Three things from this week. Still travelling through Scotland this week so you get to see three more things this week that I saw. The Isle of Skye is full of stunning landscapes. I loved hiking the easy part of the Quiraing. I was confused by the Old Man of Storr. I was recharged visiting the rushing waters of the Fairy Pools. The Quiraing name (or Cuith-Raing in Gaelic) comes from old Norse languages and describes the folded structure of the land.

Three things from this week. I’m on vacation in Scotland this week so here are three pretty things I’ve seen that you can see too. This is the Carraig Fhada Lighthouse. We walked there from Port Ellen then contniued on to The Singing Sands beach. The beach is also known as Traigh Bhan in Gaelic. Lagavulin distillery has named a few scotch whisky bottlings after Traigh Bhan. We tasted #3 and #4 and they were both delicious.

Three things from this week. Buildroot can be a really nice fit for lots of embedded Linux applications. I’ve used it off and on over the past few years and it’s taking me a while to get an idea of what idiomatic Buildroot looks like. This week I was really happy to set up a project using Buildroot so the three things from this week will be example packages in Buildroot.

Three things from this week. There’s a genre of book that excitedly catalogs gee-whiz factoids about the unbelievable activities going on in the animal world. Tigers that can leap 20 feet straight up and ants that lift 50 times their own body weight. Blue whales are the biggest, giraffes are the tallest, cheetahs are the fastest, and camels are the coolest. I loved learning these little bits of trivia when I was a kid.

A Global Shutter Camera for the Raspberry Pi started shipping a few months ago. There have been other global shutter camera modules for the Raspberry Pi but this one comes from Raspberry Pi directly. So it should be well supported by the mainline software including the camera driver and libcamera. Here’s a little summary of some official Raspberry Pi camera modules with the details I care about: Name aka Sensor Pixels Shutter Lens Camera Module 2 v2 IMX219 8M Rolling Built-in Camera Module 3 v3 IMX708 12M Rolling Built-in 75° Camera Module 3 Wide v3 IMX708 12M Rolling Built-in 120° High Quality Camera HQ IMX477 12M Rolling C/CS High Quality Camera HQ IMX477 12M Rolling M12 Global Shutter Camera HQ IMX296 1.

Three things from this week. The second best thing this week was Tailscale Up. The best thing was picking up my wife at the airport the next day. These are very different things but I can’t very well put a conference ahead of seeing my s.o. for the first time in a month, even if it was a really good conference. And it was a really good conference. It was just the right size to feel connected and conversational but also structured tightly to value everyone’s time.

There’s an issue with the way the shutdown command works on gammacam P6. I really like using the little OLED bonnet user interface to control the system and I’d like to fix things so that I can reliably shut it down without needing to check in over ssh. Here’s a quick overview of how the menuing system works. First off, the UI is split into two parts. One file has the hardware-specific part and another that has no hardware dependencies.

Three things from this week. If binge-watching old TV were a part time job then I pulled a double shift this week. My niece mentioned some news about Dr Who to me mid-week and that was all it took. That night I scrolled back to the newest episode that I was pretty sure I’d seen and hit play. Suddenly I’ve now regained consciousness and days have passed. Unfortunately this isn’t a new thing for me.

Three things from this week This week I’ve been fanagling a lot of files, trying to organize my backups and my archives a little better. It turns out I have a lot of partially-duplicated copies of ad hoc backups. Don’t judge me. Trying to compare lists of files across directories gets complicated and it can sink a whole lot of time. I’m using some shell one-liners to compare lists of files and so this week I thought I’d share a three good bash commands for this kind of work.

Three things from this week. I tried out three different ways to use an LLM on my home PC this week. A Large Language Model (LLM) is the kind of ML model that runs inside of ChatGPT and other similar popular chatbots. Running on my home PC lets me see just what they can do and whether they’re useful to me. While there have been a whole lot of different models emerging lately, there are also a few different frontends or user interfaces that can load the model and perform inferences.