What programming/technical projects have you been working on?

I built up my websites over like the last 2 weeks ago and it has been a blast. My goal is to like somewhat recreate one of those 1.0 Web experience or just an "Old Website". The most recent thing I added is a gallery with some of my drawings and I "updated" the landing page (index.html) So it would look better and it now shows some of my "obsessions". Yay.

Also I installed OpenSuse on some old Thinkpad laptop and altough i've had some experience with linux in the past but i basically forgot everything. And it makes me so happy with all the stickers I put on yayyy :3.

I'm thinking about learning some python again or maybe not. But yes -- That's about it. Yay -- Have a nice evening / day or whatever.

Continuing to work on my accordion MIDI controller. (So far it's just a piano-style keyboard with three keys.) I've been working on the mechanical part: getting a solid connection from the levers to the key caps and making sure they rotate smoothly without bending. Next I want to do some experiments on reducing noise.

Started work on the JSON API for tildes.

The read-only APIs that don't involve user authentication should be fairly straightforward. The authenticated api endpoints will prove more interesting.

Gonna need to figure out how to nicely integrate REST api token based authentication into the tildes codebase (which relies a lot on user sessions) without duplicating too much code

A while ago (back on May 2nd!) I mentioned that I was reading through the river Wayland compositor's upcoming river-window-management protocol to write my own window manager. I did a bit of basic work in early June but stopped until I've started looking at it again the last week or so. I've managed to make an—extremely basic, barely functional—window manager so far, but it's able to at least display a window—and not crash when the window closes. I'm excited to work on it more. I'm sure the other WM's that come out for the protocol would be more than enough for me but I'm still excited to be able to run software that's mine every day.

Been setting up IRC bouncer and connecting to it from Emacs. Lots of struggles, but I've been having fun, and some chats are still pretty alive! This is also a chance to tinker with my instance after so long and Nix is making everything smooth as always.

I'll probably try to create a NixOS module for gamja, the web irc client that integrates tightly with my bouncer of choice, soju.

I've been trying to get into ricing Arch ("ricing": The process of heavily customising your Linux desktop and general aesthetic, see /r/unixporn for examples). Looking at various tiling/dynamic window managers (technically called "compositors" in Wayland) and am a bit dismayed by the options.

Hyprland is the big trendy one these days because it has loads of fancy features and is super smooth, but IMO it's super bloated and is far more CPU intensive than other options. Also the lead dev is a huge bigot and I don't want to support that in any way.

On the other end of the spectrum is dwl, a Wayland fork of dwm, part of the Suckless collection of software that aims to be aggressively minimal and lightweight to near absurd levels. The whole thing is less than 2000 lines of C code, super lightweight, flexible, a bitch and a half to configure (you literally have to edit the C source file and recompile every time you want a change), but really cool overall. Unfortunately, the Suckless people are straight up Nazis, so, yknow. Really loving the Linux experience so far.

There are other WM options but they're all kinda, idk, mediocre. I might honestly look into writing my own Wayland compositor because 1. I've spent ages learning C for basically no reason, might as well attempt to put it to use, and 2. the nazi guys did it in 2000 lines of code while having room temp iq how hard could it be yknow. Plus, could be a fun project to help me learn more about Linux.

New 3D printer (courtesy of my family) is on the way to me now so I can dig more into it and make stuff at home. Very excited to start another new hobby/pursuit on top of my 100 other half-done and barely-started pursuits

Also thinking through how I'm going to migrate my blog from bearblog -> static and what I want to script to automate for myself. Mostly just a brainstorming thing and this will be a nice exercise / refresh of my skills and so on.

I've been fiddling with a few designs for dry-box rollers, filament passthroughs, and magnetic filament guides which allow me to feed filament into the Prusa CoreOne directly from the IKEA-based dry-boxes mounted above the printer. This project became a necessity partly because the PETG really can't stay outside of a drybox for long without becoming swamped, and partly because the two kilo PLA spools don't fit on the stock spool holder. I've just this second installed the magnetic Bowden coupler pieces that allow easy reconfiguration of what filament goes in where!

I wrote a small script that writes git commit messages for me instead of "wip". I don't use wip commits all the time but I will use them when it's mostly churn. It's a bad habit I know but no one is paying me so I don't bother with fixing myself.

