I got in a mini PC this week and I’m setting it up NixOS on it to do distributed Nix builds as well as light home server work. The end result should have a feed aggregator (Miniflux), XMPP server (ejabberd/Prosody), voice coms (Mumble), and perhaps UnifiedPush.

I’m a teacher and my school’s spring break begins this afternoon. This weekend we’re going to clean the hell out of the apartment, and I’m going to finish Let’s Go and start The Karamazov Brothers. I’ve never read it, and I’ve been looking forward to it since reading Crime and Punishment for the first time at the end of last summer.

Heading down south to visit a friend for the weekend. Suspect we’re going to spend time pairing on gnarly problems (likely related to date logic and Turbo Frame JS), but also need to walk his dog, spend time outside and generally catch up on life. 3+ hours each way in the car will also make a dent in catching on weeks of podcasts too!

Close to finishing interative TUI app for Python regex exercises. 100+ questions, covers both re and third-party regex module. Code is a huge mess, but I don’t think I’ll spend much time cleaning up. Need to do sanity checks, record a video demo, write a blog post, update the regex ebook, etc.

I just finished porting shift-based DFA to Zig and I have an idea on how to achieve > 7GB/s of utf8 validation. That’s very close to vectorised algorithms without clobbering vector registers or requiring a large dataset to achieve that speed. I want to implement and test it over the weekend. I could use some help with generating comparison graphs from criterion.rs though…

• Continuing working on some ugly frontend code (simple HTML/CSS/JS, no framework or libs) that I can easily reuse to build small SaaS. Not as bad as it used to be (as long as you only care about modern browsers), and closure-compiler helps a lot.
• Still doing research on the whole SaaS idea thing. The hard part is how to find the right audience to test the idea. The internet is full of people telling you what they want. But it does not mean companies are going to buy your software.

• Enjoying day 2 of a 4 day weekend end with the kids
• Playing some Astroneer with my son, last time I fired it up was April 2021. I had the foresight to get my windows install booted and updated earlier in the week, I had not booted it since Nov 2021
• Taking my son to the DMV to take his learners permit exam, now that he’s 17.5 (!)
• Lots of school work on Sat and Sun, I’m starting week 6 of my Intro to C++ class. I’m starting back at the beginning on a CS degree after a 20 odd years break
• Trying to continue to walk for 60 minutes in the morning

Traveling to SF for work!

A long and cold (but dry!) run tomorrow, and maybe a bike ride into Golden on Sunday.

I’d also like to (finally) finish the Common Lisp translation of Hashlife that I started a while back. I translated some Python code I found on GitHub, including the unit tests, and everything seems to work, except for a bug in the hash calculation, which causes the two functions that use it to return the wrong cached/memoized values, which basically just breaks everything and causes nonsense output.

Working on writing a toy 9p library in zig

Just released my WebRTC library in Rust str0m 0.1.0 right this moment. I think this weekend I’ll look closer at some PRs I’ve had hanging around for a while there.

I’m running my trivia question test that I did on GPT-3.5 (https://www.sliceofexperiments.com/p/chatgpt-vs-50000-trivia-questions) but now on GPT-4

My raspberry pi finally arrived so I’ll be diving head first into openthread and hopefully finishing up my IoT project.

With the looming risk (being announced this coming week) of being made redundant, I’ve been fairly low energy, but I’ve made some good changes to a set of tooling I’ve been building around managing your dependency data at https://dmd.tanna.dev and the associated command-line tool which has been good

I’m working on a system for autogenerating content for a new twitch channel using ChatGPT around the concept of TTRPGs like D&D and Pathfinder. It’s live on twitch now, but much of the content is still very basic. We’ve got both some prompt tuning to do and some tweaks to our interface with Unreal. It’s been an interesting sort of crash course in LLMs, Text to Speech, game engines, all kinds of stuff.

• Cleaning the house, yard, etc while dealing with a very active toddler as we prepare for a trip to Bulgaria in a little over a month.
• Going to try and get some coding in, primarily to learn Rust. Just porting some of my small Go tools here and there so I can learn Rust.
• Working on my own TTRPG setting and game system.
• Maybe play some games on the Steam Deck if I have any time available for it.
• Hoping to go through the 100s of half-finished projects and ideas I have to find something that strikes my interests again, really want to get something done but none of my old projects or ideas are doing it for me. I have 1 that I like, but its such a massive project, I get tired and demoralized at the scope as a single dev working on it.
• Figure out how to connect a LVDS laptop screen to a raspberry pi so I can replace the guts of an old netbook with a RPi or equivalent to bring it back to life with more performance. Already got Keyboard and Touchpad figured out. (Using Teensys and RPI2040s with keyboard software on them parsing the flat cables). I dont have much space to work with to get one of those drivers from ebay to convert to HDMI. Also looking into LVDS <- MIPI DSI boards.

Probably playing around more with implementing game animations using coroutines.

It’s Mother’s Day this Sunday here in the UK so I’m taking my son and wife to a nice restaurant today in a vain attempt at surprising her. And also because tomorrow we’re having her parents and brother around.

Also changing strings on my acoustic guitar, and spending some time learning new songs. I’ve recently started going to an acoustic open mic and was told by people I met there that there’s a thriving scene locally. I had no idea, because it’s all hidden in the walled garden of Facebook.

I’m digging in to what happened to Brave’s Basic Attention Token, a solution to micropayments that looked promising, but now appears to have collapsed or poisoned in some way.

Playing with alternatives to Ubuntu, because the latest no-flatpak thing might be the straw that broke the camel’s back. SpiralLinux has a really nice Debian-based desktop, with the polish that regular Debian lacks.