Weeknotes 235

Christmas again. It was fine. Glad it’s over. So is my credit card.

ISS IN REAL TIME

A real-time journey onboard the International Space Station

This is crazily detailed. Very cool.

CAD is not something I’ve ever done with the possible exception of 1 module at College when I was 18 or 19 (although the memory is so vague that I question if it actually happened or not!). However, it has become clear that I will need to learn some sort of CAD software if I want to take this 3D printing malarkey somewhere other than download and print. There are many, many, options. I seem to have started with the most difficult option.

OpenSCAD is “The Programmers Solid 3D CAD Modeller”, so in some ways it is more familiar to me than the way a lot of other CAD software works. I’ve spent my life working with text, not pointing and clicking in an UI. Instead of a GUI you use it’s programming language to describe the shapes you want. Which is of course very familiar to me as a programmer.

It is very early days but I can already see it getting very complicated and “mathsy”. I did manage to alter a bracket for an Apple TV though. It turns out that the bracket doesn’t work for my use-case, but still, I did a CAD.

Incidentally, the current stable release of OpenSCAD is 2021-01, released in…2021. They have nightly builds though, so on the recommendation of a tutorial I downloaded that instead.

In order to get the Raycast 1Password extension working I took the plunge and upgraded to 1Password 8 after avoiding it for a long time. It was fine. And now the extension works.

YEAH BITCH! MAGNETS! – Ahem. I’ve been buying magnets in various sizes in order to extend the range of a contact sensor for my gate. I think I found the right combination of size and number in order to make it work. Next is to design/alter a case for them to go in.

I don’t wanna be right, but I was. After fixing my home automations I was feeling pretty good about how reliable it all was until I got home after being away for the weekend, and none of them were working.

In the end I had to restart some software piece of the puzzle and then everything started working again, but this has somewhat shaken my faith in the whole system. I do not want to be restarting things to have my house work.

Thirteen years of Rust and the birth of Rue – Steve writes I take note.

Father Christmas was particularly kind this year and got me a Kaweco Brass Sport fountain pen. I’m still getting used to it, with it being both heavier and slightly shorter than the Lamy Safari. I think the nib is probably a bit thin for my liking too, but giving it a try for a while to compare. A converter is winging it’s way to me now so I can fill it up with different inks.

I’m looking forward to the patina kicking in after my filthy mitts have been on it a while.

I like the new Ruby Language website. It looks fresh and modern. And the update to the docs is also very welcome. I haven’t used them yet though, so it’s hard to judge how useful they are other than that they look nicer.

I bought some new drill bits and finally put up a blind in my office that I purchased in September 2024. Impressive even by my standards.

The worst part? It was really straightforward and took about 15 minutes. Maybe it was the magical new drill bits. Maybe something else. Imagine what I would be capable of if not cursed with this brain.