=================================== Baking, Jingle calls, ray tracing =================================== Here is another news digest. I keep writing things on Mastodon quite regularly, but each time I am annoyed by the bugs and lags of its interfaces (both web and Emacs ones), I am tempted to switch to static WWW or Gopher. Though updating those kinds of sites quite regularly as well, just not as often. Well, to the news. Software Development ==================== In the past couple of months, I worked on rexmpp a little more: it had Jingle calls before, but merely transmitting RTP packets. Now it supports audio I/O (with PortAudio), codecs (custom PCMA and PCMU implementations, optional libopus for Opus), RTP (also custom wrapping and unwrapping). And it can use OpenSSL (in addition to GnuTLS) for DTLS-SRTP now. And alternative libraries for hash functions, so there are just two mandatory dependencies now (an XML parser and a cryptographic library), but they support multiple alternatives. Also had a fun little toy project: 3D rendering into text (ASCII art) implemented in Emacs Lisp, with ray tracing and basic shading. An example rendering is available at , the repository is at . And there was some other development, both work-related and FLOSS/hobby. Among work ones, replaced PostGIS with a basic custom function to find distance, given coordinates: it is the only part of PostGIS I used, yet having PostGIS complicated updates, especially from PostgreSQL versions no longer supported: would be tricky to get matching PostGIS versions (required for pg_upgrade) on such different versions of PostgreSQL clusters. System setup ============ Switched to Noto fonts in Firefox, and I actually like them more than DejaVu ones there: I find that their higher leading (interline spacing, vertical margins) looks better on websites without styling, including my own homepage. As another bit of setup adjustments, I have set sshd on Termux on my phone, now synchronizing pictures taken with the phone to my computer using rsync over SSH. Have also set OpenCamera to take raw pictures, so editing them in darktable afterwards, since noticed that the phone (Pixel 6a) by itself produces rather bleak pictures. Cooking ======= As for cooking, and mostly baking, I tried making clafoutis, shakshouka a few times, multiple apple strudels, and now practicing ciabatta. Experimented with bruschettas a bit, too. All those are nice, and I think I am getting better at pastries. Rest days ========= Caught a virus, was sick for a day, and finally broke the long physical exercising streaks I had. Now I am free of those, so decided to finally try planned rest days, which seem to be generally suggested (though as with much of the other exercising aspects, it is hard to find any comprehensive research, but I am only finding descriptions of conventional wisdom). Had one such rest day yesterday, which freed large chunks of time, but then I did not spend them on anything useful. Well, it still must be nice to have such days occasionally, so that I can count days on which I am too busy to exercise as rest days. And will see how they work: after being sick and not exercising for two days (that day and the one after), I was able to do 15 pull-ups in a set instead of the usual 13, and today, after one rest day, I did 14, so it seems that there is additional recovery going on, which does not happen overnight. Connections =========== Had another ISP tech support story, with a different ISP, but the story was similar: connections to this server (uberspace.net) were failing in an odd way (TCP resets after sending a few packets back and forth, sometimes packets dropped, with the issue occurring between the ISP's routers, judging by mtr output), particularly interfering with XMPP connections, so I gathered the information and contacted tech support. A chat bot mistook my report for complaints about SMS, then a human arrived, asked what is wrong with SMS sending, from them I also learned that their chat throws away larger messages or makes them otherwise unreadable by the tech support, they asked me to reboot the phone and disappeared, then another human arrived, eventually they filed a ticket for "engineers". Later those "engineers" called, which apparently were the second-line tech support: not tech-savvy, but at least acting more like human beings, not keyword-based chat bots; from them I learned that the ticket was filed as a Wi-Fi tethering issue. Then those were claiming that they "don't check things like that", asking whether "the Internet in general works", and so on, but also eventually filed a ticket for actual engineers. It took a few more calls and messages back and forth over a week, and then it was finally fixed. Later a message arrived asking to grade the service level, but I had to ignore it, since I am completely uncertain how it can be graded: the issue was eventually fixed, which is good, but the procedure to get it done is quite far from sensible; at some points it was funny how bad it was. Yet it appears to be on a par with the other ISP. And I acquired a new radio receiver, was able to receive Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty for 4 days in a row so far. It is quite usable, so maybe I will not be cut off the outside world completely in case of an Internet blackout here. Thinking of getting some SDR dongle as well, was about to order one of those RTL SDR ones, but then was uncertain which one, and whether it's a good idea to go for RTL SDR ones in particular, or maybe better to get something capable of transmission at once, and ended up postponing it yet again. Reading ======= Apart from occasional books, have read acoup.blog's "How to Roman Republic 101" articles (actually that collection is not finished yet, there is one more addendum planned), they are nice and interesting, at least to someone unfamiliar with the topic. And went through the first 20 lectures of "Applied Category Theory Course" (): they do seem nice, although not sure if I will continue reading, or will abandon it as I did with other category theory materials in the past: there is an initial excitement, but then it is hard to view as actually practical for daily tasks. Though could still be used as recreational mathematics: there certainly are worse ways to spend spare time. Music ===== The piano practice goes slowly, but playing a little bit every day. Actually was looking into acoustic guitars, as instruments not requiring electricity, portable, inexpensive, but quite versatile and seemingly easy to learn still. But dividing the little time I spend on music between multiple instruments seems likely to be counterproductive. ---- :Date: 2023-10-27