Yesterday I paid off what I owed on the tick farm.

Huzzah!

I still haven't made any real progress on the place for the past three years, but things are finally looking up!

Didn't feel like I got much done last week, but my notes say otherwise. And that's a big part of why I'm doing this.

Home:

• Properly organized:
  • Electrical crimps and connectors (consolidated several sets)
  • Much of the small screw collection (less exciting than it sounds!)
  • Automotive fuses
  • Automotive light bulbs
• Assembled a RD6012 programmable 60V/10A bench power supply supplied in kit form, and have used it multiple times already!
• KVM switch on my server rack failed a couple of weeks ago; finally replaced it.
• Hauled off another truckload of fallen tree bits.
• Shank the leaf pile by another 8 bags' worth.
• Replaced exterior door seals shredded by the cats.

Vehicular Stuff:

• Installed the new clutch slave cylinder on the bugeye, then bled and adjusted the system. Clutch pedal feel is much improved; smoother, more consistent, and perhaps a bit stiffer overall, with none of the occasional juddering I had grown used to. I suspect the hydraulics have been slowly failing for a while now!
• Another two rounds of mold killer/protection.
• Recharged the air conditioner and used it to help suck the excess humidity out of the car. I've missed driving this thing!

Rockbox-specific:

• xduoox3: More screenshots and keymaps in manual
• A couple of off-by-one errors in the haas surround code
• Rewrote the translation site helper script in perl, reducing its runtime from about 30 seconds to just 3.5.

Printing-related:

• DNP DS820: Add a FW version check for the A4x6" size

Nine weeks in a row. I think this format is working out okay, though I'm feelinmg the need to go into more detail. A lot of these things could probably be expanded into full-length articles (or photo essays, or heh, video!) but I'm not feeling that motivated.

Home:

• Broke out the circular saw to cut some shelving down to size.
• Replaced the came-with-the-house birdfeeder with one that's not (literally) falling apart. We're regularly seeing at least three pairs of cardinals, as well as wrens, titmice and morning doves.
• Cleaned out the gutters. Not too bad this time.
• Hauled a truckload of fallen tree bits to the landfill. Next up, hauling off the rotting wood pile (and if the rain lets up, yet more leaves)
• Made my best-ever batch of blackberry cobbler.

Vehicular Stuff:

• Attempted to swap the failing clutch hydraulics on the bugeye; unfortunately I didn't discover my early-production-run vehicle required a different clutch slave cylinder until after I had started reassembling everything. The correct one is now on order, but but the car is now completely undrivable until it shows up. Joy.
• Pinpointed the exact location of the worsening windshield leak and unsuccessfully attempted to repair it with some RTV. Along the way I cleaned decaying pine needles (at least two years old!) out of the rain rails and unlogged two drainage paths, so while not fixed, the leak is much improved.
• Hosed down the front seats in mold killer. Said leak, heavy rain for weeks on end, a heavily shaded yard, and very little driving make it quite difficult to dry things out!
• Removed the water-damaged boost gauge from the A-pillar and installed its replacement in the spot vacated by the no-longer-needed fuel pressure gauge. As an added bonus, I redid the ghetto-ass gauge wiring that involved a wire shoved under a fuse terminal.

Rockbox-specific:

• mips: Rework CPU cache management.
• mips: Minor tweaks to all asm code, mostly to enable future work.
• jz4760: Working hardware-timer-based udelay(). Third time's the charm!
• xduoox3: Disable some more unused peripherals to save power.
• xduoox3: Increase audio buffer size to lower interrupt load.
• xduoox3: Reclocking is now stable but the switch introduces an audio artifact, so it remains disabled.

Printing-related:

• Fix print combining on DNP DS820 with A4 media.

Here's the highlights of what I did over the past seven days.

Home:

• Put up wall shelving in one of the bedrooms
• Put together an IKEA wardrobe for the master bedroom
• Bagged and hauled off another 22 bags of leaves (total: 50, maybe 1/2 done?)
• Minor general yard work when it wasn't raining
• Swapped out ShaftNet's RAID controller

Rockbox-specific:

• Fixed longstanding bug in Mikmod port that broke XM playback
• Switched to a narrow system font on all targets with tiny (128x64) screens
• Lots of work on the xDuoo X3:
  • SD: Hotplugging fixed, Interrupt-driven DMA transfers, and automatic clock-gating
  • Un-"fixed" udelay()
  • Improved battery curves
  • Additional screenshots and keymaps in manual
  • Further cleanups to the clocking code
  • Default audio volume is no longer eardrum-destroying
  • IRQ handling improvements (including rudimentary priority settings)
  • Slightly more efficient button polling
  • Disable dynamic CPU clocking to help hunt down audio artifacts
  • Explicitly disable UARTs at startup

Printing-related:

• Job combining improvements for the S2245

Here's the highlights of what I did over the past seven days.

Home:

• New battery and alternator belt in RTV (coincidental, I think)
• New A/C compressor for the house ($1800 worth of ouch)
• Home workstation storage shuffle
• Installed a tilt-out under-sink storage cubby in the master bathroom
• Installed return air path vents in Master bedroom
• Another 8 bags of leaves filled and hauled off; would have been more but it's been raining pretty heavily all week (total so far: 28)

Rockbox-specific:

• Ongpoing bug triage
• Minor infrastructure tweaks
• Wrote the missing manual entry for the Mikmod plugin
• Wrote most of the manual for the xDuoo X3
• Fixed some minor keymap bugs on the xDuoo X3

Printing-related:

• Bugfixes for Sinfonia S2245/S3 -- All sizes now confirmed working

Here's the highlights of what I did over the past seven days.

