Notes for May 2025

This was a busy month, but there were a few things worth noting in between the usual work and family stuff, so here goes.

I’ve been hemming and hawing about doing this something like this for ages, and I can’t fathom why I never got around to it since it’s just plain fun. In short, I was looking for a way to re-use some old Raspberry Pi 3B+ boards, and after reading about the pico-mac-nano I ended up printing an SE/30-like enclosure for one of them:

The filament color isn’t quite right (it’s eSun Bone White PLA+, which looks adequately yellowish but a bit too much), the case needs a bit of filing to fit properly (it isn’t even screwed on), but it looks so cute even without electronics that everyone would be fine if I just dropped in a black screen insert and put it on a shelf.

I will be installing a Pi 3B+ in this one, but I did some cursory measuring to fit the enhanced internals I was planning to use for the custom model I was designing and it seems entirely viable to just patch up this model and mount everything inside, so I’m ordering some PolyMaker PLA to see if I can get a better color match and preparing to print another.

Update: There is now another attempt at recreating the original color in PLA filament, but it isn’t available in Europe (yet).

I even dug up a CAD model for an Apple G4351 mouse to see if I can do something with it and a sacrificial $2 USD mouse from AliExpress…

I’ve been trying to get Bitwig to run on the Chuwi Minibook X and the flatpak version installs and runs just fine, but I can’t get yabridge and my Arturia VSTs to work in that setup.

The anointed workaround seems to be setting up a distrobox/toolbox Ubuntu environment to host both the Bitwig Debian package, WINE and yabridge, but there are some serious rendering issues with that, so I’m still trying to sort things out…

A couple of weeks back I started hacking at various little projects to see if I could revamp my minimalist tool stack, and one of the things I decided to tackle was improving piku, my little micro-PaaS.

I wanted to try to use systemd and podman quadlets to replace the uwsgi supervisor, but the experience was so annoying that I decided to explore using docker compose instead.

This is because I have been using Portainer for a couple of years now and have found what I really want to do is have all the docker compose stack definitions in Gitea and just deploy from git, so there’s really no point in using the web interface.

Right now, I have my kata experiment working to a point where I can deploy most of the micro-services I run at home without any significant hassles and using half the code that was in piku, so I am calling it a win – you can have a look at both the systemd and docker variants over on GitHub.