An almost monthly life and project blog. I miss the old internet. If you're looking for something from my old project site, check the Internet Archive snapshot.

News

01/12/2025

Happy new year! For the daily recordings I've decided to read from the backlog of books I've ordered, but are unread. Finished Blessed Theophylact's explanation of Galatians already and just started his explanation of Ephesians. At the end of December I was rushing around to try and figure out what moves I should do for taxes, like loss harvesting, donations, etc. There's a lot more work to be done there, but what's done is done for 2024 now finally. Part of me wants to get a professional, but at the same time I have a hard time trusting anyone.

In the garden I've got the 2nd round of tomatoes germinated (the first ones ended up etiolated and I killed them by leaving them out in the cold overnight). Luckily I was able to get more to germinate and I've kept them under the grow lamp aggressively. They're looking much better and should probably be potted soon.

I had some issues with the Android TV Jellyfin client not playing some anime I wanted to watch which finally pushed me to see what I'd have to do to put together my own "smart tv". I found that you can buy "Commercial Digital Signage" which is a fairly basic display without all the bloatware/spyware/Googleware. And there's these nice little computers, Gigabyte Brix, that aren't too expensive, especially bought used on eBay. I'm still dialing everything in, but it's setup pretty good right now. Running Void linux, it just starts up into i3 and runs jellyfin-media-player from a flatpak fullscreen. I'm still waiting on a remote control and I'd like to build some software that lets you shut it down without opening a terminal to do sudo shutdown -h now, once that arrives I'll figure something out. Once it's done I'll make a project page about it. I've also been thinking about sharing some repositories of code and scripts. I haven't done that in forever and with Claude I've got a nice little collection going now.

I did a little more with micro sculptures again, this time experimenting with using laser printed water slide decals (the :3 face)

I've also been preparing for another camping excursion. I ended up returning the tent in the pictures from last month. I don't like returning things usually, but there were missing grommets in the awning and when I emailed the manufacturer they told me to return it instead of trying to put them in myself. So I did and picked up a different tent, around the same weight, but larger footprint, not "instant up" like the Oztent, but it looks easy enough. Once I try out the new gear I've been getting ready I'll make a wiki page about it.

I'm not doing "Jamuary" (making one song a day this month) this year, I jumped at it on the first day but got frustrated and decided against it. I'll definitely try and make a recording or two before the month is over. I'd like to make some more ambient space music.

I've put on a couple trades this year one using the CARD ETF (3x bear ETF on the auto industry, there's a inventory oversupply which should cause some problems) but it's biggest holding is Tesla which really isn't in the same sort of boat as the rest of the industry (different sort of company, probably half of it is data collection and AI) so I neutralized that out with some long TSLA. I also picked up a load of PALL, the physical Palladium ETF based on nothing besides the chart, it's been beaten down and has started catching some bids. Crypto stuff is crazy, I moved a lot of out from the Solana trenches back to Ethereum main net and have been doing USDe/USDT uniswap liquidity. Still working on software to monitor that and maybe even automatically manage the position (it just went out of range the past few hours after a couple weeks doing really well, not sure if I should be patient or move the range yet)

Talking about crypto, my current home server is sort of getting overloaded, it has 32GB of RAM, but is running basically everything including a geth/lighthouse ethereum node which can spike in memory usage and the 4GB of swap looked full. I'm working on setting up a seperate box for blockchain stuff (a cute ThinkCentre, looking forward to seeing how it performs and might even change out the current system for another ThinkCentre, we'll see). eBay being a good source for cheap used compute again!

I spent a too much time wrangling claude into writing a CUDA kernel to brute force a SHA256 prefix by modifying a PNG file with a nonce (random number).

$ sha256sum found_cuda_deadbeef.png deadbeefc75a5e213a19c00378bdabc78242b1473f51b7c9b8256f4675e561ab found_cuda_deadbeef.png

It was able to "crack" it in about 10 minutes on a 4090. It was funny to me.....

Other than that I've been doing normal maintenance and troubleshooting on the services I run. Like I just discovered I had something wrong in the XMPP server config which wasn't archiving messages in the group chat(s).

