paloma's journal

it's been an active day off work for me today.

i took out my compost this morning and when i opened the container, i saw that a bunch of seeds from some food i put in there had sprouted. they could be lemon seeds, or squash, or something else, but they seemed to be loving the moist, hot environment in there. i pulled a couple of them out and put them in some soil to see what they turn into.

yesterday i got some new speakers and spent way longer than expected getting them integrated into my setup. i am using them in a slightly weird way, because i have two different desks with 2 speakers on them each, and i also have a middle station with the modular synth, which i wanted to be able to monitor from as well by using the two inner speakers to create a third stereo pair. i was trying to use a passive matrix mixer for the routing, but it was unbalanced, which is a problem in my veritable hive of buzzing electronics.

but i have a motu audio interface with an internal matrix routing system! only, it's a little bit annoying to change the routing in the web browser UI that you have to use to control it. well, i ended up going down a slight rabbit hole because i sniffed the traffic from that web app and figured out what network requests to send directly to my interface, so now i can switch between several monitoring modes with a simple script that can be triggered from my home assistant instance. i made a quick shortcut to select between them, but since it's on home assistant i could set up a zigbee (low power radio controller) button or some other physical control, which would be nicer to use while working on music.

that wasn't the most difficult or important thing i did today, but it was the one that brought me the most joy. going from "i have no idea if this is going to work" to "hot damn, i have reverse engineered my audio interface's system controls" is the kind of thing that scratches an itch in my brain in the best way.

i also did other things! here are some of them:

• you wouldn't believe what a mess i made yesterday, but i cleaned it up
• i put sound damping blankets on the walls, it honestly looks weird but it sounds better
• tested out another video converter i got on ebay, yay it worked
• reorganized the bins on my storage shelves and labeled them all with the label maker
• set up another raspberry pi media player (the other one is for movies, this one is for music!) and integrated it with home assistant for controls
• came up with an idea for the next mystery object because i ran out of time for my original idea (will still do that one next time)

i still have the house to myself, so i've been a little chaotic, with no one around to reel in my shiny-object approach to projects. but my partner is on the last leg of their travels, so i'm looking forward to their return soon.

i am writing this post past midnight on a work night. oops, i stayed up late. oh well, i was working on some projects that i am excited about. mostly redoing my office/studio/computer setup. now there is a fun matrix mixing thing happening with 4 matching speakers, and there are two computer stations. why does one person need two computer stations? well, i use them for different things. it's complicated!

no photos of the new setup because, while all the major pieces are now in place, the surrounding area is covered with detritus and mess. i will finish / clean up tomorrow probably. what's the point of having the house to myself if i don't explode it a little?

another thing that happened today was that, while i was accompanying my boss to pick up a compost tumbler from an internet person, they had an extra one and sold it to me for really cheap. so now we can compost in our backyard! i've never been wild about incorporating large plastic containers into my composting process, but it has been correctly pointed out to me that in the urban area where i live, open piles are not an option. in any case, i will be happy to save all of my food scraps from the main trash, and to have some good nutrients for the foliage around my yard. (everything is basically half dead right now from the heat and dry weather, so it can use all the help it can get.)

i am back in my house in new haven. it feels great to be back in my own space. earlier today, i had tamales for lunch at the farmers' market with my family. then in the afternoon, i helped a family friend shoot video of a live performance with a percussionist on a metal sound sculpture. then i drove back home, and managed to make it back before it was fully dark. when i stopped by the grocery store near my house, there was a nice, dramatic, dusky sky to behold. i always see the best skies in strip malls for some reason.

i think i got some watery gas the other week, and was hoping that my little road trip would burn through the bad stuff in my tank, but i'm still hearing some engine pinging when i put my foot on the gas pedal at certain speeds. i might have to look into more things to try this week if it keeps up.

tomorrow, i'm back to work, with a busy week ahead. even being away for one weekend makes me feel like there is so much i want to do but so little time. i'm glad to not have any plans for the next one.

i am upstate visiting my family. i drove up here yesterday evening after spending most of the day doing various house related projects.

today, i got to spend a fun afternoon with my younger sibling. we walked into town and visited the cafe where their partner works. i also brought broom corn and we crafted some hand brooms together. now i'm watching a nature documentary with my parents.

this evening after work we biked downtown and went to a szechuan restaurant called "taste of china." we had assumed it was not authentic due to the english name but someone recommended it so we checked it out. turns out it was indeed pretty delicious! we got a lot of food and we have lots of leftovers now. i have a headlight on my bike now so that helped me today because we biked back in the dark.

i also worked a bit more on the kobo dashboard. it looks way better now and i even have custom fonts set up. i want to make a nice background drawing for both the day and night modes and then i will take another picture of it.

for now, here's a photo of the brutalist hotel in the ikea parking lot from sunday.

it's been a nice weekend, despite getting mild food poisoning (?) that kept me up with stomach cramps and nausea the other night. even though i didn't get much sleep on friday night because of that, i still managed to muster enough energy to join andrei on a local bike trail that runs for many miles north along an old canal. the weather was perfect for biking, yet the path wasn't crowded at all.

