Kyle Rankin @kyle@librem.one

I wrote a blog post about the dangers of focusing too much on hardware specs to predict performance when choosing hardware. In my experience many other factors (such as the software the hardware will run) have much more of an impact. Focusing on specs alone incentivizes bad practices like planned obsolescence and disposable hardware.

https://puri.sm/posts/the-danger-of-focusing-on-specs/

I knitted a shawl! Well, the flatbed knitting machine did a lot of the work, but I helped. This was the second attempt as I ran out of yarn halfway through for the first attempt and the local yarn store only had the single skein. I ended up selecting a different yarn for this attempt.

#knitting #machineknitting

All the functional pieces of my hackaday-inspired knitting clock are in place:

* Working circular knitting machine
* Spare Raspberry Pi I had lying around
* Adafruit motor control hat
* Spare stepper motor from a broken 3D printer
* Software to control the stepper motor

The next and more challenging step is to figure out the best way to attach the motor to the knitting machine and build an attractive case to mount everything.

#knitting #electronics #rpi #raspberrypi

I rotate through my set of favorite razors whenever it's time to change the blade. The Gilette Fat Boy and Slim (far left in picture) are great razors, as is the red tip (3rd from left). Yet each time I rotate to the Stahly Live Blade (center of picture) I'm surprised and impressed again at how well it shaves.

I don't know if it's the fact that it vibrates, or the design of the head, but with a new sharp blade it beats everything else in my collection. Underrated razor.

#shaving

My Purism GPG key expired today so I updated the expiry and published the key to keys.openpgp.org (the link is in my profile).

In my case I normally use subkeys stored on smart cards, and keep my private keys offline and stored in a safe place on a pair of thumb drives for redundancy, so updating the expiry is a bit more involved than it might be for most people.

#gpg #pgp

The best way to get over the fear of messing up something you have handwoven is to put it to use right away!

#weaving

I finished weaving my pair of doubleweave overshot hand towels! I'm really happy with how these turned out.

In these pictures you can see how the colors invert on the opposite side of the towel. On one towel I experimented with inverting the colors for the stripe and I think it does add an extra dimension and visual interest to it, but I'm also curious which of the two you prefer. I also subtly modified the pattern on that one so the pattern around the stripe was symmetrical.

#weaving

Another batch of vintage Knitking magazines arrived! This is an even larger batch than the last one from the late 80s and early 90s, and spans the years 1972 through 1978. I have the full year's worth of issues in some cases in this batch.

My wife reviewed the last batch and while she found many of the pictures amusing, she didn't want me to try to make any of them. We'll see whether this batch from the `70s does any better!

#knitting #machineknitting #vintage

After seeing this @hackaday post about a knitting clock, I've decided to try to make one of my own. It will be my first electronics project with stepper motors so I imagine there will be quite a bit to learn.

https://hackaday.com/2023/01/23/knitting-clock-makes-you-a-scarf-for-next-year/

#knitting #hackaday

For the second fancy hand towel, I'm experimenting with inverting the colors for the stripe section. I like the effect but now I'm wondering whether it would be even better to invert the colors for the borders around the stripe as well. The problem is, now that I've committed to this, I can't really try that idea out on the other half of this towel without making it asymmetrical.

#weaving

I finished weaving the first in a pair of fancy hand towels. From this angle you can see how the doubleweave overshot technique makes the pattern reversible--the opposite side of the fabric has the same pattern but the colors are inverted. I also somehow leveled up on my selvedges partway through this towel.

These are for us to use and don't have to be a matching pair, so I'm going to experiment with a different stripe pattern for the second one.

#weaving

I finally started weaving the next in my series of fancy-so-you-feel-guilty-using-them household items: fancy cotton hand towels!

This project is an excuse to try doubleweave for the first time. In this case I'm doing a doubleweave overshot technique which results in a dense, thick fabric without the long floats overshot usually has.

#weaving

When I finished threading my warp, I discovered I had some unexpected threads left over. Oops. So when I sleyed the reed, I painstakingly double-checked every threading and caught a few mistakes.

In one case I had to insert temporary heddles, and halfway through I found I threaded a pattern twice in a row, so I had to shift the remaining 200+ threads, a pair of heddles at a time. After 13 hours total to measure warp and dress the loom, I'm now ready to weave.

#weaving

The biggest piece of advice I'd give to colleagues who are devs, is to figure out what you will do when software dev work moves from many opportunities writing code at a large number of companies to fewer jobs managing automated systems that write code.

Sysadmin/neteng careers made that transition w/ cloud over the past decade, the remaining major cost for tech-heavy orgs are devs, which is why the industry focus is on reducing that head count with automation. Tech is not there yet, but coming.

If you were laid off recently, especially if you are taking it personally, I recommend reading The End of Loyalty. It covers the shift over the 20th century from companies providing lifelong employment (retirement watch, pension, etc) to mass layoffs at the drop of a hint.

Take home message is that the future promises not only little job security, but less *career* security. Have to be prepared to retrain/retool, and possibly even change careers multiple times during your working years.

Final update: The power came back on a bit after 5pm.

This was a good exercise to see what worked and needs improvement for an extended outage (like in a major earthquake). In summary, if I want to use solar to help charge batteries, I will likely need larger (probably permanent) panels. An additional, larger battery pack would help too.

Update 2: Power is still out. The solar panel was not providing enough energy so the battery bank ended up slowly draining. I had to fire up a portable 700W propane generator I normally keep in the camper van to charge it back up. With all that, my home server/router has stayed up the whole time.

After it was clear the outage was going to be longer than a few hours, I plugged my fridge into the larger battery bank I've been using inside to charge devices. It still has plenty of charge to go.

Update: power is still out, supposed to return this evening. The power bank was at 20% with a bit over an hour to go, but instead of firing up a small generator to charge it, I decided to try my portable solar panel setup I use when camping.

It is supplying enough power to the battery bank that there is a small surplus, so I should be able to keep the equipment running for a few more hours without resorting to a generator.