2024's Devlog

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!

The result.
A single side of the stand.
0X.10
TR/ST. Progresja Club Warsaw

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
1X.08

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:

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:

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.

Spending evenings with this machine and my piano.

Our satellite integration crew. Glad to hold the unofficial title of the Youngest-Polish-Programmer-Who-Has-Entered-The-Spacex-Integration-Facility-So-Far.
0X.07

Reading

  • Patrick Lencioni - The Ideal Team Player

Listening:

  • Anomalie - Lune
  • Swing Out Sister - When the Laughter Is Over
3X.06
Dead-simple gradient-based coloring of posts on the map.

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

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
Exploring Thailand/Bangkok on holidays. I'm sensitive to the heat, but the views are worth it!

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:

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:

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!

The EagleEye satellite, soon to be launched!

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:

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
Snarky Puppy and the absolutely top tier frypan solo.
2X.04

Reading:

  • Eelco Dolstra - The Purely Functional Software Deployment Model
1X.04
Attended the SynthJaw jam session. Incredibly friendly synth people, recommended!

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:

Listening:

  • Lor
The band Lor in Niebo, Warsaw
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:

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

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

Metrics from Node Exporter. Light-blue line marks the moment when PostgreSQL tunings were applied.

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.