TL;DR: Kicked off a new habit: jotting down bits and bobs throughout the week, then turning it into a blog post. Played with Meshtastic, roasted some coffee, fixed (and broke) Fossilizer, and started messing with garden irrigation. Just trying to get stuff out of my head and onto the web again.

It's weird to start a new thing, abruptly and out of the blue. But, sometimes that's the only way to start.

So, here's my latest attempt at a blog post with notes from throughout the week. Just an accumulation of miscellanea. Some of it won't be much more than a single bullet point or a rehash of a toot. But, maybe some of it will develop into more interesting things if I can clear the bar to get stuff out of my head and onto the web again.

The process here is starting very ad-hoc: This is a document in my Obsidian vault that I'm adding to throughout the week. I have a vague notion that, on Friday, I'll manually copy it over to my blog repository and give it a little polish before publishing. I have vague hopes that, if I keep up with this, I'll further automate and improve things. Pave the cow paths as I discover them.

But, the main thing is that I just start and that I do this somewhere convenient. So, that means Obsidian, since that's where I keep all my personal notes & todo items these days.

Miscellanea

Wayback me

I found a goofy old photo of myself from a past blog snapshot on the wayback machine! Then Maggie McFee photoshopped me into greater silliness

Roasting coffee

I've been roasting coffee at home, off and on for years now. I roasted some more last weekend.

It started as a kind of ADHD enthusiasm hobby about 15 years ago. I read a dozen books, fell down the rabbit hole of forums and docs online. My first few dozen batches were carefully logged. I tried filling my head with details of varietals and roasting profiles. This was serious scientific business! Until I got bored of that, at which point I stopped being careful.

These days, I mostly just wing it and push the buttons on the Behmor toaster oven. I hang out and watch to make sure nothing catches on fire. I listen for the cracks and sniff the air to decide when to end the roast.

It takes about 20 minutes, all told, and the coffee ends up plenty good enough for a week of daily drinking. And, given the current era of tariff madness, green coffee beans end up a little cheaper and have a relatively long shelf life that make them worth buying in bulk and hoarding in the basement pantry.

Playing with Meshtastic

I've been hearing a bunch more lately about the Meshtastic mesh networking project across TikTok, YouTube, and the Fediverse.

Did a quick bit of looking around and discovered it was super cheap to dive in, so I made an impulse purchase of a couple Heltec V3 boards. Flashed the firmware and plonked a node onto my desk in my upstairs office. After a few minutes, the thing had found over 180 other nodes in the mesh around town.

I repurposed the factory box into a case with a few snips of the plastic. That was good enough to stash the rig into one of the saddle bags on my bike and go take a ride around town. Wasn't really sure what I'd see happen with the thing, but it did pick up another dozen or so new nodes.

The USB power bank is rather bulky. But, it turns out the board has a connector for battery. So, I ordered some LiPo batteries! Now, it no longer fits in the makeshift case.

So, I started looking through 3D printable case models that fit my Heltec V3 board and hopefully this 3000mAh battery. Most of them were designed for a smaller battery, but I found a model that was big enough.

Seeing that this case model fits my hardware, I decided to bust out some fancier filament and print some snazzier versions.

I still don't really know what to do with this thing. Maybe screw around with the APIs and build a bot? Maybe a thing that responds to pings with cat facts? I dunno. Maybe I can make a few friends?

Anyway, that's a week. I think I like this format. Started off with random notes in Obsidian on Monday, then added a little polish and a few new web components on Friday. Hoping I can keep it up and improve over time. Going to take it week by week, but it would be nice if this stuck as a habit.