I'll wrap it up here, until next time, peace <3

12/12/2024

I found that baking resin prints works for making silicone molds. I pulled out a variac so I could control the temperature of a toaster oven I got from goodwill (I honestly forget why I bought the variac, but I had that toaster oven in order to try and make a solder reflow oven someday). I just put a thermocouple plugged into my multimeter to read the temperature and had it set to around 100C. I tested various cure times and bake times and they all worked besides some deformation and flaking on longer times. I'll probably end up doing more experiments.

and here's a video of the final product: Attach:microrarity_final_crop_sm.mp4

That vial figure is a gift and has been shipped off. I'm working on some other printed gifts as well, some 3D printed diatom ornaments:

In that photo the supports are still attached, I didn't take any pictures yet, but I coated the final product with Krylon clear glaze. I still have to figure out hooks and ship them off next. I did the modeling in blender, I feel like I could have done a better job, but I think they turned out okay.

I also went out for a single night camping in the desert by some old abandoned mines. I'm trying to get a "luxurious" camping setup where I can spend some time in remote areas, but still be able to be relatively comfortable and connected. I'll probably make a separate wiki page for my experiments with outdoor gear, what works and what doesn't.

I've still been coding with Claude AI. It's been really useful, just now to crop that video I linked above I prompted it with:

I'd like to make a script that can crop a video to it's content. Currently I manually use kdenlive's Edge Crop effect to crop a video, but I get black bars when I export of course. So I export a frame from the video open it in gimp and measure where the content is, then use ffmpeg like this: ffmpeg -i peekaboo_beetle.mp4 -vf "crop=993:1080:450:0" -c:a copy out.mp4 to crop the video down. It would be nice to have a video_crop.sh or .py script to do that automatically. Can you give it an attempt?

and it produced a beautifully over engineered python script using opencv to sample frames from the video, calculate the content area and run ffmpeg with the correct dimensions to crop a video. I feel like I'm still not using it to the full potential, just like 3D printing, it's great technology with amazing potential, but I feel so slow.

I guess I should get back to the aristocratic NEET grind then. Until next time, keep your stick on the ice ;)

11/05/2024

I put together a "pressure pot" for resin casting built from a Harbor Freight air pressure paint tank. I plan on making resin castings using silicone molds of masters from the resin printer. I had one attempt, but found out the hard way that the type of resin for 3D printing prevents curing of platinum cure silicone, I took some notes on that here, and I still have to try some of the solutions I found online.

I'm still messing with micro figure prints, and painted a couple yesterday:

I thought I did a much better with my naked eye, I'm waiting on a few tools to help with these sorts of things (magnifying lamp, tweezer set).

I've also been DJing and doing some music production. I've upgraded the mobile DJ setup (video here), I had picked up one J8 speaker last year and added another just recently along with a stand alone DJ controller and battery power supply which provides a surprising amount of play time. Next time I take the setup out I'll have to see how a live synth set sounds.

I did a small migration of an i2pd instance to another server and was introduced to WireGuard which I used to wire up some services as if they were on the same network over the internet. Very useful, glad to have that in my arsenal of admin tools now. Other than that and normal maintenance I haven't done much else interesting with computers, though I spend a lot of time sitting here!

In the garden, the squash plant is still alive and I saw that it made a couple flowers last time I checked. No squash yet though. The jalepeno is doing good and it has at least 1 more new pepper. The 2 chitlepin plants (from seed, still indoors) seem to be holding up too. I might try and grow some of the super hot peppers from seed again, and I've been eyeing some heirloom tomato seeds that would be nice to get started.

I haven't looked through the microscope in forever, but have been trying to keep an ostracod culture alive. I moved a small test tube of them over to a jar, I hope that will give them enough room to thrive better.

I suppose that's it for now, see you in December

10/07/2024

Last month I finished up the indoor irrigation setup:

which worked well when I was at the convention. I also finished up the Flim Flam cosplays, but forgot to get any pictures at the convention. Next time...