Git commit messages should primarily be a record of your state of mind and why you are making the change. But sometimes my state of mind is just "bleh" and that's not very useful to write down. Previously I was using gitupdate but the code is not doing much as you can see so I figured I could take a better stab at it: bin/wip_message.py

I think the most interesting part is this:

def track_moved(added_lines: list[str], removed_lines: list[str]):
    added = list(added_lines)
    removed = list(removed_lines)
    moved = []    
    for line in list(added_lines):
        if line in removed:
            added.remove(line)
            removed.remove(line)
            moved.append(line)

    return added, removed, moved

Which is a pretty simple way to calculate moved lines. It's kind of pretty isn't it? I'm sure Git uses a slightly more complicated way to calculate moved lines but it is surprisingly easy to do it yourself!

I recently attended an Intro to Modular Synths workshop. Now I've been messing around with VCV Rack, a piece of software that emulates a rack setup. It's been pretty interesting since I've been figuring out which modules I prefer to make cool-sounding drones and noisy things.

I'm currently in the process of building a Stremio addon. I'm not certain if I'll ship it because I would definitely open source it and I'm not sure if I want such a thing associated with my public profiles that employers and such may look at. The core thing that differentiates it from other addons I've found is that it natively supports private indexers (not that they're built in, just that it makes it possible to add URLs and keys and such to make the ones that match standard formats work). I also want a feature that I've not yet found in any of the other debriding addons: when playing a video also start the cache process for the most similar next episode. By "most similar" I mostly mean picking the closest resolution and closest name. Basically just the one I think is most likely to be clicked after the current video finishes.

This project is a bit of a distraction from a larger project I am only in the early design phases for. This project is similar to cloudflare tunnels or localtunnel, but while satisfying a few goals that aren't fully achievable with them. I could expand on this if anyone cares why anyone would build yet another tunneling service, but its probably not that interesting for anyone familiar with these technologies.

Chipping away at my side project. I want to build the first high quality product and "actual" deals site. It tracks exclusively high quality products with real world averaged pricing over time to find when things are actually on sale instead of just discounts from artificial sale prices. At the current rate, it'll be finished.. never. I need to find some motivation or maybe try to find a dev partner. Not letting people down can be a strangely strong motivator for me.

I posted about it in ~games.tabletop, but I figured I'd elaborate here a bit. I wanted to try building a non-trivial piece of software using only prompting and for a while I've had an idea for a VTT. So I started out using Google Code Assist as a plugin to VS Code. I've managed to prompt coax it into something that works ok. Part of the clunkiness in the current version is due to not having a server component at all (besides the hosting of the static webpage and scripts). It relies on WebRTC to connect the players. The GM sends out invites (url with base64 encoded "offer") and the player must then copy and send the response (an base64 encoded "answer") back to the GM. That must all happen out of band, e.g. via separat chat or email. Once the connection to the GM is established that person acts as a signaling server for all the players so all peers can establish connections without the whole invite dance. I might rework this whole thing at some point, but I want to build some other features first.

It is a bit of a hassle to test it out on my own properly since I ideally need a whole group of players to connect and test it out. But before I do that I want to make sure that it can handle reestablishing a connection e.g. on page reload and I'm a bit unsure if that is possible to do without a new invite.

I am both impressed with the Llama ability to produce code and a bit dismayed that for some simple operations can take quite a while to figure out what it should do. Smaller refactorings and shifting the code around is much faster if I do myself, larger requests can sometimes cause the agent to end up in a never ending loop. Sometimes the context isn't big enough to handle the output causing it to crash. So you often have to instruct it to first make a step by step plan, then start on step 1... then ask it to do step 2 and so on. All that said I don't think a non-web developer would be able to prompt it to do this properly. I have a big advantage from understanding the underlying technologies and can steer the LLM/agent to a solutions I want.

The whole code base is up on GitHub under an AGPLv3 license. If you want to try it out the application is available at:
https://vtt.lindqvist.dev

Edit: Just wanted to mention my favourite feature so far; the distance based volume when players claim tokens. The audio for peers is adjusted based on the distance the other peers token is from my token. It is there to encourage more roleplay (and perhaps shouting hehe).

I'm writing a "Stupid Simple" Lisp in C: https://git.sr.ht/~aaronm04/asslisp

Currently it's close to the stage where I can add in lambda and defun (tree-walking for now), and finish garbage collection.

My goal was explicitly to have a fun project and I think it's met that goal a little too well. I find myself thinking about it too much...