Trying to stay afloat with an ever growing todo list š
Highlights of the week should be a live recording of the Smith n Sniff podcast, and heading down south to visit a friend for a long weekend. Also made progress on my head unit bracket, think I have the positioning correct enough for it so now experimenting with how to strengthen it. Think I might print it in ABS and see how that holds up as a āstrong prototypeā, then Iāve got some PETG-CF to print a final edition of it. Weāll see how far I get with that this week.
Also chasing an electrical fault in a different car, on which the MOT expires this week. Realistically with travel thatās probably going to take a fortnight to get back on the road, sigh. At least I can sell it knowing all the issues with it have been chased out at that point though.
The App Connector stuff will be useful for any UK-based people, find an exit node outside the UK IP Ranges and pin Lobsters to that. š
I didnāt realise that Tailscale + Mullvad was effectively double-blind to traffic, makes sense now I think about it some more. I love it because itās just one VPN solution on every device, and I can appear from elsewhere when I want or need to without having to muck around with yet another app.
You should ask for a Hat if you donāt want to write that each time š
And yes, App Connectors are super useful. It would be super cool if you could nominate a Mullvad exit node for them, but I can totally get why that isnāt a simple integration heh.
Going clay pigeon shooting for a friendās stag do, then presumably spending the afternoon in the pub. Think the last time I went clay shooting was a different friendās stag do in the before times. If I hit something, Iāll be happy.
Iāve to Google to understand what is clay pigeon shooting. Still didnāt get what it means stag do. It seems a place where do such activities especially in UK. Is that correct?
Was so proud of myself for putting this together recently on a trip to Scotland! Saw phrases like āhaving a doā around town on posters, and eventually had an aha moment like āoooooh as in doing, like an event.ā Already knew the phrase āgoing stagā which is when a man goes to a primarily couples event solo. When the phrase āstag doā came up, I immediately got it and was so proud of myself :) For context, am from the US
Supposed to be replacing the brakes on my friendās car, only the next day delivery order we placed with Halfrauds has turned up with only rear discs in it when thereās supposed to be discs & pads all round. Their customer support service is basically useless, so Iām 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. (Theyāre also wearing low and old, so need replacing.)
Otherwise I intend on making progress prototyping the bracket for the Z4ās head unit to be mounted lower. Havenāt touched it for a few weeks, and donāt really know what kind of shape I need so aiming to just have something printed even if it looks crap and doesnāt fit superbly so I can iterate from there.
Spending my last 36 hours or so in the sun, before heading back to the cold rain that masquerades as the UK at this time of year. Not looking forward to it if Iām honest, already booked the next trip back out here to stave off the winter blues. š
Suspect my time outside work will be catching up with family & friends. Need to continue prototyping the bracket for the Z4 head unit, else Iāll come to do an event in June with it and it still wonāt have a head unit which will really annoy me.
How do you like it there? I havenāt been for 20 years. Iāve been pondering moving there since my girlfriend is Mexican and it would be easy for her, language wise. I am a bit worried about the rift between foreigners and Spanish people, since I remember they have anti-tourist demonstrations now. Even though Iād be there for longer, I am worried that Iād never be accepted because of xenophobia.
I guess if you decide to settle on a place (like Canarias) which is uber-tourist-y but not a major tech hub, maybe some people will not be nice. But most people will fixate on drunk tourists and the like, and will not ignore the guy who cannot speak Spanish well, but is not obviously a tourist.
If you go to one of the major citiesā¦ thereās so many foreign people working on tech that I think you wouldnāt even register.
I guess thereās people that think that highly qualified workers from richer countries drive housing prices up (and maybe they are right), but I dunno. I guess unless you decide to live in an Airbnb house, or end up living in the house of a granny who was kicked out of her house to make room for your higher rent, youāll be fine?
Exploring Gran Canaria with a friend for a few days, and also thinking about where to base myself for next week. Havenāt yet booked anywhere to stay once my mate leaves, but as weāre driving round the island to see different places Iāll figure it out.
More formally kicking off a project at work, which means more knowledge sharing and not just hacking on something whilst keeping notes.
Also preparing to head to Gran Canaria for a fortnight. Never been before and doing some tourism with a friend for a few days before spending the rest of my time working and slowly exploring.
Also driving to Aberdeen so my wife can have a nice birthday spa and play skee-ball while I try to figure out how to be creative when all my skills are fixing things and threatening servers with actual malice.
Assuming that Storm Ćowyn leaves any roads working between here and Aberdeen.
