I finished off a little side project putting a RGB LED to use as a monitoring tool for the server I run at home. Server makes it sounds much more grand than the cobbled together spare bits of PC that it actually is.
As my coding skills are very rusty, I leaned on Gemini to help me figure out a high level plan for my mini project. Rather than just have it do everything, I tried to work with it so that I could actually learn something from the process. Broadly speaking, it saved me a few hours of searching the web and no doubt spared me the frustration of hitting brickwalls. I have some lingering guilt of taking a shortcut. For people like me who dabble with code and just want to get to something that works, I can see why this is an alluring route to getting trivial but useful things done. From experience, I’ve hit brick walls with projects like this before where the technical solution has alluded me and I’ve run out of time/enthusiasm/patience to complete it. But I continue to worry for what is being lost in return for this convenience.
Once I got the display up and running, I realised that I needed a way to mount it somewhere. I created a small plastic clip to mount the display above the TV that sits over my office desk. It’s been a few years since I used Tinkercad, so I was quietly pleased that I remembered just enough to knock up a model to print.
It took two iterations as my first attempt wasn’t quite wide enough for the display PCB to sit in. I also had a lot of problems with some transparent PLA that I’d recently bought that just wouldn’t stay stuck to the build plate. So I reverted back to the black PLA that I normally use and all my printing problems disappeared.
A year end review of finances also prompted a spring clean of services and subscriptions. I realised that I had stuff scattered around various cloud storage plans, so spent some of the holiday period moving it all into a singular location and generally trying to simplify my online storage footprint.
Both kids started home schooling this week. Although online remote schooling might be a more accurate description. It’s early days, but they seem to be enjoying it and already seem happier, more focused and less stressed. Long may that continue!
I’ve been reading
- Personal websites often have a link that says “now” that tells you what this person is focused on at this point in their life. It’s called a “now page”. – https://nownownow.com/about
- Computer scientist Yann LeCun: “Intelligence really is about learning” – https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/01/computer-scientist-yann-lecun-intelligence-really-is-about-learning/
- Journalist discovers his wife is a Tetris world champion – https://archive.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2007/08/19/bizarro_world/
- Automation does not, by its nature, need to be bad. Can we disentangle ourselves from automation that disrespects user rights and makes heavy use of computation? I make the argument for the importance and value of “stupid smart things.” – https://www.not-so-obvious.net/stupid-smart-things/
- The rime of the ancient maintainer – https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-rime-of-the-ancient-maintainer/
I’ve been watching
- Finished season 1 of Fraiser
- Finished season 5 of Stranger Things
- 2 epsiodes of Down Cemetary Road
- 2 episodes of Traitors
- Started Great Pottery Throw Down