Father, author, developer, maker. Please consider sponsoring my work.
Ode to the AA Battery
Recently this post from @Merocle caught my eye:
I'm fixing my iFixit soldering station. I haven't used it for a long time and the battery has gone overdischarge. I hope it will come back to life. Unfortunately, there are no replacements available for sale at the moment.
Devices with built-in rechargeable batteries have been bugging me a lot lately. It's convenient to have a device you can take with you and use anywhere. And with modern Li-ion cells, battery life is remarkable.
...Recapping My 5 Year Old Studio Monitors
A few weeks ago, I started hearing a slight crackle at the loudest parts of whenever sound was playing through my PreSonus Eris E3.5 speakers. It was very faint, but quite annoying, especially when editing my YouTube videos.
For a few days I thought it could be a hearing problem (at this point in my life, every year brings a new health adventure...), but after testing my wired headphones and another small computer speaker on the same output, I determined the problem was, indeed, coming from the PreSonus speakers.
...Migrating 13,000 Comments from Drupal to Hugo
After 16 years on the LAMP stack, I finished migrating this website from Drupal to Hugo a few weeks ago.
What's old is new, as this blog was originally built with Thingamablog, a Java-based Static Site Generator (SSG) I ran on my Mac to generate HTML and FTP it up to my first webserver (over 20 years ago!).
The main reason I moved from an SSG to Drupal was to add comments. I wanted my blog to have the same level of interactivity I had pre-Thingamablog, when I was (briefly) on Xanga.com.
...Raspberry Pi's new AI HAT adds 8GB of RAM for local LLMs
Today Raspberry Pi launched their new $130 AI HAT+ 2 which includes a Hailo 10H and 8 GB of LPDDR4X RAM.
With that, the Hailo 10H is capable of running LLMs entirely standalone, freeing the Pi's CPU and system RAM for other tasks. The chip runs at a maximum of 3W, with 40 TOPS of INT8 NPU inference performance in addition to the equivalent 26 TOPS INT4 machine vision performance on the earlier AI HAT with Hailo 8.
...Raspberry Pi Pico Mini Rack GPS Clock
I wanted to have the most accurate timepiece possible mounted in my mini rack. Therefore I built this:
This is a GPS-based clock running on a Raspberry Pi Pico in a custom 1U 10" rack faceplate. The clock displays time based on a GPS input, and will not display time until a GPS timing lock has been acquired.
- When you turn on the Pico, the display reads
---- - Upon 3D fix, you get a time on the clock, and the colon starts blinking
- If the 3D fix is lost, the colon goes solid
- When the 3D fix is regained, the colon starts blinking again
For full details on designing and building this clock, see:
...Local Email Debugging with Mailpit
For the past decade, I've used Mailhog for local email debugging. Besides working on web applications that deal with email, I've long used email as the primary notification system for comments on the blog.
I built an Ansible role for Mailhog, and it was one of the main features of Drupal VM, a popular local development environment for Drupal I sunset 3 years ago.
Unfortunately, barring any future updates from the maintainers, it seems like Mailhog has not been maintained for four years now. It still works, but something as complex as an email debugging environment needs ongoing maintenance to stay relevant.
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