April 2021 Braindump

🎮 Finished NieR: Automata - when this first came out I was intrigued but not convinced I’d be able to put the 40-odd hours in to get through it.

When it appeared on Game Pass I thought I’d give it a chance, and I’m very glad I did. An excellent combination of thought-provoking story, fun characters, engaging combat and fantastic music, sprinkled with a few tropey JRPG bits and a slight lack of respect for the player’s time.

🎲 We’ve been playing quite a bit of MicroMacro: Crime City, a game that presents you with a large city map and a set of crimes you need to solve by spotting clues sprinkled throughout the city. A lovely unique concept that I’m excited to see more of.

📺 Discovered That Van Jolene via GeoWizard. A well-presented and entertaining YouTube series on a couple’s adventures in converting a van in to a campervan. Now I’m tempted to buy a van.

📖 Currently reading Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed. I’m not usually interested in aerospace or the military, but this book’s story of the engineering effort that goes in to building one of these machines is amazing. There’s a few interesting lessons on security here too!

🏠 I bought a Coral Edge TPU and set it up with Frigate on our home server to do real-time object detection on my cameras.

I’ve done a lot of of experimenting with various self-hosted camera monitoring tools (MotionEye, Shinobi, ZoneMinder, Blue Iris) - while they all have their advantages, they all fall short on motion/object detection. Offloading this to an Edge TPU with Frigate is working out great.

🌻 Our greenhouse has been in a state of disrepair for a while - so we finally got around to replacing all the broken glass panels with corrugated PVC sheets (not quite as pretty, but way more rugged for our windy garden).

We also installed fancy automatic window openers to control the temperature in there. These are such clever, simple pieces of engineering made up of a piston filled with wax which expands and contracts based on the temperature. Magic.

💻 I discovered and switched to asdf which replaces tools like pyenv, nvm and rbenv with a single tool. Very happy with it so far.