What I did over the past week XXXV

Home:

  • Gave shaftnet its quarterly maintenance.
  • Removed a broken branch dangling over the driveway and chainsaw'd a different ~15' branch that came down earlier in the week.
  • Rerouted the extension cord supplying power to the camper across the garage ceiling instead of across the floor.
  • Greased the wheels on the garage door. Marginally quieter now.
  • Continued organizational improvements in the garage, making more efficient use of of the shelving.
  • Cleaned out the gutters and burned another barrelful of yard detritus while sweeping up a couple more loads of leaves.. until the RTV broke.

Vehicular:

  • One of the truck's headlight bulbs literally exploded. Replaced.
  • Replaced the WRX's radiator cap with a proper OEM unit.
  • Identified the source of the WRX's A/C leak: bad O-rings at the evaporator coil/expansion valve junction. Unfortunately the new valve had the same type of not-quite-right O-rings, so the car remains inoperable while a complete OEM set remains on order with dealer.
  • Since I had the dashboard opened up anyway, I used the opportunity to re-route the dashcam power, radio auxiliary input, and Bluetooth wiring neatly out of the way, in a properly secured manner.
  • While sweeping up leaves, the RTV blew the high pressure hydraulic supply line to the steering system. As this model has no mechanical linkage to the steering rack, this resulted in a total loss of steering control. Given the utter PITA factor involved in replacing the blown hose (have to remove the windshield, roof, roll bars, front cowling, seat belts, seats, floor, air filter housing, both side cowlings, auxiliary lighting, steering wheel, and dashboard...) and the equal vintage of the rest of the steering hoses, it seemed prudent to replace all five at the same time. Parts on order.

Rockbox

  • Bug fixes to the MIPS caching code (a collaborative effort)
  • Fixed long-standing issue with ROLO when voice prompts are enabled.
  • Some minor code janitorial work.
  • Fixed the broken en-US "translation" that resulted in an invalid voicefile being generated. Tweaked the build scripts to properly handle (and properly report) this class of error.
  • Fixed an unrelated language dependency issue that could local changes to result in incorrect non-English language files.
  • Fixed a settings menu bug with the USB mode selection.
  • Added the ability to set the relative volume of the voice prompts.
  • Reviewed and merged several more patches.

Printing

  • Minor documentation updates.

What I did over the past week XXXIV

Home:

  • Finally filed my taxes after a third pass.
  • Reworked a few things about the home network, fixing multiple issues that prevented zeroconf/avahi from working reliably.
  • Major tune-up on the leaf blower; it's finally running well.
  • Got the other three small motor-powered tools running and warmed up.
  • Replaced the recessed light over the master shower with a fixture containing a fan. Very cramped quarters, foot-thick blown-in insulation, and beams/studs in unexpected places made this far more of a PITA than it needed to be. Still sore three days later.

Rockbox

  • Reviewed and merged a bunch of patches.
  • Fixed a crash in the perceptual bass enhancement code.
  • Fixed longstanding dependency bug in the build system.
  • Fixed a SWCODEC-removal-related bug in the standalone database tool that prevented non-mp3 metadata parsers from being included.

Printing

  • selphy_print regression suite made slightly stricter.
  • Fixed a couple of minor memory leaks in the Kodak 1400 and 605 backends.
  • Enable support for HiTi P510, P518, and P728 series (all untested!)

What I did over the past week XXXIII

Home:

  • Further office storage consolidation, now with labels!
  • Wrapped the fiber-optic cables for a work system with a split-loom harness to protect them from a certain kitty who thinks they are made of noms.
  • Second pass on my taxes; It's now up to 15 forms and schedules.
  • Picked up an old steel barrel, punched holes in it and burned up a big load of yard trash.
  • Cleaned out the gutters and hauled off 10 more bags of leaves (total: 80)
  • Picked up a pressure washer with a catastrophically-blown pump. Removing what was left of the old pump was an unexpected ordeal; its internal seals had failed, causing the end of the shaft to corrode and seize. I ended up cutting away the casing with an angle grinder to expose the pump's swash plate and shaft, after which I judiciously applied a blow torch, PB Blaster, and a slide hammer. It's now ready for a new pump; I'll be replacing the failed axial cam unit with a more robust triplex unit.

Vehicles:

  • Cleaned up the truck's under-hood wiring using some spare split looms.
  • Rewound the cable on the RTV's winch, liberally dousing it with WD-40 to help prevent further rusting, and bent the fairlead mount back into the correct position. Finally picked up a proper winch cover too.

Rockbox

  • Minor fix in the MPEG-4 metadata decoder

What I did over the past week XXXII

Home:

  • First cut at my 2020 taxes. Less crazy than I'd anticipated so far.
  • Let the magic smoke out of a label printer, and nearly blew up some lead-acid batteries.
  • More storage/organization cleanups in my office.

Tick Farm:

  • Hauled some stuff back and forth.
  • Swapped out the server and access point.
  • Rearranged the server rack and greatly cleaned up its wiring.
  • Mapped out existing network cables and measured conduit runs.
  • Started planning first new work out there in over three years.

What I did over the past week XXXI

Home:

  • It's tax season. Started assembling all the paperwork needed, and researching how to properly account for selling my old Melbourne house.
  • Moved backup drive out of a USB enclosure into an unused hot-swap bay in the server.
  • Hung up a new ironing board rack and relocated some wall art.
  • Big storm knocked out power and lots of bits off the trees; cleaned up most of the mess.
  • Split up my big heavy trunk of camera gear into three smaller watertight containers; Core lenses & accessories, Lighting, and DX+Specialty lenses. Recharged all batteries.
  • Put together a new hyper-adjustable desk chair, replacing the old one that broke back before Thanksgiving.

