2021-12-26                         from the editor of ~insom
   ------------------------------------------------------------

   Happy Boxing Day (except that might be Monday because today
   is Sunday).

   /now = Rust, Microcontrollers, Introspection

   Since I last posted I had success with reflowing a PCB. It
   worked first time. The actual circuit is only okay, but
   that's probably as much the microphone as it is the
   amplifier.

   I found the start of my vacation more relaxing. Not sure if
   that's because I feel my time off ticking away or because
   everyone else is off now too so we're doing more social
   stuff (which is great but not always relaxing, per se).

   Also I think I got too interested in too many diverse things
   and wasn't making great progress on any:

   I dug out the SDR I built after reading some posts by
   ~paultag. I decided that maybe it's finally time to learn
   how to use GNUradio properly. I had a couple of mildly
   frustrating evenings, picked up some very strong signal
   (weakly) and have popped it all back into a box. Maybe next
   year, Ham Radio!

   After rescuing the display and writing off the motherboard
   for my X131e I wondered if I could make it more useful by
   putting Coreboot on there. I bought an SOIC-8 EEPROM
   programmer and dumped the ROMs, which felt very "Hackerish"
   tbh -- with a chip clip on the motherboard.

   Anyway, even though Coreboot says it supports the X131e, it
   actually only supports the Intel models, and mine is an AMD.
   And that's how I learned that AMD support in Coreboot is
   poor (mostly AMD's fault), and it's probably impossible for
   me, as a casual contributor, to add support for my
   motherboard.

   I've written this little project off and will be selling the
   salvagable parts on eBay.

   I did put Coreboot on my Chromebook though, as I got a
   notification it's going out of Google support and will no
   longer receive updates, despite the fact that the hardware
   is totally fine for most of the things someone would use a
   Chromebook for, and it's a similar spec to many Chromebooks
   you can literally buy new in the shops.

   I also got to put BunsenLabs Linux on there, which is a
   spiritual successor to Crunchbang, based on Debian.

   I wrote a small utility for controlling two servo motors
   connected to the hardware PWM on a Raspberry Pi. The modern
   way of doing this (with kernel support and entries in
   `/sys`) is so much nicer than poking registers as root was.
   This is for Jack's and my drawing robot project.

   All of these are distractions from the Rust + SFML stuff I
   told myself I would work on! If you specialise in
   everything, you specialise in nothing. I think this has been
   subtly stressing me out -- which is a shame. Sometimes I'd
   like to be the kind of person who just lets their fancy take
   them places.