Ćowyn did in fact leave most of the infrastructure just fine, that I saw, apart from one cable dangling off a building in Dundee.
Rather than figuring out how to do A Creative Thing, I just spent most of Monday sleeping and then played a game on my Steam Deck today while my wife collected just over 500 tickets playing skee-ball and brought home a small ugly mug. :D
Fixing deploys and flakey tests on a client app, as I broke it last weekend and only noticed during an unrelated incident today. (Always the case, sigh.) Getting the itch to do more things in the homelab (like finish the half-baked migration to FreeBSD) and puppetise (OpenVoxify?) some more of it.
Also need to get the in-laws internet upgrade ordered now they have FTTC available, get them off the wet piece of ASDL that purports to be a connection.
Sunday is dinghy racing at the club, drysuit and thermals required. Brrr.
Itās unclear to me what led to this and what the goals of openvox are. Maybe someone who knows the history better could elaborate? Has puppet labs gone south after the perforce acquisition?
Yes, you are correct. Hereās how Perforce officially announced that: āIn early 2025, Puppet will begin to ship any new binaries and packages developed by our team to a private, hardened, and controlled location.ā
Hereās what the community (or, at least, a part of itā¦) thinks: āWhat Perforce is doing right now is taking the open source code that we have collaborative used, debugged, written, collaborated, stared at and deployed on thousands of machines, and closing access to it to paying customers.ā
I was vaguely unsettled by it, having not looked at the puppet project for about 5 years. Seeing Voxpupuli involved(/leading?) it makes me happy though, theyāve been a large part of the puppet community for years. Used a lot of their modules when I was doing puppet full time.
I see Bolt is still a thing too, wonder if easy masterless-puppet-over-ssh (Ala Ansible, pyinfra) is not too difficult these days š¤
Diving into a new project with my main client, we have a goal and a deadline and need to figure out what needs to happen to get there. Making good progress so far, so Iām expecting a huge show blocker to appear at some point. Currently loading knowledge about GraphQL, OAuth, JWTs and other lovely technologies back into working memory.
Work on the bracket for mounting the head unit display lower in the car has stalled somewhat. Fallen into the trap of trying to make it great first time, and canāt decide exactly where I want it to sit or how much bracing I want to add to it. Suspect I just need to remember itās a prototype and get something printed to see how it sits in the car and how I feel about it. I can then break it and try to work out where to add strength!
Heading to a friendās boat for the weekend, no doubt itāll involve beer, kebab and some TV shows. Probably get out for a walk somewhere as well, been fairly good at not sitting down for days on end for the last month or so and would like to keep that up.
I canāt convince my other half (some might say better half) to upgrade from an M1 MacBook Air, fairly base specs, even to a spare MacBook Pro we had lying around the house after I upgraded. Aside from not running 32-bit macOS based games, or even windows based games, sheās pretty happy with the thing and doesnāt want to change.
Long suspected this, but interesting to see it called out explicitly.
Companies House used to be another UK Gov property that had a website with opening hours, although they appear to have re-engineered it to be at least read-only during the night now. Means company history/officers can be looked up in the pub when ranting discussing now!
Timeboxing a Rails app upgrade for a client, and trying to finish prototyping my head unit bracket as Iāll want to use the car next weekend with a head unit (2.5 hour drive without podcasts is boring.) AMS for the Bambu P1S arrived this morning, need to get that installed for starters.
Need to finish prototyping the head unit bracket from last weekend. Heading away in that car (I think) next week for a few days, so need a head unit in otherwise I have no podcasts.
Decided Iām going to take part in the January dinghy racing at the club, and given my Supernova hasnāt moved since ā¦ June 2024, heading over on Saturday to make sure I can still rig everything and thereās no last minute repairs needed, maybe get on the water (it is bitterly cold in the UK currently). Then racing Sunday. Think the eldest is coming with her Topper, so we can be cold together.
Amuses me how the same arguments come back round again. Remember seeing this same message as ānot every user runs the top spec Powerbook / PowerMacā which gives an idea on how long ago that wouldāve been.
As developers we run things on high end powerful hardware, and our users often donāt or wonāt. Ditto internet connection speed.
