Is anyone else familiar with the feeling when something fun becomes work?
Like when your favorite game gets an update with loot boxes (apologies; surprise mechanics) and grind. Or a quick task that will knock an item off a list and give you some motivation and momentum that turns into a rabbit hole of chores (Malcolm in the Middle was a GREAT show).
So has turned this fun adventure with the bme680 environmental sensor into a bottomless pit of miniature “ok, to make that work, I first need to completely reverse engineer this thing” soul-sucking jobs. Don’t misunderstand me; I love a challenge! But this whole thing was started to learn new things, not to become an expert in the field on this one thing. I have done enough academic research in my time to know how to pick these kinds of battle wisely.
I have countless ideas (that can be revisited later). From decompiling the library (not the first time) and reverse engineering the algorithm to simulating all possible variations of temp/press/hum/gas parameters and creating an ML model to learn its secrets (also not the first time).
But right now, I need a break from the “break” and to do some new fun things.
For example, how is it like updating the 9front install? While in the “sensor hole”, there was apparently a new release of 9front. The answer: suprisingly easy! Well, it’s easy compared to projects like LFS or archlinux.
Yes, you have to compile it yourself and copy the kernel manually, but the update process is really smooth. And it came with quite a few improvements.
The system doesn’t just feel faster; it actually is faster:
Let’s throw in some CSS tweaks as well, and the site is fun to work on again.
While we’re updating everything, how about some hardware updates?
Let’s add a homemade I2C bus break board for the Raspberry Pi with the worst soldering ever:
Since I discovered that pictures add a certain flair to these posts, a thermal check how the previous Raspberry Pi overclocking is holding up:
And to continue the update streak, why not finally figure out how to resize the hjfs partition.
It actually worked:
All of this got me interested in what else in the plan9 / 9front world got updated. If nothing else, I see the new drawterm now has a window bar under Wayland. It’s amazing that this part of the computing world is still kicking so much. Brings back some motivation for my own projects.
And we’re back on track.