sometimes.digital - personal website
For the past couple of weeks I have been trying to learn more about generative (procedural) art. I plan to update this post continually when I have more things to write down and share. Hardware Around five years ago I bought an Ender 3 3D printer. It is capable, but frustrating to configure and picky about the filament. They go second-hand for around €60. For the past couple of years it has been…
While playing with a €2 camera module I found a CircuitPython example of converting the camera’s video stream to ASCII art . I thought it was really inspiring – the mapping between the image brightness and the characters feels both very simple and clever – and it’s such a cool way to test the camera out (without dealing with image encoding and file handling). A reply from Katherine on Mastodon…
Turns out that a one-way mirror can hide the cracks of a display behind it. This way a broken device can be repurposed into a smart mirror . Whether that is the best use of the technology may still be debatable 1 , but it makes for a cool gadget. I ordered the mirror online for around €10. For a fancier or more artsy look it could be fun to use a mirror in an irregular shape, or to engrave…
I promise, I am not setting up a smart home. The Wi-Fi kettle was a gift, and I haven’t connected it to the Internet anyway. But I have been curious what The Cloud has to offer. I have been dabbling. I’m not a fan of most of it, but some features are really cool: for example, the infamous Tuya devices can fully run on a local network, without any outside traffic. So I am not setting up a smart…
I was working on a multi-language Eleventy site and I realised that configuring the translations from scratch (by writing a custom filter) would be easier than choosing an existing library. This is a very bare-bones implementation that doesn’t support pluralization or interpolation, but it was enough for my site. In .eleventy.js : // set up the official EleventyI18nPlugin import {…
At the end of September last year, I wired together a tiny solar-powered web server. Some time ago, on Mastodon, I’ve stumbled upon compost.party . I love this project in its entirety: the domain, the setup , the trash museum , and everything else. I was also impressed by kaimac running his site on a repurposed EMF camp badge and talked with Tomoe a lot about running a set-up similar to…
We’re renovating the apartment, which is why I haven’t been online as much as I’d like. The renovation feels very offline. Sometimes we have to move the side table that the Raspberry Pi is on and this website goes down in result. There is a likely possibility that the reason for the server not responding is us putting the flooring down or drilling into a wire again . This has happened before, and…
I have been tagged by Katherine and Jamie in the Blog Questions tag / challenge – thank you so much for thinking about me 💓 Why did you start blogging in the first place? On the posts index page I wrote “writing things down so that I won’t forget them later” and that is still the main reason. I used to think that I should only write posts about novel things that no one else has written about, but…
My second-hand Canon camera tagged all my photos with the name of the previous owner. The author name cannot be changed in the camera settings – the camera has to be connected with a mini USB cable to a computer that runs the Canon EOS Utility . I am sure that I have at least one mini USB cable somewhere in my apartment, but I couldn’t find it, so before I surrendered and ordered a new one, I had…
For the low price of an additional €2.5 to my monthly Internet bill (for the static IP) I can now just drag html files into a network folder on my Raspberry Pi and have them appear online, in the form of this site. And I can see all the logs! These are pretty interesting, because there really are a lot of crawlers out there. I knew there would be some , but reading the logs for the first time felt…
I like Eleventy because I can say “please take this folder and make a website out of it” and it will probably do that with little effort on my side, but at the same time there are also a lot of options for elaborate configuration and customization. I feel like I haven’t thought about its templating nature enough, and it adds a lot of possibilities. Here’s a small detail I’ve added that I think is…
I added a photo stream to my site. That’s how serious I am about my new hobby. For now, there aren’t many photos there, but I’m going to be adding more. There are several ways to do this , but in my approach I’m not hosting the photos myself - I’m just fetching all my public photos from Flickr. The API is nice, and there’s a recommended wrapper for Node . The API returns up to 500 photo IDs in one…
I often use Vinted to find second-hand clothes. I like that you can buy items from different European countries and that the shipping is cheap. I particularly treasure this hat with the Panasonic logo and the tagline “ideas for life”. I got it from some guy from Érd in Hungary. But the glut of fast fashion brands makes it sort of annoying to search for this kind of stuff. You can filter by…
Here’s a neat way to prevent the scroll bounce in PWAs with CSS: @media all and ( display-mode : fullscreen ) { html { overscroll-behavior : none ; } } Without the media query the rule will also work in browsers. I think it’s a nice touch that unifies the way native apps and PWAs behave on iOS, while keeping the bounce in the browser. Here’s a demo page . I haven’t tested it on other systems or…
There is an NFC chip inside of my toothbrush head, and it counts the time. After 360 minutes of work it will signal that it needs to be replaced, even if it doesn’t really. It’s possible to reset the counter, by sending a message from a phone to the toothbrush head. It’s all a little insane . (source) Scan the Philips Sonicare toothbrush head with the NFC Tools app ( iOS / Android ). Copy the…
I added the og:media image tags yesterday, and the approach seems to work, so I’m going to share it in this post. I am using the filter functions and generating the raster images directly inside of the filter with canvas-text-block and node-canvas , as described in this article . First I added the meta tags to my default layout. I called the filter previews , and I will be using the title variable…
I’m writing down all the mods I added to my grandma’s new Kobo Libra 2 before gifting it to her for Christmas, mostly for my own future reference, but also hoping that it may be useful for other people too. KoboCloud I added KoboCloud and configured it to synchronize with Google Drive. NickelMenu I set the “parental controls” on so that the Kobo Store (the Discover tab) isn’t in the menu anymore…
Return to the times when buttons were not afraid of showing feelings. Some time ago I stumbled upon a Windows 98 inspired CSS library called 98.css . I thought it was cool and wondered if there also existed one inspired by Windows XP - it does . I didn’t find one for Windows Vista, but someone did make one for Windows 7 . It is fun to look at the recreations of these design systems for nostalgia…
I replaced faulty switches in my boyfriend’s Logitech G603 mouse and I thought I would share the process. The issues were typical: buttons double clicking or not clicking at all, wheel jumping up and down, skipping steps, or scrolling in the wrong direction. The mouse is discontinued, but it’s a really good model - it’s wireless, has a nice form factor, two modes, and an interesting powering…
In July last year I bought a wireless mechanical keyboard on Aliexpress for $30. The arrows didn’t work, so I messaged the seller, and forgot about it. In January I noticed that the seller replied only a day after my message. The message read: “Hello, please give me your e-mail and I will send you the software” . I apologized for a late reply and sent my e-mail address. The next day I received an…
USBASP drivers On Linux and MacOS this step should not be necessary. On Windows, install Zadig and install the libusbK (v3.1.0.0) driver (libusb-win32 (v1.2.6.0) did not work for me). Connections Enable the slow mode with a jumper (JP3). Connect the USBASP to the ATtiny (bear in mind the orientation of the USBASP pinout, check if it’s not mirrored when using a ribbon cable ). USBASP…
(several ways to do this, but here’s one with the STM32CubeProgrammer and Windows) Download the .hex file. Connect the board through the ST-Link USB. Open STM32CubeProgrammer, choose ST-Link and Connect . In Erasing & Programming choose the .hex file path, don’t skip flash erase, and Start Programming . If everything is okay, connect the second USB port. Two devices should be listed ( NOD_F767ZI…