I made a coding challenge, vaguely tied up as a game. Your goal is to complete simple coding challenges, with a major twist--you only get one try. You can only hit RUN once. (Well, actually you can hit RUN more than once. But it gets marked as failed.)

It put together about 10 challenges, together with some story narration.

The game problems are now tested.

You can play online. The code is on github

One feature I really liked about older ThinkPad models was that when you plugged in power, it would give a little chirpy beep. Same when you disconnected it.

The downside to system beeping is that it gets really annoying. I don't want a failed tab completion to go "beep" aloud, especially when I'm in public.

I aggressively turn off all kinds of system bells, etc. Sadly, I get no beeps either.

Today I wrote a little python script to monitor power beep how I want. It plays it through my computer speakers (unmuting them if needed, just long enough to beep). It works for me on both ALSA and pulseaudio with an ALSA bridge (I have a few computers on each).

My default settings are:

• Two falling tones when power is unplugged
• Two rising tones when power is plugged back in
• Two warning beeps when the lowest battery reaches 10% (my laptop has two)
• Three warning beeps when the lowest battery reaches 5%.

Source code is on github if you want to use it too. To change the thresholds or beeps, you'd have to change the code. No fancy configs, sorry!

Today I mostly slept, but while I was awake I tried making an ai friend/boyfriend as an experiment. I spent a lot of time getting Pygmalion (an LLM based on LLaMA-2, which specializes in roleplay and narration) to run. At the end, it was underwhelming, at least what I could run locally. I get the impression the full version is a lot better.

Although this was a failure, Pygmalion was sponsored by spicychat.ai, which I found to be much better for creating AI companions. However be warned--the site is in general very NSFW.

Today I wrote a very small library for converting games to multiplayer. I was able to convert my Go game so you can play online with other players.

Go demo is here. 2p library source code is available as a gist, or you can view the go game source code.

I made my first android app today. It was terrible and I plan to never do it again.

It took me about three hours of trying to get the sample apps to run before I gave up and made something from scratch. Both involved heavy use of ChatGPT (not my usual flow).

That said, if you want an app that reminds you how to tie your tie in an easy step-by-step way, you can download the APK from my website, and I believe you should be able to run that on your phone.

I don't know how to easily share Android source code, so I won't.

Today's project was one I've been wanting for a while--a way for people to send me files.

There were two components -- a web form where you can upload things, and a server that you send the things to. Both were fairly easy.

You can now send me things at upload.za3k.com

There are 24 hours in a day. This shows you how many of those are daylight. You can use it as a calendar, or you can wistfully watch it, waiting for the sun to come back.

A demo is online. Source code is on github.

I added some temperature sensors around my house.

The sensors run on AAA battery, and periodically transmit the temperature on zigbee, a radio protocol in similar frequencies as Wifi. The signals get received by a USB dongle designed to receive and transmit zigbee.

This is connected to a raspberry pi running zigbee2mqtt. The messages get sent to an mqtt broker via wifi. mqtt is a pub/sub protocol that runs over the internet. Any computer on my LAN can then be notified of temperature updates, by asking the mqtt broker to send them updates.

I wrote a small server which stays on all the time, listening to updates and recording changes to a database. It also generates reports periodically.

I think my database format is mildly interesting, in that it's designed to use a fixed amount of space. Anyone who wants to see the technical details, can check the github repo, specifically this file.

Temperatures can be seen in celsius or fahrenheit online. An example in Fahrenheit is below.

    Current Temperature
    last updated: 2024-11-07 8:34pm

    Sensor                        Temperature  Humidity    Last update
    Outside - Front                51.51°F      69.86%     1 minutes ago
    Outside - Back                 64.26°F      99.99%     22 hours, 49 min ago
    Upstairs - Dining Room         69.67°F      53.24%     0 minutes ago
    Upstairs - Bedroom - Za3k      71.35°F      60.15%     21 minutes ago
    Upstairs - Bedroom - Master    68.90°F      58.11%     4 minutes ago
    Upstairs - Kitchen             71.20°F      50.50%     6 minutes ago
    Upstairs - Garage              65.55°F      60.65%     2 minutes ago
    Basement - HVAC/Server         68.02°F      51.27%     3 minutes ago
    Basement - Workshop            67.10°F      52.91%     14 minutes ago

    -------------

    Hourly Temperature
    last updated: 2024-11-07 8:34pm

                    outside    inside     
    2024-11-07  8am    54.49°F    69.44°F   
    2024-11-07  9am    53.81°F    69.04°F   
    [...]
    2024-11-07  6pm    56.11°F    69.86°F   
    2024-11-07  7pm    53.53°F    69.65°F   

    -------------

    Historical highs and lows
    last updated: 2024-11-07 8:34pm

                outside             inside              
    2024-11-07    51.51 -  64.15°F    67.06 -  81.54°F   
    2024-11-06    61.21 -  71.24°F    68.36 -  81.18°F   
    [...]
    2024-10-10    49.39 -  60.89°F    67.59 -  77.49°F   

    -------------

    Code: https://github.com/za3k/temp-monitor

Having tested out zigbee and mqtt, I felt ready for my actual use case -- curtains. I live across the street from a major parking lot, and they have floodlights on all night. To sleep, I need blackout curtains. The problem is, it's pretty hard to wake up with blackout curtains drawn.

My solution was to get some smart curtains, and have them automatically go down at the end of the day, and go up in the morning.

This worked fine, after I got the curtains set up. I've completely forgotten about them, which is exactly how I like my home automation--I want to never think about it. For more about how to set up IKEA smart curtains, see my notes. It comes with 6 manuals.

blinds controls my blinds via the computer, and mqtt2mqtt allows my IKEA remote to control them too. cron and heliocron automatically open and close the curtains on a timer.

I worked on monitoring power usage via my circuit breaker with current transformers and the circuitsetup ESP32 energy meter but it's currently stalled. The main problem is that I can't fit the CTs into my circuit breaker. If I get it working, I'll post an update.

Today I tried to design a laser-cut set of Soma cube pieces. The pieces (shown above) are (conceptually, and sometimes actually) made of 3D blocks glued together.

I've seen a particular style of joinery for acryllic, called finger joints. Those looked easy to cut and easy to put together (if hard to design).

I wrote a python script that takes a description of a piece, like this:

Piece E
xx x-
x- --
-- --

And draws all the flat faces I need to cut.

I was already running far behind, time-wise. I ran out of time before I could get the joinery working. Honestly, I don't think I'm very close, either.

How to do a three-piece corner join was especially confusing me.

I've changed the backend of my blog. You shouldn't notice any differences, except that comments are disabled for the time being.

All links to the site should continue to work.

If you notice any problems, even small ones, please send me an email.