We should be testing on slow devices & connections and as has been said elsewhere, optimising the slower paths will benefit all your users whether they notice or not.
when i was doing VR dev, it was easy, because the min-spec and top-spec were so close together in 2016
thereās often a bit of tension if you have heavy build-time steps, or you need to view unoptimized assets in realtime (like, previewing scenes in the editor before the lights are baked). in those cases you actually want a better dev machine, but it makes for higher friction testing
My approach for that sort of thing when I canāt just use SSH with X11 forwarding (eg. for developing on Linux and testing on a 65W TDP dual-core HP prebuilt PC from 2011 with Windows 7) is:
Hang the slowest machine I want to support off one of the secondary inputs of one of my three monitors.
Install Barrier (A software KVM that stitches PCs into a larger virtual desktop, forwarding mouse, keyboard, and basic shared clipboard support over the LAN)
If developing something that isnāt web-based, set up a SMB share for the build directory and mount it on the other machine.
Then, when it comes time to test stuff, switch the monitorās input and itās almost an identical experience to testing on the same machineā¦ just with my physically central monitor suddenly being off the left end of the left monitor, virtually.
For stuff where I can use SSH with X11 forwarding (eg. the hand-me-down Vorke V1 running Debian, which is a Win10-era mini-PC made of laptop parts with the RAM maxed out to 8GiB and performance comparable to a Raspberry Pi 4, but x86-based), I can just pull the remote browser or app up on the same desktop as usual.
Taking an older Pioneer head unit with a floating screen that only adjusts in/out from the dashboard and modelling a new bracket for the screen that will allow it to sit lower on the dashboard. Where it currently sits it blocks the middle heating vents in the dashboard, which when on full heat both means heat isnāt getting to the driver and itās massively heating up the screen, neither of which are wanted behaviour.
I tried fitting a newer Pioneer head unit that adjusts up/down out the box, but the screen is bigger (9.8ā vs 6.8ā) so it either blocks the vents above or the heater controls below, neither of which are a choice I want to make. Being able to move the 6.8ā screen down about 40mm will keep the controls accessible, and also allow the vents to blow air past the top edge of the screen.
I foresee a lot of Fusion 360 and printing prototypes in my future.
Trying to stay afloat with an ever growing todo list š
Highlights of the week should be a live recording of the Smith n Sniff podcast, and heading down south to visit a friend for a long weekend. Also made progress on my head unit bracket, think I have the positioning correct enough for it so now experimenting with how to strengthen it. Think I might print it in ABS and see how that holds up as a āstrong prototypeā, then Iāve got some PETG-CF to print a final edition of it. Weāll see how far I get with that this week.
Also chasing an electrical fault in a different car, on which the MOT expires this week. Realistically with travel thatās probably going to take a fortnight to get back on the road, sigh. At least I can sell it knowing all the issues with it have been chased out at that point though.
The App Connector stuff will be useful for any UK-based people, find an exit node outside the UK IP Ranges and pin Lobsters to that. š
I didnāt realise that Tailscale + Mullvad was effectively double-blind to traffic, makes sense now I think about it some more. I love it because itās just one VPN solution on every device, and I can appear from elsewhere when I want or need to without having to muck around with yet another app.
Think of App Connectors like SplitDNS for specific domains. Really useful!
Note I work for Tailscale so everything I say is subject to bias.
You should ask for a Hat if you donāt want to write that each time š
And yes, App Connectors are super useful. It would be super cool if you could nominate a Mullvad exit node for them, but I can totally get why that isnāt a simple integration heh.
Going clay pigeon shooting for a friendās stag do, then presumably spending the afternoon in the pub. Think the last time I went clay shooting was a different friendās stag do in the before times. If I hit something, Iāll be happy.
Iāve to Google to understand what is clay pigeon shooting. Still didnāt get what it means stag do. It seems a place where do such activities especially in UK. Is that correct?
Was so proud of myself for putting this together recently on a trip to Scotland! Saw phrases like āhaving a doā around town on posters, and eventually had an aha moment like āoooooh as in doing, like an event.ā Already knew the phrase āgoing stagā which is when a man goes to a primarily couples event solo. When the phrase āstag doā came up, I immediately got it and was so proud of myself :) For context, am from the US
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bachelor_party
Ah! Learned something new today. Thank you!
Supposed to be replacing the brakes on my friendās car, only the next day delivery order we placed with Halfrauds has turned up with only rear discs in it when thereās supposed to be discs & pads all round. Their customer support service is basically useless, so Iām 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. (Theyāre also wearing low and old, so need replacing.)
Otherwise I intend on making progress prototyping the bracket for the Z4ās head unit to be mounted lower. Havenāt touched it for a few weeks, and donāt really know what kind of shape I need so aiming to just have something printed even if it looks crap and doesnāt fit superbly so I can iterate from there.
