Notes for August 24–28

I came back to work this week, started catching up on everything, and decided to go out for groceries without an umbrella (it is still August, right?) and got drenched.

That might be why I ended up having to take a day off–the fact that there was a virus rampaging through the household for a few days might have been entirely coincidental. But it removed all the momentum from my return to work and didn’t improve my ongoing shopping list of ailments (back, plantar fasciitis, etc.).

Trying to get some exercise in by going to the pharmacy was not on my bingo card.

Since misery loves company, I followed up on the other day by pulling up a spreadsheet and trying to figure out how deep I would be in the hole if I bought a new desktop Mac, and… nope. I don’t think I am going to buy any new Apple hardware this year (unless something critical breaks). In fact, maybe no hardware whatsoever except for reviews, which just feels weird.

I got some very generous donations recently, though, so expect interesting hardware write-ups soon.

In that spirit, I revisited a little hack that let me keep using old hardware: we’ve had M5Stack ESP32 cameras in the house for years, but Apple, in their wisdom, broke HomeKit repeatedly until they stopped working (to be fair, they probably shouldn’t have worked in the first place).

I’ve used them to keep tabs on 3D printers, chimneys (it’s extremely irritating when your upstairs neighbours decide to renovate their kitchen), and other things, but they had become kind of useless since HomeKit didn’t support their MJPEG streams and I really don’t want to use anything but the Home app.

Well, it turns out that my earlier ESP32 hackery paid off: I realised that, yes, an ESP32 can do H.264 encoding, and spent a while iterating on the problem with gpt-5.6-sol–first getting encoding to work, then trying to figure out why HomeKit didn’t like the stream and mapping out all the parameters involved, and finally adding caching and interleaving encoding with streaming until I got 5fps (which is enough for most uses).

This led to a somewhat off-the-cuff HN comment, which I reproduce below:

As I was reading this, I realized that the ESP32 HomeKit debugging session I had running was taking a while, and this happened:

Me: What are you doing?

Agent: I’m resolving Apple’s private video-resolution lookup table to determine whether iOS 26 supports 320×240 for HomeKit live streaming. The decompiled source hides the numeric constants, so I:

• Downloaded/extracted the iOS 26.1 arm64e dyld cache to /workspace/tmp/ios26-dyld/.
• Built and installed the read-only apfs-fuse utility needed to mount Apple’s APFS image.
• Planned to extract HomeKitDaemon and decode its resolution table.

Me: Oh, OK. Carry on then.

These are weird times.

I was using piclaw for this, but a few days later Codex pulled a very similar stunt on me–I am increasingly of the opinion that sol is perhaps a bit too proactive…

This week I cancelled my LinkedIn Premium subscription, which is ironic in far too many ways to comment here, but doing so felt long overdue. The reason I did it is that even with a corporate discount I was getting negative value from it:

• It has devolved into a vanity fair that is worse than Twitter (if that is possible, solely because I still get some value from my daily 15 minutes of Twitter).
• There was absolutely zero sense in paying for any of the “perks” it offers, all of which I have used approximately zero times.
• The spam was getting really annoying, even after I patiently disabled everything.
• People I meet at work can use my e-mail address to connect with me, so contact discovery is moot.
• And, in a shocking, shocking development over the past few years, recruiters don’t really use it for recruiting any more–they just spam you without even checking if you’re a match.

None of that is worth the money–unless they were paying me to use it.

I can’t really remove it from my phone yet, but… we’re getting there.

I also spent a fair amount of my downtime filing e-mail and poking at a few interesting things, largely to keep myself organised.

For good measure, I decided to take another stab at the “personal CRM” thing–doing reviews is great, but you end up asking yourself “what is the state of X?” too often, so I got piclaw to whip up a moderately sensible data schema:

The key thing here is that there is no UI and no integrations–I just drop e-mails (or entire mailboxes) into a chat, and piclaw files them away and reasons about them. Retrieving data is, as you’d expect, trivial:

• If I want to see the overall status, I get an interactive Kanban board in the piclaw UI.
• If I ask about someone or something, I get search results and a little table of our correspondence, including a plain-English summary of what transpired.

I thought about adding this to Memento, but the transactional and threading parts wouldn’t be a good fit (the CRM handling skills and modus operandi went there automatically, though, which was nice).

Turns out sol’s proactivity has manifested again. I asked it to review and test the secure P2P messaging add-on, and, without any intervention on my part, it provisioned two additional piclaw instances, tested the add-on across all three and then cut the 2.15.0 release.

To paraphrase Douglas Adams on children and off switches, I may need to work out where sol’s is…