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What creative projects have you been working on?
This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.
Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.
If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.
Does carving a wizard staff count?
Is it actually gonna be magical?
It will have a big amethyst crystal at the end, does that count?
Last week I finally had the time to set up my first ever home server. I sought advice here before and gotten plenty of useful responses (thanks again to everyone, but especially @Greg, @smores, and @JXM), which lead me to install Unraid on my Nuc. I was familiar enough with Linux distros, but home servers and networking was not something I've ever dabbled in before, so it's been and continues to be an educational experience. I also used Docker for the first time, which has been great.
The main purpose of the setup is to be a Plex server and it's been great at that. I didn't have any issues with permissions as I had feared in my advice thread and I can't say I ran into any troubling issues. Setting up Wireguard that comes with the system was a bit of a pain for reasons unbeknownst to me, but I worked around that problem by installing Tailscale instead, which uses Wireguard anyway, and it's been a breeze. The server doesn't accept any remote connections unless connected through Tailscale, so it's as safe as it can be, too.
So far I've tried running two 4K video transcodes simultaneously and it didn't even make the CPU/GPU sweat. I'm honestly in love with the Nuc. It's very compact, doesn't make a peep since it's without a fan, has ample head room for any project I might throw at it down the road, and it consumes little energy. My storage situation is not the best (all external drives with no parity), so I'm already thinking of solutions. I'll be on the look out for discounts on a DAS and snatch it when the opportunity presents itself.
Separately, I also got my first ever audio interface today. I have a Fender Jazz Bass that's been gathering dust for years now and I'm finally going to put it to use. I'm expecting my instrument cable to arrive tomorrow and then I'll start practicing and see how it goes. If I like creating music, however bad it is, I might end up buying a MIDI keyboard too. While researching for an interface, I got a chance to learn about them and they look fun!
Glad you got everything up and running!
Intel NUCs are surprisingly powerful, especially for homelab stuff like this. I know a few people who use Yottamaster DAS boxes and they’ve been pretty solid and they aren’t too expensive.
Like I said before, if you need any help or have any questions, I’m happy to help!
That DAS looks slick. I'll keep it in mind when I'm in the market in a few months. Thanks again!
I've started writing another story, with hopes that it will have enough depth to expand into a novel. It's odd, but I can never tell at the start, which stories will pan out and have legs.
I'm having issues introducing one of the three protagonists, as he is angry and bitter, and I have trouble putting myself into that mindset. I'll get there. Right now, he's mocking me in my mind, so yes, I will get this bastard on paper.
I went to Yosemite to continue exercising my new birding hobby! Here are my favorite pictures from the trip:
https://ibb.co/album/r2JKCD
Lovely! Thanks for sharing!
I'm crocheting a teddy bear for my daughter. She found one I made for her mother years and years ago and asked for her own. She chose the colors herself.
Work in progress shot: https://www.dropbox.com/sc/btt7ldjqdosqinp/AAA0gMFnj5FX4EiOOc4daG3Wa
This is so sweet!
Sports photography I made it to a women’s volleyball game at Ithaca College which is a much better venue than where Cornell plays. I was completely defeated at the Cornell-Harvard march, probably the worst thing there is a bright LED sign that causes all sorts of problems. At Ithaca I can sit in the first row of the bleachers or sit on the floor which is really ideal (If I do it enough though I will get hit by the ball..)
I shot both games with my 90mm macro lens which takes beautiful pictures and opens somewhat wide but the autofocus sometimes takes two seconds to lock and if you lose two seconds in a volleyball match you lost everything. Focusing ahead of time and using the auto focus lock helped a lot in the second game. Also you just have to understand the game and have a plan so you can hit the shutter before the action rather than try to follow it…. Because volleyball is that much quicker than, say, soccer or field hockey.
I also made it to a woman’s soccer game with Harvard after that and got some shots with the 90mm but it was dependent on the players being on my side of the field.
