Notes for August 17–23

Tomorrow I’m going back to work after a rather lopsided summer break (not feeling up to it physically or mentally), and the social network pendulum is swinging back into a bit of normalcy as I progressively tune nearly all of them out.

Twitter (which I refuse to name otherwise) is still a controversial (but time-boxed) part of my news intake since Mastodon has turned into a desert for any serious AI discussions other than violent opposition, LinkedIn is still crammed with sales-y ego trips and YouTube keeps peddling glitz rather than substance, but I do need to figure out what is going on.

For science, I dipped into a few of them over the weekend, which did not improve my general mood–it doesn’t look like I am going “back” into a saner industry (rather the opposite), but at least I sort of got my book reading habits back over the break, and I can finally say I did more productive stuff than just doomscrolling.

First my shaver broke in the most subtly annoying way (the retaining latch was clearly not designed to outlive the mechanism), then I decided to do something about designing and printing cases for a bunch of SBCs and realised I no longer need to buy dust mesh for those:

Turns out I can print 0.1 mm-thick dust filters with zero issues using PLA and a 0.4 mm nozzle, even if the prints themselves are a bit susceptible to minor flaws if the filament is aged. But being able to design them to size (and shape) is promising.

I ended up trying Qwen 3.8 on the only machine I have that can somewhat run it at speed (my MacBook Pro M3, which has 36GB RAM), and… it sort of worked (with RAM to spare, which is nice), but quickly reminded me why I prefer doing AI on servers as the battery visibly drained and the machine became warm enough on my lap to be noticeable.

Doing small programming tasks (algorithms or singleton functions) without an agentic harness context was doable (so I could probably rely on it if I was doing the same stuff I needed three years ago), but it takes forever (something like 30 minutes) to churn through a basic sub-32Ktok agent context, so… I still need better hardware.

Under the pretext of upgrading to Bun 1.4, I did some of the long-standing TypeScript cleanup work in piclaw, dropped in a few fixes and dependency updates, and let it loose.

As recounted in what is probably this year’s longest post, I just want to use the thing now, so unless there’s some amazing new frontier model out or some critical fix, I’m going to try to throttle back on it–also, my free Codex subscription is running out soon, so when that goes I’ll have to re-think how to keep my work and hobbies separate.

But things are looking up–RAM use seems lower, most of the annoyances I had seem to have been fixed, and there are (crosses fingers) no immediate issues.

After a very careful waiting period, I finally updated my home automation setup to homebridge 2.x, which, of course, broke things. In my case I am using homebridge-webos-tv to control my living room TV and homebridge-mqtt to create virtual HomeKit devices from Node-RED, and they both broke instantly when I upgraded to 2.4.0 (yeah, I waited that long) because they seem to be fairly niche and not fully tested with 2.x yet.

The solution (which took a while to figure out) was to disable their child bridges and force the use of the bonjour-hap advertiser in the top config stanza:

"bridge": {
  "name": "Homebridge",
  "username": "0E:…",
  "port": 51826,
  "pin": "123-45-678",
  "advertiser": "bonjour-hap" <- ADDED THIS
}

At this time, nearly all of my automations are pure native HomeKit, with only a few things patched through Node-RED (which I upgraded to 5.0.4 this week as well), which is great except that it exposes me to Apple’s general penchant for breaking things every now and then.

But everything “just worked” aside from a minor configuration glitch in a “Virtual Bell” accessory that I use to merge our doorbells into a single alert, and my usual fiends, the ESP32 cameras that we still use to check on open windows and stuff.

Those tiny and slow cameras are long overdue for replacement, possibly with something like the Aqara G100. The M5Stack hardware was never really meant to be HomeKit compatible, but I’ve been hacking at the ESP32 firmware for years and they have suffered through years of Apple breaking things subtly (without even documenting the right behaviour for camera devices), so at this point I keep them around for a sort of sport.

If you’ve missed my apple papercuts update, well, I’ve been trying to get a lot of writing done on my iPad, and… stuff happened. I’ve also put together a swift-app-template to see if I can standardise a bit the stuff I am doing, and made a point of cramming in as many quality-control steps as possible so I don’t keep reinventing the wheel, starting with SwiftPM defaults and ending with a comprehensive set of agent skills consolidated from my library.

I also pinned down and fixed a site rendering bug (images inserted using certain ancient formats of Markdown references would be interpreted as page links).

Building on last week’s book marathon, I finished The Shattering Peace by John Scalzi, which was a nice, fun romp, and got started (again) on Norse Mythology, still one of my favourite reads.

I think I’m ready for whatever Loki tosses at me tomorrow when I log back in.