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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  6d ago (text post)   315 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for January 7, 2025

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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Just got 750Wh out of testing a 400W solar array, in January, with a peak insolation of 250W/m^2 (near the Canadian border).

The technology has gotten so good and cheap that if you have any kind of battery backup you'd be insane not to include panels to top them up.
750Wh is enough to run 46W of stuff for 16hrs a day, so internet plus a laptop, lights, and phones. That's with 40lb of panels ($170) and a $100 battery.
In the summer thats going to be high enough to run some refrigeration too.
Keeping light loads on battery helps use your generator efficiently too, because running them constantly for light loads is wasteful on petrol/gas and their limited running life. There's no need to run a generator just for house lighting any more.

Best part is that if you use the energy all the time, your "UPS" will pay for itself, by my count in about 3 years thanks to some pretty good sale prices (and utility power costs skyrocketing 8%/yr due to typical mismanagement)

I'm seriously thinking of scaling up to an ~8kW array to zero out my summer power use and keep all critical loads going in the winter.

I'm working on a VR game. For me, VR game development has recaptured some of the magic of indie games ca. 2005, before the whole scene got professionalised and commercialised to (un)death: the space of existing games is tiny (and so is the potential audience), so whatever vaguely new idea you have, chances are good that nobody has ever done it. You don't need to be a talented artist and animator, because the medium itself still has a certain "wow" factor like the first 3D console games did in the mid-'90s and has not been ground down by the hedonic treadmill. There are hardly any established "best practices" for interaction design either - instead of spending weeks to reproduce some deep local optimum of camera and input behaviour that has been iteratively refined by the industry over decades, you can try out any crazy idea you have and it probably won't be much worse than the typical existing game (and has a good chance of being better if you put some thought into it). Oh, and support in the major engines is a steaming pile of bitrot and performance regressions, so you can actually write bare metal code and not drown in FOMO over the SIGGRAPH-certified gimmicks and asset libraries you are missing out on (last I checked UE's Lumen-Nanite combo was still unusable in VR?).

There is a slight problem in that OpenXR (the only reasonably portable API) is somewhat overengineered and underdocumented, which is probably why there isn't really much of a user community for it, but so far I haven't encountered obstacles that couldn't be overcome with some gentle trial and error. It's slightly more unfortunate that its way of talking to the drivers is sufficiently weird that tooling like RenderDoc (indispensable program to record/profile/replay graphics API calls) can't work with it, so debugging also kind of has to be done like you are a primitive (ca. 2005) technology Youtuber.

Since the performance envelope is so tight, optimisation (for performance and appearance) also feels quite fun and rewarding, though your mileage might vary if you don't share a former ROM hacker's masochism. Over the course of the past 48 hours, I tried to improve a volumetric fog effect by reading (absence of data races not guaranteed) the depth buffer to clip each volume at solids already rendered, realised that I made an algebra error integrating the fog (nontrivial because I loathe wrangling FBOs and so am trying to do almost all objects as raytraced primitives) before, found that the wrong integral serendipitously happens to be in a family of integrals approximately equal to those of other fog functions that look decent, found that this all tanked rendering performance, and then more than recovered the loss by tweaking the drawing order and using the newly available depth buffer data to discard some fragments early.

Does anyone here have experience with hobby game development? How do you release your games? VR development is a wilderness, but not so wild that you can just throw up an FC2 homesite and hope that people will find your project. Are there still forums of the type where people would happily try out a half-baked game and give constructive feedback out there?

I'd be excited to see whatever alpha versions you come up with, and I know there's a couple game developers here.

I wish someone would make a good VR port of a drone flight simulator like Liftoff. Doesn't seem like it would even be all that hard to do, but it wouldn't be profitable in any way. It might make a good first project for someone.

On a related note, the very best drone flight simulator on PC right now is a free mod for GTA 5. Nobody made a dime off of it.

I too am making a game. I don't know a damn thing about product release or marketing. All I have is this tweet for a marketing strategy, it seems pretty sound to me: https://x.com/codyschneiderxx/status/1819790369166430275

I've rebuilt my home network. My good old router (Xiaomi Mi 3G running OpenWRT) wasn't able to handle v2rayA properly and I upgraded to a fanless N100 mini-PC with 4 NICs by BKHD. My old router is just a wireless switch right now.

The good things: the new setup can handle 500Mbps of traffic with ease: it can route each packet to the VPN or the ISP at full speed and when routing it to the VPN it can both decrypt and encrypt it at full speed as well (god bless AES-NI). It would likely handle 1Gbps with ease if I needed this much bandwidth. The temps are around 45C. Not that cool, but not that hot, no real need for me to reapply the thermal paste. I'm running Proxmox, so I plan to add some more stuff to it, like a LDAP server. Anyone has any ideas what I should put there as well?

The bad thing: the company that hosts my VPS doesn't have enough upstream bandwidth in its datacenter. Depending on the congestion I am getting 20-100 Mbps. Which is better than 20 Mbps my old router could push through xray, but still worse than I expected.

