Notes for November 23–December 8

Thanks to local bank holidays we had a couple of consecutive extended weekends, which I spent doing a bunch of long overdue chores, including replacing kitchen lights, organizing my office a bit better, and generally ticking off various small tasks that had been piling up for a while.

Among those there were some hardware upgrades to my 3D printers, the most involved of which was a hotend upgrade to my KP3S Pro, which was a good pretext to experiment further with DaVinci Resolve and the entire process of documenting my projects.

Even if the added complexity of recording video for the most trivial stuff can be a little annoying, the CAD work was fun, and now both my printers use the same BambuLab clone hotends, which saves me a bunch of headaches.

Another less involved but still useful upgrade was adding Voron style LEDs to the TwoTrees SK1, which makes it much easier to see what’s going on during printing:

I also went on a little side quest regarding transport surfaces for DaVinci Resolve, and it turns out my Korg nanoKontrol Studio works perfectly on the audio/Fairlight page (transport and all) when set to Pro Tools mode (holding down the Scene and (Rewind) buttons on power up).

I was able to use it just fine via Bluetooth after binding it via Audio MIDI Setup, and I can then pick it under Preferences > Control Panels > Audio Console as a HUI controller, but it just doesn’t work in the Edit page for some reason.

Another side quest entailed trying to improve my typing experience. Since I was having trouble placing my ring and pinky fingers on my TOTEM when typing at speed, I got a cheap, simplified set of KLP Lamé keycaps, and they definitely help with finger placement–my typing speed has improved quite a bit since then.

I am, however, still struggling with the lack of multiple modifier keys when coding and moving windows around with Moom (home row mods just don’t cut it for me) and I am much faster with a standard layout, so I think I will end up building a second custom split keyboard with a more conventional layout…

With the sharp decrease in daylight, I decided to revamp my office lighting a bit and ordered a cheap LED ceiling light to use as an indirect “sunlight” analogue, pointed at the ceiling atop one of my office bookcases. Visually it works quite well, but my ZigBee mesh doesn’t seem too happy about it:

AI has removed a lot of the fun from my usual coding hobbies, but with a little more time on my hands, I revisited the status quo of local AI image generation and ended up playing a bit with Z-Image.

Performance on Apple Silicon using MPS or MLX was pretty dismal since the base model would eat up all the RAM on my 36GB MacBook Pro, but I managed to get the quantized GGUF of Z-Image-Turbo to work quite well on my pokey RTX 3060 and have been playing with describing the kind of illustration style I prefer, with pretty reasonable results so far:

Comparing this to the state of the art three years ago is indeed a night and day difference, although I’m a bit sad that we’re clearly past the point where you can run interesting and truly useful models on modest hardware.