Notes For Recent Weeks

This was a bit of an eventful week–at work and otherwise. I seem to be energized by constant context switching, so a peak of project work actually resulted in me needing to “relax” more thoroughly and do a lot more hobby stuff than usual at the expense of sleep (I’ve slept an average of 6h/night over the past month…)

I have a couple of portable 30W solar panels that were put to good use during the recent blackout, so of course I went and ordered another (60W) one, taking advantage of the fact that modern panels have USB-C PD support, which is handy to charge some devices a bit more efficiently (like this 145W/25000mAh one, which can charge a MacBook Pro from zero to full and still have ~30% capacity to spare).

I’ve been playing around with various combinations and I can charge a bunch of stuff throughout the day–mostly for science and understanding of limitations, but also because it’s a fun thing to do even though it doesn’t really add up to meaningful savings.

But since I found myself using that powerbank for charging stuff away from an outlet more than a few times now, I am strongly considering getting another one and making a little game out of seeing how far I can go with regularly charging things from solar only over Summer.

However, I managed to break off the rubber port cover of the new solar panel while testing it, so I went and designed myself a new one–and actually improved the fit a bit, since the DC port wasn’t plugged in the original:

The end result is pretty decent, if you’ll excuse the usual TPU stringing (which I later removed with a hot gun):

I’ve been using GitHub Copilot extensively over the past month and found it has improved massively, so after some experimentation I’ve settled on a workflow that is quite productive (and will write a separate note about).

I had a hand at doing several things, some of which were spurred by my desire to have better free CAD software with parametric design (and no, please don’t talk to me about FreeCAD, I abhor its UX, and yes, I keep trying it every release):

• Porting and refactoring a ZFS pool monitoring script from bash to Python
• Improving Solvespace STEP exports
• Contributing a number of fixes to CAD Sketcher, the Blender parametric sketching add-on
• Updating my ancient mini-redis toy project to Python 3 and asyncio
• Refactoring piku to use systemd and podman-compose (this one is turning out to be a fun experiment)
• Converting my RSS feed summarizer from Node-RED to Python.
• Adding pre-commit hooks to various projects (like this site) to run YAML validation and Markdown linting.

And I’ve been doing that on a very nice little machine I will be posting about soon.