I'll probably order a new mobo to upgrade my NAS next. The same company should have one with Intel N305.

And here I am just trying to get my shitty fiber modem and 10yo router to play together.

So what's v2rayA doing in your setup? Deciding what does to the isp vs VPN? Is there a big advantage of the router doing that rather than individual machines?

I'm still using smb for all my network shares, at least when it's actually working rather than throwing mysterious errors. Been wanting to try some home assistant things for solar and security cameras, as well as set up my own weather station logging.

Is a mini-PC the route you'd go for all that? It'd certainly be nice to give up on purpose-built routers entirely, ngl.

The big advantage is that it works on all devices. I don't have to configure the VPN on my desktop PC, my laptop, my phone, wife's phone, wife's tablet, son's laptop, son's tablet, MIL's phone, MIL's tablet and our TV. And yes, v2rayA does the routing: Russian hosts and traffic-heavy stuff avoid VPN, everything else goes through it.

My old inexpensive purpose-built router could route to VPN just fine as long as it had to route based on the source IP. But this was much less convenient. Maybe one of these murderdrone-looking modern ASUS routers could do this, but I paid less for my mini-PC than I would pay for one.

Could I bother you for the results of your research into VPNs? The free proxy I use to look at furry porn is banned from all respectable places like YouTube, and the more reputable VPN I used to have seems to be blocked on the country level.

I rented a VPS and set up my own VPN. Actually, they had a VPN server template that I used.

The only websites that aren't happy with it are imgur and redgifs and even they, I think, are triggered by something in my VPN setup and not its IP. I should try curling them from the host.

I see. Something that I too had once upon a time, at the beginning of the crackdown those years ago. But now I'd need to gather strength to look into the eyes of the easiest conduit of transborder payments for me after having let him down, though.

This VPN protocol is also both an assurance of access to information for the technically knowledgeable, and an anxiety about the way that access can be decisively closed. Make every SSL/TLS connection mandatorily registered with RKN at one of the two ends, and it's game over. Banking, commerce, WFH, they go on, unsanctioned activities not so much.

Gah, I went back to work today and realized everything was broken. I should've realized this yesterday. I did a bunch of hysteric changes to get Checkpoint VPN to work in my work VM, but now everything else is slow and I don't know what caused this:

  • I set up a new Hyper-V external switch to the wifi adapter because I did something to the default switch by mistake
  • I went back to redirects from tproxy

Now my plan for the evening is unfucking my setup. I have a suspicion that going back to redirects fixes the issue I had with exhausting the limit of open file handles on the router. If I go back to tproxy I'll have to solve this problem as well, but I have no idea where to start, lsof reports that no files are open.

Over the long holiday break (I had to burn a lot of PTO before the end of the year or lose it), I got mostly done with designing and building a video game arcade cabinet. I've built some stuff before, a long built-in window seat for my Florida room. But this felt like really jumping into the deep end because so much of this isn't square -- on purpose. I've learned a lot about both designing furniture and woodworking in general.

It felt cool using some of the tools I've acquired over the years in anger. The biggest enabler of this journey was the Shaper Origin, which is a hand-held CNC. Second was the new table saw I got last year.

https://imgur.com/M03FtuI https://imgur.com/Sz8Xqqd

I'm at the point where the only parts that are left are:

  • Install the screen. Not pictured, but I have a mount for the monitor. It'll live on the cleats that are on the inside.
  • Make and install the keyboard/mouse drawer. Of course I decided to walk the harder way by specing a push-to-open undermount drawer slide.
  • Wire everything up and test. Central to this is a MiSTer FPGA that I already have.
  • Install the back of the cabinet.
  • Finish the cabinet and install the T-molding into the slots that I already routed.

I'm really hoping to get through all except finishing it over the weekend. The only part that really worries me is the drawer since that seems a bit annoying -- mostly because I've not done it before.

(and yes, the control panel was recut because it wasn't square; you can see a few mm gap in the front... since I had the bad one, I decided to install some controls to see how it'll feel.)

Well, the holiday season has been distinctly tinker-free for me (well I suppose I did make a new batch of beer after a long break, but nothing new programming-wise).

How have you been doing @Southkraut?

Trundled along with the tutorials. Nothing really interesting so far; got basic first-person controls set up and picked up some odds and ends about Unreal on the way.

I've also switched to the JetBrains Rider IDE instead of Visual Studio, since it came heavily recommended by the tutorials and also went free for non-commercial use very recently. I've tried it in the past, but it didn't leave an impression back then. Presently it seems perfectly adequate. Additionally I have had the idea that I could avoid having to look at seprate .h and .cpp files by simply hiding the .cpp ones, but sadly Rider does not actually offer this functionality.

Other than that, did a lot of worldbuilding writing. Mostly just rehashing older stuff of mine from memory. It'll be a fun exercise to compare what I wrote back when and how I wrote it now and how much my writing abilities have degraded since. I'd guess the new stuff is better structured, but the older one probably contains many more actually interesting ideas. But so far I haven't opened up my archives, so I'll facepalm another day.

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