Weeknotes 232

If your blog doesn’t have a feed it is dead to me. That’s a shame because I would like to read your blog.

We picked our Christmas tree on Wednesday afternoon and it was delivered Friday evening ready to be decorated, which I cannot be arsed to do. Ho, ho, ho.

I added a handy dandy Raycast script command to start 3D cameras.

Once I plucked up the courage (pathetic!) to figure out how to change out half-used filament spools, for example to change to a different colour, it became clear that this was going to be a constant pain. You have to carefully tape up the filament so it doesn’t unravel into a big disastrous mess when removing it from a spool, which is time consuming.

As a result I’ve been printing lots of filament spools (told you) that I can more easily swap on and off the printer.

The MegaDesk controller for my desk became unresponsive and it wouldn’t move up or down. I had to reboot it (turn it off and on again). Nothing is immune from breaking!

I had my first failed 3D print this week. The print just stopped after it was about 35% done and reported being “successful”, which it very much was not. The print head didn’t move back to its home position like it usually does either, which resulted in the print sticking to the nozzle as it cooled 😢

After some research it seemed like the G-code was probably corrupted.

G-code instructions are provided to a machine controller (industrial computer) that tells the motors where to move, how fast to move, and what path to follow.

It seems like it just followed the G-code as far as it could and then stopped when it found no more instructions. SD card corruption was popping up a lot in my research, which I found strange. I was under the impression that the SD card was just used to manually add prints to the printer, but it turns out that even when you initiate a print over the network it is still written to the SD card, so the card is always involved in any print job.

I formatted the SD card, and I’ve had many successful print jobs since, but I ordered a new SD card anyway in case it happens again.

Given the amount of fake flash memory devices floating about on popular marketplaces I decided I should test the new SD memory card somehow. I came across f3 and gave that a go. It seemed to “work” I suppose 🤷‍♀️

Ghostty Is Now Non-Profit

In addition to the 7% fees, my family is personally donating $150,000 directly to the Hack Club project

Mitchell Hashimoto seems to be one of the good guys who made good and is now giving back in big, sustainable, ways. Not just technically, but financially.

Build A Boy update #1: WIP and tech specs - Natalie the Nerd is making good progress on her Lego Game Boy kit.

Buying the Kinesis Advantage 360 keyboard was a mistake

I had to consider all the keyboard shortcuts that I normally use. Every attempt at changing the layout would be costly. It takes weeks to develop new muscle memory, so it felt very important to get it right on the first try.

This is exactly how I’ve felt about customising keyboards. I just don’t have a particularly strong opinion on what is the best placement for a key, and the cost of experimentation just seems too high. (No, I am still not using the new keyboard.)

Makera Z1 Desktop CNC: Entry-level CNC, Pro-level Power – another week, another home CNC machine.

A Series of Vignettes From My Childhood and Early Career

This is indeed a set of passive-aggressive jabs on the continuing assault on our senses by the LLM hype lobby.

If you need to check what your public IP is when connected to some remote machine you can do this and you’ll get a nice JSON response.

curl http://ipinfo.io

This is useful for checking if the request is, say, connecting through a proxy too.

curl -x http://ip:8888 http://ipinfo.io

You know when RSS feeds don’t have the full content? Annoying, right. I was aware that proxy services and software were a thing, so went investigating for a solution (I’m not busy actually, no) and I found that the service I already use, Feedbin, has this built-in – sort of. There is a “Reader” button you can press which shows you the full article content.

At first it looked like it was only going to work in the Feedbin iOS app, and I use NetNewsWire like any self-respecting feed user. I was sure it wouldn’t work there, but it does!

It’s not perfect, loading each article manually by pressing the button seems like unnecessary friction. Better than nowt though as I can avoid “local news website ads”, the worst kind of ads.

Now is not a good time to build a PC. Look at the price of memory!

(Hat tip to Harry for the graph link.)

DNS is really hard, man - for me at least. Sure, the basics make sense, but it can get complicated fast. I’ve been adding a fair few new Docker services to my home network recently and I’m sick of typing URLs with port numbers, so I wanted to be able to refer to services by a custom domain.

I’ve decided to go the very lowest of lo-fi route, for now – /etc/hosts.

Because I only connect to these services on my local network, or via Tailscale, and I have Tailscale Subnet Routing turned on I can always revolve the local IP, so I can just add entries to /etc/hosts like:

192.168.0.1  service.custom.domain

Coupled with a reverse proxy (which I’ve yet to setup) and it should work. It will only work on this one computer, but it will work.

That’s all I need right now. I will revisit running proper DNS later when then network evolves into something proper.

In a major coup for someone, Alan Dye leaves Apple – this guy couldn’t design his way out of a paper bag. Design isn’t making things transparent, Al.

People, stop making things pretty, start designing.