○ 2024's Devlog

1X.11

Watching:

• The Wild Robot (2024)
• Castle in the Sky (1986)

Listening:

• Nabihah Iqbal - DREAMER

0X.11

Watching:

• The Art of Self-Defense (2019)

Listening:

• Louis Cole - nothing

2X.10

Learning more about CAD software, designing small parts around a custom synthesizer which I'd like to build. The sheer amount of work compared to what I usually have to do for pure-software prototypes is astounding. Gained a ton of respect to all mechanical engineers this month :)

Listening:

• Skalpel - Big Band Live
• TR/ST - Joyland

Watching (now proud of this, still had fun):

• Scary Movie 1
• Scary Movie 2
• Scary Movie 3

1X.10

A friend of mine has recently offered me an amazing birthday gift - we made a custom stand for my Octatrack, I learned a bit about CADs (OnShape), 3D printing and woodworking. It turned out really nice!

Reading:

• Fyodor Dostoevsky - Crime and Punishment

Listening:

• Jacob Collier - Wild Wild Sea

0X.10

Listening:

• TR/ST

3X.09

Listening:

• Sungazer - Against the Fall of Night

2X.09

Watching:

• Vivarium (2019)
• Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)

Listening:

• KARAŚ/ROGUCKI - Ostatni bastion romantyzmu

0X.09

Watching:

• Dark City (1998)

Listening:

• Sampha, Little Simz - Satellite Business 2.0
• Magdalena Bay - Imaginal Disk
• Genesis Owusu - STRUGGLER

3X.08

Watching:

• Alien: Romulus
• The Accountant (2016)

Listening:

• Duran Duran - Invisible
• Sungazer - Against The Fall Of Night

2X.08

Watching:

• Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Reading:

• Isaac Asimov - Foundation

1X.08

"EagleEye, deploy confirmed" - words from the SpaceX launch stream, which sparked a wave of joy in the mission control team in Creotech. Successful launch, followed by a series of equally successful communication sessions, the satellite talking with us right from the first communication session… It was a long night. Glad to report that all mission control systems worked at the first try, without any unexpected interruptions or downtime. We've already learned lots from that first launch and operations and with the team we currently have, I have nothing but good hopes for the future.

Listening:

• J Dilla - Donuts
• Sungazer - A Song With No Words

Watching:

• Mars Express (2024)
• Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

0X.08

For the last few weeks, my thoughts have been circling around the topic of data sonification. In my daily job, I am often watching over multiple streams of logs and metrics. Processing all this information just by eyes sounds like a waste of resources. We've built data visualisation tools so that we can utilize our visual cortex for "free" data pre-processing. Why not use other senses?

Thinking about a rich data sonification system. Brain dump:

• For raw textual logs, flow rate as a sub-bass signal. More logs, higher frequency or a filter opening up
• Alternative for the bass, an ambient sample, something from Brian Eno's Music for Installations, rising in volume with the logs flow rate
• A log filtering engine, as simple as mapping "regex → sound". All matches are fed into a sound generator as MIDI-like events, with some debouncing applied
• Automatic determination of a "nominal" flow rate of all logs or just filtered events. Second-order derivative and some inertia? Or maybe just a simple moving average?

Watching:

• Mad Max 3 (1985)

Listening:

• The Chemical Brothers - Skipping Like A Stone
• Sungazer - Cytherean

3X.07

Watching:

• Mad Max (1979)
• Mad Max 2 (1981)

2X.07

Started contributing some of my CPU power to Science United via BOINC.

Reading:

• Tim Marshal - Prisoners of Geography

Watching:

• Ryuichi Sakamoto - Opus
• Eryn O'Neil - Congrats! You're the tech lead - now what?

Listening:

• Flying Lotus - Zodiac Shit
• Son Lux - Clair de Lune (Pied au Piano)

Everybody likes to write reusable code and nobody wants to reuse anybody else's code

~ Eryn O'Neil

1X.07

Recent SpaceX issues with their second stage caused launch delays, which gave me some much-needed free time to spend more time with the Octatrack. After listening to too much of Jacob Collier, I'm playing around with with 3/4 and 5/4 rhythms, a simple way to make the compositions stand out.

0X.07

Reading

• Patrick Lencioni - The Ideal Team Player

Listening:

• Anomalie - Lune
• Swing Out Sister - When the Laughter Is Over

3X.06

Started coloring the nodes on the map based on how related they are to:

• Art - more red
• Computers - more green
• Music more blue (da ba dee)

Having fun learning about gradients, as most out-of-the-box visualisation/graphics tools only support linear two-color gradients. Seeing stuff like CIELAB is currently blowing my mind away, hoping to understand it better soon.

I've set up zoxide a couple months ago and forgot about it completely during holidays. Accidentally fast-jumping to the correct directory (from an invalid base dir) reminded me that I have it installed. Recommended tool for sure, improves navigation speed significantly.

2X.06

Got back to libretakt, instead of rapidly prototyping the UI, I first modelled the application state as nested fat enums and structs. After the initial modeling phase, UI implementation felt like a breeze. Thank you, @NoBoilerplate!

Listening:

• Jacob Collier - Flow Freely

Watching:

• The Boys (Season 1)
• Patrick Lencioni - Are you an ideal team player?

1X.06

Visiting places I never thought I'd see.

