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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  1mo ago (text post)   323 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for February 4, 2025

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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While my projects are on hold, my mind keeps wandering.

I've been thinking for a while that search engines started sucking enough that probably some for of an alternative might be feasible. The idea isn't crawl the entire web, because that's kind of pointless, but to do a very narrow search, and even curate the index. I had the thought that something fairly basic as starting a shallow crawl on the Motte, would quickly yield a decent catalogue of interesting stuff on the internet. I took a quick look at some FOSS search engines, and so far I tried:

While some of these projects are cool in their own right, I'm looking for something:

  • Simple, that I can spin up and debug easily (so far each of these projects has been a pain in the ass to look into).
  • Not resource intensive (most these projects are large indexes needing lots of ram and disk space)
  • Giving me a good readable map of the indexed sites, and an ability to prune them (or failing that, back to point 1, are easy enough to grok that I can code it myself)

Anyone have any recomendations?

I some minimal tinkering in the past week (more on that in a separate comment). Did you have better luck @Southkraut?

Last Saturday I went to bed immediately after getting the little one to sleep, got up at 3 AM and spent a few hours wrangling Unreal before going back to bed just im time be woken again by a little someone climbing all over me and asking for breakfast.

I managed to somehow break what little code I had until then, and ended up fixing it by accident when I corrected a typo I thought unrelated. Goes to show how little I know.

Played around with Unreal’s volumetric clouds, but did not find a satisfactory compromise between the looks I want and not needing to curate each cloud individually. Ended up leaving them out.

Generated some terrain. At first far too much, which ended up eating up all my RAM. Then I went for a decidedly low-poly heightmap, which worked and honestly suits my taste just fine. It also looks like absolute crap because of z-buffer issues and unsightly seams between quads. Still looking into this, but will limit my efforts because in the long run I aim to write a custom terrain generator anyways.

So not a lot so far. I’m a little worried about my hardware not being up to the task; I only have 16 GB of RAM, and in between the OS, the IDE and the Unreal Editor, there’s precious little left. Might need an upgrade soon, and that means re-learning how to build PCs at all. If anyone has a good guide for dummies, please share. Also, do affordable GPUs even still exist?

I recently announced my plans to do a self-imposed NaNoWriMo in February and document my progress in these threads to keep myself honest. I'm moving house this week and I've decided it's not feasible, so I'm pushing it back until next week. I apologise for not being as disciplined as I'd hoped.

What's your novel about? Do you have a blurb?

I've only told a couple of people about the book so far and am deliberately not going into a huge amount of detail. The basic premise is that it's set in eastern Europe. There's a woman working for a pharma/medtech company, who's developing an invention which has the potential to completely revolutionise diagnosing fertility disorders, but she's concerned that the invention will be stolen from her and used for purposes she doesn't intend.

Where do you store your writings?

Why do you write?

I've been writing this novel in Google docs, periodically backing it up on Dropbox and on a thumb drive.

Why do you write?

I had an idea for a novel I couldn't (can't) get out of my head.

Solar panels pulled in a peak of 395W this afternoon, or almost their STC rating. 28F and snow on the ground really helps bump up the voltage and backside-absorption. Considering how often we've had power cuts on the coldest, clearest days in winter, it might be worth upsizing a charger/inverter rather than way overpaneling.

Also noticed my wood fire had been burning through logs faster than usual, and the damper wasn't actually damping. Found out the seals around the glass had slipped and were letting air into the firebox. Took out the panel and reseated it, now it's back to proper throttle response and 4hr burn times.
For a cheap shitbox that was discontinued due to quality control issues, I've gotten reasonable use out of that thing. Really need to find recommendations for a better one so I can relegate it to the workshop though.

Makes me wonder just how much stuff runs degraded because people don't know how to notice and diagnose problems around the house.

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