I ordered Sony’s 135mm/1.8 G Master lens because that seems to be the weapon of choice for indoor sports (basketball and wrestling are also on the agenda) which has very fast focus. I have tried it for “shoot pictures while walking around” mode and haven’t my head around using that focal length.
There are a lot of games this weekend and it is hard to pick. I think will be Polo this Friday because I haven’t shot it yet and my wife runs a riding academy but if it was just the sports fan in me it would be
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_football
I don’t know what it will be Saturday but I am looking to settle the grudge w/ Volleyball at Newman arena but I might shoot ordinary Football (a ticketed game) because I haven’t done it yet.
I have such a backlog of sports photos, some good, some not so good. Most of all I owe the sailing coach some shots of a meet a few weeks back that I haven’t “developed” yet.
Three-sided cards These have yet to really get sports photos but they will. I gotta just make a simple collage from sailing, but I am developing a “same size on one dimension, varying the other” design pattern with these characters from Fate
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111219354336635872
and I am restarting the pipeline for photo cards
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111219423742414547
but I do have to compose my borderless cards with a little more room in the next set.
Spent a few hours Sunday getting Arch Linux for ARM installed on my Raspberry Pi 3. Lost a couple hours getting the SD card to boot which should not have taken that long, then configured sudoers incorrectly, then locked the root password. After I finally figured out how to recover it the weekend was over.
Then I had to install my AUR helper (paru), which was failing to compile so I spent some number of hours troubleshooting until I found a random post saying you need 800MB of ram free to compile it, and I had... pretty much exactly 800. So I spent 30 seconds turning on a swap file and everything was fine.
Then I went to install pi-hole-server from the AUR, and it kept failing with a sha256 sum mismatch on a file. Ended up learning a lot more about the AUR and PKGBUILD files than I had intended... And while I was learning all this stuff I kept going "wait a second, I'm not doing anything wrong here this is a real bug". I refreshed the AUR page for the pi hole server and saw someone reported the exact same issue I was having! And the maintainer responded! I'd do some more changes, make some progress, then get stuck in a new spot. Reload the page, more comments, and more maintainer responses! Eventually the maintainer released a proper fix. I saw their post 20 minutes after it was released, and 22 minutes after it was released I had everything installed.
I spent something like 12-20 hours all together on everything, and I should have been done in an hour. Maybe 2.
I learned a lot though. So that's nice.
.... now I've gotta configure everything so I can replace my old pi hole...
I've been giving my brother grief about writing a Spider-Man
spec-scriptfan fic when he should be working on his grad level physics project, but after a conversation with him about how unadaptable Gwenpool would be for the MCU, I kind of want to give it a try.I've been painting my Necron Monolith which I bought over the summer. I've been tired of it sitting in pieces and am eager to get it assembled, so in order to do that, I gotta get it painted. I have all the central pieces painted (with excessive amounts of glow...), but I've kind of lost steam this week as I've begun playing Elden Ring, which is sucking up all the free time that I have.
Once I actually have a game scheduled with my buddies, I'll probably finish it off, as I realistically only have like 6 or less hours to go on it.
Iv tentatively started writing about my time spent living and working in backpacker hostels. Iv done a fair bit of travel so I'd like to incorporate that in there. I'll be honest. I'm just gonna blatantly rip off Anthony bourdain style wise but figure it's a starting point and ideally as it progresses I will find my voice.
This did not get reposted last week. What this a mistake or is this series being discontinued?
It's posted biweekly.
Ive been playing around with Rust on microcontrollers. I just got my micro:bit to act as a tilt-compensated compass, thanks to some (fairly hairy) math. (the basic, non-tilt compensated part was part of an exercise, I added the tilt compensation and a few other features myself)
It was pretty fun writing a fairly high level language for such a small processor, while still having full access to all the low level features!
If anyone wants to look at the code, I put it up on my gitea and on github