What are you doing this weekend?
15 points by caius
15 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!
Relaxing, yesterday I had a panic attack after my job, my parenting and my side project that I’m trying to convert into side-income have been taxing me for weeks, I feel exhausted, everything hurts, my head is cloudy. I need some rest….
The problem is that for me the early phase of a project tends to fade fairly quickly, but the motivation for this one has been going strong for a good while and I want to ride the way until the motivation is self-sustaining because it has users. And this push has basically drained me… Will take the weekend to recover, and continue next week with refreshed energy.
Performing video game music with an orchestra at Gaymer Pride 2025.
To the art store! I rebound my first book a few weeks ago, a used version of Yourdon/Constantine’s “Structure Design” I ordered which arrived in 3 pieces. It stays together and is readable; I learned a lot, but could have done better. I need proper mull (I could only find cheesecloth) to hold the text block, better cardstock for endsheets, and a bigger glue brush.
Buying an used Intel NUC from Craigslist and installing Linux on it!
Nice, I use a NUC with NixOS on it as a game streaming client in my living room for my desktop in my office.
Sounds fun. Are you going to use it for self hosting some web services?
I will be using this as my new dev workstation. Ubuntu + Firefox + Rustrover. I am seeing cpu fans ramp up, but the performance is still pretty good.
Another, interesting point, I can’t install new BIOS on it. All the original documentation and files have been nuked from the intel’s website. The original BIOS is from 2016, I have tried multiple versions, nothing has worked.
I love those things, smoothest driver experience i’ve ever had.
(The new asus ones aren’t as good)
I noticed that the iCalendar has journal support, so I started building a fuse-based filesystem for diary entries in a nicer format, that then converts is back to ICS files. These can then be synced with vdirsyncer.
This would allow you to write journal entries in your favorite editor and have them sync with any CalDAV server. There is potential to extend it to todos, scheduling and more.
My daughter and I will attempt to make paper out of the black swallow wort I’ve been harvesting around the neighborhood.
Finishing debugging some crazy hardware issues with a machine (causing all sorts of excitement like “alloc magic is broken” in GRUB). There are two final tests to run before I decide to give up and build a newer machine.
If I decide to build a new machine, that’s a later problem, so I’ll spend the weekend finishing some custom shelves that I had half-built, but had set aside to work on the hardware issues.
I’m working on a faster, more feature rich replacement for bats. The aim is to be the cargo-nextest of shell test runners.
We use bats at work and we have a suite of about 600 tests. Not having a fail-fast option is a huge pain in my ass. The fact that it creates a separate file descriptor for debug output is also a pain when it gets inherited by a background process and causes a deadlock waiting for it to be closed.
With these kinds of tests you’re often making assertion about exit status and the contents of stdout/stderr. One of the ideas I have is to collect all output into a SQLite database that you can then query to make those assertions. An added benefit is that you can inspect the output of tests, how long they took, etc even after the test suite has completed. You can then generate whatever reports you want (JUnit XML, etc) whenever you want, and you don’t need to rerun the test suite just because you forgot to add a flag to generate it.
Also, there’s a fixed startup overhead of about 7 seconds on my machine with bats. I would very much like to start tests immediately with my replacement.
We dump test results to parquet (not through bats, just rough bash and python). Which gives you a bit higher compression, typed nested structs and lists, as well as being able to remove a failed run by just deleting the parquet file for that run. Added bonus you can query using duckdb CLI across the files and run SQL queries piping results to a csv, or many other formats. It’s column oriented so you can do stats queries and get results back fast. Might be worth a thought.
Planting more roses. Working on the solar system on my DIY RV. Hopefully being done being sick.
A DIY RV? That sounds interesting … tell me more about your RV! I have some experience with solar on RVs … here’s a project I did a few years ago: https://cameronpurdy.blogspot.com/2021/05/adding-880w-of-solar-to-tb-400-part-i.html
Working on some story content for Botnet of Ares. Also working on a very nerdy short story to go with the game, and help give some inspiration.
