JustEnoughDucks

Hello,

I am making an open source privacy-first fitness band for myself and I am writing the firmware now as someone relatively inexperienced at firmware development (I am an electronics engineer by trade). I get it done but sometimes I run into concept issues, especially when I start overthinking, like now that I need help with.

I have a macronix SPI NOR flash on-board that I want to use as offline activity saving, backup at low battery, etc... I am dreaming up the data structure for it. Here is the values I need to save to not lose information and what will be required for my supported features in the Bluetooth Physical Activity Monitor Service:

struct memory_map_nor {
    time_t timestamp;
    uint16_t sub_sess_id;
    uint32_t steps: 24;
    uint8_t bpm;
    float16_t spo2;
    uint16_t pulse_inter_beat_interval;
    uint16_t cadence;
    uint16_t speed;
    uint16_t activity_level;
    uint16_t activity_type;
    uint16_t temp;
};

So from this datastructure, it has a total of 28 bytes of data. This has to fit on a 256 byte page, which means 9 "rows" of data can be written per page, 144 per sector, 2304 per 64 bit block, and 147456 in total for a 32Mbit NOR.

But, I am getting confused while reading about memory structures in "normal" processors that need to read everything in 4/8-byte words via the parallel interfaces. This means that conventionally, everything has to be padded to neat structures that are divisible by 4 (32-bit) for QSPI reading. In that case, I would either have to add another 32 bits of data or pad 32 bits to every "row", making a neat 8 data "rows" per page.

OR, because I am only using single lane SPI, would this not matter and I could shove an extra datapoint in each page. The difference is 147456 data rows vs 131072 data rows. At 3s polling rate, that is 5.12 days vs 4.55 days. For my application, the difference might be useless anyway, but the band goal battery life is 2 weeks or so.

Again, maybe I am overthinking this and can just pad the data to make everything neat and fit well. Anyone have any opinions? Thanks!

I have been getting beaten down between 24/7 job uncertainty with the bad engineering market right now, a full-strip house renovation, and not sleeping well.

Yesterday renovation with my girlfriend's family I hit a breakpoint of just going numb after the 3-4 hours of work I put into building the bath frame has to be shortened by 2cm to get the tiles flat that I wrongly calculated because my brain doesn't work anymore. Like 50% of the work has to be redone and half of the holes through the tiles carefully redrilled.

Today I actually took a day off just working on my personal electronics project. Just a nice, sunny day playing with our dog, doing a bit of gardening and actually enjoying the day instead of just going and going renovating or working or going to social events. I really needed it. Back to the grind tomorrow.

Glass canning jars are absolutely ridiculous here in Belgium. I garden and I am going to scale up my gardening next year, so I need to get into canning and preserving again.

If you live in the US, you could get a 12 pack of standard mason jars in a store for https://www.target.com/p/ball-16oz-12pk-glass-regular-mouth-mason-jar-with-lid-and-band/-/A-12794405 under $15.

Here, any sort of glass jar is no cheaper than 20€ for 6 online and in stores it is often 5-10€ per jar, depending on size!! That is 300% more expensive on the cheap end here. It is not super sustainable to have to spend 200 euros on glass jars to can your extra fruit and vegetables.

Is there a secret to finding reasonably-priced glass canning jars that some people have found? I would reuse glass jars that I get from the store, but you are not supposed to reuse the lids because they degrade and will let in harmful bacteria and let things oxidize.

My girlfriend bought a cafe and they had a cast iron waffle iron that had, in some places, 5mm of grime built up over 2 years, never once been cleaned. Even the hinges were full of old crusted on batter and grease.

I spent hours with a grill scraper scraping every individual pin.

I have gotten to or past the seasoning in many places except in between all of the pins is hell to try to scrape the old baked on grease away. I have tried sodium carbonate soaks, a wire brush and a wire brush on a drill, a few different scraping tools, and I have only gotten about half out of those grooves. Miles better than before, but still not perfect enough to season and put back in the cafe.

What a boring and terrible time.

I was sick with influenza for 14 days, longest sickness of my life. I just recovered to go back to work yesterday. Migraines every day and temperature ping-ponging between 35.3 and 38.1. I couldn't focus at work and also couldn't work on any home projects. For some of the worst days I just had to be a vegetable in front of the TV or in bed.

My body still isn't back to 100% yet and I still wake up covered in sweat multiple times per night.

Hey everyone,

I am completely stripping my house and am currently thinking about how to set up the home network.

This is my usecase:

• home server that can access the internet + homeassistant that can access IoT devices

• KNX that I want to have access to home assistant and vice versa

• IoT devices over WiFi (maybe thread in the future) that are the vast majority homemade via ESPHome. I want them to be able to access the server and the other way around. (Sending data updates and in the future, sending voice commands)

• 3 PoE cameras through a PoE 4 port switch

• a Chromecast & nintendo switch that need internet access

Every router worth anything already has a guest network, so I don't see much value in separating out a VLAN in a home use case.

