Going to protest my government in the hopes that I won’t lose the right to protest my government.

I have a list of one-off experiments that I pick something from whenever it feels like productivity is dipping. This weekend feels like one of those. The pick this time is to make a renderer that can output some point cloud visualisations of process memory for a Looking Glass portrait display the predecessor to the less interesting ‘cloud AI connected bullshittery’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N24CqEvtXxk).

For the unfamiliar, those are basically just a hidpi screen with a lenticular lens sheet glued on top. They hide a json blob in the serial number exposed over EDID with the calibration data (sheet properties and alignment). Realtime rendering to it is ‘a bit’ weird in that you encode the view angles you want into a ‘quilt’ so it’s n*m renderpasses and then postprocess in a shader that samples the quilt with offsets from the calibration.

Had an interesting conversation with industry folks about use of software both embedded and SaaS. In shipping and logistics industry. We all know about the Tesla’s and Self driving lorries. But I am more interested in simple software. I want to be able to create minigames with those use cases. For e.g. a gamified version software for determining optimal container allocation in a vessel or best route for your truck to reach a certain number of delivery spots. I am keen on getting into the engineering behind these things.

Supposed to be replacing the brakes on my friend’s car, only the next day delivery order we placed with Halfrauds has turned up with only rear discs in it when there’s supposed to be discs & pads all round. Their customer support service is basically useless, so I’m going on a hunt for parts in the morning to hopefully do the job on a dry day. Also getting new tyres fitted to my S-Max as the steering gets a wobble at speed which we think is from a misshapen tyre rather than anything else. (They’re also wearing low and old, so need replacing.)

Otherwise I intend on making progress prototyping the bracket for the Z4’s head unit to be mounted lower. Haven’t touched it for a few weeks, and don’t really know what kind of shape I need so aiming to just have something printed even if it looks crap and doesn’t fit superbly so I can iterate from there.

Dealing with toddler son.

If you don’t have a kid yet… Please try to enjoy your completely massive amount of free time before it ends for 18 years

Continue working on my cross-platform binary emulator/debugger (built on top of the unicorn engine) :)

Playing around with the cardputer.

Last weekend I spent a lot of time making a small LCD work on my Raspberry Pi running NetBSD (from Rust no less!). Figuring out how to get SPI to work was really painful, but in the end it did work. During the week, I cleaned up the code and this morning I “merged” it (see video).

So this weekend… well, I have family visiting, but if I have a chance, I’ll get to work on supporting the Pi Zero 2 W whose form factor is going to be a better fit for this. I already got NetBSD to work a couple of weeks ago with unofficial changes, but I suspect not everything is going to be OK just yet. Or… I’m wanting to write an article on what I learned about hardware autoconfiguration and the Device Tree, so maybe that instead.

I’m going to start rewriting one of my C++ projects in Rust.

Enjoying the snow that finally arrived in my city! Also coding and shit I guess

The “rewrite it in Rust” version of the firmware for the distributed lighting controller I made for my friend’s Burning Man project is almost working, so I hope to get that to 1.0 and do some radio range tests in the park this weekend. The embedded Rust journey has been difficult but rewarding — learning Rust in “hard mode”!

Reading through vulkan supporting documentation and tutorials to then hopefully write the barebones vulkan init in the OpenXR renderer I’m slowly putting together. No triangles expected though.

Trying to recover from a persistent cold (mild flu? covid?) while on holiday in Beppu, which we had booked without an option for refunds.

The train ride across the country went pretty smooth, in part thanks to having Balatro on my phone.

Good question! Likely lots of bureaucracy work this weekend, supported by a mess of personal project management. Picked up xir hard copy of The PARA Method last night and looking forward to annotating that like xe have with Building a Second Brain. (Already listened to the audio books for both.) Those have both paired exceptionally well with Obsidian. That and some socializing at the local indie bookstore that ordered both books for xe!

And remember to download your Kindle books while you still can!

I’m getting ready to start the University of North Dakota’s online-for-credit Calc II class. This has been a challenging year so far. When things are challenging, I take comfort by engaging in something that lets me bring order to something. Right now, that means filling in some fundamental math that’s spotty for me. It starts with putting my surroundings in order, which here means setting up VSCode to author LaTeX because I like the tidiness of doing my homework this way. I’m old enough to think about retirement within a decade, and so I’m entertaining the idea of getting a math degree.

Out dancing and jumping in Rotterdam with friends 😊

Finish the data lean spectroscopy paper that I’ve been about to finish next month for six months now.

Next weekend I’m sure I’ll be doing the same thing

https://github.com/link-society/flowg/pull/419

Tinkering with Raft in Golang, to add replication to FlowG. I recently added backups, and now I’m working on making it scalable (so that the Helm Chart for Kubernetes can use a DaemonSet).

I’m on a roll this week, having gotten out 3 posts on my blog already. I’m particularly happy about the last two, but I haven’t submitted them here lest 3 submissions in a row be qualified as spam.

I will try to continue my writing streak, though arguably my weekends (or choredays?) are often busier than my weekdays.

Some well needed maintenance for my website as wel as implementing some new features. This is becoming so over engineered for a personal site, but I’m kinda enjoying the mental challenge instead of the day to day drudge I have to shovel at work.

Aside from that it’s a quite weekend with just some brunch plans on Sunday.

I was planning to work on my personal projects, but a guy I follow on Mastodon that has some accessibility needs commented that they want to use OCRmyPDF and was having issues with the Windows install instructions.

Which are wrong, of course. (The Windows Python installers do not put a python or python3 on the path…)

So dusting off my Windows PC to send a patch to the docs…

Converting 23.98 fps video to 25 fps so I can edit it with other 25 fps video. I thought this project was going to be trivial, but…

I’m deep in a bureaucracy checklist phase. Household tasks are behind as a result, but the more I stay on top of the hard stuff, the better I feel about all of it. I’m also eyeing up the second King’s Field game but unwilling to start it yet.