Listening:

• Jacob Collier - Djesse Vol. 1
• Aphex Twin - Flim

Reading:

• Liu Cixin - Death's End

Watching:

• LOGIC SESSION BREAKDOWN: "With The Love In My Heart"
• Severance (2022)

0X.06

Listening:

• Jacob Collier - Here Comes The Sun (feat. dodie)

Watching:

• Sunshine (2007)
• The Invisible Man (2020)
• Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

2X.05

Migrated my homelab containers (or rather what's left from them, as I'm running almost everything under NixOS' Systemd services) to Podman.

Migrated my LibReddit instance to Redlib, as LibReddit is being discontinued.

Listening:

• Sade - Smooth Operator

1X.05

After a few weeks of equally satisfying and exhaustive work, earthly days of the EagleEye satellite have nearly passed. It is now ready for it's final journey!

Bought myself a bike. Expłoring biking routes around Warsaw.

Watching:

• Into the Wild (2005)
• Invincible - Season 2, part 1

0X.05

Questioning my approach to functional programming, memory safe programming languages, and "doing things the declarative way" with the thought-provoking arguments provided by Mr Richard P. Gabriel.

Reading:

• Richard P. Gabriel - Worse Is Better
• Richard P. Gabriel - Models of Software Acceptance - How Winners Win

Listening:

• Ryan Lott - Pentaptych

3X.04

Made a tiny contribution to Nixpkgs without making myself look like a complete fool (which happened at the previous try). Their documentation for contributors is likely the best piece of software documentation I have ever read.

Listening:

• Snarky Puppy

2X.04

Reading:

• Eelco Dolstra - The Purely Functional Software Deployment Model

1X.04

Reading:

• Liu Cixin - The Dark Forest

Watching:

• The World's End (2013)
• Poor Things (2023)

Listening:

• Peter Gabriel - Scratch My Back

0X.04

Converted my home NixOs infrastructure to Nix Flakes. Pinning the entire OS configuration to a specific revision(s) of Nixpkgs and having it build/rollback without any fears is a breath of fresh air :)

Listening:

• Sam Harris & Robert Sapolsky - We Really Don't Have Free Will?

2X.03

Watching:

• Dune: Part Two
• The Holy Mountain (1973)

Reading:

• NixOS in Production
• Cixin Liu - Theee Body Problem

Listening:

• Lor

1X.03

Finally having some time to play around with the used Octatrack unit I bought a couple months ago. It still surprises me how much hardware-centered music making machines feel similar to terminal-based tools such as bash/zsh/nu and vim.

Still fiddling with NixOs, making tiny steps towards using it as a daily driver.

0X.03

Watching:

• Crumb (1994)

Listening:

• Ryuichi Sakamoto - Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence
• Jacob Collier - Djesse Vol. 4

A pleasant surprise: Djesse Vol. 4 - Box Full Of Stars Pt. 2 contains a few words in Polish at 2.15

2X.02

Picked up an Arduino and started playing around with Rust for AVRs.

Watching:

• Hayao Miyazaki - The Boy and the Heron
• David Lynch - Dune

Listening:

• Son Lux - Prophecy
• Daft Punk - Infinity Repeating

1X.02

TODO: add note on making myself look like an idiot when attempting to contribute to nixpkgs.

Listening:

• Daft Punk - Human After All
• Alan Parsons Project - Ammonia Avenue

0X.02

Listening:

• Robert Sapolsky - Human Behavioral Biology

Reading:

• Peter Watts - Behemoth

2X.01

Done some optimisations of my infrastructure:

• All services are now accessible from IPv6
• Switched from TCP to UNIX sockets in the Postgres database used by Invidious instance
• Fine-tuned Postgres with PGTune, hoping to see some results in my monitoring. Doing that configuration via NixOs was a breeze

To my surprise, after 2 days I took a look at my monitoring charts and saw visible improvements in my metrics:

• CPU usage is down a lot
• Almost 3 times less IO operations are performed
• CPU temperature is down by 10℃

..all of that while the request rate reported by Caddy hasn't changed!

Went back to my Invidious MR adding Prometheus metrics.

Listening:

• Depeche Mode - Exciter

Watching:

• Ennio (2021)

1X.01

Broke my whole IT infrastructure for 12+ hours due to a trivial mistake in static IP configuration. I haven't noticed it until late afternoon, the fix was rather easy but I learned a bit about nmcli. Funny adventure, worth it :)

Week 1 of going to the gym!

Bought a used Octatrack unit. I already have to hold myself back from tinkering with it instead of during house chores. Once I connect my piano to it I'm gonna be out for at least a few days :) The workflow is wonderful and the idea of having a single "macro knob" is both simple and effective.

Reading:

• Peter Watts - Maelstrom

Listening:

• Vulfpeck - Live at Madison Square Garden
• David Bowie - Sound and Vision (the pure piano version)

0X.01

Finished migrating my cloud & home instrastructure to NixOs. It really feels like an improvement over Ansible playbooks (although I am still using them for copying files & running system rebuilds, it is the easiest solution for me), as I can merge custom software builds/packaging with the system setup & configuration. Learned a bit about nftables in the process.

Trying out some funky rhytms - learning how to play Beastly by Vulfpeck. Amazed to see that they've made an official tutorial on that song and some others.

Reading:

• Peter Watts - Starfish

Listening:

• Nicolas Jaar - Space Is Only Noise If You Can See
• Jungle - For Ever
• Kenny G - Sade
• Lovage et al. - Music to Make Love to Your Old Lady by

Go back to 2023.