I'm backfilling my whole log in November since I haven't updated it this whole year. Accuracy and detail may be questionable.
01 - January
- Had a nice post-New-Years party with some friends. Two of them started dating each other as a result, which gives me very "I guide others to a treasure I cannot possess" energy.
- Also got my ears pierced
- Took a ceramics class and made a mouth sculpture (TODO pics)
- Made some modifications to my life counter project because the flexible
e-paper display that I was using was discontinued and now I have to use the (thicker)
non-flexible version.
- I also had some new PCBs laying around for it that I hadn't tested that fix some of the power management issues I was having (and I think use a newer, cheaper MCU)
- Messed around with DNSSD on the STM32 dev board
- I'm trying to get a camera system working, so I've been experimenting with action cams and PoE security cameras, but nothing seems super compelling so far
- Made some mechanical changes to tone-tram, like a thumb hook that makes it more comfortable to hold, and a valved mouthpiece that lets you adjust airflow rate
02 - February
- Helped a friend with a short film
- Watched Heated Rivalry
- A bunch of my friends have been getting more into game dev, so I've been messing with Godot to help them out
- Tried to make a shiitake soup broth, and used it in a miso soup that made my breath smell absolutely rancid. Went on a date immediately after that, and while there may have been other factors, I think it made a non-negligible impact on the impression I made, and potentially led to not having a second date. I now have a personal vendetta against shiitake mushrooms.
- Been getting pretty good at making cream puffs. It's much easier than I thought.
03 - March
- Did my taxes
- Got some injection mold quotes for my hexagonal keyboard keycaps
- Spent most of the month hanging out with friends and visiting family
04 - April
- Recorded some videos (which I didn't end up editing or posting)
- Continued to try to get STM32 ethernet working. Made a breakout test board for the PHY, but it also didn't work. Interestingly, the off-the-shell breakout I bought, which used the same parts and (I think) had the same routing did work, so I'm pretty sure it's my soldering that's the issue.
- Went to watch a friend perform Mozart's Requiem at the symphony with my mom. Lacrimosa was great, but I think Dies Irae was the sleeper hit.
- Had a going away party for a friend who's moving to Chicago
- Went to a hors d'oeurves (not gonna check the spelling on that) potluck that had a lot of attendees with eating restrictions. There was one undisclosed eating restriction that I was unable to fulfill, but making something that is vegan and gluten free (that's not just like ants on a log or something) was an interesting challenge. I ended up making a sweet potato gnocchi with a cauliflower "cream" sauce, and it was something that I'd probably eat myself on a regular basis if it wasn't so time-consuming to make.
- Made copycat pilsbury sugar cookies for a WWE party. It was pretty fun, and I think I'm going to do it again in the future with some different techniques. (TODO: get pics)
- Helped 3 different friends move this month. Just that time of year I guess.
05 - May
- Working on a new version of my hexagonal keyboard that's more modular (to take to Open Hardware Summit at the end of the month)
- Added a bunch of features to tone-tram, also for OHS
- Added a battery
- Improved linear sensing reliability and stepping
- Added a soda can counterweight
- Made the frame foldable so I can transport it in a carry-on on my flight
- Went to Berlin for OHS
- Super cool city, very similar to Austin, but more genuine and interesting, and not overtaken by tech workers from California
- OHS was solid as usual. Cool venue, good talks and workshops, good people attending. I'm glad they did Berlin because I've been wanting to go for a while, but I wish they'd do another one in Canada, or maybe Mexico or Asia.
- Went to a bar called ELSE, which I thought was kinda just OK initially, but then I found out what I thought was the only dance floor was actually just the waiting area for the cooler (in vibe, much more hot and humid in climate) techno dancefloor. Got to chat with some people visiting from Korea. Situations like this make me really happy to be multilingual.
- Went on a picnic with some cool locals.
- Went to New York
- Saw a friend perform saxophone, it was cool and a good time
- A friend recorded a video of me (without my knowledge) and posted it (with my knowledge), and it's currently both of our most viewed/liked videos
- Another friend took me "rooftopping" around New York. I was initially worried about being a burden on him because I had my backpack with all my stuff and probably wouldn't be able to run if like a cop or security guard saw us, but he said that's actually a good thing because then I'll get caught instead of him.
06 - June
- Added SD card support to the hexagonal keyboard so I can record OSC messages to it and use that instead of MIDI because I hate MIDI
- Started working as an electronics instructor at Austin Community College
- Made an ethernet bracelet that I'm going to start using as a sort of business card (TODO: pics)
- Filmed another video for social media. Mark Zuckerberg is dangling metrics in front of my face and it's working.
