March 2022.

Tue 05 April 2022

January 2022

February 2022

What I read in March:

• https://jvns.ca/blog/2022/03/13/celebrate-tiny-learning-milestones/ Years ago already, Julia also encouraged people to write what she calls bragging documents. It's a bit of what inspired this diary and helps to put things into perspective. I have yet to do it at work which was the main point in her bragging documents. If you don't know Julia's work, please check out her blog and shop, she's excellent at vulgarizing computer stuff.
• https://www.xda-developers.com/best-youtube-vanced-alternatives/ How I learned that YouTube Vanced is shutting down. I've been using it for a couple of years now, specifically the Music app, pretty sad to see it go since YouTube in browser requires the screen to stay on and that is how I burned in my screen... I'll see if NewPipe can replace it but it was too much oriented on videos and less music (which I used my phone mainly for as I spend already too much time on YouTube on my PC).
• https://www.wired.com/story/salary-transparency-gender-pay-gap/ Transparency is a very good thing for things that can be as taboo as salary. French people have a tendency to compare themselves based on the income and judge hard on the amount some people they know are paid. Hence why money is taboo in my opinion. Salary opacity hurts people, particularly minorities and benefits only the company which can spare some money on the back of its employees. I am not sure it'll be a short-term benefit for France but I believe it'll help in the long run.
• https://www.wired.com/story/hybrid-working-original-fix/ I've yet to find the right balance. I like my solitude and people tire me, so not fully in-office works great for me but I fear going too much remote will hurt my social life/skills since I just love staying at home so much. But working neither fully remote nor fully in-office is a great thing for my health right now, so I'll try to remember to alternate a bit more often :)
• https://www.wired.co.uk/article/remote-working-rude-colleagues "There’s just an emotional element missing when you’re trying to manage someone from behind a screen, so things get lost in translation.". This is a regular "issue" in online communities where we only very sporadically meet in person and the majority of discussions are over text, either via e-mail, IRC or GitHub/GitLab issues/pull-requests. This is already hard for native speakers but add people who only speak English as their second, third, etc... language and it gets messy very quickly. Soft skills are even more important online than they are when in person. Now add the pandemic, forced remote work and companies, managers and employees first experiencing with online-only communication and you've got a ticking bomb in your hands. The one rule: NEVER answer or send a mail when angry. Wait a few hours or next day when you've digested the info and can have another look at it, in a different mood/mindset.
• https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-support-a-friend-going-through-a-difficult-time This shall become my monthly re-read because it basically teaches you how to deal with different kind of people and contexts when people are going through a rough patch. When struggling yourself, it could also be a way to help the person you're sharing things with give you the kind of support you feel like you need at the moment.
• https://hbr.org/2022/03/how-supportive-leaders-approach-emotional-conversations Kind of a professional approach of the previous link. Employees are people and some struggle too :)
• https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/03/enjoyment-not-pleasure-creates-happiness/627583/ Made me realise that I go too much for pleasure and less for enjoyment. Need to change that :)
• https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220322-the-realities-of-the-four-day-workweek if you ever wondered what's the capitalistic take on the 4-day work week... /me facepalms

What I cooked/baked in March:

• Goat cheese, rocket and pesto quiche. Forgot to take a picture but I'll make this recipe again one day :)
• Homemade Maultaschen. It was absolutely delicious fresh, but I need to work on how to keep it in the fridge because they all just stuck together and the taste had changed overnight. I followed this recipe for the filling and that one for the dough.
• Slow-cooked pork loin, the return. Still too dry, next time I'll use conventional mode instead of convection since I assume this might be what dries it out.
• Oat flakes, coconut oil cookies from last month (minus the chocolate because I can't be bothered). Still an amazing find, need to find a way to make it into a cereal bar for hikes or rides :)

What I worked on in March:

• Reported two "bugs" to cargo about incorrect or confusing error messages: https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/10503 and https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/10504.
• Fixed a few CVEs by bumping Qtbase version in Buildroot.
• Fixed a race between Qtbase, libxkbcommon and QtWayland packages in Buildroot.