It’s gonna be a long weekend in Italy and I’m just planning to get some much needed sleep. I’ve been having trouble sleeping lately so I’m very glad to have a few days of not having to worry about waking up in time for stuff.
Hopefully, I’ll be replacing dual boot Windows and Debian with Void Linux after ~2 months of willing to do so.
Implementing DBSP, a way to do incremental computation. I’ve been refactoring the representation of an operation circuit, and finally got it mostly done. I just got the creation of the op state done, and am swing back to iteration of the circuit through the forward connections to step through the execution of the op. I hope to get out of this rabbit hole soon, and pop back up to working on the reactive notebook.
For personal life stuff:
For HardenedBSD:
open(2)/openat(2) and friends: https://git.hardenedbsd.org/hardenedbsd/HardenedBSD/-/issues/117
Flying to L.A. with a friend to attend a live Dimension 20 show! Relatedly - trying to control my anxiety around a) travelling b) arranging entertainment for friends!
Strenuously not thinking about work, as I’ve been over-working the last week or so in an attempt to feel “caught up” at a new job, and that is not a path I want to go down again.
Recording my first YouTube video on structuring and organizing code. Had a false start last weekend, recorded, started editing in the week ( which I’m learning to do) and in the process of editing realized I needed to put more effort into script writing and planning further ahead and finding good visuals to support the topics I’m going to talk over. Tossing the recordings and starting from scratch seemed the best approach.
It’s been a nice fresh learning exercise as I’ve only ever edited in kdenlive for my sons Minecraft YouTube videos. Trying to do something more structured and trying to get over the awkwardness and keep it engaging is trickier than I thought it would be. Talking to a screen while your family are going about their business around you feels weird.
Been using Manim to create animations, though some of the things I want to do are a bit limited by manims math focus. Will march onwards!
The weekend is mostly over, but I’ve been working on implementing 500, the card game, in Elixir with Phoenix and LiveView.
I’ve been working on it on and off for about 5 years for fun, and finally got around to getting an LLM to do some of the leg work for UI. It’s mostly working, still some extra bidding logic and win conditions to account for, then I’ll be bugging some friends to play it with me!
Took the kids to the Turnfest yesterday as part of our long weekend activities. Today will be recovering and preparing.
i’m trying to get my self-built computer system to use a flexible palette for video output instead of a computed color. This would allow me to actually have nice 256 colors as well as proper grayscale colors.
I’m also trying to get keyboard and mouse input implemented properly, so i can use the system standalone without relying on hacks like dd if=/dev/input/mice of=/dev/ttyUSB0 bs=3
I’ve found myself in possession of a Dyson cooling fan (TP10 model) which for better or worse does not include wifi integration, but what it does have is an easily accessible UART debug port over which the fan continually streams its internal state and sensor data! So I’m working on adapting https://github.com/Alex-Trusk/Dyson_UART_parser to work with a Wemos D1 mini and getting something to show up in Home Assistant.
Happily, the UART also provides 3.3V with enough power to run the D1 mini, so no external power supply is needed, and it’s possible to entirely conceal an attached D1 mini under the fan’s removable air filters.
Writing a non-directly-applicable-to-real-world-right-now clojure system based on self-ruling cellular automata. No “New Kind of Science” type, rather “hundreds of microservices calling for external actions in sync” type.
Kendo practice today. Visiting https://www.retrofest.uk/ tomorrow.
I didn’t know about Retrofest and I’m only half an hour away! Sadly, there don’t seem to be any cheaper tickets available for uninterested children that I’ve dragged along with me so I might not make it. It looks very cool, though.
It was partly organised by https://www.museumofcomputing.org.uk/. Open Saturdays, also based in Swindon.
I hope it went well. I’ve enjoyed reading that website before but didn’t realise they were based in Swindon. Time to plan a visit!
Working on the Ecstasy module linker for JITting to Java byte code.
Building A-frames for cucumbers in the garden.
Building a cedar pyramid for a honeysuckle vine.
Replacing some kitchen sink plumbing.
Hopefully getting a run in.
Praying for my country to survive its mad ruler.