Weeknotes 238

Although I now have a slight reluctance to print for fear of something going wrong I decided to go ahead and print a AMS Lite top mount. This is so that you can mount the AMS above the printer, to save space. This is a long print with multiple plates, so I got to test out the automatic filament switching capabilities of the AMS Lite and A1 for the first time as the spool I was using did not have enough filament on it to complete the job. How this is supposed to work is that if you have another spool of the exact same material and colour on the AMS Lite it will automatically switch once the current one is used up.

This required enabling “AMS filament backup” in the AMS settings.

I watched eagerly as the current spool ran dry and then…after a brief pause to purge the existing filament, it automatically started using the full spool. Magic 🪄 So that seems to work nicely.

Speaking of devices which might spontaneously combust, Bambu, with me only having to mention UK consumer law a couple of times, agreed to send me a new version of the AC board for the A1.

Credit to them, it has already arrived.

Given I bought this printer two months ago I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect them to replace the AC Board as a precautionary measure. I could demand a replacement or refund.

Coincidently, I’ve noticed on Reddit just how many people are willing to accept that their printer might melt. I suspect, given the demographics of Reddit, that most of them are likely American and used to non-existent consumer protection laws.

Framed another picture this week. This time a small print of the first Tindersticks album cover.

We locked ourselves out of the house for SECOND TIME at the end of last week. Grown adults. Twice. 🤬 💸

This stems from living in a flat for 10+ years where you had to leave with the keys in order to lock it. The new house just lets you pull the door shut as you leave. God-damned convenient door.

For all the wonder of LLMs you’d think Claude would be able to work without losing the text I just typed into the chat box. You’d be wrong. It’s completely reproducible too: you don’t have Internet but Claude is running, you type into the chat box, it reconnects to the Internet and loses what you typed. Cool.

I moved my Plex library around this week and it went buttery smooth thankfully. I’ve been putting it off, but I made a plan, ran it past Claude for a critique, and followed it. Nothing abnormal going on so far. I plan on writing a proper blog post about this, but I have said that before.

This week I learnt that Framework, the upgradeable laptop people, make a Desktop PC. I was surprised. Building PC’s from upgradable parts has been a thing for a long time already.

Code Is Cheap Now. Software Isn’t.

With twenty dollars, a few hours of spare time, and a bit of patience, almost anyone can ship a functional application.

“almost anyone” — this post makes a lot of interesting points, but I think they’re really overestimating the average person. That is not meant to be disparaging, I just don’t think most people have an interest in making their own software?

Web development is fun again

That leaves room to experiment with UI and UX, to try ideas and throw them away. To add small quality-of-life improvements I couldn’t justify before, because there was always something more urgent."

I got around to using KOReader on my jailbroken Kindle this week and oh my, it’s been quite a journey. The software is clearly highly capable, but the menus and settings are indecipherable to the degree that I had to Google basic things. Still, I got there in the end. Maybe I’ll read a book.

Introducing Mouse Jiggler and Double Click

Built-in mouse jiggling is a novel, and potentially useful, feature.

Helmarr is a lovely looking app which I installed this week to provide better iOS-based management of my “homelab” (I have given up and started calling the computer in the spare room that). It is very nice indeed.

Upgraded to iOS 26 this week (mostly so that I could install Helmarr, and I knew I couldn’t avoid upgrading forever) and I can’t say I like it, but it does feel like setting a new wallpaper.

I finished printing a Cathedral board game that looked cool this week.

An opportunity to print something with more detail, and to try out some different filaments. It was a bit tricky removing the supports, and some parts we very fragile and broke off. Some fell off. But overall not bad.

We haven’t played it yet!

Monarch – A potential Raycast competitor I’ll keep an eye on.

I’ve learnt a surprising amount of things about Linux permissions this week. It’s actually slightly embarrassing that it’s taken me this long, but it’s the kind of thing that once you know the basics you can just get by (chmod 777 anyone?). And I have been doing for many years.

I’ve utilised the both the setgid and “sticky” bits.

The setgid bit.

When a user creates new files in a directory, they are owned by the user and their primary group. I was not aware that a primary group was a thing, but if you run id <your-username> you will see that it outputs something like this:

uid=501(jord) gid=20(staff) groups=20(staff),12(everyone)

gid is the primary group, and groups is all the groups the user is a member of including the primary group.

If you have different processes interacting with the same files this can cause permission difficulties where one process creates the file and another can’t read it etc.

The solution is to set the setgid on the parent directory which means newly created files will inherit the group already set on the directory. As long as the users are a part of this group, and the permissions allow, everything will work.

The “sticky” bit.

Setting the “sticky” bit on a directory means that a user can only delete files in a directory which they own. I was moving some files around, and giving access to those files to a new service user. I added the sticky bit so that the new user can create files in the directory, but not delete existing files. As a precaution. Will it work? I’ll let you know.

Helium

Best privacy and unbiased ad-blocking by default. Handy features like native !bangs and split view. No adware, no bloat, no noise. Made for people, by people. Fully open source.

I gave this a very quick go and it didn’t strike me. Good to have competitors in the browser market though.

The World’s Most Important Machine

I heard about about EUV Lithography on a podcast a whole ago and then ATP mentioned this video recently. It sounded fascinating. And, it is. It’s actually incredible that any of this works.
This is an hour long, which in 2026 is a long time, but absolutely worth your while. I wish I understood more of it!

Yamatter

Inspect and transform YAML frontmatter data from the command line.

I can see this being useful.

TIL about mTLS from Securely Exposing Docker Services With Mutual TLS and Caddy. I think I’ve seen this acronym flying around before but never knew what it was. It seems like this is mostly used in Enterprise environments which would normally make me allergic to it, but it seems pretty handy for a, here it comes again, homelab environment too. Basically TLS where both sides of the connection, client and server, are verified to have the private key. If they don’t match no connection at all it made.