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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Since there's a dedicated place on this site to share progress on projects, I figured I may as well post updates here, to help keep myself accountable and to get more comfortable being a non-lurker.
The asset tracker we use at my work (Asset Tiger) is really bad if you want a thorough, trustworthy count of the devices in our school building, especially if you want it done fast. District, in their infinite wisdom, has decided that one person can count every one of 1000+ devices, check what state they're in, do a once-over on the camera system, check all the printers, and about a dozen smaller odds and ends that don't merit mentioning here, all over the course of a single week. They want us to schedule a week sometime in June (meaning, after the school year ends) to get all this done.
I've done a full device count before: it was incredibly difficult and took about three months, because the tooling sucks. However, I've recently learned to use the browser dev tools baked into all the modern browsers, and I've discovered that I can mimic the POST and GET calls the site sends to Asset Tiger's servers. This means that if I wanted to I could make a custom tool that has all the features and does all the checks I would want an audit tool to do.
Well, I wanted to, so I've been doing it.
So far it's just HTML and CSS, but working on the project has already taught me a ton (in fact, the things I learned helped me get my personal site across the finish line over the past week or so), and I'm expecting to have it done in time to share the tool with my fellow campus-level techs.
The attached picture is what I've got so far. All the buttons are interactable but at the moment they don't do anything, the table is scrollable and handles any number of entries beautifully, and damnit I think the thing just looks nice.
Next steps are to make the modals. There will be five in total, being:
After that I can put together my scripts to translate Asset Tiger's get/post calls into my own data, and vice versa, and then I can plug everything into everything else. Hopefully the chaos of the school year's closing doesn't prevent me from having the time to do this (though I suspect that might be the case, in which case I already have GitLab set up and have already tested working on this at home).
/images/1779455880578106.webp
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Per @ToaKraka's suggestion, I've built a fairly snazzy-looking map in QGIS. What I'd now like to do is export it to HTML so that senior management can peruse it at their leisure without having to install QGIS. When you open the link, it should show you a map of my country broken down into counties, with scale-based rendering applied so that, when you zoom in, the county boundaries disappear and are replaced with electoral boundaries. Clicking on any electoral district should produce a pop-up listing key metrics (population, population density, average age etc.). There should also be several layers that you can toggle on and off visually representing e.g. average age by electoral district.
Someone is bound to suggest exporting to qgis2web. I have tried this, and while it works perfectly when zoomed all the way in, panning and zooming are unforgivably slow when zoomed out to the national level. ChatGPT and Gemini have suggested several ways to improve performance (dramatically simplifying my vector layers, exporting to vector tiles, customising the JavaScript produced by qgis2web), with limited success. One or the other also suggested exporting to raster tiles, and in fairness the panning and zooming are as smooth and fast as I'd like. On the other hand, the export files are half a gigabyte, and that's only including 2 of my desired 11 layers. This seems preposterously large for a 2-dimensional map of a small island.
Anyone with any experience in GIS have any resources on how to produce a lightweight, high-performance webmap, ideally for someone with limited coding experience?
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Trying to brainstorm out an RP2350-based educational robot brain. I don't really want to like the chip, both because it's stupidly overkill except for the multi-UART environment I'm increasingly thinking is unavoidable, because the RaspPi foundation's got my hackles up, and because the 'recovery mode as USB drive' is the sort of thing that sounds great to engineers and makes any IT person wonder what the fuck they were smoking, but the PIO blocks are just so damned convenient... if they work.
I'd love to go with an STM32 part instead, if only for the much stronger recovery environment, but even if they make a cheap, small, 6+ UART hardware, good fucking luck finding it from their website. And it's pretty well outside of their wheelhouse, or the wheelhouses of anybody selling to peons in the <1k purchase range.
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Claude lied to me! So here I was trying to optimize the bullet simulation. To do that I have to create a similar spatial index that I made for the bugs. That one is kept in a series of buffers, which in glsl work kind of like C structs. Now wanting to recreate 3-4 of those I was wondering if there's a way to somehow keep the bullet data in the same buffer as the bugs, but have the data well organized. Since the bug-data is an arbitrary length array that gets tricky, I can't have two of those in the same buffer... but I could do that if one of them is fixed length. Then I find out the glsl also has "constants" that you can set from the cpu-side, and that I can use them to define array lengths. Like I said, lies.
It sort of worked but the program was using the constant's default value, not the one set from the CPU. A series of bugs ensued that weren't entirely obvious to troubleshoot. When I finally got to the bottom of it, it turned out I'm back at square one. Next step: do the same thing again, but with actual compile-time constants.
How have you been doing @Southkraut?
Thanks for asking. No progress this week; busy with parenting and work.
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No progress from last week. This is my promise to get to and finish the big <censored> scene by the next TT thread.
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