Monthly Log 2025

2025-02-26    9 minute read

01 - January

  • Learned to play the first bit of Verrat on the HXCSTR (the piano part in the first 20 seconds). Surprisingly easy! The rest has been much harder. TODO: upload a quick video
  • Started working with a designer to make crofu look less ugly. Their current progress is available at https://ghostcatte.codeberg.page/crofu-design/
  • Started working on updating knus (forked from the unmaintained knuffel) to KDL 2.0. Keep up with my progress here. I've still got a long way to go, but a lot of the "main" features are implemented (bare identifier string arguments, new keywords). I'm still a bit bummed that the proposal to remove / from reserved identifier characters didn't pan out, but such is life.
  • tlature (apparently people pronounce it as "lature" when I format it as ↹lature)
    • Bumped kdl dependency to 6.0.0 (implementing KDL 2.0)
    • Lots of refactoring, as usual
    • Added some audio and event metering functionality
    • Added a plugin logger view
    • Wrote my first proc macro to make a "splittable" trait derive that implements a trait allowing a structure to be split into main and audio thread versions.

02 - February

  • Been exploring a game concept for a turn-based tower defence. Explored a couple different game engines because I was tired of bevy compile times. Ended up settling on macroquad. Revived tacticum because it seemed to be a good fit.
  • more crofu legal studying
  • built a cheese press
  • Lots of cooking
    • Kkwabaegi - turned out pretty bad
    • Phở - pretty good, but I have lots of notes for next time

03 - March

  • Got a bowl at a local makers market
  • Used my newly made cheese press to make paneer from nearly expired milk. It smelled a little sour and the yield was pretty low, but it tasted great, and the texture was almost perfect (maybe a little bit harder next time).
  • Made my own cheesecloth to use with the cheese press (literally just a square of muslin with a hem)
  • Set up a used Mac Mini to use with AirMessage. It doesn't work yet, but I feel like I'm close. Also, I want to modify the Mac Mini to use PoE, so I'm exploring some higher power PoE modules.
  • Did a bunch of clerical stuff for crofu:
    • Contacted a lawyer about incorporating and stuff
      • Gave me a recommendation for an accountant
    • Contacted an accountant about tax implications
      • Haven't heard back yet
    • Renewed my LetsEncrypt certificate
      • It was really quick once I figured it out
      • I should probably document it here
      • I think it also added a cronjob to renew it automatically
  • Made a script that pulls embedded images out of an inkscape file. Should be better in terms of file space, but doesn't seem to have a big impact on load times.
  • Continued work on knus. Things are slow, but hopefully I get them done soon.
  • Did a ton more practice on the HXCSTR
  • Made some Palak Paneer, and it turned out better than before, but it's not quite all the way there yet

04 - April

  • Played Twilight Imperium with some friends. I didn't win, but I did pretty well for my first time.
  • Been reading various books, but none have really hooked me yet.
  • Refactored crofu to use a different ID. I switched from 128 bit UUIDs to a 64 bit bigint. (Read more)
  • Learned to make shokupan. Followed this Serious Eats recipe, and it's the best bread I've ever made in my life. Also fried some of it to make donuts, which are also really good.
  • Modded my Mac Mini to use PoE as I alluded in last months log. It was pretty easy, and a surprisingly bearable experience.
  • Practiced a ton of HXCSTR, this time for the third movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. I'm at the point where I can play the first 8 measures reliably at about half speed. It's probably the toughest thing I've learned to play, partially just because it's so long, but it's also been a lot of fun.
  • Made a script for saving local copies of Mastodon posts
  • A bit of exploration of ch32 ethernet capabilities (basically replicating this ch32-hal PR)

05 - May

  • Updated my Inventaire profile with all the books I've added to my backlog
  • More HXCSTR practice (still moonlight sonata)
  • Add OAuth support to crofu. Took a while, but it was pretty straightforward, other than a bug that ended up being because the URL I had been using on the provider side (0.0.0.0) was different from the one that my server was being hosted on (127.0.0.1).

Made a new profile picture

Previous update post

I had been using a profile picture with an extremely outdated haircut, and I've been meaning to replace it. I've got a friend who has been doing photogrammetry scans of a bunch of folks (and another friend has been printing them out), so I took the opportunity to get a scan of myself. The scanner had a lot of trouble with my legs, but I was able to get something I could rig and pose, so I made this:

Old New
old profile picture, titled *Gradient*. A vector depiction of jaxter184 at a roughly 3/4 angle. a beige-skinned figure, head tilted to the side, with hair tied up in a messy bun. A bright green (#20ff80) hexagon barely covers his facial features. new profile picture, titled *Falling*. A 3d render of a photogrammetry model of me facing the camera, holding an orange icosahedron, with blue bars surrounding him. I am wearing black pants and a dark shirt with a leaf motif.

Unfortunately, this one isn't an SVG, but frankly, the difference in size is a few hundred kilobytes, so I'm not too torn up about it.

06 - June

  • I read Lab Rats. It was interesting, and I found myself agreeing with the identification of the problem (the management strategies developed in Silicon Valley companies disregard human dignity), but not with the proposed solutions ("stakeholder" capitalism, "impact investment"). It was a pretty good history of the subject though, and it pointed to a lot of other authors and events that I'm interested in learning more about.
  • Started practicing the third movement of Vivaldi's Summer on the HXCSTR (specifically this part). I had rekindled my interest in bayanist Oleksandr Khrustevych, and wanted to try to learn some of the pieces that he plays to see how different things are on the HXCSTR vs a bayan.
  • Refactored my life counter project to use Embassy. Embassy made it really easy to get rid of a bunch of critical sections, improving responsiveness, but I'm running into a couple weird memory usage issues that I have yet to figure out. I think it might be something I can fix with some configuration or crate reorganization shenanigans, but I ordered some MCUs with greater built-in flash because I figured that would be the easier solution. Overall, really really happy with Embassy, and I'm hoping it'll make it easy to make it programmable over USB (instead of using an ST-LINK), or migrate to RISC-V.
  • made keyboard pants. might be easier to explain with a picture (TODO)
  • crofu
    • apply new site design
    • add profile avatars
    • add project avatar image upload
    • my certificate is expired again, oops
  • started planning out a dictaphone
  • did some experiments with a time of flight sensor

07 - July

  • migrated this blog to use only vendored javascript so I could revert back to hosting on sr.ht, mostly just because I prefer the upload workflow.
  • made a little game console. honestly a bit of a paradigm shift despite being such a simple project because it re-taught me how much i love working directly with hardware (I've been writing software on top of linux in my day job so much that I kinda forgot how great it is to just make something). TODO: dedicated wiki entry
  • pictochat terminal
    • been messing with thermal printers. TODO: dedicated wiki entry
    • researched the underlying tech behind wacom tablets. I've done this before, but this time, I ran into a project called patchouli, which seems to have already done a lot of the stuff that I am uncertain about (namely the analog frontend and coil design)
    • tried to get better refresh rate on a specific epaper display
  • made a script for generating bingo cards

08 - August

  • dictaphone
    • added i2s support for ch32-hal (it already had spi support, so it was mostly just adapting that over) (including dma)
    • messed around with sd cards. they're simultaneously more and less complicated than i expected.
    • got an audible recorded sound written to the sd card!
    • unfortunately stores keep sending me the wrong i2s mems microphone module. i think there's a factory issue somewhere.
  • continued tone-tram development. got midi output, i've got some videos to add to the wiki entry.
  • crofu: just a bunch of little fixes. I hope to get back into things in September, because I think all my external obstacles have been cleared, and it's just a matter of hunkering down and getting things done.