today, we met up with a new friend to explore the strange waterfront area of new haven, from a massive brutalist hotel in the parking lot of an ikea, to a stale, semi-defunct gambling arena among looming oil storage tanks, to a seagull-ridden pier between the highway and the industrial port that hosts a long line of latin american food trucks.

after the explorations, i could not resist a stop at ikea to gather some storage containers and other home goods. i have kind of down a rabbit hole of working on improvements around our apartment for the past few weeks, from the raspberry pi movie watching and speaker setups in the living room, to the new countertop, and the kobo "dashboard" and home assistant stuff, which i worked on more this weekend, and now coming up, to revamp my office a bit and maybe build another wooden shelf with the remaining plywood i have left over. i'm not sure when it will all be "done" but i've been enjoying it. it's nice to have a home that i like enough and, though it's not permanent, feels long-term enough that it's worth investing effort into making it nicer and work well.

i took a bunch of photos from the wharf and such today, but i haven't had a chance to look through them yet, and now we're about to watch a movie. perhaps i will follow up and post some of them on here another day soon.

it's been two days since i last wrote! yesterday at work was very chill because the people i work for were on a day trip to nyc. then afterwards i went to the gym even though i hadn't even planned to. and i ran a mile in 12:15.

this morning i went to the doctor because i just got my connecticut health insurance and i haven't gotten a checkup since... 2018? i forgot to set an alarm and andrei woke me up literally when the appointment was supposed to start. luckily no one at the doctor's office cared that i was late and there was basically no one else there.

we biked to kit's to pick up some cucumbers because he had a surplus of them in the garden. i also worked on some random little things and generally enjoyed my day off. i wanted to try and fix something with the home assistant setup but it's still a work in progress due to VM configuration things i need to figure out. also, i am planning to change up my computer setup in my office/studio soon, so i did some research on external monitors and ordered one. my laptop, which is actually newer and more powerful, will become my main computer setup with an external monitor/docking station, and i will move my desktop off to a side station since it's now kind of becoming mostly a server.

anyway, we are currently watching jaws. i didn't realize this movie was set so close to where we live.

i guess i'm just writing a bit more inconsistently since my week of house-sitting. which honestly is fine. sometimes it feels good to just... accept and embrace mental scatteredness.

what's going on?

• on sunday we went to meet up with andrei's family for indian food and then we went to the thrift store.
• our upstairs neighbors moved out and sold us their washer dryer in the basement, so we can do laundry in our own home now. luxurious!
• i got into "home assistant" (the open source automation app) through doing the kobo python wall display project. i started running it on a VM on my desktop computer instead of a docker container for networking reasons. it seems to be working well and i was able to bridge a bunch of lighting controls to apple homekit, so that enjoyably scratched some "random tech project that improves my life slightly" itches.
• i also did some more automation stuff for the rhino/adobe file workflows at work. i can now do a bunch of things that would have taken an hour or so in just a few minutes.
• it was hot and humid and there were also hornets, so we haven't done much outside work.
• andrei and i watched a very incoherent detective dee movie last night and now we are watching once upon a time in china.
• i wanted to go to the gym yesterday but i was too drained from the heat so i went today instead. among other things, i ran a mile in 12.5 minutes. (previously i did it in like... 14?)
• i gave my plants a bath.

i continued working obsessively on the hacked kobo, and though i couldn't get ahold of all of the data i wanted to display, i eventually landed on a satisfying result for now. it shows the time, date, current weather conditions, and the next event on my calendar, as well as an illustration at the bottom, all of which should change to a theme with a black background after sundown. the sun is still up currently, so i guess we'll see if that worked!

i also mixed a new batch of the cocoa and spice blend that i've been mixing into my cold morning tea, and made some progress on sorting through my piles of cables and other debris around my office/studio. there is still one final pile of stuff to organize and put back, but at least it's contained. i set up just enough equipment to test out some new, expensive video converters i ordered from ebay. i had to return the two $40-$140 sdi<->component converters i bought, which is fine because i factored some trial and error into the process. ironically and unsurprisingly, the two $5 converters i bought as backup and backup-backup are working fine.

one more thing i did today was figure out a quicker and easier way to grab photos off of my nice camera. i am starting to feel the limits of my iphone camera lately, even with the "halide" app which lets me turn of the horrible default image processing, the sensor is still tiny compared to a real camera and things often look grainy. so hopefully with this new method, i'll be encouraged to pick up my sony a6000 more knowing i can almost-as-easily grab and edit the photos i take with it.

these days off in between house sitting and returning to work have been filled with rabbit holes. but that's not too surprising. since i know i won't have time to dive down them after tomorrow, my brain is seizing the opportunity.

anyway, i have to go do the dishes so we can watch the rest of this dumb bollywood movie.

it's been a few days since i last wrote. dog sitting was kind of fun but i was pretty tired and disoriented by the end of it, so it was a welcome relief to return to my own home and sleep for a full 9+ hours.

