Mind's Forge

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

03/15/2025

I thought I hadn't done much since last post, but I was wrong. Sometimes I guess you get busy and it feels like nothing is really getting done, but there is motion.

So I did get the tent out for a night at a different camp ground, desert camping can be a bit of a pain with all the cactus and burrs, but the equipment setup worked pretty well! Tent was in good shape and not missing any parts (I did forget a hammer so I had to bang in all the stakes with a rock)

I also forgot to take a picture outside the tent. Next time.

I drove out to ETH Denver, mostly to attend a side event and was also able to get in on a turbo-ish poker tournament. I had to drive back pretty quickly because of a family medical emergency, and that has been a big priority (still)

Still doing server stuff, I ran into problems with the NVMe USB enclosure that I mentioned last time so I just gave up on using the ThinkCentre for the crypto nodes and picked up an Intel NUC. The heatsink wouldn't fit in this one either (it has a built in heatsink), and the NVMe temp seems to be staying reasonable, just under 40C, but some other temps are pretty high...

Also maintaining services on VPSs, had some intense troubleshooting last night on the fedi instance. I haven't been doing any (or much) coding, just admin stuff. The garden is shaping up, I got the rest of the tomatoes planted in the ground (had to replace 2 that didn't survive from the previous picture). They aren't growing too fast, so I added some fertilizer too. We're still reading Paradise Lost, just finished book 8, it's been pretty interesting if you can get through the old English style and words. I'm not sure what to read next, but I did pick up "The Lazy Universe" by Jennifer Coopersmith after watching this Veritasium video and being realllly intrigued by the concept/model of "action" and wanted to dig in. That might be more of a slow private read than something I could read and record. Maybe do something of a summary book report instead.

Oh yeah, also got around to installing non-janky security cameras around here finally. I guess I'll wrap this up here, been pretty busy helping family out, but also having a good time lately.

Until next time, peace

02/11/2025

One thing I do to remind myself of what I've done over the last month is look through my photos. It looks like I replaced the garage door opener finally. That was a project that wasn't as horrible as it could have been. I discovered the previous installation was missing the retaining nuts on one side and was just held up by the weight binding the bolt to the frame. Lots of jank. Ideally I would have completely replaced the bracket attached to the ceiling, but doing it by myself and trying to get it done in one day I made do with what was there and everything worked out in the end. It's been nice not getting out of the car and manually lifting the door anymore.

I did end up picking up a couple M70q ThinkCentres off eBay, one of them is running my blockchain nodes (geth/lighthouse, monerod) and the other one is doing everything else so far. One problem I ran into was the heatsinked NVMe drive wouldn't fit in the small form factor, so I had to remove the extra bulk, but that caused the temp to rise to ~70C when under heavy load. I ended up moving it to an external actively cooled enclosure. It was interesting learning about the UEFI system, which inspired me to work on a bootable demo (think demoscene) for a few hours one day. Maybe next month I'll share that.

I still haven't pushed myself to go out for another camping test run, but I'm ready. Maybe I'll do that tomorrow just to see how it goes. I did do a write up on the gear I've collected and put together.

The tomato seedlings have grown up, and I just planted a row of them in the garden today. It was nice seeing that it's remained moist enough that there's earth worms out there! The 2 chitlepin plants are still alive, and I've moved them outside after it's warmed up some along with the tomatoes. They seem to like it so far, will probably just leave them in those pots until they grow a bit bigger. I went to the local gardening meetup thing at the library and gave away 6 of my tomato plants since I had more than enough, met an interesting guy and will probably go check his setup out sometime once spring really gets going.

I found some art at Goodwill that I butchered to frame a Paul Laffoley print I had in storage for a long time. Another eBay deal. I had to disassemble everything (a lot more glue than I expected) and after trimming the matting to size I was able to get a pretty decent finished product.

That's it for the pictures, I did go for a couple hikes, but like always I spent the majority of my time in front of the computer. I recently started using aider plugged into Claude Sonnet for AI assisted coding. Been sort of finding the limits of what it can do, with aider I find myself going too far off the rails and can hit API limits if I'm not careful. Blockchain stuff can get pretty complex. I also setup my own Forgejo git instance so I can keep private repos, but have also put up some of the scripts on a codeberg account, including the image hash miner I mentioned last month. I've still got a bunch of little projects that aren't published anywhere yet, but I'm sure I'll keep at it as I think to do it.

As for readings, we've done both of the explanations of the epistles (Galatians and Ephesians) by Bl. Theophylact, and just finished reading a fairly dry commentary on the Acts of the Apostles by Archbishop Averky. I'm a couple days into reading Paradise Lost by John Milton, a bit off from the regular path, but I've been wanting to sort of expand into reading other things for a while.

I guess that's about it for now, should be a fairly busy month doing a bit more running around than I'm used to, here's hoping everything goes well. Until next time <3

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:

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!

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mindsforge@abovesobelow.com