Spending my last 36 hours or so in the sun, before heading back to the cold rain that masquerades as the UK at this time of year. Not looking forward to it if Iām honest, already booked the next trip back out here to stave off the winter blues. š
Suspect my time outside work will be catching up with family & friends. Need to continue prototyping the bracket for the Z4 head unit, else Iāll come to do an event in June with it and it still wonāt have a head unit which will really annoy me.
Exploring Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, trying to get out and see things after working the week from here. Few days left, fly home next week.
Probably some tinkering with stuff, maybe some client work.
How do you like it there? I havenāt been for 20 years. Iāve been pondering moving there since my girlfriend is Mexican and it would be easy for her, language wise. I am a bit worried about the rift between foreigners and Spanish people, since I remember they have anti-tourist demonstrations now. Even though Iād be there for longer, I am worried that Iād never be accepted because of xenophobia.
(Spaniard, living in Barcelona/Madrid.)
I guess if you decide to settle on a place (like Canarias) which is uber-tourist-y but not a major tech hub, maybe some people will not be nice. But most people will fixate on drunk tourists and the like, and will not ignore the guy who cannot speak Spanish well, but is not obviously a tourist.
If you go to one of the major citiesā¦ thereās so many foreign people working on tech that I think you wouldnāt even register.
I guess thereās people that think that highly qualified workers from richer countries drive housing prices up (and maybe they are right), but I dunno. I guess unless you decide to live in an Airbnb house, or end up living in the house of a granny who was kicked out of her house to make room for your higher rent, youāll be fine?
Exploring Gran Canaria with a friend for a few days, and also thinking about where to base myself for next week. Havenāt yet booked anywhere to stay once my mate leaves, but as weāre driving round the island to see different places Iāll figure it out.
Stayed there last year, loved it! Bit tricky to drive to, but the views & the roof terrace were great! https://fr.airbnb.com/rooms/39979159
Cheers, suspect thatās a bit far out of town for solo travel but looks awesome.
Enjoying it so far, although Iāve been working for most of it so far. Looking forward to exploring the next few days.
More formally kicking off a project at work, which means more knowledge sharing and not just hacking on something whilst keeping notes.
Also preparing to head to Gran Canaria for a fortnight. Never been before and doing some tourism with a friend for a few days before spending the rest of my time working and slowly exploring.
Joining Lobsters, apparently.
Also driving to Aberdeen so my wife can have a nice birthday spa and play skee-ball while I try to figure out how to be creative when all my skills are fixing things and threatening servers with actual malice.
Assuming that Storm Ćowyn leaves any roads working between here and Aberdeen.
Oh hai!
Hello!
Ćowyn did in fact leave most of the infrastructure just fine, that I saw, apart from one cable dangling off a building in Dundee.
Rather than figuring out how to do A Creative Thing, I just spent most of Monday sleeping and then played a game on my Steam Deck today while my wife collected just over 500 tickets playing skee-ball and brought home a small ugly mug. :D
Fixing deploys and flakey tests on a client app, as I broke it last weekend and only noticed during an unrelated incident today. (Always the case, sigh.) Getting the itch to do more things in the homelab (like finish the half-baked migration to FreeBSD) and puppetise (OpenVoxify?) some more of it.
Also need to get the in-laws internet upgrade ordered now they have FTTC available, get them off the wet piece of ASDL that purports to be a connection.
Sunday is dinghy racing at the club, drysuit and thermals required. Brrr.
Itās unclear to me what led to this and what the goals of openvox are. Maybe someone who knows the history better could elaborate? Has puppet labs gone south after the perforce acquisition?
Yes, you are correct. Hereās how Perforce officially announced that: āIn early 2025, Puppet will begin to ship any new binaries and packages developed by our team to a private, hardened, and controlled location.ā
Hereās what the community (or, at least, a part of itā¦) thinks: āWhat Perforce is doing right now is taking the open source code that we have collaborative used, debugged, written, collaborated, stared at and deployed on thousands of machines, and closing access to it to paying customers.ā
I was vaguely unsettled by it, having not looked at the puppet project for about 5 years. Seeing Voxpupuli involved(/leading?) it makes me happy though, theyāve been a large part of the puppet community for years. Used a lot of their modules when I was doing puppet full time.
