I built a keyboard!

I am building a wireless speaker using a raspberry, their speaker bonnet and raspotify. The idea is to build one in each of our main rooms (living room, bedroom, office), and hide them inside cute vintage objects.

I’m writing a Windows package manger. Obviously this is done to death and mine won’t be any better than the last thousand, but just like the last thousand, I still need a system for installing/uninstalling/upgrading the software I distribute, and I’m really looking forward to being able to efficiently say “upgrade all from the Internet” from the command line without copying new installer binaries around.

Today, hung out in Coventry with a friend. There’s a few interesting galleries in the Herbert at the moment, including a retrospective on Rare with a huge behind the scenes on Sea of Thieves, and a history of games and toys. Managed to get another release of OOP the Easy Way out too.

Tomorrow: probably more writing, I’m itching to get out of Part One of the book but it’s the place where I’ve already done most research. Also playing and dancing at a local church fundraiser.

I’m playing around with libtls (per advice. I’ve already proved to myself that it can be used in an event based server, and now I’m playing around with trying to get it integrated into our network flow, which in this case means writing a Lua wrapper for it. [1]

[1] There are two Lua modules for libtls that I’ve found, but neither one meets my criteria, namely, using the call back mechanism to control the network. The changes are extensive enough that I find it easier to write my own version.

Recovering from a half-marathon. Testing power consumption for various hardware configurations for the Linux intel_idle patch I wrote last weekend. At idle in power state C4E, I shouldn’t be hearing the CPU fan. And yet there is still fan noise.

Will try finish writing my DSL for updating Karabiner configuration.

Recently posted a thread on keyboards here on Lobsters and it’s awesome to see so many keyboard lovers out there. I was quite upset to see so few people customizing their keyboards so I hope to change that soon.

I dog-sat my brother’s 7 months old Australian Sheppard. Never again. Now that that’s done, kids’ swimming classes in half an hour, then we’re receiving friends this afternoon. I’d like to get some coding done tonight maybe. That our more LinkedIn Learning.

Tomorrow, I can’t remember what’s up. Probably gonna read me some more Lovecraft. Maybe something more technical. Definitely some reading.

I’m in the middle of switching from bspwm to swaywm on wayland. I’m hoping to be able to contribute a few patches down the line, especially for simulating keyboard presses so I can get rofi-pass’s autotype working under sway.

Trying to figure out a good outdoor security camera system for my new house that can record to the existing NAS (NVR-style) and not forward video to the cloud while still having neat realtime alerts to our mobile devices and remote streaming. The tough requirement is not proxying through the cloud for these features and also securing the streams (i.e. tunneling or RTMPS instead of RTSP or similar).

I am going through some Coq tutorials and getting pretty amazed at how cool it is. But I am also thinking about how does theorem proving and other formal methods apply to web services that are basically composition of calls to other services.

My main project will be finishing up plans for a cycling vacation in the Netherlands and Belgium. My wife and I sometimes have different ideas about what we want to see and the pace. She tends to leave the planning to me though. I’ve been trying to get our ideas into a Google Map so that we can discuss the itinerary based on how many overnight stops we want to make and the proximity to interesting places.

This has me thinking about what my ideal travel planning tool would look like. I tend to think of trips as a graph with a start and end point that I select first. I then need to fill in a path with interesting things. The itineraries at the front of Lonely Planet tend to be useful, but I’d like to have a site where I can find and fork itineraries, and have people suggest other places by just picking them from a map. I feel like the last year has been relatively fallow in terms of personal tech projects as my energy has been elsewhere, so I figure sharing it might help motivate me a little more.

I’ve signed up for my first 10-miler in Annapolis, Maryland so I need to sit down and plan the last month of training. It has been very ad hoc so far, but I’ve gone from only running 5k regularly in March to 6-7 miles now with great encouragement from my sister-in-law.

Travelling to Europython! Any other lobsters there?

Relaxing with season 2 of Westworld and hacking on my creation myth generator. Last weekend wrapped up my 4th wedding of the year, and honestly I’m just looking forward to a lazy weekend that’s actually a weekend.

Building my company.

I took the time to learn a little Go and write a small little tool I wanted to have for a while now.

I was impressed with how easy Go was to pick up (between google and godoc, basically everything was covered), and with the standard library. It’s definitely a useful tool in the box for “I need to write a small service that does something trivial”, a spot that used to be taken by Python or similar.

Other than that I’m mostly trying to care for myself and recover.

• Implement a project for the second part of the SpaceKnow interview process.
• Continue putting together my own programming language (tinySelf).

I’m leaving for vacation soon, so I’m going to do some packing. I also have been downloading some Netflix shows I plan on watching, and looking for some ebooks to put on my trusty Kobo mini.

The most work related thing I’ll be doing is enabling out-of-office, and I’m very much looking forward to it!

Working on finishing a single binary init system in Rust. Other then that I’m exploring youtube APIs so I can make some modifications to a distributed scraper I wrote. Planning to help an archiver try and scrape all meta-data off youtube.