Time for another one of my Irregular updates! You can tell I've been busy because it's actually been 3 weeks over 4 weeks since my last post, instead of 2. I'll talk about that at the end of the post.
So what's been going on? Well, as always, I've made a list of various events and projects, with accompanying photos and links. But before I list all of those, I just want to say thanks to everyone that's been supporting me over these last few months. Every penny has helped immeasurably. I'm still searching for work and contracts, and I've had at least one interview (I'm assuming after 2 weeks of silence, I didn't make the cut). However, until then, I'm relying on donations from people to pay the bills, and while I'm unfortunately not yet breaking even, the support has been immeasurably helpful, and has definitely helped things to stop getting too dire. I hope it's obvious that I am trying my absolute hardest here, and I hope for a break soon.
With all of that out of the way, here's what I've been up to since the last post
Migrated Blog platforms
I migrated blog platforms! Right now, the main blog is running on Ghost CMS. This is basically so I can more easily mirror content between my ko-fi and my blog itself. Ghost also has the benefit of having the option to directly support the writer, which is interesting. There is no exclusive content yet, but I may change this in the future. Any exclusive posts here will get mirrored to Ko-Fi of course.
I finally stopped getting shocked by things in my office
Yeah, this was a frustrating one.
For a long while now, I've been getting random shocks from things in my office. Not often, but occasionally just a (quite painful) bite when plugging say, some audio equipment in. Given the nature of my office, I suspected it wasn't a huge deal. There's a lot of random stuff in there and my setup can be complicated. Nothing would reliably shock me either. This really wouldn't happen often so I just didn't think about it.
A bit less than a year ago now I bought a thunderbolt dock to help with my music production. And that would reliably shock me whenever I plugged its audio interface output into my mixing desk. I rushed to get my multimeter and read 90V AC. No wonder it hurt.
But here's where it gets stupid. I still couldn't trace the issue. So I just didn't connect those things, and left it for another year because it didn't really crop up. I'd very rarely get a shock, but I shouldn't have left it for so long.
One day, I got a particularly bad shock, and I was in a particularly bad mood. So I disassembled the office and pointed my multimeter at every. single. device I had. It was only after I noticed the voltage would build up over time that I had the epiphany.
The main extension lead I use for half of my office equipment has an open ground. Now this may not seem like a huge issue if you're in one of those weird countries that doesn't ground their appliances by default, but I'm not happy with this at all. Likely I'm being shocked due to Leakage Current building up on the devices I have plugged into this socket. Before I write the whole unit off completely, I do want to check that the plug is wired correctly. Normally I test this stuff as soon as I get it, but this particular one came from my girlfriend's house when we moved in together and it must have slipped me by.
I'm not entirely sure this was ever wired in! of course for a lot of circumstances you'd never even notice, as the Earth is really just a protective measure to ensure you don't get shocked if there's a fault. None of my devices have a fault as such, but putting a large amount of small transformers on a circuit can add up, and connecting with an actual ground (such as, with the ground of a audio cable), means you suddenly are part of a circuit, and all that tiny floating voltage adding up suddenly passes through you. It's highly unpleasant.
Ever run your hand across a macbook while it's charging, and it feels 'bumpy'? That's the leakage current making itself known, as the macbook chassis becomes ground (and macbook chargers don't have a ground themselves).
Ground cable rewired (the other terminals were fine), no floating voltage anywhere, problem solved!
Changed the routine for our wax melt
This is a tiny thing, so I just want to brief it here in case anyone is curious. I run a smart home with Home Assistant. I do it for fairly cheap, but Home Assistant makes those cheap things all work together in a way that feels very swish.
We have a "smart wax melt". In reality, it's just a wax melt on a socket timer. I changed its routine so it turns on an hour before sunset, as long as at least one person is home, and then turns off whenever we go to bed. It tries to turn it off again at sunrise just incase something messed up. It means that it's only running while we're able to smell it, and we get a bit more life out of the little smelly wax circles! I plan on writing a whole post, maybe even doing a video about my smart home at some point. There's a lot to talk about.
