Three things from this week. This week I thought it’d be nice to talk about a simple camera hack to solve a niche problem, a Linux API to solve different niche problems, and a couple 3d printed parts that solve an entirely different niche problem. Seeing the back of your own head I have a personal mission of making it easy to see things that might otherwise be impossible or unpleasantly difficult to see.

Three things from this week. When you’ve got a home server or a lab computer that you want to keep on all the time there are a lot of ways to set up the jobs you want it to do. My current lab machine is a pretty capable 5th gen AMD Ryzen 7. I decided to try Debian Testing as the OS and I installed with a desktop environment even though I expect that most of the time I won’t be using that interface.

Three things from this week. No real theme in the three things from this week. Even if it looks like it. Really. Let’s dive into it. Windows N editions Apparently there are editions of Windows 10 and Windows 11 with the suffix “N” which are distinct software products from the non-N editions. Why a product would be launched with such a minor tweak to an existing product name is a mystery.

Three things from this week. This week had way too many things. More than three, even. There are some neat tabs lingering open in my web browser that have aged a good couple months though so let’s take a break and see a few of those. There’s no real through-line at all this week - just ideas that are lingering in the back of my mind. Linear Sequential Unmasking Linear Sequential Unmasking is a technique I heard about on the AAAS Science podcast a few months ago.

Three things from this week. This week there’s more of a common thread between the three things that bubbled to the top. Home assistant Home assistant keeps showing up in the periphery for me so I finally made some time to try it out. It’s a self-hosted home automation software that runs well on a Raspberry Pi 4B. I plugged in the RPi to the router, I found a blank microSD card, and imaged it.

Three things from this week. This week I’ve been following a lot of random threads again. Here are a few of them. Octoprint If you use a 3d printer you might be interested in Octoprint. It runs on a computer connected to the printer and handles a bunch of features like managing prints sent to the printer, tracking progress, or (with a webcam) streams video of the printer while it works.

Trying out something new, we’ll see if it sticks. I read a lot of random stuff online and rather than just forming an opinion and dropping it I thought I’d try sharing my thoughts. That’s all a blog is anyway, but sometimes they’re just little thoughts. Since each one is just little I’m putting a few together. I won’t claim they’re related in any way except that the all went through my brain.

Overview I wanted to build a self-sufficient portable lab network consisting entirely of Raspberries Pi. The lab network should be able to access the internet if there’s wifi available. And it should be easy to connect an external computer to the network and access any of the Raspberries Pi over the lab network. Basically I’d like to be able to run the whole thing on battery power and use it with or without upstream internet.

I’ve been thinking for a few weeks about how a self-hosted personal feed mixer could work. Like many other folks I’ve recently revived my presence on Mastodon - @Rob_Russell@mastodon.cloud. When I read this post from @nuthatch I started dumping my ideas into a reply but soon realized I was hundreds of words off on a tangent. So instead I captured my ideas here. A personal feed mixer, as I’m calling it, is a way to take multiple periodic data sources and produce a ranked list for the reader.

This one’s a bit dry but it lays out some ideas I think are really important for successfully launching a niche engineering product. The kinds of products I’m thinking of become a tool for someone else so they should adapt to the goals of the user rather than requiring the user to think differently about their goals. They should be blend in with the world they’re used in but they should be open to inspection and modification without undue effort.