What I discovered/learned in March:

• My cat has an auto-immune disease which makes her scratch herself so much she had wounds on her chin and very irritated lips. She got some treatment, we'll see how often we'll need to get her treated. She was meowing soooo much because she was constantly hungry and she woke me every night multiple times to try to get me to feed her.
• Socializing after so many months of just seeing colleagues. Long overdue and I really had a nice time (and ate homemade paella made by a Spanish friend, and homemade Spätzle by an Austrian friend). Will need to do this more, I just tend to forget to check on people.

What entertained me in March:

• 📺 The Haunting of Hill House. I was hooked quickly and enjoyed watching it a lot. A bit disappointed by the last episodes though.
• 📺 The Haunting of Bly Manor. A bit less on the horror side than The Haunting of Hill House but as enjoyable. A bit less adrenaline overall but worth a watch (and didn't get a disappointing ending like the first season).
• 📺 Attack on Titan, last season (still a few episodes to air though). Still the great TV series it was :) I am not entirely sure I'll start watching other anime TV shows though, if they all follow the same structure of almost one scene per episode. It's just too frustrating and "forces" me into binge watching the series.
• 🎥 Spider-Man: No way home. A decent entertainer but not much to it, which is what I feel about most action movies anyways.
• 🎥 Turning Red. While it's obviously about PMS, to me it was also about accepting and dealing with your emotions. It was a nice movie.
• 📖 Big Little Lies, by Liane Moriarty. Loved the book, can recommend it. Weirdly enough, even if there were many characters in it, I could quickly remember who was who in a sentence or too and made the "reading-while-commuting" experience quite enjoyable. It's basically a drama based on parents of children going to kindergarten.

What I'm excited about for April (and later):

• Finally received my Seeed XIAO BLE boards so I'll try to play with Zephyr OS a bit, at least get the LED blinky example to work :)
• Riding season should start if the temperatures rise to 12-15°C (there was a last dance from winter this week, hopefully not for too long).
• I would like to try making some ravioli myself. Let's make that the goal of next month :)

Februdiary 2022.

Sun 27 February 2022

January 2022

What I read in February:

• https://www.csail.mit.edu/news/invisible-machine-readable-labels-identify-and-track for embedding QR codes within 3D printed objects which are then readable from an IR camera. Super neat way of protecting the QR code from harsh environment but also making nice designs without seeing ugly QR codes everywhere :)
• https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/new-risk-social-contract-covid-ethics/621246/ not specifically about covid but questioning what's the role of society, the implicit rules we come up with and what's to be decided wrt our personal impact on other people's lives.
• https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/03/how-to-change-your-personality-happiness/621306/ being an introvert and not liking some of my character traits led me to have the same questions. Never had the energy to invest into that kind of "experiment" so it was a nice reading :)
• https://www.biphelps.com/blog/The-Fastest-GIF-Does-Not-Exist damned useless backward compatibility.
• https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/podman-features-1 awesome new features in Podman. Already using --latest and --replace

What I cooked/baked in February:

• Fully (except tomato sauce, not really the season for fresh tomatoes :) ) home-made lasagnas. The dough was too thick this time. I need to try again. Oh no. What a shame.
• Bread (yeah, it'll be a regular, get used to it :) ). This time tried with much more whole grain rye flour than usual (350g + 150g bread wheat flour), I very much like it this way.
• First ever white bread (for a club sandwich recipe and also Croque Monsieur very soon),
• Moussaka, followed this recipe (without the potatoes)
• Almond-chocolate cookies. First time replacing butter with coconut oil. The smell and taste were amazing. There was some oats in it and I got a nostalgia flashback of the chocolaty cereal bars from my childhood.

