Valhalla's Things

A few ago I may have accidentally bought a ring of 12 RGB LEDs; I soldered temporary leads on it, connected it to a CircuitPython supported board and played around for a while.

They we had a couple of friends come over to remote FOSDEM together, and I had talked with one of them about WS2812 / NeoPixels, so I brought them to the living room, in case there was a chance to show them in sort-of-use.

Then I was dealing with playing the various streams as we moved from one room to the next, which lead to me being called “video team”, which lead to me wearing a video team shirt (from an old DebConf, not FOSDEM, but still video team), which lead to somebody asking me whether I also had the sheet with the countdown to the end of the talk, and the answer was sort-of-yes (I should have the ones we used to use for our Linux Day), but not handy.

But I had a thing with twelve things in a clock-like circle.

A bit of fiddling on the CircuitPython REPL resulted, if I remember correctly, in something like:

import board
import neopixel
import time

num_pixels = 12

pixels = neopixel.NeoPixel(board.GP0, num_pixels)
pixels.brightness = 0.1

def end(min):
    pixels.fill((0, 0, 0))
    for i in range(12):
        pixels[i] = (127 + 10 * i, 8 * (12 - i), 0)
        pixels[i-1] = (0, 0, 0)
        time.sleep(min * 5)  # min * 60 / 12

Now, I wasn’t very consistent in running end, especially since I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to run it at the beginning of the talk with the full duration or just in the last 5 - 10 minutes depending of the length of the slot, but I’ve had at least one person agree that the general idea has potential, so I’m taking these notes to be able to work on it in the future.

One thing that needs to be fixed is the fact that with the ring just attached with temporary wires and left on the table it isn’t clear which LED is number 0, so it will need a bit of a case or something, but that’s something that can be dealt with before the next fosdem.

And I should probably add some input interface, so that it is self-contained and not tethered to a computer and run from the REPL.

(And then I may also have a vague idea for putting that ring into some wearable thing: good thing that I actually bought two :D )

A few days ago¹ I wanted to paint, but I didn’t know what to paint, so I did a few more colour tests to find out which green combinations I can get out of the available yellows and blues (and greens) acrylic I have (from a cheap student grade line).

I liked the cool grey tones in the second to last line, from 200 “Naples yellow” (PY3 PY83 PW6) and 410 Ultramarine blue (PB29), so I went up a step on the scale of “things to do when having a desire to paint, but the utter inability to actually paint something ” and did a bit of a study with those two colours plus titanium white.

And btw, painting with acrylics on watercolour paper taped to a sheet of scrap paper works just fine for stuff like this that is not supposed to last, but the work will get glued to the paper below when (not if) the paint overflows :D

Some time ago I installed minidlna on our media server: it was pretty easy to do, but quite limited in its support for the formats I use most, so I ended up using other solutions such as mounting the directory with sshfs.

Now, doing that from a phone, even a pinephone running debian, may not be as convenient as doing it from the laptop where I already have my ssh key :D and I needed to listed to music from the pinephone.

So, in anger, I decided to configure a web server to serve the files.

I installed lighttpd because I already had a role for this kind of configuration in my ansible directory, and configured it to serve the relevant directory in /etc/lighttpd/conf-available/20-music.conf:

$HTTP["host"] =~ "music.example.org" {
    server.name          = "music.example.org"
    server.document-root = "/path/to/music"
}

the domain was already configured in my local dns (since everything is only available to the local network), and I enabled both 20-music.conf and 10-dir-listing.conf.

And. That’s it. It works. I can play my CD rips on a single flac exactly in the same way as I was used to (by ssh-ing to the media server and using alsaplayer).

Then this evening I was talking to normal people¹, and they mentioned that they wouldn’t mind being able to skip tracks and fancy things like those :D and I’ve found one possible improvement.

For the directories with the generated single-track ogg files I’ve added some playlists with the command ls *.ogg > playlist.m3u, then in the directory above I’ve run ls */*.m3u > playlist.m3u and that also works.

With vlc I can now open http://music.example.org/band/album/playlist.m3u to listen to an album that I have in ogg, being able to move between tracks, or I can open http://music.example.org/band/playlist.m3u and in the playlist view I can browse between the different albums.

Left as an exercise to the reader² are writing a bash script to generate all of the playlist.m3u files (and running it via some git hook when the files change) or writing a php script to generate them on the fly.

Update 2025-01-10: another reader³ wrote the php script and has authorized me to post it here.