The couple days before leaving I was able to setup a WiFi and bluetooth signal logger and monitor. Claude Sonnet didn't like that idea at all (it thought it was unethical to monitor signals to see what mobile devices were near my property...), so I had to write most of it myself, but I used it to swap out Redis for FluxDB for the database, and helped setup a Grafana dashboard to show signal strength and hardware addresses:

It was much more willing to help me setup a script for motion detection and recording. That was pretty fun to get setup, I just had the videos get saved into a Jellyfin directory and send a text which made it pretty easy to keep an eye on the office. The camera is overkill and I just mounted it to the exercise thing, but it's what I had to work with at the time. I might work on making a more permanent setup like I've wanted to do for some time now.

And did this tiny resin pony print yesterday:

I need to put something together to guard the garden at night, there's something that's been destroying my Pereskiopsis plants. I'm thinking a motion detector hooked to a pump. Maybe next update I'll have something about that!

09/03/2024

It's already September, how time flies. I thought I didn't do much this last month, but I did get 2 restorations basically finished: The Macintosh SE and the Moog Etherwave. Both of them were eBay finds, auctions I was okay with losing because I wasn't really desperate for the items. I just think they're cool. The Mac SE was a "lot" listing, with a lot of vintage accessories, like the boxed version of the classic Mac game, Dark Castle. I haven't checked if the disc is in there, but I've seen just copies of that game (with box) basically go for as much as the whole lot cost. I will probably end up selling it since it's not nostalgic for me, never played it. I got the BlueSCSI board soldered together and working, I took some notes on getting a working image to boot off an SD card. I gave up on trying to get an emulator working on linux, I thought minivmac would work, but it turns out the images it produces doesn't have the correct SCSI format (??). I played some Oregon Trail (which is nostalgic for me) as well as Crystal Quest. Reminded me of typing class in middle school.

I would like to write some code for it sometime, especially an After Dark plugin to make my own versions of the flying toasters screensaver.

The Moog Etherwave repair was a journey. The first thing I did many months ago was track down a 14vac power supply and wire up a 5-pin DIN connected for it. Then more recently used some flexible copper tubing and plumbing hardware to fashion a vertical pitch antenna for it. I probably damaged the voltage regulators by wiring the power supply up wrong at first, so those were replaced too, and I ended up cracking some of the delicate ferrite cores on a couple of the variable inductors. I tracked down some more modern replacements since the ones in the circuit weren't being manufactured anymore. Finding tuning tools was also troublesome. It's all come together finally, I ended up drilling 3 holes in it so I could tune with the case on since the wood and screws changes it fairly drastically. Designed and printed some caps for those holes.

Some more wildlife showed up, a tarantula this time. I also saw a vulture up close sitting on a telephone wire which was neat.

I've also been doing some cosplay projects, going to try and sew up a few vests. I've done one sewing project from a pattern years ago because I wanted to make my own button up shirt with custom printed fabric... it was much more difficult than it looked! At least I'll be going into this knowing that. I've also worked on both indoor and outdoor irrigation. The outdoor system had a stuck solenoid valve and I woke up to a bit of flooding, that took some time, but I was able to open and clean out the valves and get them working again. I'm also running more drippers to more plants and pots. I've also mostly put together and indoor irrigation setup with an ESP32 micro, relay module and pump so I can keep my potted plants and isopods happy while I'm not around. I just need to get the drip lines setup for that and a 5 gallon bucket. I've been testing it for about a week now on just the isopods and it seems to work. It sets off the pump for a few seconds at noon, measures soil moisture with a single probe, and then texts me what it reads.

Today I've been experimenting with training YOLOv5 a vision machine learning model.

I guess that's pretty much it for now!

08/02/2024

The waterslide decals did show up like I thought they might. I used the resin printer to print this Posey Bloom model, I didn't expect to spend so much time and effort getting a good result. Started with a transparent green resin print, primer, and some old acrylic paints I've had that were still okay. Used paint on Testors clearcoat (gloss for the eyes and hooves, dull for the rest) and did the custom decals in Inkscape and printed by Bedlam Creations. It was a fun side project, even though it did take up a lot of space on the table while I was painting all the parts.

