I got a Metriful indoor air sensor, and wrote some code to expose it as JSON. It’s definitely not much:
Looking again at the website, I see that 8 days ago they added what is hopefully a much better version of what I started. Yay!
EDIT: Yep, it’s way better:
Here you can see the light levels as the sun set, followed by turning on a lamp in that room for about an hour.
For the 8th grade talent show at the end of the year, I made a Flash animation to Lemon Demon‘s Dance Like An Idiot. As you may be aware, Flash hasn’t aged super well, so I tried making a video of it at modern resolutions. It now has a height of 1080 pixels, compared with its original mid-2000s 548×400, but is still 12 FPS. I noticed some problems such as duplicated frames, but deemed it good enough for a first published attempt.
This video rendition is over 25x the size of the original SWF at around 33 MiB.
With heavier services removed, it turns out this site can run on a Raspberry Pi! It’s a bit low in RAM headroom, mainly due to MySQL, but it cut my network and server hardware power usage by about 2/3! Ubuntu 20.04 works quite nicely on it, and I ran into a certbot bug while I was at it. An interesting experience!
He is very good.
I was having trouble hitting framerate in Beat Saber, especially with spectator view smoothing on in Koto. Upgrading the CPU helped a lot:
I made a scan of the corner of a room to test. I took 34 photos with a Nexus 5X on a tripod with this 3D-printed mount printed by a friend and Meshroom.
This tutorial was helpful. The white balance was fixed, exposure was 100 ISO, and focus was at infinity. I might want to try a closer focus next time; see if that changes things.
I’ve been working towards this for several months, but today I finally wrote initial software for the thing:
The intent is that this provide useful information as you’re getting ready to go out the door. What’s displayed in the image above are easier, proof-of-concept things:
As it is now I have it refreshing on the hour.
This is just the beginning, though! I hope to add support for configuration files, and weather and bus information too. It’d be nice to know what sort of temperatures to expect that day, and whether I’m likely to need an umbrella. And when to leave for the bus. (I have USB speakers so it could chime.) The e-ink display (PaPiRus Zero) I’m using has some tiny switches on it, but they’re not easy to use at all, so I’m hoping to figure out how to use a handful of keyboard keys. 3D printing will likely be very helpful with that.
It’ll involve more hardware work, but I’m also hoping to have this thing provide a UI for measuring the weight of my cat’s food and water bowls. Currently I’m doing it manually, and I only get a start and end measurement for each day at varying times, so there’s a lot of slack to it. If I automate it, every few minutes will be no problem, and I can get an idea of his consumption rate. Graphs! This seems likely to require more soldering, as I haven’t been able to find a USB scale that operates in grams, but I have been able to find someone else with the same problem who solved it by soldering things.
You can find the code here.
Almost two weeks back I had this dream:
I had constructed a sentient intelligence in a cube one foot to a side. It had a little lopsided hat on top and was suspended over a three-story drop onto a enormous floor constructed of white panels which reached out past the horizon. My intent was to use this cube for calculations.
When I climbed the staircase up to it, it said to me “two plus two is two and big foo.” Seeing my expression change, it asked apprehensively “you don’t like big foo, do you?” I said I didn’t. It said hopefully “well, you have time to fix it, right?”
I thought for a moment, and instead of answering it directly I started battering at its connection to the line suspending it above the floor, trying to get it to detach. Recognizing my intent, it said “let me save you the trouble.” There was a click, and it started falling. Just before it hit it called “remember my percentage!” then shattered into its components across the floor.
Beat Saber is pretty loud, so I often want the volume level at or near 1%. This is hard to do from within VR with existing tools, which involve pointing at a small 2D slider.
So I made this:
It’s available on GitHub, and I’ve posted a build of v0.1.
I hope it’s helpful!