<?php
define("MUSIC_FOLDER", __DIR__);
define("ID3v2", false);


function dd() {
    echo "<pre>"; call_user_func_array("var_dump", func_get_args());
    die();
}

function getinfo($file) {
    $cmd = 'id3info "' . MUSIC_FOLDER . "/" . $file . '"';
    exec($cmd, $output);
    $res = [];
    foreach($output as $line) {
    if (str_starts_with($line, "=== ")) {
        $key = explode(" ", $line)[1];
        $val = end(explode(": ", $line, 2));
        $res[$key] = $val;
    }
    }
    if (isset($res['TPE1']) || isset($res['TIT2']))
    echo "#EXTINF: , " . ($res['TPE1'] ?? "Unk") . " - " . ($res['TIT2'] ?? "Untl") . "\r\n";
    if (isset($res['TALB']))
    echo "#EXTALB: " . $res['TALB'] . "\r\n";
}


function pathencode($path, $name) {
    $path = urlencode($path);
    $path =  str_replace("%2F", "/", $path);
    $name = urlencode($name);
    if ($path != "") $path = "/" . $path;
    return $path . "/" . $name;
}

function serve_playlist($path) {
    echo "#EXTM3U";
    echo "# PATH: $path\n\r";
    foreach (glob(MUSIC_FOLDER . "/$path/*") as $filename) {
    $name = basename($filename);
    if (is_dir($filename)) {
        echo pathencode($path, $name) . ".m3u\r\n";
    }
    $t = explode(".", $filename);
    $ext = array_pop($t);
    if (in_array($ext, ["mp3", "ogg", "flac", "mp4", "m4a"])) {
        if (ID3v2) {
 	   getinfo($path . "/" . $name);
        } else {
 	   echo "#EXTINF: , " . $path . "/" . $name . "\r\n";
        }
        echo pathencode($path, $name) . "\r\n";
    }
    }
    die();
}



$path = $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];
$path = urldecode($path);
$path = trim($path, "/");

if (str_ends_with($path, ".m3u")) {
    $path = str_replace(".m3u", "", $path);

    serve_playlist($path);
}

$path = MUSIC_FOLDER . "/" . $path;
if (file_exists($path) && is_file($path)) {
    header('Content-Description: File Transfer');
    header('Content-Type: application/octet-stream');
    header('Expires: 0');
    header('Cache-Control: must-revalidate');
    header('Pragma: public');
    header('Content-Length: ' . filesize($path));
    readfile($path);
}

It’s php, so I assume no responsability for it :D

I have no idea either.

Happy Maladay¹ to those who celebrate it, I guess.

If you care about the how, it started as china ink on tracing paper, with the help of a template (and a correction sheet for one page where I used the wrong line on the template).

A rubber stamp was carved with the author’s signature and stamped on white paper because the ink from the pad wasn’t working well on tracing paper.

Then everything was scanned (with the correction on top of the wrong page) asemic_zine_scans.tar.

Imported in Inkscape and traced asemic_zine_svg.tar.

Printed, cut in half, folded and stapled. The magenta lines weren’t by design, but are there because my printer is currently² cursed.

And finally, asemic_zine.pdf was created, joining the pages together with pdfjam, for convenience in case somebody wants to download the full thing.

All the .tar and .pdf downloads from this page are released under the WTFPL, or All Rites Reversed..

I’ve been influenced again into feeling the need for a garment.

It was again a case of multiple sources conspiring in the same direction for unrelated reasons, but I decided I absolutely needed a linen hood, made from the heavy white linen I knew I had in my stash.

Why? I don’t know. I do like the feeling of wearing a hood, and the white linen should give a decent protection from the sun, but I don’t know how often I’m going to wear these instead of just a hat. On the other hand the linen was already there and I needed something small to sew.

My first idea was to make a square hood: some time ago I had already made one out of some leftovers of duvet cover, vaguely inspired by the Skjoldehamn Hood, because I have a long-term plan of making one a bit more from scratch¹.

I like the fact that this pattern is completely made out of squares and rectangles, and while the flannel one is quite fitting, as suitable for a warm garment, I felt that by making it just a cm or two wider it would have worked nicely for a warm weather one, and indeed it did.

Except, before I even started on the square hood, I started to think that the same square top would also be good for a hood-scarf, one of those long flowy garments that sit on the head, wrap around the neck and fall down, moving with the wind and the movements of the person.

Because, let’s be honest. worn in a way that look like a veil they feel nice, it’s true. But with the help of a couple of pins then you can do this.