What I worked on in February:

• Trying to switch from oh-my-zsh to a much smaller setup with Starship. This effort has stalled because the Fedora package is too old and I need to dig a bit deeper into zsh plugin system because I extensively use auto-suggestions for command line programs and it's unusable without,
• Adding support for a new MIPI DSI display panel in the Linux kernel
• Fixing MIPI DSI not working on Rockchip PX30 SoC since Linux kernel 5.15
• Editing the photos I had taken in the last 6 months that were waiting for me on my PC and published them on my photo blog.
• Installing a monitoring service for all my self-hosted services. I use Uptime Kuma for https://status.0leil.net. Works pretty well because I'm spammed by mails for services being down. Too much apparently because I discovered that the server was down only 16 hours later the incident.. just because I wanted to publish this post.
• Writing a new blog post on research on Python binary packages.
• Working on a new horizontal panorama viewer in HTML/CSS for recitale, but it'll need some Javascript too and that makes me a bit sad.
• "Leading" my first interview for a potential new hire,

What I discovered/learned in February:

• https://unicode.party/ for Emojis to insert in my Markdown-based blog :)
• https://vivent.at/gratis-ins-museum/ for a list of Viennese museums freely accessible. Bookmarked for when the pandemic's over.
• I needed to support two different display panels with the same device tree and driver and apply the correct settings at runtime from the kernel driver. The auto-detection mechanism relied on some MIPI DSI Display Command Set (DCS) command being sent to retrieve the panel register ID. However, this can only happen when the display is powered. Moreover, the display modes are different between the two variants. Since the display is powered and correctly configured only in .prepare or .enable callbacks, this is where the auto-detection mechanism needs to happen. Sadly, most MIPI CSI controllers do a copy of the modes of the display when the panel gets attached to the controller. This means that after mipi_dsi_attach is called, any change to the modes of the panel won't be applied to the modes internally used by the controller. This could be modified by having the controller save a pointer to the modes data structure from the panel. However, the modes are applied after getting retrieved from the driver with .get_modes callback in the panel driver which happens before .prepare callback is called. Therefore, since .get_modes is called before the panel can exchange MIPI DSI DCS commands, it cannot be used for auto-detecting the display. This also means that the modes will be wrong. By chance, in our custom Linux kernel, the panel gets configured twice, once for the framebuffer and once for the MIPI DSI controller, meaning we could modify the modes variable in .prepare so that the second call to .get_modes will return the correct value for the detected display. This is obviously a brittle work-around and a more robust solution would be to implement MIPI DSI DCS commands for this MIPI DSI controller and display panel in U-Boot and select a different Device Tree or Device Tree Overlay for the kernel.
• I2C drivers do not necessarily need an of_device_id to match against a compatible from the Device Tree. Instead, the match callback of the i2c bus driver will try multiple things to match a device against a driver, one of them being i2c_match_id which iterates over the compatible string of an i2c device Device Tree node until if finds an exact match in one of the drivers name. This explains why one can add a Device Tree node for a MEMSIC MXC4005 with a compatible "memsic,mxc4005" and have only "mxc4005" as i2c_device_id in the driver and have the i2c bus driver probe this device correctly.
• check-wheel-contents to - you guessed it - check the content of Python wheel packages.
• jless for viewing and going through JSON content on the command line. Note: Firefox (and probably Chrome with this extension too) can do the same (while obviously NOT allowing this to be done from the command line :) ).

What entertained me in February:

• 📺 Peacemaker - A different kind of superhero TV shows. Flirts dangerously with cringey at times but had a good time overall!
• 📺 How I Met Your Father - The spin-off definitely does not live up to the original series I liked to watch. Most "jokes" fall flat. Trying to push through the first season but every week is a reminder I should probably stop losing my time :)
• 📺 Boba Fett - A bit disappointed by the ending to the point that I didn't know it was the season (series?) ending until the week after when a new episode didn't drop. All in all, it was a good entertainment nonetheless.
• 📺 Maid - I felt uncomfortable during the whole series, especially during the first episode which was hard to watch.. showing it was well acted/directed/produced since it's talking about abuse and everything the main character had to go through to try to start a new life for her and her child.
• 📺 The Wheel of Time - A bit confused by how little was shown/introduced/explained during the first season. It felt to me like a 7h long trailer to the actual series. I'll probably watch the second season once out to decide what to think of it. Really shallow scenario for me at the moment.
• 📺 Fleabag - What I think is meant by "British comedy"? I binge watched it over two evenings. The story telling is much different that what I was used to, but got quickly and easily hooked and it's the strength of the series for me. It's funny and emotional at times. Can recommend, the seasons and episodes are short and easy to watch.
• 📖 Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie - I rarely read a book in long sessions so it needs to be easy to get back to but this book was not. Too many characters and details to remember to be able to enjoy the book. Story was okay but I probably would have enjoyed it more, had I had the time, energy and will to go through multiple chapters in long reading sessions.
• 📖 Verity by Colleen Hoover - What could probably be labeled as erotica mixed with thriller genre. A bit too much on the sexual side, but the thriller part was nicely and slowly brought up. I just couldn't stop reading. Loved it :)

What I'm excited about for March (and later):

• 🏍️ (Slow) start of the motorbike riding season,
• Hopefully receiving my two Seeed XIAO BLE,
• More cooking recipes to discover and try,
• Going out of my apartment and seeing some friends,
• Attack on Titan final season should be about to end, so I'll start watching it at the end of the month :)
• Peaky Blinders final season episodes dropping every week, so need to watch the old seasons again to prepare for the new season :)

Dear Diary. January 2022.

Fri 28 January 2022

I saw Paul Barker work on an ambitious weekly diary and told myself I might be able to enjoy doing it too, though monthly is probably more realistic for me :) So here we are, first (and last?) entry for this year's diary.

What I read in January:

• https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html like most people I assume. Cynical TL;DR: web3 = downsides of web1 + downsides of web2.
• https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0513/ and https://hashman.ca/pycon-2019/ehashman-pycon2019-slides.pdf about Python binary packages.
• Aaaand... I should have bookmarked the stuff I read :)
• Wishing to find more time and motivation to read "IRL" books in the next few weeks/months.

What I cooked/baked in January:

• Bread (once a week :) ).
• Savory porridge with wallnuts, wallnut oil, shiro miso and an egg. 3/5 stars. I have a picky stomach in the morning.
• French crêpes.
• Karaage (japanese; double-fried chicken). Twice. I like it. A lot.
• Started my own kimchi (korean; spicy fermented nappa cabbage). Fermented alright, container almost exploded to my face after 2 days. Tasting session in a few months :)
• Tried "slow"-cooking a pork loin (seared in pan then put into 80-90°C oven til center reaches 66°C). Still a bit overcooked but getting there.

What I worked on in January:

• stretching almost daily since I challenged myself to do a front split by the end of the year.
• keeping up with my daily yoga morning routine: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLui6Eyny-Uzyp5P3Vcuv5qCHQOC8W6grN.
• released a new alpha version for récitale which fixes a few things, publishes a container image per new release, shows a progress bar while reencoding video/audio files, adds some unit tests and other stuff. See https://github.com/recitale/recitale/releases/tag/v2.0.0a2.
• finally started to upstream some patches for the Linux kernel, feels good to be back :) simple DTS fixes for now.
• trying to find a shop that sells a Ryzen 5300GE or 5600GE to build myself a new, more powerful, NAS with the same power consumption as today's. Didn't manage to yet, impossible to find the GE variants for some reason.