Started using SyncThing
I set up SyncThing on a bunch of devices! It was a pain in the ass! But once it's all up and working it is very very swish. I'm using it with Retroarch to basically have cloud sync saves between my iPhone, Retropie, Steamdeck and computer. It's reasonably seamless which is always my goal!
3D Printer Plug exploded
Okay it didn't "explode" as you'd imagine, but it did stop working. I turn on/off the power to my 3D printer with a smart plug, as otherwise the fan can run 24/7. I could just manually flick the switch but I'm silly. One day it was not responding, the plug was definitely plugged in, but unresponsive. I knew what this was immediately as it had happened before.
Hey, where's that capacitors hat gone?
The whole thing had popped off and was rattling loose inside the housing. Thankfully, the AC power side of the board is completely isolated and shielded by plastic, so there was no chance of it having bridged the live and neutral contacts. That would have been... exciting.
Part of me wonders if this could be salvagable. The capacitor is a through component, but I don't like messing with mains voltage equipment where possible, and I don't know what other damage was done. So it's goodbye ot this, and a replacement slotted in that I thankfully already had ready.
I've had two smart plugs do this exact thing on me, and both of them were on the circuit that I now find out had a non-existent ground. I wonder if the current leakage (and subsequent random 'grounding' incidents) have caused undue strain on that particular capacitor in the circuit causing it to fail early.
Started using "System Bridge" on Home Assistant
Initially, I installed System Bridge on my computers, a service that lets you control your computer and interact with Home Assistant. Unfortunately, I found out, through my pi-hole instance that System Bridge was checking for updates by pinging Github's API every 30 seconds. You multiply this by the 5 or so devices I had it installed on, and my IP address got rate limited. I uninstalled System Bridge after a week. It certainly explains some other random issues I was experiencing.
These days, I'm using HASS agent. It's still a litle hacky, but it works, and I can now shut down or lock my computer through the Home Assistant Actions, or have reports on high temperatures. One idea I have is to turn the office lights on whenever my PC turns on, as it's usually quite dark in here even in the middle of the day.
My Crossposter Borked and ate up all my storage :(
If you follow me on social media (and if you don't, where did you find this? Follow me), then you'll likely know I crosspost my posts. I don't like "twitter" and I want my presence to be more decentralized. So I use a crossposter that takes my Bluesky posts and posts them to twitter. Specifically I use this one, as it's configurable, plain, and open source. I do also use Openvibe to post to other platforms simultaneously as well.
One day, my home server stopped working. After some diagnosis I learned that my storage was full. It turns out my crossposter, after a recent update, had been logging my entire feed to a file every 30 seconds. Not only that, but the logfiles had no rotation or expiry set, so it just kept going! I had 50 Gigabytes of log files. This VM doesn't have a lot of storage as it's mostly small services, so it filled up quickly. I basically rewrote half of the crossposter, as I also found out it wasn't handling sessions correctly. I haven't forked this or posted the code because it was done in a rush and the crossposter itself is still under fairly active development. I have my own plans for a crossposter that I'd like to do at some point.
More Home Assistant!
Another Home Assistant thing! I added reporting for temperatures and batteries. I also added support for a telegram group, so a bot now posts in relevant channels (Chores, Media, General) whenever something needs doing. My robot hoover lets us know if she's stuck or needs emptying with a random message.
I also added categories to the automations in Home Assistant, a somewhat new feature.
At some point I really have to go through and organise my Home Assistant. It's evolved and changed so much over the 4+ years I've been using it, and some stuff in there really needs changing or overhauling.
I migrated our servers away from AWS
I migrated our business servers from AWS to Hetzner. We didn't expand as much as we expected over the last few years, remaining fairly static, and the Hetzner servers will provide us with everything we need for about 20% of the price of AWS. Additionally, I migrated our container registry from Amazon ECR to Github packages. We already use Github workflows for CI/CD so this just made sense, and is included with the plan we pay for. It took a few days but I'm very grateful for all the systems and documentation I set up way in advance becuase it made the changeover very smooth, most of my time spent was just backing up, restoring and triple checking. Our clients had almost no downtime at all, less than 60 seconds total due to a small misconfiguration that was quickly solved.
