Timasomo 2022: Week 1 Update Thread

I've made some progress so far. I started the Codecademy Git & GitHub course, and it's slowly sinking in. I also started working on my actual webpage, figuring out the layout, colors, and content. Didn't bother with full wireframes, since it's just one page and fairly simple.

My next steps are to 1) continue getting Git and GitHub set up and familiarizing myself with using them, and 2) dig into Flexbox more. I figure setting up hosting on GitHub pages or Netlify will be relatively straightforward, so I'm not worried about tackling it yet. Maybe that's a week 3 thing, along with organizing and simplifying my CSS.

I guess one thing I'm struggling with a bit is Flexbox. I'm comfortable with the basics, but I'd like to expand my use of it and work on understanding how to achieve specific responsive layouts without media queries. I might bite the bullet and get Every Layout...

Track 1 started, not uploading the whole thing yet for mastering reasons. I started 2 a bit early as I'll be out for four days next weekend. I'm not having any difficulty with it, I just have to constrain myself to finishing a track before starting the next.

Well, in the grand tradition of Hal Wilkerson fixing a lightbulb I have started by addressing this wobbly issue here, which took £40 of new levelling castors and a few hours of cutting, screwing and painting. End result is super sturdy though (and yes, I did cut my thumb doing it)

Anyway, materials gathered - there's some 38mm round aluminium, two hammer handles (pre-made), two hard nylon replaceable hammer faces, some bits of stainless steel for making peg pullers from and a couple of new bits of tooling.

First thing I need to do is to square off the end of the aluminium bar which should be easy enough on the mill except it went clunk and jumped and now everything is at a jaunty angle. The mill is fine, I just had to spend an hour or so getting it back to vertical. The aluminium has a nice chunk gouged out of it though, as does one of the cutters. It's fine, I'll use the other end. Mmmm, that's more like it. Now to drill a hole. It needs to be bigger but I can't fit my honking new 14mm bit into the milling machine so I'ma do that bit by hand. Same goes for tapping the hole to M16 (I don't have a tap wrench big enough for that huge tap so had to bodge it with some pliers). Next up is milling a slot for the handle

Anyway, none of this has worked very well. The thread for the hammer face is wonky, the recess in which it sits is the wrong shape, the hole for the handle is the wrong shape and size (although the handles have some freakin' weird geometry I'm not sure I like them). I suspect some of this is related to order of operations, and some is definitely down to poor workholding. This is the first thing I've ever really done on a milling machine and it's... not quite as straightforward as I thought it was going to be. I have enough aluminium to screw up two times, so that's fine. This was a test run. I'm going to think more about what to do and when to do it and have another go.

Oh, and I think I managed to kill the horizontal DRO (the digital linear scale which lets me locate the x-axis position accurately and repeatably and is incredibly useful for re-aligning things that need to be aligned). Might be able to repair that though.

I've figured out a generic redirect class and implemented the hostname redirect I mentioned was the inspiration for the extension. The next step will be to figure out how I want to do URL matching, which I've thought up 2 potential solutions for just last night.

Past the initial setup of the codebase, most of this week's progress has been in my head but if all goes to plan I'll have the coming week to implement the URL matching system and start on the UI. The next week to hopefully finish the UI. And then the one after that to polish everything up as much as possible.

Hello from the future! Again? Here is another handy link to the second update.

So this week I want to buy all the things for my shield, with an aim to do a lot of assembly work next weekend since I am taking some time off. My purchases so far:

• Plywood sheet, 15/32 in by 4 ft by 4 ft, sanded
• Cheap corded jigsaw
• Nicer jigsaw blades, I went for some for finer cutting
• 1x2 board, my local big box store accidentally charged me $40 for this and I had to go back and complain
• Variety pack of sandpaper
• Boiled linseed oil, to finish the handle
• Wood chisel set, to shape the handle
• Wood glue, to attach the handle maybe and also the linen facing
• 1 yard of linen to face the front
• Red, green, and black paints to paint the front
• A paint brush set since I only had some detail brushes before
• Some primer to help my paint stick
• Some 1.5 in nails to attach the handle and the boss
• Some 0.5 in tacks, to attach the rawhide edging and maybe also the carrying strap

You can see a mandatory haul photo of my purchases here. I still need a few more items:

• A rawhide bone from a pet store, to soak in water and pull apart to make the edging
• A leather strip to make into a carrying strap, might end up being pleather. Local big box craft store only had some pretty flimsy pleather straps and some more substantial woven straps, so might look online for this.
• A metal mixing bowl to serve as the boss. This is tricky because I want something that is as hemispherical as possible, something which does not have rubber on the bottom to help it grip, and something that has a rim that I can use to attach it to the face. I think I saw something online that I can pick up at a fancier kitchen store near me though.

Overall good progress, I think I will have a time to get or at least shop for the rest in the next day or two. I also noticed that my neighbors down the alley have some sawhorses in their carport, so I might knock on their door and ask to borrow them. They look kinda old, but they are definitely going to be easier (and safer) than whatever else I might be able to come up with.

