday season.