07 - July
- Edited the video that I filmed last month. A nice artifact that came out of it is that I made a script for generating hexagonal musical keyboard layout SVG files, which I used to replace the existing images on the Wikipedia articles for harmonic table note layout and Wicki-Hayden note layout
- Started working on a string controller. It's basically a giant potentiometer using a cello string as a "wiper" across a resistive surface. Right now I'm using velostat (carbon impregnated polyolefin film (don't blame me, I'm not the person that named it)) because I have a giant roll I got on sale several years ago, but I think I'm going to learn how to make resistive epoxy and use that instead for the final version.
- Assembled a bunch of ethernet bracelets
- Went to Crowdsupply Teardown
- Saw the SlimeVR in action, and had a very nice conversation with someone at the booth about people who might be doing AR/VR/VTuber music stuff, because I think that's a potential avenue for collaboration or client work
- Got a bunch of ideas while talking with Kevin from Jumperless for how to do better board-to-board connections between my modules. I think I'm gonna do a thing with FPC cable connectors.
- Redid the synthesizer PCB that I use on tone-tram and my hexagonal keyboard to use the CH32 because ethernet seems to be more viable on it (mostly since it doesn't require an external PHY)
08 - August
- One of my friends was given an interpersonal relationship diagram by her boyfriend and I felt so data-mogged by it that I felt like I needed to make my own
- Recorded another hexagon keyboard performance video that I haven't posted yet (and will probably have to rerecord)
- Got nerd sniped into writing a vocaloid. I have to make a wiki article about it soon, but long story short, I did a lot of research on vocal synthesis during my master's degree, but it was primarily focused on physical modelling methods (ex: articulatory synthesis), but the state of the art (i.e. vocaloid) is mostly using spectral methods based on recorded samples, and that wasn't really relevant to my thesis for various reasons. But recently, someone asked a question in a group chat I'm in asking if anyone knew how to make a vocaloid, and while I technically do, I really only have theoretical knowledge, so I wanted to test that out by trying to make one. So I did. It mostly works, but there's still some more stuff I want to try. I have enough material now to make a wiki article about it, and maybe a video? Though if the last 6 months have taught me anything, it's that my video pipeline is in dire need of improvement.
- Had a dinner party where I A/B tested recipes using my friends as guinea pigs. The theme was "my favorite foods I had in Sweden", which were palak paneer from Café Curry and spinach lasagna from Röda Sten. I think the lasagna was more popular, but I was personally more happy with the palak paneer because it was harder to get right. I also made vanilijlängd, but it didn't really turn out how I wanted it to.
- I tried hosting a hardware office hours thing, and it went alright. I was hoping to answer questions and help people out, but it was mostly just people hanging out and making hardware stuff, which was neat, but not the intention.
09 - September
- Implemented module position detection for my hexagonal keyboard (before, all the positions were manually hardcoded)
- Got my digital harp proof of concept working (no sound yet, just sensor data)
- Began my 2 months of travel, starting with visiting a friend in Chicago
- Got these cool pants at Uniqlo
- Went to Casama
- Watched the new Resident Evil. It was alright, I liked the humor and the ending.
- Went to Lula Cafe (they had really good desserts, I wanna try making their matcha bostock)
- Visited a friend in Norfolk, Virgina
- Cooked a bunch of food
- Walked my friend's dog
- My laptop broke, which scared me, but then I just reseated the display cable and it started working again
- Watched Backrooms. It was pretty good, but I think it should've been a miniseries.
- Got made fun of by the owner of a focaccieria because I was eating it weird (taking bites of focaccia and scooping the toppings into my mouth with a fork), but imo, it was his fault for making a food that's so hard to eat. It was greasy as hell and way too tall.
- Met a rando on the train on the way to Boston named Baili who was also practicing Mandarin (they were practicing for a class, I was practicing because I'm about to go to Shenzhen).
10 - October
- Visited my brother in Boston
- Made butter chicken. I think I give him a hard time because he made it once and it tasted kinda like pasta sauce, and I hold that over him because, on paper, he is more successful than me by every metric except for ability to make butter chicken that doesn't taste like pasta sauce.
- Stopped in Hong Kong for a few days
- There's so many egg tarts everywhere and they're all so good. I wish I lived in a city where, if I was on my way somewhere, I could just stop somewhere nearby and grab a little savory dessert. Hong Kong is a magical place.