My IoT devices work locally, not through the cloud. I want them to work functionally flawless with Home assistant, especially anything on battery so it doesn't kill its battery retrying until home assistant polls.

The PoE cameras can easily have their internet access blocked on most routers via parental controls or similar and I want them to be able to send data to the on-server NVR

I already have PiHole blocking most phone homes from the chromecast or guest devices.

So far it seems like a VLAN is not too useful for me because I would want bidirectional access to the server which in turn should have access from the LAN and WiFi. And vice versa.

Maybe I am not thinking of the access control capability of VLANs correctly (I am thinking in terms of port based iptables: port X has only incoming+established and no outgoing for example).

I figure if my network is already penetrated, it would most likely be via the WiFi or internet so the attack vector seems to not protect from much in my specific use case.

Am I completely wrong on this?

I got immich with SSO up and running. It runs like a dream compared to Photoprism and is simple enough for me, but also has necessary features like user accounts.

There is one thing I couldn't find in the docs:

I already have a library of 5000 photos and 150 videos on my server that sync to my phone with Syncthing to 4 different directories (one for each phone I took the photos on) in Immich. Right now I have that directory as an external library, but I don't think this is the "right way."

My goal:

• No duplicates between phone app and desktop app
• Don't have to re-upload every image from my phone as my network is 100/30 mbps
• Am able to manage my photos from the Immich app and web app (deleting photos that will propagate between devices)

Can I just map the "Upload" folder to that syncthing photo base folder and get parity between my phone and my server? Or do I have to re-upload everything from my phone? Or am I waiting for a feature that doesn't quite exist yet? I noticed some feature discussions about photo hashing and de-duplication.

I tried asking in a discussion on the repo, but nobody answers those much.

For the past few months or so, steam precaching has been out of control. I have to download between 10 and 30 GB of shader precache data per day. That is extremely ridiculous. Steam's shader caches are quite often almost as large as the game itself. For example: the image here is a game that is ~7GB for the full game, downloading 10GB of shader precache. If I download an average of 30GB of shaders per day, then that is almost 1TB of data downloaded written per month just in shaders...

Not to mention that games I play regularly like CS2 get a precache update literally every 2 days that is 5-10GB and if I manage to cancel it, there is 0 difference in performance at all.

Also fossilize replay that takes 20%-50% CPU load, sometimes for an hour and is the single highest user of disk IO on my entire system. I would be concerned about SSD wear if it was during the early times of ssd just because of the massive amount of writes.

I'm all for downloading shader precaching, but at normal intervals of after updates, not just randomly every few days when there hasn't been a game update in months or years. I don't want to delete all of my games because I only have 100/30 internet, so it would take me a long time too redownload games.

Has anyone else been seeing these ridiculous intervals and datasets of shader cache? Could there at least be a selective pre-caching setting only for games that I play regularly so I am not caching shaders for games that I haven't played in 2 years?

Hey guys, I have been looking at building a home gym (possibly outdoors) in my new house we are renovating.

I want to get back into lifting as it has been about 4 years since I did it seriously.

I was looking at bars and the market here is ridiculout it seems. I can't find a single stainless steel bar for under 475€($520). The Ohio bar is one of the cheaper ones at 550€ instead of $370. Of course I get why it is more expensive for an import bar, but I literally can't find any bar here non-imported that says that it is stainless steel that isn't calibrated and insanely expensive (550€+)

The difference here betweeen cerakote and stainless is even greater (>100€ in some cases).

I was hoping to just get a second hand rack, some basics weights, and a barbell for around 1000€ or so, but it looks like I would have to spend at least 2000€ to get any kind of setup. Cage here are 850€ or so on the lower end just by themselves.

I am looking at strengthshop.eu, roguefitness.eu, fitness-seller.nl, but I don't really know what are the best bang for your buck options.

It looks like one of those sites has a 340€ stainless steel ATX bar, but I don't know if that is a reliable brand.

Anyone in the EU with any advice?

Hey lemmings,

I have a headless server that works beautifully. B450 with 2700X and 32GB of micron 3200MHz RAM.

I am currently running Debian 12 Bookworm on it. I am at kernel 6.1, but in preparation for 6.2 or 6.3 being backlogged, I want to buy an Arc A380 for transcoding since they are only 150€ here. Software was fine for a single video stream, but I bought a new house and will have 4 camera streams running. Plus I want to dabble in AV1 transcoding for media or storage of my camera streams

Currently there is neither X nor Wayland installed since it is exclusively with SSH that I do all of my work on it. After I install the GPU, I was wondering if it is possible to not even install X or Wayland since I will literally never use a display on it?

Would I still be able to do Jellyfin and Frigate transcoding without an X server? If I have to get one, does it matter if I choose X or Wayland for hardware transcoding?

Thanks!