And no, I’ve never played that game², and I’m not even 100% sure what it is about, other than killing people, climbing buildings and petting cats³, but that’s not really an issue when making a bit of casual cosplay of something, right?

Anyway, should anybody feel the need to make themselves a hood or ten, the patterns have been released as usual as #FreeSoftWear: square hood and hood scarf.

This article has been originally posted on November 4, 2023, and has been updated (at the bottom) since.

Thanks to All Saints’ Day, I’ve just had a 5 days weekend. One of those days I woke up and decided I absolutely needed a cartonnage box for the cardboard and linocut piecepack I’ve been working on for quite some time.

I started drawing a plan with measures before breakfast, then decided to change some important details, restarted from scratch, did a quick dig through the bookbinding materials and settled on 2 mm cardboard for the structure, black fabric-like paper for the outside and a scrap of paper with a manuscript print for the inside.

Then we had the only day with no rain among the five, so some time was spent doing things outside, but on the next day I quickly finished two boxes, at two different heights.

The weather situation also meant that while I managed to take passable pictures of the first stages of the box making in natural light, the last few stages required some creative artificial lightning, even if it wasn’t that late in the evening. I need to build¹ myself a light box.

And then decided that since they are C6 sized, they also work well for postcards or for other A6 pieces of paper, so I will probably need to make another one when the piecepack set will be finally finished.

The original plan was to use a linocut of the piecepack suites as the front cover; I don’t currently have one ready, but will make it while printing the rest of the piecepack set. One day :D

One of the boxes was temporarily used for the plastic piecepack I got with the book, and that one works well, but since it’s a set with standard suites I think I will want to make another box, using some of the paper with fleur-de-lis that I saw in the stash.

I’ve also started to write detailed instructions: I will publish them as soon as they are ready, and then either update this post, or they will be mentioned in an additional post if I will have already made more boxes in the meanwhile.

Update 2024-03-25: the instructions have been published on my craft patterns website

Yesterday I had planned a pan sbagliato for today, but I also had quite a bit of sourdough to deal with, so instead of mixing a bit of of dry yeast at 18:00 and mixing it with some additional flour and water at 21:00, at around maybe 20:00 I substituted:

• 100 g firm sourdough;
• 33 g flour;
• 66 g water.

Then I briefly woke up in the middle of the night and poured the dough on the tray at that time instead of having to wake up before 8:00 in the morning.

Everything else was done as in the original recipe.

The firm sourdough is feeded regularly with the same weight of flour and half the weight of water.

Will. do. again.

A few notes on what we had for lunch, to be able to repeat it after the summer.

There were a number of food intolerance related restrictions which meant that the traditional lasagna recipe wasn’t an option; the result still tasted good, but it was a bit softer and messier to take out of the pan and into the dishes.

On Saturday afternoon we made fresh no-egg pasta with 200 g (durum) flour and 100 g water, after about 1 hour it was divided in 6 parts and rolled to thickness #6 on the pasta machine.

Meanwhile, about 500 ml of low fat almost-ragù-like meat sauce was taken out of the freezer: this was a bit too little, 750 ml would have been better.

On Saturday evening we made a sauce with 1 l of low-fat milk and 80 g of flour, and the meat sauce was heated up.

Then everything was put in a 28 cm × 23 cm pan, with 6 layers of pasta and 7 layers of the two sauces, and left to cool down.

And on Sunday morning it was baked for 35 min in the oven at 180 °C.

With 3 people we only had about two thirds of it.

Next time I think we should try to use 400 - 500 g of flour (so that it’s easier to work by machine), 2 l of milk, 1.5 l of meat sauce and divide it into 3 pans: one to eat the next day and two to freeze (uncooked) for another day.

No pictures, because by the time I thought about writing a post we were already more than halfway through eating it :)

After making my Elastic Neck Top I knew I wanted to make another one less constrained by the amount of available fabric.

I had a big cut of white cotton voile, I bought some more swimsuit elastic, and I also had a spool of n°100 sewing cotton, but then I postponed the project for a while I was working on other things.

Then FOSDEM 2024 arrived, I was going to remote it, and I was working on my Augusta Stays, but I knew that in the middle of FOSDEM I risked getting to the stage where I needed to leave the computer to try the stays on: not something really compatible with the frenetic pace of a FOSDEM weekend, even one spent at home.

I needed a backup project¹, and this was perfect: I already had everything I needed, the pattern and instructions were already on my site (so I didn’t need to take pictures while working), and it was mostly a lot of straight seams, perfect while watching conference videos.

