What are you doing this weekend?
13 points by caius
13 points by caius
Feel free to tell what you plan on doing this weekend and even ask for help or feedback.
Please keep in mind it’s more than OK to do nothing at all too!
Jazz busking. There’s a piano in the centre of town which was provided for public user by the town council. We’ll add saxophone, drums and bass and attempt to entertain the public for an hour or two.
Busking is on my bucket list. Jealous and excited for you! I’m working my way up to an open mic somewhere.
Got the anvil, hammer, tongs, and forge sort of set up so I’m going to try to make something. Also gotta clear some hillside for a fence.
Just took my first axum rust web app (an auto-updating index/tracker of Gaza support fundraisers) live so I’ll be monitoring it like a hawk and debugging issues as they come up. Link is https://gazadirect.com/ if anyone is feeling generous and wants to help victims of genocide.
Recovering from cycling 230km through the Finnish Archipelago on Thursday and Friday.
Reading up on Incus, and contemplating building a silent mini Nas.
Going to Marzahn by tram to get rained on by the weather gods (and see my kids perform in an open air venue).
I recently heard the phrase: “Where the tramway starts, that’s where Berlin stops” and I’ve never felt that as much as now.
Where the tramway starts, that’s where Berlin stops
What’s the context of this phrase? I may be obtuse, but I don’t understand. My interpretation of the tramway map is that tramways are distributed all over the former East Berlin. As far as I can glean, the only one that cross the current state borders are the Woltersdorf Tramway and the Schöneiche bei Berlin tramway, both marked magenta on the map. But those have no relation to Marzahn at all, which is entirely within Berlin.
Best of luck in Marzahn, hopefully the weather gods will smile upon you.
It’s a Wessi way of saying that East Berlin is not Berlin (because that’s where the trams run).
The weather gods did not smile today, though it could have been a lot worse with the rain.
I’m learning Godot by trying to do the 20 Games Challenge in it. Starting from just straightforward reimplementations of old arcade games like Pac-Man, Boulder Dash, Tetris and Breakout. It’s a fun break from being stuck with trying to do something actually ambitious. The games themselves are very completeable, at least early on, but there are still interesting details when you look at how they’re put together and making the whole thing polished exercises a lot of areas I don’t normally touch much.
Volunteering at a uni microbiology lab to develop lab skill in support of starting a mushroom farm.
Starting up my first ‘big’ embedded software personal project. My wife and I would like to have electric roller blinds that communicate with home assistant, but off the shelf smart roller blinds are ~350€/window for our size windows. However, dumb blinds with a pull chain are ~40€, and an esp32c3, a stepper motor, a TMC2209 (stepper motor driver chip) a reed switch and a few power supply components comes to under 20€/window.
Originally I was gonna use ESPHome for this, but as it turns out, ESPHome doesnt have great support for driving a stepper motor with endstops. So, I guess im writing my own firmware. Ive been enjoying embedded rust with the embassy async framework, and it has good support for the esp32 and its network connectivity, so ill use that.
Seems like the hardest part is going to be driving the stepper motor, as while there are already packages available for MQTT and networking, the only package for driving stepper motor drivers is formally abandoned and doesn’t support the TMC2209 anyway. In theory, its just a bit of uart and toggling a pin on and off, but you have to control motor acceleration, and the timing ends up being quite tight.
going camping, doing some bushcraft stuff :) think i’m going to try friction fire lighting (bow drill, probably) since i haven’t done it before
Interesting! Any learning resources (videos, articles, books) you’d be able to share?
yeah! Tom McElroy and Hidden Valley Bushcraft are both fantastic yt channels for bushcraft / survival stuff, and for a book you can’t do much better than Essential Bushcraft by Ray Mears :)
Reconstructing the Bodleian Library Broadside Ballad collection from a broken RDF dump and the Internet Archive after Oxford University kindly decided to take it offline.
Back to working on fixing up my house! Gotta clean and pressure-wash the basement, do some yard work, find all the miscellaneous places that minor repairs or repainting need to happen…
Preparing for a technical interview that requires pcba knowledge, so looking for prep resources for that
Well that sounds like a lot of fun. Did you find any good resources? PCBA is one of those things that I’ve found a few guidelines about over the years but mostly learned as I went by screwing up (sometimes… pretty costly unfixable screw ups). Now I’m in a spot where I’ve got an intermediate engineer under me that is taking care of most of our board layout and sending to a PCBA house for manufacturing and… I’m just perpetually sharing lessons learned with him as I see him making the same mistakes I’ve made… but he has also made his own mistakes that I’d never considered before :D
Still working on bootstrapping my programming language.. This weekend I have a short-ish task that I want to finish, which will make bootstrapping much easier. I hate parsing so I develop tooling to make it easier. I have a PEG parser generator that works quite well, and I have a full parser for my language using it. It can currently parse all Fir code in the repo (including itself), 18,236 lines of Fir code in total (excluding comments and whitespace).
Unfortunately the generated parse trees are terrible to work with, for various reasons.. I already implemented some conversions from the parse trees to ASTs, but it’s a lot of tedious coding, similar to hand-written parsers. So I also hate it..
So this weekend I’m hoping to implement semantic actions, to be able to create the ASTs I want directly in PEG productions. After that it should just be a matter of creating the right AST nodes in PEG productions and the most boring parts of implementing a language will be done in the bootstrapped compiler. Exciting!
Getting cracking on some initial commits to an open-source project I just announced. It’s basically empty rn. If anyone else is interested in Rust teaching space, feel free to drop by! https://github.com/nrposner/rust_quest
Apparently, writing a DOM stack calculator to reduce my dependency on some old Python2 packages…
(For some things that do require JavaScript so won’t work with my download-then-custom-HTML2Text, I sometimes use Marionette for convenient external control; formfilling, saving page HTML, retargeting forms, dropping CSS… But it is unclear how long until Marionette gets redone sufficiently that my old setup is fully broken — some things are already no longer working, so I am smashing together a personal WebExtension with NativeMessaging for most of those tasks. This includes tons of stealing snippets from MDN, a bit of asking local Codestral to do something trivial while I get fed up and context-switch to something else, only to come back and need to debug the code I get — still better than writing this boring stuff though, and some actual coding. Of course, WebExtensions don’t like eval nowadays and I don’t want to reload the extension for every minor change, so instead of native eval I have a stack calculator. Which can be controlled via a Unix domain socket proxied by Native Messaging micro-application.)
Painting a fence, and clearing out a spare bedroom for my mother-in-law. You know, the exciting stuff.
Going to finally do the setup for a new local tech meetup next week. I’ve never done something like this before, but all the meetups are social, and not a “bring laptops, have a 10-15 minute talk, and then work and share projects” type of meetup. I’m thinking of trying 1.5 - 2 hours every other week.
All the places I asked for space (even asking about paying for a space) haven’t responded yet, so I’m thinking of booking a room at a local library and then setting up something on Meetup.
Modifying the backend of a compiler I’m working on to generate C instead of using Binaryen.
I will be moving my recipe site my new Incus server. I’ll also be seeing if I can make SSH talk to Incas via a socket instead of a port. And I think I’ll make some fun Thomas’s improved lemon pound cake.
Building a platform for my first swamp cooler and maybe fix a fence too. And a weighted hike too.
I’m still plugging away at my cargo to camper van conversion. As is typical, my van LAN gear is all ready to go but the walls are out and I haven’t installed a ceiling. :-)