I am also running a parallel Make Something Month over on Beehaw, if you want to check it out.

My project is to put together a full text search library that I can use in my various Elixir projects.

Most of this week was just looking at some of the options for full text search and their associated documentation and limitations.

I had used the Tantivy Rust library for some projects in the past and was very happy with that so I wanted to try using something that was built on top of that.
The first option I looked at was Meilisearch because I had seen it discussed many times in r/rust whenever the topic of search came up and I initially thought that it was the obvious choice for this project.
Unfortunately, after looking more closely, I found that it had some limitations and performance issues that I would likely run into with some of my projects.
I spent the next few days looking through all of the other Tantivy based options I could find, but nothing else seemed to meet all of my needs.

I gave up and decided to just make my own search service using Tantivy.
I was pretty sure that the limitations that I was worried about in Meilisearch were Meilisearch specific and not limitations of Tantivy itself, but I wanted to be sure before I put in a lot of work for nothing.
So, I went to the discord server for Tantivy and asked there.
I quickly got a response that those were Meilisearch specific limitations and that someone else in the server maintains another option that might fit my needs better: lnx.

From reading the documentation and doing some local testing, it seems like it does indeed meet all of my needs without the limitations or performance issues, so that's what I'll be using for this project.

Next up is to build an http client for lnx.
I'm doing this project in Elixir and I'll be using the Tesla library to do this.
I'm hoping to get the basic functionality of this done tomorrow so I can work on testing it out with my first use-case this week (importing all chapters of stories from fimfiction).

I mostly made progress in additionally refining the details of my phoenix necklace this week. Specifically, some of the shapes and sizes of the stones I want to use... I intended to get my materials order in this week, but some asshole(s) managed to get my debit card info from a skimmer somewhere, and I had to wait for a replacement (which arrived yesterday afternoon). On the plus side, they only got $11, which my bank assured me would be returned. So... I'll get my materials order in on Monday, and begin to work on the actual fabrication process.

Somewhat tangentially, I'm making progress on learning how to better use the accessibility features of my phone. Yesterday, I successfully managed to take a photo of the original 20+ year-old copper wire phoenix that is the inspiration for my Timasomo project, and texted it to my friend who'll be the recipient of the completed necklace. He'd not had a chance to see it before, and his response was so genuinely delighted that my eyes got just a little "leaky" and my cheeks a little sore from smiling so big. I'll do my best to get that image uploaded somewhere online, so I can link to it for anyone who's interested to take a look at.

I finished the back panel and I’m over halfway done with one of the front panels of my 𝑻𝑰𝑴𝑨𝑺𝑶𝑴𝑶 𝑺𝑾𝑬𝑨𝑻𝑬𝑹. It’s going a lot quicker than I expected, so I may even be able to meet my stretch goal, which is making a matching sweater for my little dog. :)

Progress photo when I was nearly done with the back panel. https://i.snap.as/kBt3FRpD.jpeg

Part of my miscellaneous WIPs-to-complete that I've worked on this week are: a short story, Halloween decorations, and draw this in your style (DTIYS) sketches.

Short story: I finally decided on an ending for a story I've been thinking/jotting down about. I also made a major plot decision. The biggest thing is I came up with the idea a year or two ago but it was during a major SADs episode so I wanted to make it a little different, maybe a bit more positive while still having some of those deeper, sad tones. I've really struggled with SAD these past two years and I'm hoping to tame some of that by exercising, getting outside some more and having my focus be on more positive things and I think taming this story is one step towards that.

Halloween decorations: I got the SVG/image from the Sillhouette design store! The specific artist is Fumika Ishiguro and she makes such incredibly adorable designs. She says they're mainly for like pre-school and daycare decorations but they definitely fit the bill of just plain kawaii that everyone likes. I was able to use my local makers space to cute some ghosties out with their laser printer! We only get one 12inx12in board a day so I had to go over the course of a week to get the ghosts cutout.

I made 3 small ghosts to hang, and 3 to stake into the ground. The small ghosties are painted with acrylic paint and have a few layers of glow in the dark paint that does okay. I need to put a sealant of some kind over them so they can survive the cooling weather and sun exposure. The larger ghosts are currently being glued to a wooden stake, and will just be spray painted white. I plan to do a couple of pumpkins next. They'll be double sided so I can have one side with a jack-o-lantern face and one side just a plain pumpkin so I can use them all fall hah.

DTIYS sketches: I got through just a couple of rough sketches, but didn't get very far overall with my drawing. I will try to focus more this week. I didn't get quite as much done, but I'm also satisfied that I'm working on my creative projects in my free time!

ugh hit a roadblock...hopefully I have an update for next week

Got a bit stuck with trying to figure out why the capacitative sensor doesn't work correctly, but the gold-plated one does, so... :shrug: I'll go with that.

I did manage to track a complete drying cycle in one of the pots, turns out "dry" does not equal "dry", so I'll probably have to customize thresholds for when to water per plant. Which will take a while, so I don't think I'll manage all of that in the next two weeks.