busybee fluffy rambles

The plan went pretty much according to keikaku¹.

I had difficulty finding the studs because there’s some particleboard behind the drywall for some reason. Maybe some half-assed attempt at a moisture barrier or something? It was pretty obvious that it was there since it was visible through the light wiring hole. I ended up using some neodymium magnets to locate some drywall screws and then verified it by drilling pilot holes. I’m not absolutely certain that they’re screwed into studs but there’s a lot more support than there was before, and those screws are at least held tight to the wall.

On the left anchor I thought I’d messed up and that there actually was a stud behind it, somehow, and I started to patch it up so that I could screw in a construction screw instead (which is why there’s plaster on the left hole in the first picture), until I remembered, oh yeah, there’s weird backing board behind some of the drywall. So I drilled a smaller pilot hole and, yep, it went through easily, so yeah, it needed an anchor after all. (I mean I already knew that based on what had happened previously, but, still.)

Also I couldn’t find the nice toggle anchors I’d bought a couple years ago, so I ended up buying some similar ones at Home Depot. Which aren’t nearly as nice. A couple of them ended up breaking off and falling into the wall, and they were just kinda not-great to work with in general. But they did their job, and everything’s tightly screwed down.

Leveling the cabinet was a pain in the ass. It’d have been a lot easier if I had someone to help me but I was being stubborn about just getting this done.

Also, I didn’t need to do any painting, as all of the paint damage happened to be behind the cabinet. Nice.

Hopefully this time it stays up for more than two years!

Also I decided to be fancy and whipped up a custom centering jig to draw the centerline for drilling the holes in the hardwood. It was absolutely overkill but it didn’t take me long to do. I’ll probably post it as a customizable object on thingiverse/printables or something.

So hey, the Bandcrash GUI is finally, finally in a working state! You can now use it to easily encode a bunch of wav files into mp3/ogg/flac and make a web preview, and optionally upload it all to itch.io automagically!

Also, I’ve released prebuilt macOS and Windows binaries over on itch.io. I’ll probably do a Linux version as well at some point, although Linux users are likely much better-equipped to just build-and-install it themselves.

To that end, I used it to upload one of my older albums to itch, and I gotta say, having a GUI to set it up is actually a lot nicer than doing it all from the CLI with hand-written JSON files? Weird.

There’s still a lot left to do on it but what is there right now is Good Enough for now.

That said, I’m hopeful that bandcamp remains viable for the long term, but now it’s a lot less necessary to worry about a single platform like that.

I finally replaced my blood sugar meter and, after verifying the new one’s calibration, my blood sugar is back to normal-ish, which is to say, 110 mg/dL after waking up, which is still “prediabetic” but not even remotely “go to the hospital.”

I’m not sure if it’s the meter or my test strips which were bad, but either way doing a refresh on the whole kit was a good idea, especially since I only do occasional testing. The included sample strips and test fluid always last me way longer than the “discard after” time, and I also was never great about closing the test strip vial after taking one out (which I guess can affect the chemistry), and given how infrequently I need to test, it just makes more sense for me to buy a new test kit bundle when I need to.

I wonder what the useful lifetime on a blood glucose tester is supposed to be, anyway. They sure seem to be made to be disposable. (But also that’s probably a function of how they work to begin with. Reagents always degrade, as do chemical detectors.)

But at least we can take blood sugar off of my immediate list of concerns.

Well I sure have a bunch of craps for the crap pile right now.

Craps

1. My dental insurance doesn’t cover crowns at all as it turns out, so it’s not just that my insurance was maxed out, that crown is gonna cost me like $1800 no matter what. I’m still putting it off because if I have a new crown on both sides of my mouth it’ll be difficult for me to eat for a while. Which isn’t great.

2. I’m in considerable pain right now, as usual

3. My “prior authorization” on my (expensive) cholesterol meds ran out and the process for getting that renewed is in some sort of limbo and I still don’t think it even matters

4. I NEED A NEW FUCKING ROOF. previous homeowner insisted it was only 10 years old when I bought the place. Multiple neighbors remember it being installed around 10 years before I bought the place. Solar panel company said the roof seemed fine for several years to come. THEY WERE ALL WRONG.

   Fortunately I got an estimate on the roof replacement, and it’ll cost “only” around $16,000, which is a lot less than I was expecting. If I’d known it was going to be that cheap I’d have just done it before getting solar panels! Because getting the solar panels removed and reinstalled is going to cost another $3000! ARGH

5. The job market still fucking sucks and I’m unable to find anything I’m capable of doing that also pays anything reasonable, and social security is still taking their time in evaluating my disability application, and everything’s a struggle right now

On the plus side

I’m finally making some progress on the GUI for Bandcrash. I’ve made peace with Qt and am just using that. I wrote my own custom data binding layer so that it can just modify the JSON data directly. It seems okay. Progress is slow but hopefully it’ll be worth it.

Also I still have plenty of savings, at least. Sigh.

I wonder how people in a similar situation to me who don’t have a net worth of [somewhat large, but not quite “fuck off,” amount of money] handle this.

I’m grateful that I’ve been fortunate enough to be in a situation where even all this still isn’t financially ruinous.

Still wish I didn’t have to be grateful for that, all things considered.

Anyway, while I’m not even remotely close to GoFundMe levels of need, I still wouldn’t mind if people would consider throwing some money my way for the stuff that I do, either via ko-fi or via buying stuff I’ve made.

(Note to self: there’s still a lot of shit I need to get around to re-adding to my various online stores.)

As mentioned earlier today, the pyBlamscamp name was incredibly confusing and needed to be changed. Thankfully, blackle mori (who made blamscamp in the first place) came up with a much better name suggestion, “Bandcrash.” I have now renamed pyBlamscamp and its associated Python package appropriately. The blamscamp pypi project now just exists as a thin wrapper around bandcrash and its usage should be discontinued.

Existing installations should continue to work (and might even pull in future updates!) but it’s highly recommended that any scripts, venvs, etc. that rely on it be updated with the new package.

And of course this gives me even more of an impetus to finally write that damn GUI.