Elfen Lied.
I finished the Elfen Lied anime. I don't know if I should recommend it here? Is this the recommendation section of these posts?
Elfen Lied is a 2004 anime (based off a 2002 manga) about a few things. I think it's about violence against women in society, and maybe about explotation of the lower class? It's also extremely violent, rather horny, and completely inappropriate at times. It's very 2004, I can say that much? I didn't hate my time with it, but it's a harsh watch, and I think it quite often misses the message it's trying to say. If it's trying to say anything at all. I'd also recommend reading the Does the dog die? page in advance if you have any triggers, as the anime definitely covers, and outright shows you several instances of extremely not-good content. Also a dog definitely does die in it.
I Made lots of tasty food!
Let's lighten the mood! I made food! It was tasty.
We've been using Too Good To Go a lot recently, and the place we frequent keeps giving us fresh fruit and vegetables? I mean, they're close to the date but still perfectly usable. It was a perfect excuse to make a Baked Apple Crumble, with cinnamon and sugar topping. It lasted 2 days for 3 people.
The other ingredients, vegetables, eggs and vegetarian ham I put together with some udon noodles. I made a deep broth with some vegetables and Miso paste and made a ramen dish. It was a lot of food, but very very tasty!
We're struggling a lot recently, and cooking is one of my love languages. I hope it helps my partners as much as it helps me to see them happy eating something tasty.
Let's talk about being productive, and what that means.
As mentioned, I've been struggling a lot recently. This is one of the reasons this post has taken so long and been so delayed. Has this been a productive month for me?
I don't know. It doesn't feel like it.
I've spent hours getting just this post written. I don't even think it's my best work. I migrated servers and set up a blogging platform. I spoke with friends, I reassembled my office and even found time to get the Lazy Bastard achievement in Factorio
Was that productive? It really does seem like it when I all lay it out there, but yet I don't feel like I've gotten anything done. So many times I'll start work on a task, only to be interrupted with something else. Last time I was supposed to work on this blog post I learned my read-it-later service Omnivore was shutting down fairly quickly, and I had to spend half a day migrating my bookmarks and saved notes to another service. They're all synced and saved in my Obsidian vault now, in markdown. So they're not going anywhere. See that tangent? That's what my entire life has been like these past few months, maybe years. Constant interruptions to my flow. I go to 3D print something and the smartplug has broken, I go to make some music and get shocked by my guitar, leading to me disassembling my whole office.
I think I need to address what I consider 'productive' or maybe not chase my ideal of productivity so much. But the reality of it is I'm basically unemployed right now, I feel useless and I want to do things that contribute, or at least feel like I'm contributing. I'm burned out and need to rest, but somehow I need to find more work and I need to slow down and I need to do more and I need to stop and go and be productive and settle down.
I need a break.
The Search for work
I'm still searching for work. My current client is struggling to pay me (through no fault of their own!) and I already have them at a heavily discounted rate, as they're a long term friend before anything else. I have some small leads, maybe some music production, maybe a month of devops work. But nothing concrete yet and nothing stable. I do search and apply every day. It's a large part of my thought process. I'd love to just... make, full time. That's my dream. But I understand for now it's a dream. I have so many things planned, so much to write about. I hope one day my content will be interesting enough to support me, becuase I really feel like I can bring a unique voice to this whole space. I do so many things, and I have so much passion to create! In the meantime, if you're reading this, and you know of any work going for a software developer with 12 years of experience, a designer or musician like myself. Please let me know.
Additionally, you can always support me directly to help me achieve that dream.
Is this too much?
We're nearly done now, and I want to address the elephant in the room. This little blog post is approaching 3,000 words in length, and that's just simply Too Many Words for my liking. You might think the time between posts has affected its length, but I'm still only counting what I did in the ~2 weeks since the last post. It's been another 2 weeks since then, and I have so much more to talk about!
I'm considering splitting these posts up, rather than "What have I done in the past few weeks", I could spend time focusing on a single week, or perhaps splitting my posts up into one per project, even if some of those projects are fairly small and banal.
What are your thoughts? Let me know!