We are entering the end of 2024, and I have turned 29! I Feel like my Saturn return as hit at some point in the last two years. Still trying to figure out what I learned from it (I think ppl relationships are way more important now)
I’m now kind of navigating seasonal depression/mania, but managing.
I wanted to log how much shit I’m working on atm bc most of it is new and exciting and fulfilling that itch I always have to give myself more Passive infrastructure bonuses(TODO: I should post a blog piece on this idea).
2 weeks ago, for work stuff, I managed to get GitHub CI working for auto-building fw (firmware) packages and posting releases! fun times, took maybe 6 hours to really get something working, and another 2 to polish. Baby’s first CI pipeline!
Last week, I got that working for Bitbucket, so now I can tell you: BitBucket is wayyyy more sane/easy in how they do their scripts and what’s available out of the box/automated. However, they don’t offer release pages so everything is dumped to a single downloads page for now (good luck!). It took maybe 3 hours.
I am now wondering how smooth a GitLab transition would be.
Last week, on Friday, I was able to justify getting started on creating a read-the-docs style manual-site for the same work fw repo. This one is also a first! I’m learning a lot of infra automation, it seems. This one I’m really happy about. I’m still polishing, but basically using Doxygen style comments in the source, then using Breathe to convert those to xml, then using a complementary lib to Breathe called Exhale to convert that xml to rst files, which then are directly consumed by Sphinx (with a read-the-docs style plugin). Sphinx is something I’ve wanted to mess with for a really long time, and having a job related task makes justifying it easier. So yeah! now I can pretty readily take source C/C++ and make a read-the-docs site. After this is polished, I’ll talk w/ my boss ab either relying on static/local deployment via bundling with the existing fw zip, or maybe pushing the site files to a hosted server somewhere on the corporate network.
Other than all that, I got a Pi Hole going last night, so now I have a Christmas idea for my parents (mom is really bad at not clicking ads).
I ALSO have some buddies who host parties fairly regularly, and their complex recently added RFID scanners. I told them my Flipper could read/write RFID, and then demonstrated. We talked ab getting rings (which I may personally still do, they’re dummy cheap on aliexpress) but for now one of the guys go a stack of t5577 cards, so I’m going to write a fob ID to those and we’ll hand them to trusted party guests.
WHEW
Another thing: I got with my buddy, E, two weeks ago and we really got into this idea of setting up a magnet/Hall effect based light system for his house safes. Basically, just had it so that the presence of a magnet on the door interacts with a Hall sensor and turns off and LED strip. We were originally going to use a dev board I got at a lab at EWNA in Austin a few months back, but honestly the job was simple enough that a HW logic-only solution via a simple circuit and some transistors works fine. Also the build system for the demo project for that dev board is broken, and NXP’s build system is arcane. I ain’t debugging that!
My friend sent me a video yesterday of his first breadboard(!) and showed the sensor working and everything! I’m really proud of him, he knows just enough fundamentals to jump out and try something! So now he’s in a prototyping stage and I’m providing options/guidance where possible. I personally don’t do a lot of direct circuit stuff, I know enough to talk shop and get by, and I know what info to look for. The actual application of that info is still a very rough practice for me. I may get into circuit stuff in a year or so if there’s a work or other project that makes sense. I have had an inkling I need to learn PCB design anyways, and there’s plenty of inspo on Mastodon.
SPEAKING OF MASTODON
2 weekends ago I began the very early stages of scoping out what kind of fedi server I would want to run for myself, and where I might run it. The Pi Hole lends itself readily to running something like my own home network stack, but I’m quite wary of external network exposure. I certainly know enough to know that my security fundamentals are lacking. So based on some preliminary scoping, I will likely setup a Sharkey (a Misskey variant, Misskey is a ActivityPub protocol compatible system, ActivityPub is the proto Mastodon uses to be fedi, etc….) instance on Oracle for freesies, and then do some DNS domain tinkering. I also think I can carry over a good chunk/most of my Mastodon data, so we’ll see what that looks like.
That’s a lot! I forget how much I get running sometimes. And this is just my projects in tech LOL