What I discovered/learned in January:

• that my work laptop wasn't using Wayland for everything /o\ dmenu (the default app finder on sway) is using XWayland so I switched to bemenu instead.
• that sway needs to be configured correctly so that it does not get killed by systemd-oom when compiling Yocto images/Buildroot images/Linux kernel. I use sway-systemd right now. See https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1933494.
• that sway does not detect my NVIDIA GPU (nouveau driver of course :) ) on my work laptop. Not that it's a big deal since the iGPU from Intel is doing its job quite ok.
• that Firefox and Thunderbird both use X11/XWayland by default. Install (and run!) thunderbird-wayland and firefox-wayland on Fedora to use Wayland instead.
• how to switch Chromium flatpak from X11/XWayland to Wayland: flatpak run org.chromium.Chromium --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --ozone-platform=wayland. Note: Chromium crashes every now and then. Since I use it only to connect to the awful Microsoft Teams website, I don't care too much when it does crash.
• how to also allow screencasting in Chromium flatpak: flatpak run org.chromium.Chromium --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --ozone-platform=wayland --enable-features=WebRTCPipeWireCapturer.
• how to connect my Jabra Elite 85h via Bluetooth and use as a headset on Linux. It is not perfect but it works okay. I just need to switch between profiles to be able to use the embedded microphones but doing so switches the audio output to mono of bad quality.
• WirePlumber to manage my sound devices (mainly used right now to switch between headset and headphone modes my Jabra Elite 85h). wpctl status and wpctl set-profile DEVICE_ID MODE_ID.
• how to have git hooks specific to a git worktree: git config extensions.worktreeConfig true and git config --worktree core.hooksPath /some/path. The goal was to have a directory with all upstream source code checked out and then use worktrees per customer/project. One project is using Gerrit though, so I needed its git pre-commit hook to add the Change-Id but didn't want the Change-Id to make it to my patches destined for upstream.
• that Python binary packages pip can fetch only get fetched for glibc-based distribution... which Alpine isn't (musl-based). This means that pip will fetch the source of the Python package and build it locally on those distros. This results in tons of additional dependencies and an increased build time. So I based the container image I built for récitale off a slim Debian instead.
• that Python binary packages for musl-based distributions are in fact now possible! See the musllinux tag from PEP-656. It's still very new but hopefully more packages over time will be available for that kind of distros.
• an unofficial, pre-PEP656, Python package index for musl-compatible Python binary packages: https://alpine-wheels.github.io/index (to be used with pip's --extra-index-url) https://github.com/alpine-wheels
• https://caniuse.com/ for CSS/HTML features support list per browser and browser version (and their market share). Will come in handy when working on récitale :)

What entertained me in January:

• Finished The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.
• First season of Arcane. Looking forward to the second :)
• 7th season of American Horror Story. Really liked the first part of the season, which is really the kind of thriller I'm interested in, less for the remaining.
• American Psycho. Forced myself to read all the 40% of the book before giving up a few years back. Movie was as uninteresting to me as the book was.
• Last Night in Soho. Really liked it... except for the ending.
• Harry Potter 20th Anniversary: Return to Hogwarts. Had a nice time, so much nostalgy :)
• The Book of Boba Fett. Same musical ambiance and story rythm as The Mandalorian so I really like the hour or so I spend watching it :)
• Trumbo. I'm always baffled by historically-inspired movies. You really think some things could never had happened, yet.. here we are, about 50 years later after the event.

What I'm excited about for February (and later):

• Bought myself a pasta machine/rolling mill. Fresh lasagna, fresh tortellini, fresh ravioli, fresh Maultaschen, fresh tagliatelle, fresh puff-pastry dough (the one sold in Austrian supermarkets is HORRENDOUS).
• I ordered two Seeed XIAO BLE SBCs to play with Zephyr, BLE and Zigbee and try to setup some home "automation" this year.
• Stumbled upon the new (?) module from Olimex based on an RK3328 SoC from Rockchip which looks kinda perfect in terms of perf and budget for my forever-dream of building my own motorcycle GPS.
• Starship to replace oh-my-zsh.
• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time - Master Quest. Just started :)
• More improvements to come to récitale :)
• Finding a place closer to work so the commute is less time-consuming.