Home:

• Installed supplemental LED lighting on RTV
• Front yard leaves are finally done [enough], onto the back yard now
• Started bagging up the giant leaf pile; 20 30-gallon bags so far (truck only holds 12 at a time!)
• Workstation's SSD shat a brick, some data loss
• HVAC failure at the house Friday afternoon, repair scheduled for Tuesday
• Lack of A/C, poison ivy rashes, and a general need to rest scuttled most weekend todo

Rockbox-specific:

• More accurate jz4760 udelay()
• Finally got the top-level rockbox.org migrated to new infra and updated the SSL certificate
• Triaged a few more bugs

Printing-related:

• Get rid of global state in lib6145
• Un-hardcode use of stderr for logging
• Common USB connection object
• Minor cleanup of some internal variable names
• Discussions about a Gutenprint Printing App

Here's the highlights of what I did over the past seven days.

Home:

• New set of batteries in the camper, due to the old ones suffering internal damage
• Replaced front CV axles on the RTV, changed front-end fluids, air filters, and the engine oil (again)
• Yet more yard work -- most of the leaves in the front are now up
• Unpacked a couple of the remaining boxes from last summer's move

Rockbox-specific:

• Major xDuoo X3 clocking changes -- Dynamic CPU reclocking, audio PLL downclocked, and USB & SD ratios fixed. Higher peformance, better battery life, and more stable to boot!
• Triaged a few more old bug tickets and patches
• Fixed plugin path bugs affecting the Rocker, X3ii, and X20
• Enabled variable sample rate playback on the Rocker, X3, X3ii, and X20 (was previously fixed at 44.1KHz)
• Upgraded mikmod plugin to upstream code and improved its configurability

Printing-related:

• Finished reverse-engineering the S2245 library, fixed many bugs in the driver, and it all works!
• Initial work on the S6145-5A/CS2-c "hashtag" printer
• Got my FC7000 cutter/plotter un-buried and on the network

It's only been a week since I got my hands on this thing, but I'm pleased to announce it's now fully usable under Linux. This includes a reverse-engineered version of the S2245's image processing library, which thankfully turned out to be far simpler than I'd first feared. Or maybe I'm just getting that much better at figuring all this stuff out?

I haven't come up with a sane way to do validate the RE library's output, as Sinfonia's official image processing library appears to only be available for Windows. That said, the ICC-corrected output looks pretty good, so there's nothing grossly wrong.

To take advantage of this support, you'll need to grab Gutenprint out of git (or a snapshot/release dated after 2020-08-05) along with selphy_print (of similar vintage) to pick up the library.

Meanwhile, the Kodak 6900 and HiTi M610 stand a pretty good chance of working too, but that will need to be indepedently confirmed.

One whole month, wow.

Here's the highlights of what I did over the past seven days:

• Changed the RTV's transmission's filters and hydraulic fluid, the fuel filter, and a particularly nasty coolant flush
• Replaced the winch wiring that got ripped out by a branch. Two years ago
• More yard work (so...many...leaves...)
• Mounted a second bird feeder onto the existing pole, and further escalated the anti-anti-anti-squirrel countermeasures
• Ongoing garage cleanup and organiation
• Discovered one of the camper's batteries popped its vent caps
• Months-overdue OS upgrade on ShaftNet

Rockbox-specific:

• Housecleaning on the forums
• Further refinements to the revamped translation backend
• Merged a couple of decade-old patches for early iPod models

Printing-related:

• Added Mitsubishi CP-M15 to Gutenprint (functionally equivalent to CP-M1 family)
• Significant progress with the Sinfonia S3 / CHC-S2245, including recreating the new image processing library
• Refactoring the CHC-S6145 backend to accomodate the S3 changes

Three, three weeks in a row! Ha Ha Ha! [cue lightning and thunder]

Here's the highlights of what I did over the past seven days:

• Bought a trailer to haul my Kubota RTV900 back and forth
• Replaced the kitchen's above-cabinet flourescent fixtures with LED tubes
• Wired in an electric brake controller to the truck
• Retrieved the RTV, big[ger] generator, and my kayak from the Tick Farm
• Changed the sludgy oil in the RTV and ordered parts for a complete filter & fluid change
• Ran the generators and changed their oil
• Some yard work with the Kubota
• Lacerated my knee doing said yard work and limped my bloody self to an urgent care center to get stitches.

Rockbox-specific:

• Removed support for the Archos DAPs and stuff only used by them (sh architecture, character cell screens, hardware codec support, butonbars), >
• Fixed a memory corruption bug in the voicefile loader
• Refactored and combined the Hibyplayer bootloaders
• Triaged and closed more tickets
• A few more GCC 4.9.4 fixes (All known issues resolved!)
• Fixed more voice generation bugs
• Major improvements to the translation & language tooling
• Fixed a bug preventing volume settings from being saved

Printing-related:

• Some minor end-user support and started validating the CP-M15E