- Went to a cat cafe and met some Australians and a precious kitty named Zuma
- Most people in Hong Kong are bilingual (with Cantonese as their first language), but tend to be better at Mandarin than English. A lot of the times, when I tried to speak Mandarin, people would respond in Cantonese (probably because I have a really bad accent)
- Quick travel tip: if you're ever on Grindr while in Asia, if you see "CF", that means "chemical fun", i.e. drugs.
- Used trip.com to book a train between Hong Kong and Shenzhen in both directions, and customs was on the Hong Kong side in both cases.
- The place I spent the most time in on my trip was Shenzhen
- Their metro cards are gorgeous (TODO: pic)
- Went to HuaQiangBei electronics market. It was neat, but not really mindblowing, and honestly kinda overrated. Maybe I just didn't go to the right places. There's also a vibe that things used to be better there. Ran into bunnie huang and he recommended going further south, which was really cool, but I think requires knowing an insider to get the full experience. I wanted to take videos of all the people removing chips off recycled boards and like hanging out and smoking around bowls of fruit, but I wasn't sure if that's something they'd be annoyed by.
- More places seem to accept cash than I think China gets credit for.
All the touristy stuff and food requires AliPay for sure, but pretty much everywhere
else, I was able to get away with paying in cash.
- There's sort of a dual culture going on where theres the traditional analog person system where you talk to a person to buy a thing and pay for it (like street stalls and HuaQiangBei and convenience stores), then theres the newfangled app economy, like DiDi (taxi app) or Meituan (food taxi app) or Taobao (ecommerce giant). These places all expect you to pay with a card linked to an AliPay or WeChat account, and there are "micro-apps" (websites) designed to run inside the AliPay and WeChat apps, which most restaurants and cafes use, as well as vending machines.
- I also ran into a vending machine that radicalized me against this culture, that used an honor system where you can just pay for stuff and take your thing from what's essentially an electronically locked refrigerator (rather than a machine with a mechanism to dispense the bevsrage). These, however, require a "Sesame credit score", which makes sense, but I hate. Running into this on my first day in Shenzhen basically ruined that whole day for me.
- Roamed around DongGuan and got a long egg tart. Also got to see the textile markets, which are kinda far from the main tourist area, but imo a must-see for anyone who makes stuff with fabric. Initially, I was in the tailor area where people are making suits and stuff, but I happened to go to the one booth with someone fluent in English, and a nice person named Pei helped me find the actual fabric markets that I was looking for (TODO: pics and directions). Apparently there are other fabric markets in Taiwan and other parts of Shenzhen that are also really good.
- Went on a bunch of factory tours. I tagged along with Joey for his NextPCB factory tour, and Kevin for his Elecrow visit. I also had a sheet metal factory and an injection mold factory that I've been in contact with that I wanted to visit, and got to see both of those as well. It was nice to have Jenny along for the injection mold tour because my Mandarin is ass.
- Also saw a ton of people on the subway watching stuff on 红果短剧 (Hóngguǒ Duǎnjù), which is essentially diffusion-generated microdramas. Definitely a future that I don't want to see reaching the US.
- Went to a spa called Tenz (alledgedly pronounced "Ten Zee"), and it made me appreciate spas much more. I wanna get good at building that experience for myself at home, in the same way that I remake restaurant dishes that I like.
- Stopped by Boston on my way back to Austin, and met up with a cool person. Thanks for the good hangs, Mara :)
- Went to Florida with some friends for one of their birthdays
- Took a picture with every person I saw dressed as a Minion (which was only 5 unfortunately, but those 5 costumes were really great)
- Got radicalized again by a beverage machine. My personal hell is littered with fast passes and NFC-chip soda machines.
11 - November
- Went to Hackaday Supercon in LA
- Got to catch up with a lot of folks, met some cool people, handed out tons of ethernet bracelets. Didn't showcase too many of my own projects this time around, but I hacked on my harp while I was out there.
- The big part of Supercon culture that I think differentiates it from other conferences of this type that I go to is the badge hacking. This year, both watching other people work on their badges and listening to them talk about their projects during the ceremony, it was abundantly clear that pretty much everyone used LLMs to do more or less their entire badge hacks. I was never big into the badge hacking portion of the conference myself, so it wasn't a huge personal loss, but I think it's completely antithetical to the entire premise of badge hacking, and I have a feeling it will be much less of a thing next year, or substantially changed.