Checking In

It’s been a crazy few weeks, and in keeping with the geopolitical situation, it doesn’t seem like it’s going to get any better soon, so keeping positive things in mind is a bit of a challenge.

Additionally, the weather has been warming up so that office crawls past 27^oC most days, which means I am spending as little time in there as possible.

As such, I’ve been trying out a few things I don’t need a desk for. Writeups will appear ASAP, but one has been an intriguing complement to AudioKit’s completely amazing (and totally free) Synth One J6 app for the iPad – however, the lack of musical inspiration due to workload has been too much for me to write about either….

But I finished my tiny SE/30 and compiled an SDL-only version of BasiliskII for it, which is currently running System 7 and (of course) the After Dark screensaver:

The steps to get the core software going (and minimize boot time) are mostly documented in this YAML file (I have no time to do a full write-up, but this is meant to be reproducible).

Like I mentioned a couple of weeks ago I also got a roll of “platinum grey” filament from Polymaker. but since I want to do a version with proper audio, better internals and a slightly different look and there are no STEP files available, I’ve been recreating a usable model from the STLs I have:

…and, since I want to have a period-accurate mouse, I am indeed modeling one – starting with the fittings for a modern three-button one (with wheel). The tiny mice I’m using are cheap enough that I am planning to do a couple of these (a period-accurate one and an ADB version), and I’m definitely not rushing things:

The mechanism I’m using seems to be pretty common in AliExpress US$2 mice, and looks like this (SD card for scale, since I was out of tiny bananas):

There’s a lot more going on, including the fact I’m shifting the static site builder to an ARM VM on Azure that is 30% cheaper (and has twice the cores) than the Intel one that’s been publishing my updates but I’ve also been changing the way I deploy the builder service, so it’s not all there yet.

But I am very happy with the approach I was taking at paring down piku even further, and a few smaller things are already running that way. I just got distracted by work and the somewhat crazy notion that I should rewrite my RSS feed summarizer in Go just because I wanted to get off the usual “Python is the AI runtime” beaten track–I get enough of that at work.

But I am going all “agentic” on the idea of converting the older 4000-odd entries on this site to pristine Markdown with some sort of AI workflow. That might arguably be an even bigger time sink than anything else since like any other massive AI-driven content or code conversions, validating the results is a nightmare…