I also saw a rattle snake while going to get the mail. I heard a strange rattling sound and a cat run away and sure enough when I brought the flashlight up there was a small rattler. I went and looked up what I should do and the fire department ended up driving out and taking it away in a 5 gallon bucket.

Also got around to "re-capping" (replacing old fluid electrolytic capacitors) a vintage Macintosh SE. I just did the analog board and removed the lithium battery on the motherboard, which luckily wasn't leaking. The disk drive was bugging out saying a disk was inserted and needed formatting, but there was no disk so I just disconnected that for now. I'm waiting on a BlueSCSI kit from "Tom" so I can setup disk images from my main computer and load up software more easily. I made some notes about vintage mac emulation here. I feel like making use of Claude's Sonnet 3.5 LLM has really helped boost my productivity. I won't go over everything I've used it for, but here's some of the things that it's helped with over the last month:

Setting up and debugging my local ethereum node
Writing scripts to analyze contract interactions, etc
Writing arduino firmware for the LilyGo GSM board, now hooked up to cycle my network equipment when I text it
Scripts to send me text alerts with the board (it's plugged into the home server)
Repairing and troubleshooting an 'as-is' Etherwave theremin off eBay (almost ready to finish this)
Various Linux configuration and maintenance tasks (backups, i3 configs, cron jobs, etc)

as well as just bouncing ideas around. It has a feature where you can upload documents into it's context that allows it to query them, it was interesting using that feature with the theremin repair to discuss the schematics and troubleshooting steps.

The markets have been a bit crazy, especially today we had quite a spike in (implied and realized) volatility. I haven't tried realizing my dream of making an automated trading system in quite some time, but I feel like I have a much better chance at it with Claude Sonnet on my side. I haven't really done any music stuff, just messed around a little, I'll have to record something with the theremin when that's completed.

I'll wrap it up there, until next time, peace

07/01/2024

The garden is finally succumbing to the heat. The squash did much better this year, I mean the foliage grew out at least -- still no fruits. Next year I'll probably try and start some seeds indoors during the frost days and then transplant them outdoors. I might try doing some tomatoes too, there's a local heirloom variety named after a local doctor (which is also the name of the street I live nearby!). I did get the best bean harvest I've ever had out here, not really enough to eat, but enough to plant next year. I might do some guerilla gardening with them too. I also cut down the big tree on my property, bought an electric pole saw and took it down, bit by bit and my grandpa gave me his old electric chainsaw which I used as the trunk became thicker near the bottom. I ended up giving away the thicker wood on craigslist for firewood.

I still haven't received the custom waterslide decals, but they might be showing up today. I was finally able to communicate with the seller. I haven't done anything else with the 3D printers.

I've been using the solar oven pretty regularly, and made an apple cobbler in it yesterday which turned out well. I should make some recipe pages for it. I also cooked up a zucchini from my cousins garden in it the other day too.

Trad-fi trading has been lackluster, crypto has been pretty good, but a battle in some arenas. I might be getting back into automating things again. Tradier has started supporting futures trading, I just need to sign up for an account there. I'm also working on setting up my own ethereum node with the goal of writing my own monitoring and risk management software. I've stopped liquidity providing for USDe, but would like to get back into it after I get the node and risk management software going.

I've also experimented with Claude.ai's Sonnet 3.5, the first corporate AI I've really tried assisted coding with. It was very impressive and was able to output a working frei0r video effect plugin in just a couple iterations. I still haven't made the local "meme database" thing I mentioned last post, but with Claude it should be a cakewalk. Feels weird making code this way, almost like cheating.

I guess that's it for this update. I did do some IRL things too like visit Laughlin with my uncle and played roulette for the first time. I cancelled the clubgg subscription (poker), I didn't win a satellite into the WSOP main event, but got closer than before, last year I think I got a 5th place, this year I hit 4th which paid out enough to cover the subscription costs this year. Maybe next year (or maybe I'll just buy in directly, just for the experience).

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