Notes for October 18-24

I’ve been more interested in exploring how to simultaneously enjoy Greek yoghurt, orange marmalade and the glorious golden-hour light that pervades my living room than, well, most other things, so this week was a bit of a bust as far as personal projects go.

Part of that is because I have finally swapped the Surface loaner I was using for a brand new machine (more on that later) and am also returning the Lenovo Chromebook I recently reviewed, so I had to spend a little while making sure nothing of relevance was lost.

The rest was… mostly housekeeping, really.

A sharp-eyed reader (hi!) noticed that I mentioned the Radxa Linkr had some WPA3 issues, and told me an OpenWrt update had some WPA3 interoperability fixes for the Cudy M3000, so I upgraded one of my APs–that didn’t fix the Linkr, but after some soaking in I upgraded the rest with no ill effects.

Roaming around the house still works fine, but there are a couple of reported issues with fast-transition (FT) associations in this build, so I’m keeping an eye on OpenWrt PR #23181 and mt76 issue #1098 in case I come across any issues in the future.

I’ve found an interesting workaround for my “no local agents on my Mac” rule–I’ve been using Open Minis on my iPad for a while now because of its iOS integrations (it can handle Reminders, Calendar, HomeKit, etc.), and I realised that it can run as a fully sandboxed iOS app on my MacBook Pro and sync via iCloud with my iPad and iPhone.

Since I had previously gotten my iPad to sync skills with memento, it took me 5 minutes to get everything working on my Mac, including mapping a couple of “external” folders to it.

Since it’s using the same engine as ios-linuxkit (even if they didn’t take any of my PRs and fixes, which is a bit sad), there’s additional ARM-on-ARM emulation going on, but on a MacBook that barely registers–and having a sandboxed agent that can run its own native Safari WebKit browser completely isolated from my Mac is pretty nice.

I’ve been patiently nudging piclaw to port itself to pi-durable. Most of that has already happened–the new version is self-healing and is gradually removing the redundant abstractions I had built atop the original SDK.

No hurry there.