💾 Archived View for flatline.ro › logs › 2021-12-27.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 15:24:30. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2022-01-08)
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Two months and a variant later I remembered I have this gemlog that I use to keep track of stuff I've been doing. I don't think anyone's actively reading it, and don't need any sort of metrics to tell me that I'm the only reader. There's something magical about knowing you have your secret but at the same time out in the open personal nook where you jot down all the stupid shit, without a care about regular visitors ingesting and judging every paragraph, injecting their own viewpoints and judgments in the comments, and wondering why you haven't posted in a while. There's always the chance someone could stumble upon it, and get this anonymous glimpse into my life, but that too gives me a fuzzy feeling. I'm content with this being just my own personal time capsule, which I keep adding to. If I keep at it, I'll have a neat timeline of my life to look back on. Sort of like a diary, huh? Like what blogs were supposed to be before they became interactive and ridden with ads and beacons.
A lot has happened since my last post, so time to catch up!
My fleet of pocket computers has grown quite a bit. I added another two RPi zeros and an Arduino Nano. The Arduino is kinda useless to me right now, but it was cheap and I may find a use for it later. The zeroes don't all have a role yet either, but they're a lot more versatile since I can SSH into them and run Node.js services - like the climate monitor for my little garden. I have a wide spread of versions: RPi 4, Zero, Zero W, and Zero 2 W. I'm most excited about the 2 because I can easily do remote development on it using VSCode, without hacking together funky sync scripts.
The parts collection has grown too: shift registers, hundreds of leds, resistors and transistors, pots, connectors, DIP switches, a couple of LCD displays and a whole bunch of misc workshop tools (stripper, crimper, wire, cutting tools, etc.). My shopping history is just this soup of whatever I thought looks generally useful and/or cheap. One of the more fun parts was a DSO-138 oscilloscope kit that I had to solder, and while it's a relative piece of crap (not even genuine but a chinese ripoff) it's better than nothing.
Here's a quick rundown of what I've been up to with all of these:
Oh and I put the ol' John Hancock down on a 3-room apartment. Yeah, that happened. About 35% of my savings went instantly poof, as an advance payment. Not gonna dwell too much on that investment so I don't get depressed. Hope all goes well. The building isn't even half-finished, but I already made the layout for my workbench, complete with soldering station, parts repository, 3D printer and filament rack. I'm in this sort of muted shock right now, but at the same time excited to have more room for more stuff (isn't capitalism grand?), and a clear view of the sky for once. Might even string a UHF antenna from one balcony to another, and get a telescope too. Lots of plans, but quite a bit to wait.
In other news for the time capsule: