Notes for March 16–22

This week’s update is going to be short, largely because work was hell and I ended up spending my Saturday evening poring through my meeting notes backlog until 2AM today and I have a splitting headache to show for it.

There will be a smattering of Wiki updates on the RSS feed as well, since I realized I had a bunch of updates pages sitting uncommitted in the queue that I hadn’t gotten around to pushing yet, but the only relevant updates I have right now are that piclaw got a major package layout overhaul and a new live widget system, while vibes got some shared UI improvements and a new agent avatar caching system.

And, most importantly, I have shifted from building the tooling to using the tooling, which is long overdue.

Here’s a good example of that:

Yes, that is a Linux agent and a Windows agent setting up Bluetooth passthrough on a VM. And yes, “Smith” manages my Proxmox cluster, as well as many other things now.

And yes, piclaw sort of runs on Windows now (in bare/non-sandboxed/YOLO mode), thanks to Bun’s incredibly good cross-platform support. I gave it a VM to break and a PowerShell extension to play with, and although I’m still deeply sorry I did it, it works well enough that I don’t need to care about the OS.

I now have four or five semi-permanent installs running on various machines (and a couple of Azure and Oracle VMs), and having them all accessible from my phone has completely changed how I deal with remote management–I can check on agents, trigger actions, and do light debugging from anywhere, which beats the old “SSH in and hope for the best” approach by a wide margin.

And soon, they will talk to each other. And who knows, I might do a desktop app at some point, but for now the web interface is doing just fine.

I never did get around to writing up those SBC benchmarks I mentioned last week. The hardware is sitting on my desk, the notes are in my Obsidian vault and I have a piclaw instance that is happy as a clam trying to get various local models running on the hardware, but, again, work was just too much this week and I plan to spend the afternoon watching a movie and doing some light reading instead.