Spotted next to my office door; shot handheld with a 100mm macro lens.

Actual size of each of these dog ticks is about 2x4m.

...A female typically lays 4000-6500 eggs in a season. Suffice it to say I'm not pro-life.

It's been a while since I've talked about anything printing-related. That's mostly been due to not a whole lot happening, but lately I got the bug again, and not-so-coincidentally actually have a place to set things back up again!

So, as of a couple of days ago, the HiTi P461 is now working under Linux:

There are still some quirks -- I don't have matte mode and HQ mode working just yet, but that's a matter of obtaining some more sniffs once I have local access to a Windows PC again.

In related news, several bugs relating to the HiTi P510 series and P525 have been fixed this year, and they're confirmed working. Reverse engineering work on the v2 Heat Tables continues slowly.

Additionally, since my last printer-related update, the Kodak 605. Canon SELPHY CP1500, and DNP QW410 have seen improvements. All of this is committed to upstream Gutenprint, though the HiTi data files will have to come out of the selphy_print repository.

As always, donations to the printer fund are highly appreciated, and if there's anyone reading this with a line into HiTi, I'd welcome a dialog.

Happy printing!

This time of year, I get to see the sun set at the end of my workday at start of my ~75 meter commute back to the house.

...It's nice to have a dedicated office space again, but having it tucked away in such a beautiful place is.. heaven.

The label is rather hilarious after the fact, eh?

....I love it out here.

Taken at a fishing dock off of Lake Harris, just south of Leesburg, Florida.

"Pea soup fog" would be an apt description of the morning's conditions, with under 20' of visibility for most of the drive, but fortunately enough of the fog burned off for us to be able to see both the sky and water by the time any direct sunlight reached our eyes.

2022 was a year of major transitions, bookended by two foggy mornings whose circumstances could not have been more different. I may write up a summary, but.. I'd rather focus on what lies ahead.

Life is good.

I've been using Gitolite to manage my personal git repositories for over a decade. Combined with gitweb (and later, cgit), it's done its job well and generally stayed out of the way.

Where it falls flat though, is that if you want to use more than one ssh key, you're not going to be able to utilize its auto-created private namespaces without manual intervention or moving stuff out separately. Its simplicity also makes it a lot more challenging to integrate with other things, especially when the repositories are private.

The last straw though, was discovering that my server bandwidth was being swamped by things constantly hitting the anonymous git service, with no real ability to monitor/track/restrict it. If I was going to disable that and break a bunch of things, I figured it was the time to just go all the way and gain some new functionality for my efforts.

So.. I finally bit the bullet, and after a couple of days of insanity, have switched everything over to Gitea -- it's nicely self-contained and straightforward to administer, yet has all the modern bells and whistles expected of a software forge. It will also make it a lot easier to work with my occasional moonlighting clients without having to use the likes of GitHub.

This migration was more annoying than I expected, but that was mostly of my own doing as I decided to rewrite the history of two of my public projects to enable them to take advantage of git-lfs. This wasn't the right call, and I intend to go back and partially rectify it.

git-lfs aside, I think the overall effort is well worth it -- For example, I'll eventually be able to retire the standalone wiki and bug trackers I'm also hosting, which will help shrink ShaftNet's special snowflake server/service footprint and thus reduce my administrative burden. It sure beats letting everything rot, or just just dropping altogether.

All of my servers are finally consolidated at the Tick Farm, hooked up to a DSL line with a paltry 1.5Mbps upstream... when it's working properly -- I went through three modems in two weeks!

The rack is a real mess; I haven't finished punching down all of cables coming out of the wall, and need to relocate the switch to the back side to simplify cabling, finish racking the rest of the gear (including two UPSes and several shelves), and get rid of the "temporary" stretching across the floor of the house -- oh, and pull Ethernet and fiber through the conduits laid around the property.

I have a bunch of other network reworking in progress; I plan to keep servers on the DSL line but move everything else to the Starlink, but with its router in bypass mode so I can have the two networks sharing private internals. But I still need to elevate the Starlink dish a little higher; I have it on about 7' of 2" PVC conduit, but it's not quite enough to clear the trees. There's always something..