Rockbox

  • Got a serial console on the v1.3 Hifiwalker H2. From there I extracted the flash images and through some skulduggery, was able to generate a flashable "stock" v1.3 image. I'm holding off on a v1.2->v1.3 update for the time being.
  • Generated a "patched" v1.3 image for use with Rockbox, and added support for this variation into rbutil.
  • Enhanced the daily voice builds to run in parallel.

Printing:

  • Multiple bug fixes for the SELPHY CP790, which has apparently been broken for quite some time.
  • Properly report loaded media type for the CP790.
  • Some internal simplifications in the other SELPHY code.
  • Take the URI_PREFIX from the executable name instead of hard coding at compile-time.

What I did over the past week XXX

Home:

  • Broke out the chainsaw to chop up some large branches that came down in recent storms.
  • Repaired another section of the fence on the east side of the property.
  • Partially excavated the fire pit, and used that dirt to re-pot the root-bound bird-of-paradise that is somehow still going strong up here. Started burning up the very old rotting pile of wood.
  • Attempted to clear out some of the vines choking the back quarter of the property; between the wild muscadine grapes hanging from on the mature oaks trees and the greenbriar (smilax) thickets, I pulled out what felt like a mile of vines and tore up my hands and arms in the process. Plenty of work remains, and then there's the tick farm and its 30 acres of much-worse-than-this!

Rockbox

  • Dusted off some work on native pthread-based threading on hosted targets, and attempted to resume work on an Allwinner FC100 or V3 port.
  • Took apart the new v1.3-firmware-equipped Hifiwalker H2, but without success in getting a usable serial port. It's most likely my shaky hands on a tiny test point.

Photo Organizer

  • Fix printing to remote hosts with newer CUPS versions.

What I did over the past week XXIX

Home:

  • Swapped out the guts of my 2012-ish FX8320E-based workstation for a 2016-ish Xeon E5-1660v4 with double the RAM and considerably more oomph. In the process, wiped the rarely-used (and barely functional) Win7 partition and converted the Fedora Linux image to boot from UEFI and rejiggered the storage so that all $dayjob-related stuff is on a dedicated drive.
  • Re-imaged a recently-retired server to prepare it to replace the (13+-year-old) one I have at the tick farm.
  • Started sorting out the paperwork I'll need to file last year's tax return.

Printing:

  • Continued work on the D90 panorama; it's now ready for testing. Fixed a few unrelated issues uncovered by the regression suite, and started on preliminary work on enabling panoramas on the DNP DS620 & DS820.

Rockbox

  • Fix a problem generating firmware updates for recent AGPTek Rockers.
  • Spent some time digging into the FiiO M3K 1.4.5 firmware update. In short; it's more of the same hacky mess, with further changes to their kernel that aren't captured in their now-3-year-old source dump.

What I did over the past week XXVIII

Home:

  • Unclogged the tiny fuel filter in the leaf blower's carburetor. It's still not quite right but considerably improved.
  • Cleaned out the gutters, swept up three loads of new leaves, and hauled another 10 bags off to the landfill (total: 70)

Vehicular:

  • Changed the front O2 sensor on the WRX; The old one was pretty beat up, literally -- whoever had installed it didn't use the proper tool, actually bending the old sensor, damaging the insulation on its wiring, failed to properly secure and route the wire, and did a crappy splice repair on a broken lead near the connector. It somehow managed to hold on for five years before finally giving out.

Printing:

  • Properly report the -S variants of the Mitsubishi CP-D70 family.
  • Bug fix relating to job detection mismatches on the Selphy CP790 & ES40.
  • Preliminary support for printing panoramas on the Mitsubishi D90.

What I did over the past week XXVII

Home:

  • Installed a couple small stylish shelves in the master bathroom.
  • Resumed doing yard work; bagged and hauled off another 10 30-gallon bags (running total: 60)
  • Further consolidated/organized some of the storage in the home office; now I'm down to just one box of "misc" stuff that needs proper sorting, mostly into the garage. Incremental progress FTW!
  • Properly rack-mounted shaftnet and its UPS, finally moving from its temporary home (of >1.5 years) on top of a small filing cabinet. Replaced a failing case fan too.

Vehicular:

  • The WRX's O2 sensor doesn't like this cold weather, throwing an open circuit code every other time I get in the car. New one on order.

Photo Organizer:

  • Moved to better-descriptive directory names in he on-disk photo repository.

Printing:

  • Cleaned out a lot of old test jobs that were no longer needed.
  • Some spelunking into the firmware for the Mitsubishi CP-D90DW-P. The eventual goal is to identify a way to query print counters, but it's probably a pipe dream at this point.

What I did over the past week XXVI

Today was my first day at work in about three weeks. The downtime was much needed, and the extended chunk of time allowed me to tackle several large projects. The week before, it was vehicular stuff, but this time, it was household.

Home:

  • Replaced the carpet my home office and one of the bedrooms with laminate flooring that matches the rest of the house. This was a major project, taking the better part of five full days of pretty heavy labor. Two rooms remain, but they are gated on further logistical wrangling.

Rockbox:

  • IRC logger storage script didn't handle the new year changeover. Fixed without any data loss.

Printing:

  • As part of my home office re-flooring, I had to empty off (and move) the shelves that held my entire collection of printers. I used this opportunity to neatly organize the wiring (USB, power, Ethernet, oh my!) and cleaned up enough cat hair to stuff a pillow.