today was pretty hot, so i mostly stayed indoors. at the top of my to-do list was to sort through all of my stuff that was in disarray from the show last weekend and my hasty packing job from the house sitting, but instead of doing that i mostly actually played around with installing python on a disused e-reader to convert it to a little home dashboard. i wasn't able to finish the project today, but i made surprisingly decent progress considering i had to fix a bunch of things because i was using a different model of e-reader, and also i ended up spinning up home assistant to handle some back end stuff for the information i want to display. hopefully tomorrow i can get more things working and then convince my brain to move on to more practical matters at hand.

i also finished my book (the vorrh by brian catling). despite its strange start, i ended up enjoying it a lot and i now want to read the other two in the trilogy. but i'm holding back on starting any more books for the next couple days until i have more of my affairs in order.

we watched half of a really long, kind of idiotic bollywood action movie. sometimes i am very confused by andrei's taste in movies, but they are usually entertaining anyway, even if i'm just laughing at how stupid they are.

last night, i finally managed to get a good night's rest, despite the hyper puppy sitting situation. in between walks and playing with the small creature, i've been working on website and newsletter updates. i posted the full video of our performance on youtube and peertube, as well as a shorter highlights reel. hopefully today i can make a post for my blog and update my CV! lots of things to update.

also, later today andrei is coming over and we are going to visit a waterfall with the dog and then do some grilling over the fire pit.

i'm here at the house where i am puppy sitting for the week. the show on saturday went well, but we didn't get back until 2am that night, so i barely got an hour of sleep before i had to get up and head here to meet anoka and david as they left for the airport. i was able to take a few naps though, so i actually felt OK, if a bit dazed. the puppy seems to have adjusted well to the transition and i've been working on training him to walk on the leash without pulling.

i realized that i sort of forgot to promote the show at all from my end; normally i post the link somewhere at least, and invite people directly, but the location in upstate NY was a bit remote so i didn't really know who to invite or who would make the drive if they weren't already going for the rest of the show or upstate arts week; there were plenty of people around though since there was also an open studio and a sculpture exhibition on the same site (chashama north). i guess we did enough by just performing and supporting the other artists. also our friends were there, so we got to hang out, and it was a fun evening.

yesterday, during my first day of puppy sitting, i brought thor (the puppy) to a park in new haven and met up with andrei, his sister, her two kids, and andrei's mom and aunt. the park was full of activity and children, so thor was a little nervous, but he behaved well and patiently tolerated the clumsy physical affection of ozzy the four-year-old human.

i've had a string of video converter deaths over the past few months. the first two that died were expensive blackmagic branded devices, which are supposed to be "industry grade." my fallback was a $5 cheapo hdmi to RCA converter, which i could get away with using because i was only using a black and white version of the input, so color depth wasn't a big concern. but then, yesterday, after using it for a few hours in practice and then power cycling it, that one died too! it was awkward timing because this time, i didn't have a backup converter, so i had to rethink my setup with the show coming up the next day. i decided to simplify my setup and remove the laptop from it completely (since that was the HDMI source i needed to convert), and instead do live camera feedback and use artificial life (andrei's video oscillator device), both going into my modular. despite the hiccup, i'm quite ok with the resulting output; i haven't done live camera feedback in a while, and i actually feel a bit safer to not be using my laptop for an outdoor show. it's also a similar setup to ones i used to use before i started incorporating the laptop, so i still have muscle memory for performing with it.

anyway, it's time to get ready to pack up. we are taking the van since we need to bring the PA and projector screen. hope it's a fun show and that we can get back at a reasonable hour because i have to be up ridiculously early tomorrow to start puppy sitting.

the day started out overcast and a little cooler, so we got to do some work on the shed before lunch. now it has a floor, and we ordered some lumber racks so it will be ready for material storage soon! i also did more computer work, this time it was a bit more rote since i already set up all the automations i could figure out how to do. any further adjustments to the process will likely be on the rhino/grasshopper side, which i'm not fully ready to delve into yet (but maybe soon!)

we are playing a show on saturday and i need to do some prep, but i'm leaving it for tomorrow. i've had an active week and could use a little down time (and an opportunity to read a bit finally).

i keep thinking about how i want to read my book, but the day is too full to let me sit still for long. that's the sign i'm "into" the book now though (i'm usually "into" one thing at a time — a book, a series, a game, or a project, etc. — something i think about a lot and look forward to getting back to whenever i'm not doing it).

at work, i figured out how to automate something in adobe illustrator which was rather tricky. in fact, i'm not even totally sure how i got it to work, but i'm not going to question it. i was able to speed up making the mockup graphics for the paintings by at least 20x (i should have benchmarked it for exact numbers).

i worked the front desk at the yoga studio and took the class. it was a particularly nice class, with a strong but achievable level of challenge. the only down side was i was very hungry and i did not pack enough food for the day. (this was offset somewhat by anoka giving me ice cream at work!)

i had a much needed dinner when i got home and then, ironically, worked on more workflow automation stuff for andrei's business. basically, i made it so that when someone buys their software, it generates and emails the customer a registration key. this involved wrangling shopify's API limitations, translating andrei's bespoke hashing algorithm from C++ to TypeScript (i was told that it is Very Important to capitalize TypeScript properly), and bridging some quirky serverless runtime environments. but, looks like it is all done now!

but yeah, that took up a bunch of time, and now it's bedtime. good night!