Notes for January 20-26

This week I took it easy over the weekend and put some things on hold to clear my mind from the industry’s chaos. The weather is pretty crappy and I felt like I needed to relax, so I started out by binging Noclip’s Hades: Developing Hell documentary (which, incidentally, is now available on physical media).

That eventually led to my spending a couple of hours playing Hades across various devices (I’m still dual-booting the AM18 with Bazzite for streaming), and later getting some more serious stuff done.

Continuing the VLAN adventures from last week, I joined a new machine to my Proxmox cluster and decided to fiddle with Tailscale to extend a VLAN across my homelab and a couple of cloud instances, which meant upgrading most of them, including (ironically) the Oracle ones.

Fiddled with Zed for a bit and was pleasantly surprised. The AI features are interesting, although it is still too buggy to use ollama remotely (the configuration and UI aren’t all there yet) and can’t really handle deepseek-r1 (with which I have been experimenting).

I also finally managed to run Node-RED under bun 1.2, which means I will likely be adopting it as my default runtime in memory-constrained environments, although many ancient modules simply don’t work with it.

I printed the case and keycaps for a PicoTracker, which I got in kit form as a sort of belated holiday gift. I’m still waiting for the LCD and battery, but the keycaps themselves (which came from this set) came out pretty well, and can be printed at 0.12mm layer height at an ingenious angle:

I’ve been building a MicroDexed since last summer and just can’t seem to muster the energy to go back to re-solder and assemble it after a forced pause, so this was a nice way to make something that was both satisfyingly tangible and fun.