Valhalla's Things

A couple of years ago, I made myself a pair of slippers in linen with a braided twine sole and then another pair of hiking slippers: I am happy to report that they have been mostly a success.

Now, as I feared, the white linen fabric wasn’t a great choice: not only it became dirt-grey linen fabric in a very short time, the area under the ball of the foot was quickly consumed by friction, just as it usually happens with bought slippers.

I have no pictures for a number of reasons, but trust me when I say that they look pretty bad.

However, the sole is still going strong, and the general concept has proved valid, so when I needed a second pair of slippers I used the same pattern, with a sole made from the same twine but this time with denim taken from the legs of an old pair of jeans.

To make them a bit nicer, and to test the technique, I also added a design with a stencil and iridescent black acrylic paint (with fabric medium): I like the tone-on-tone effect, as it’s both (relatively) subtle and shiny.

Then, my partner also needed new slippers, and I wanted to make his too.

His preference, however, is for open heeled slippers, so I adjusted the pattern into a new one, making it from an old pair of blue jeans, rather than black as mine.

He also finds completely flat soles a bit uncomfortable, so I made an heel with the same braided twine technique: this also seems to be working fine, and I’ve also added these instructions to the braided soles ones

Both of these have now been work for a few months: the jeans is working much better than the linen (which isn’t a complete surprise) and we’re both finding them comfortable, so if we’ll ever need new slippers I think I’ll keep using this pattern.

Now the plan is to wash the linen slippers, and then look into repairing them, either with just a new fabric inner sole + padding, or if washing isn’t as successful as I’d like by making a new fabric part in a different material and reusing just the twine sole. Either way they are going back into use.

For quite a few years, I’ve been using pattern weights instead of pins when cutting fabric, starting with random objects and then mostly using some big washers from the local hardware store.

However, at about 22 g per washer, I needed quite a few of them, and dealing with them tended to get unwieldy; I don’t remember how it happened, but one day I decided to make myself some bigger weights with a few washers each.

I suspect I had seen somebody online with some nice hexagonal pattern weights, and hexagonal of course reminded me of the Stickers Standard, so of course I settled on an hexagon 5 cm tall and I decided I could 3D-print it in a way that could be filled with washers for weight.

Rather than bothering with adding a lid (and fitting it), I decided to close the bottom by gluing a piece of felt, with the added advantage that it would protect whatever the weight was being used on. And of course the top could be decorated with a nerdish sticker, because, well, I am a nerd.

I made a few of these pattern weights, used them for a while, was happy with them, and then a few days ago I received some new hexagonal stickers I had had printed, and realized that while I had taken a picture with all of the steps in assembling them, I had never published any kind of instructions on how to make them — and I had not even pushed the source file on the craft tools git repository.

And yesterday I fixed that: the instructions are now on my craft pattern website, with generated STL files, the git repository has been updated with the current sources, and now I’ve even written this blog post :)

Many years ago I made myself a vest with lots of pockets ¹ in a few layers of cheap cotton, and wore the hell out of it, for the added warmth, but most importantly for the convenience provided by the pockets.

Then a few years ago the cheap cotton had started to get worn, and I decided I needed to replace it. I found a second choice (and thus cheaper :) ) version of a water-repellent cotton and made another vest, lined with regular cotton, for a total of just two layers.

This time I skipped a few pockets that I had found I didn’t use that much, and I didn’t add a hood, which didn’t play that well when worn over a hoodie, but I added some detached sleeves, for additional wind protection.

This left about 60 cm and some odd pieces of leftover fabric in my stash, for which I had no plan.

And then February² came, and I needed a quick simple mindless handsewing projects for the first weekend, I saw the vest (which I’m wearing as much as the old one), the sleeves (which have been used much less, but I’d like to change this) and thought about making a matching hood for it, using my square hood pattern.

Since the etaproof is a bit stiff and not that nice to the touch I decide to line³ it with the same cotton as the vest and sleeves, and in the style of the pattern I did so by finishing each panel with its own lining (with regular cotton thread) and then whipstitching the panels together with the corespun cotton/poly thread recommended by the seller of the fabric. I’m not sure this is the best way to construct something that is supposed to resist the rain, but if I notice issues I can always add some sealing tape afterwards.

I do have a waterproof cape to wear in case of real rain, so this is only supposed to work for light rain anyway, and it may prove not to be an issue.

As something designed to be worn in light rain, this is also something likely to be worn in low light conditions, where 100% black may not be the wisest look. On the vest I had added reflective piping to the armscyes, but I was out of the same piping.

I did however have a spool of reflector thread made of glass fibre by Rico Design, which I think was originally sold to be worked into knitting or crochet projects (it is now discontinued) and I had never used.

I decided to try and sew a decorative blanket stitch border, a decision I had reasons to regret, since the thread broke and tangled like crazy, but in the end it was done, I like how it looks, and it seems pretty functional. I hope it won’t break with time and use, and if it does I’ll either fix it or try to redo with something else.

Of course, the day I finished sewing the reflective border it stopped raining, so I haven’t worn it yet, but I hope I’ll be able to, and if it is an horrible failure I’ll make sure to update this post.

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.