So, on the Friday before FOSDEM I cut all of the pieces, then spent three quarters of FOSDEM on the stays, and when I reached the point where I needed to stop for a fit test I started on the top.

Like the first one, everything was sewn by hand, and one week after I had started everything was assembled, except for the casings for the elastic at the neck and cuffs, which required about 10 km of sewing, and even if it was just a running stitch it made me want to reconsider my lifestyle choices a few times: there was really no reason for me not to do just those seams by machine in a few minutes.

Instead I kept sewing by hand whenever I had time for it, and on the next weekend it was ready. We had a rare day of sun during the weekend, so I wore my thermal underwear, some other layer, a scarf around my neck, and went outside with my SO to have a batch of pictures taken (those in the jeans posts, and others for a post I haven’t written yet. Have I mentioned I have a backlog?).

And then the top went into the wardrobe, and it will come out again when the weather will be a bit warmer. Or maybe it will be used under the Augusta Stays, since I don’t have a 1700 chemise yet, but that requires actually finishing them.

The pattern for this project was already online, of course, but I’ve added a picture of the casing to the relevant section, and everything is as usual #FreeSoftWear.

I had finished sewing my jeans, I had a scant 50 cm of elastic denim left.

Unrelated to that, I had just finished drafting a vest with Valentina, after the Cutters’ Practical Guide to the Cutting of Ladies Garments.

A new pattern requires a (wearable) mockup. 50 cm of leftover fabric require a quick project. The decision didn’t take a lot of time.

As a mockup, I kept things easy: single layer with no lining, some edges finished with a topstitched hem and some with bias tape, and plain tape on the fronts, to give more support to the buttons and buttonholes.

I did add pockets: not real welt ones (too much effort on denim), but simple slits covered by flaps.

piece; there is a slit in the middle that has been finished with topstitching.

To do them I marked the slits, then I cut two rectangles of pocketing fabric that should have been as wide as the slit + 1.5 cm (width of the pocket) + 3 cm (allowances) and twice the sum of as tall as I wanted the pocket to be plus 1 cm (space above the slit) + 1.5 cm (allowances).

Then I put the rectangle on the right side of the denim, aligned so that the top edge was 2.5 cm above the slit, sewed 2 mm from the slit, cut, turned the pocketing to the wrong side, pressed and topstitched 2 mm from the fold to finish the slit.

other sides; it does not lay flat on the right side of the fabric because the finished slit (hidden in the picture) is pulling it.

Then I turned the pocketing back to the right side, folded it in half, sewed the side and top seams with a small allowance, pressed and turned it again to the wrong side, where I sewed the seams again to make a french seam.

And finally, a simple rectangular denim flap was topstitched to the front, covering the slits.

I wasn’t as precise as I should have been and the pockets aren’t exactly the right size, but they will do to see if I got the positions right (I think that the breast one should be a cm or so lower, the waist ones are fine), and of course they are tiny, but that’s to be expected from a waistcoat.

The other thing that wasn’t exactly as expected is the back: the pattern splits the bottom part of the back to give it “sufficient spring over the hips”. The book is probably published in 1892, but I had already found when drafting the foundation skirt that its idea of “hips” includes a bit of structure. The “enough steel to carry a book or a cup of tea” kind of structure. I should have expected a lot of spring, and indeed that’s what I got.

To fit the bottom part of the back on the limited amount of fabric I had to piece it, and I suspect that the flat felled seam in the center is helping it sticking out; I don’t think it’s exactly bad, but it is a peculiar look.

Also, I had to cut the back on the fold, rather than having a seam in the middle and the grain on a different angle.

Anyway, my next waistcoat project is going to have a linen-cotton lining and silk fashion fabric, and I’d say that the pattern is good enough that I can do a few small fixes and cut it directly in the lining, using it as a second mockup.

As for the wrinkles, there is quite a bit, but it looks something that will be solved by a bit of lightweight boning in the side seams and in the front; it will be seen in the second mockup and the finished waistcoat.

As for this one, it’s definitely going to get some wear as is, in casual contexts. Except. Well, it’s a denim waistcoat, right? With a very different cut from the “get a denim jacket and rip out the sleeves”, but still a denim waistcoat, right? The kind that you cover in patches, right?

And I may have screenprinted a “home sewing is killing fashion” patch some time ago, using the SVG from wikimedia commons / the Home Taping is Killing Music page.

And. Maybe I’ll wait until I have finished the real waistcoat. But I suspect that one, and other sewing / costuming patches may happen in the future.

No regrets, as the words on my seam ripper pin say, right? :D