3
votes
What programming/technical projects have you been working on?
This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?
I've been working on Surprise Date Spot, which uses crowdsourced data from OpenStreetMap to help reduce decision fatigue when picking a night out.
I built this because it can be tiring trying to pick a restaurant, so this website will randomly pick one in your area.
It's still a work in progress, but I'm hoping to make some kind of "co-op" mode where you can pair with other people to pick a restaurant together by "swiping" on the restaurants you like, and the website will show your matches. I'm also working on expanding the types of date spots that get shown, right now it's just restaurants. I want to show a much bigger range of places like bowling alleys, music venues, parks, cafes, and coffee shops!
Not a particularly high tech endeavor, but I made a media player for my toddler.
I wanted her to have some autonomy over running the television during her allowed time, but I didn't want to give her a device with internet access to stumble on whatever.
My solution was a NFC reader on a raspberry pi. I got a bunch of little NFC chips for like a nickel a piece, used the library to print off stickers for her shows, and made a configuration that reached out to the relevant media source.
I made tokens for some movies that she likes, which reach out to a file on a network drive. I made some tokens for PBS shows that reach out to the PBS Kids API to fetch a current episode. I made some tokens for old PBS shows that do a random directory walk on a network directory to pick an episode.
All of this allows her to watch shows that she likes without needing to ask for assistance from parents. I feel like it would be very analogous to a VCR player from when I was a kid.
Here are the tokens, I think they came out well
I love that idea! Having put an amount of thought, recently, into the pros and cons of collecting physical media, as opposed to purely digital, it seems that this could be a fun idea to retain an amount of functionality for Blu-Ray boxes which you have in both physical and digital. NFC chips linking to items on media on a Plex / Jellyfin instance could be quite simple to set up, and quite fun to use :)
My quest to assemble a 48TB RAID 5 array was briefly sidetracked when the system I was building the array on developed an un-ignorable amount of instability, and after checking components one by one, I've come to the conclusion that disabling XMP is enough to fix the problem. I'm not satisfied with this as a solution- the RAM is perfectly fine. I've tested two sets of 3600MHz DDR4 ram and the issue occurs with both. The system has run perfectly well with XMP enabled for three or more years, and I've made no egregious changes to it that might justify such a change in behaviour. We have had a dodgy breaker flip a couple of times recently, as well as a rack-mount audio interface biting the dust in an attention-grabbing way. It's possible something in the power circuitry has expired and the RAM isn't being supplied with enough voltage to run overclocked, or maybe the IMC in the Ryzen chip has degraded to the point at which it can't keep up. Whatever it is, I've not the patience to diagnose it further, and I've got a few days of array building to do. When that's done I can get back to collecting Linux ISOs!
We're looking at purchasing a recent Samsung display, and setting up a nice media watching space in what little room we have. It'd be nice to have friends over to watch things on a big screen, with nice audio. The only problem is that the Samsung devices don't appear to support Dolby Vision- a licensing dispute (if you call an unwillingness to pay as a dispute!). I'm going to be looking into a workflow to remux Dolby Vision content into the moderately more open and friendly HDR10+ standard. The tools are out there- and I'm sure MakeMKV isn't the only viable solution. A new and shiny TV seems like a good excuse to start collecting in a higher quality, and I don't mind ripping physical media myself :)