I see Bolt is still a thing too, wonder if easy masterless-puppet-over-ssh (Ala Ansible, pyinfra) is not too difficult these days š¤
Diving into a new project with my main client, we have a goal and a deadline and need to figure out what needs to happen to get there. Making good progress so far, so Iām expecting a huge show blocker to appear at some point. Currently loading knowledge about GraphQL, OAuth, JWTs and other lovely technologies back into working memory.
Work on the bracket for mounting the head unit display lower in the car has stalled somewhat. Fallen into the trap of trying to make it great first time, and canāt decide exactly where I want it to sit or how much bracing I want to add to it. Suspect I just need to remember itās a prototype and get something printed to see how it sits in the car and how I feel about it. I can then break it and try to work out where to add strength!
Heading to a friendās boat for the weekend, no doubt itāll involve beer, kebab and some TV shows. Probably get out for a walk somewhere as well, been fairly good at not sitting down for days on end for the last month or so and would like to keep that up.
I canāt convince my other half (some might say better half) to upgrade from an M1 MacBook Air, fairly base specs, even to a spare MacBook Pro we had lying around the house after I upgraded. Aside from not running 32-bit macOS based games, or even windows based games, sheās pretty happy with the thing and doesnāt want to change.
Long suspected this, but interesting to see it called out explicitly.
Companies House used to be another UK Gov property that had a website with opening hours, although they appear to have re-engineered it to be at least read-only during the night now. Means company history/officers can be looked up in the pub when
rantingdiscussing now!Bank of Scotlands car finding website also has opening hours, I wonder if itās also the same reason!
Timeboxing a Rails app upgrade for a client, and trying to finish prototyping my head unit bracket as Iāll want to use the car next weekend with a head unit (2.5 hour drive without podcasts is boring.) AMS for the Bambu P1S arrived this morning, need to get that installed for starters.
nocoffei ? This is going to be good.
Thanks for the context, Iād never come across that backstory before. Amazing.
Need to finish prototyping the head unit bracket from last weekend. Heading away in that car (I think) next week for a few days, so need a head unit in otherwise I have no podcasts.
Decided Iām going to take part in the January dinghy racing at the club, and given my Supernova hasnāt moved since ā¦ June 2024, heading over on Saturday to make sure I can still rig everything and thereās no last minute repairs needed, maybe get on the water (it is bitterly cold in the UK currently). Then racing Sunday. Think the eldest is coming with her Topper, so we can be cold together.
Amuses me how the same arguments come back round again. Remember seeing this same message as ānot every user runs the top spec Powerbook / PowerMacā which gives an idea on how long ago that wouldāve been.
As developers we run things on high end powerful hardware, and our users often donāt or wonāt. Ditto internet connection speed.
We should be testing on slow devices & connections and as has been said elsewhere, optimising the slower paths will benefit all your users whether they notice or not.
when i was doing VR dev, it was easy, because the min-spec and top-spec were so close together in 2016
thereās often a bit of tension if you have heavy build-time steps, or you need to view unoptimized assets in realtime (like, previewing scenes in the editor before the lights are baked). in those cases you actually want a better dev machine, but it makes for higher friction testing
My approach for that sort of thing when I canāt just use SSH with X11 forwarding (eg. for developing on Linux and testing on a 65W TDP dual-core HP prebuilt PC from 2011 with Windows 7) is:
Then, when it comes time to test stuff, switch the monitorās input and itās almost an identical experience to testing on the same machineā¦ just with my physically central monitor suddenly being off the left end of the left monitor, virtually.
For stuff where I can use SSH with X11 forwarding (eg. the hand-me-down Vorke V1 running Debian, which is a Win10-era mini-PC made of laptop parts with the RAM maxed out to 8GiB and performance comparable to a Raspberry Pi 4, but x86-based), I can just pull the remote browser or app up on the same desktop as usual.
Taking an older Pioneer head unit with a floating screen that only adjusts in/out from the dashboard and modelling a new bracket for the screen that will allow it to sit lower on the dashboard. Where it currently sits it blocks the middle heating vents in the dashboard, which when on full heat both means heat isnāt getting to the driver and itās massively heating up the screen, neither of which are wanted behaviour.
I tried fitting a newer Pioneer head unit that adjusts up/down out the box, but the screen is bigger (9.8ā vs 6.8ā) so it either blocks the vents above or the heater controls below, neither of which are a choice I want to make. Being able to move the 6.8ā screen down about 40mm will keep the controls accessible, and also allow the vents to blow air past the top edge of the screen.
I foresee a lot of Fusion 360 and printing prototypes in my future.