Weeknotes 233

Brick Borrow – This seems like a really good idea? I’ve often thought that I’d like to build some Lego sets, but I don’t know what I’d do with them afterwards. I don’t particularly want a house full of Lego.

Because I’m such selfless nice guy I volunteered to take a look at someone’s “slow” laptop running Windows 10. It became clear fairly quickly that wiping this thing and reinstalling Windows could only take it so far.

I decided the best thing for it was an upgrade from 1TB spinning disk to 120GB SSD (only ~60GB was being used anyway). I bought a SSD for £15.49! I was thinking about buying second-hand from eBay or Vinted where they can be had for slightly less at ~£8-12, but the extra few quid is worth it for the ability to return it if things don’t work out.

Is it now super fast? No. Not really. But it has turned it from “Oh my god please end this torment” to “This is a bit slow but usable”.

Installing Windows 10. What can I possibly to have done in a previous life to deserve this fate? Every time I encounter Windows, it’s worse than the last time. Awful. Just awful.

I received an email from someone thanking me for my how to replace a disk in a ZFS mirror article. I’ve benefited greatly from the personal websites of many people over the years, so giving back even a tiny bit is heartening.

I wrote up the process I followed to build the TrackID Touchpad I completed the other week. This took way longer than I expected.

I get extremely distracted by what the thing looks like – you might be thinking, if you’ve clicked that link, “it doesn’t look like you do”. I kept it very lo-fi intentionally in an attempt to tame the distraction of yet another static site generator black hole.

If you get URLs right you can change it later.

And I got the URLs right 😉

Look at these lovely USB-C cables with a truly terrible logo. I bought a couple to try (there are a few models which don’t have the logo).

Did you know you can put images on web pages now?

To me, WebP is the cool, but unsupported, new kid on the block. WebP has been mainstream since 2020. In fact WebP is being slowly superseded by even newer formats like AVIF, and perhaps eventually JPEG XL.

I did some experimentation with WebP and AVIF formats using magick, avifenc, and cwebp. avifenc and cwebp are the reference implementations for those formats respectively. magick is…ImageMagick.

avifenc and cwebp cannot convert straight from a HEIC, so an intermediate, lossless, PNG is required.

sips -s format png original.heic --out original.png

These are the results.

$ ls -1lSh | awk '{print $5, $9}'

  9.4M original.png
  1.0M original.heic
  421K original-magick.webp
  415K original-cwebp.webp
  392K original-avifenc.avif
  230K original-magick.avif

For the record, JPEG XL is definitely not ready yet.

My printer fell off the network again due to the previous 2.4GHz WiFi issues. Never trust WiFi, it will always let you down. New network equipment is getting closer and closer to purchase time. I just wanna print, man.

SnapFrames: Custom Frame Generator – this is cool and relevant to my recent interest in framing various things. I will follow with interest.

FreeCycle has been very handy this week. First I picked up a nice large picture frame for free on Wednesday evening, and then got rid of an old wall unit that was surplus to requirements on Friday morning.

I fitted a LED light upgrade kit to my Bambu A1. The double-sided tape that this came with was truly awful for what is an otherwise quite clever upgrade.

The kit uses a light sensor that fits over the existing (pants) LED light built-in to the printer. That means that you retain control over the lighting via the normal controls on the printer touchscreen, and via the app. Nice.

I added my own 3M double-sided tape in the end and that seems to have secured it pretty well. I’m not sure if this upgrade is really worth doing to be honest, it doesn’t give you a much better view of what you’re printing, which seems like it would be the point. Still, it was cheap, and fun.

I built a Filament spool rack for my filament stash. It was getting a bit unruly. It came out quite nicely I think. I found a nice design for the end pieces and connected them.

The design recommended PVC pipe, which I bought from Toolstation for £1.51, but I decided, after picking it up, that it looked a bit naff. Instead I ended up opting for some nice white steel wardrobe tubing from Wickes at £4, which I cut down to size with a pipe cutter.

Does anyone need 2 metres of black PVC conduit?

Some sniffles this week. Shout out to Xylometazoline (aka Otrivine).

I performed my first modifications to an existing 3D model this week. My aim was to add some text onto the face of a case. Bambu Studio makes this fairly easy once you’ve watched a video on how to do it. However, I suspect that soon I will be reaching for more powerful CAD software and all that that entails.

In order to save print time and filament, I also managed to cut the existing model down into a smaller piece whilst testing the print settings.

The world of Game Boy modding is full of confusion. Products are mainly manufactured by two or three big players, but often use the same (often recycled) components. For example, both Hispeedido and Funnyplaying use the same screen for their DMG “laminated” kits but it’s hard to be sure of that up front.

I only know because I bought a Hispeedido screen kit for a DMG I’m working on and tested it with a Funnyplaying laminated screen and it works. The reality is that, especially as a relative newcomer, you often don’t really know what you’re buying without experimentation.

I loves me some Quick Look, so I setup ThumbHost3mf this week for previewing *.3mf files.

This week I setup my first Home Assistant automations, and of course one instantly stopped working. This is what I envisage a “smart home” is – things just not working sometimes.

The troublesome one was a contact sensor to tell me when the front door is open. It seemed to fall off the Zigbee network as soon as I moved it to the door. Re-pairing it whilst at the front door seems to have fixed it and it has been working since so far.

The other was a hardware switch to turn my office lighting on/off. It is fine.

“Source available” is not open source (and that’s okay)

A more accurate framing would be that Fizzy is source available. You can read it, run it, and modify it. But DHH’s company is keeping the SaaS rights because they want to be able to build a sustainable business. That is defensible and generous, but it is  not  open source.

This week I realised that Joe Pesci starred in Home Alone and GoodFellas in the same year, 1990! The roles could not be more different.