busybee fluffy rambles

Bathroom

A plumber came out today and took a look at things. He ran the water and didn’t see any leakage so he thought that maybe it was just water trapped in the wall from before I fixed some caulking. But if there’s an actual leak it’ll cost around $750 to fix, plus the cost of redoing the tile on the wall.

After he left I noticed that there was some water that had dripped down some time after we stopped looking. Oops. So yeah there’s definitely a leak, although it seems like it might actually be on the output side, not the supply side.

I took the initiative to remove some of the damaged drywall and it was very moist underneath. There’s also apparently a stud in just the wrong place to be able to investigate further from the side. Sigh.

The original contractor got back to me today and he was disappointed in my negative reviews so late after the fact, and explained that it was all the fault of a subcontractor who doesn’t work for him anymore. I said I appreciated that the subcontractor no longer works for him but I can only review things based on the work that was performed. He’s going to try to make things right, although I’m not sure what that looks like just yet.

I have two more plumbers coming to do estimates tomorrow, and maybe I can get the original contractor back in to remove and redo the tile or something. I’m not sure how much I’d trust him with it though.

He’s also frustrated that I’m rushing to blame his work for this when it was two years ago, and his warranty was only six months. I pointed out that his work is the only thing that’s been done to that part of my house and that just because it took this long for problems to become apparent does’t mean there weren’t problems with the work done.

But anyway nothing seems quite urgent just yet and things will work out.

Disability

I forgot to mention here but I had my disability assessment last weekend (on the 9th). It was mostly just a (very friendly) interview for me to discuss the issues I have, and then he did some basic cognitive functioning tests which aren’t relevant to my particular disability suite. He said that they’d be for “testing my ADHD” but if they were ADHD-related things they’re based on extremely outdated criteria.

I’m not sure how it went, is what I’m saying, and I’m expecting to have to appeal at least once.

VR fun

I’ve been trying to update my avatar project for the latest VRChat SDK, which also runs on a much newer version of Unity. My Windows machine is doing just fine but I’m running into weirdness on my Mac where I do most of my dev work. I wish VRChat would finally release a Mac-runnable version of the VRChat Creator Companion GUI, although the CLI version seems to be setting stuff up correctly so I’m guessing there’s just a legit cross-platform issue going on.

I want to start working on some more avatars. I’ve got so many ideas of avatars to make.

Also, today my Bifrost Pulse devkit arrived. It’s an experimental low-cost haptic glove for VR. Right now the hardware is complete but the software is extremely minimal. I tried it out with their little protocol tester and it worked fine, but it’ll take a while for this to actually be usable with anything. Hopefully it gets OSC support for VRChat soon, since of course that’s my main use case.

Lately my VR social life has been pretty flat, in that there’s just a handful of the same people I end up hanging out with over and over again, and occasionally that leads to a slow expansion of meeting new people, or very rarely I’ll go into Furry Karaoke and have some fun there. I feel like limiting my VR time to just a couple times a week is a good thing, though. I don’t want to get oversaturated with it and burn out entirely.

Oh also a couple months ago I got fed up with my Pimax and preordered a Bigscreen Beyond. My face scan happened a couple weeks ago which means I should be receiving it soon. Hopefully having better physical comfort in VR will motivate me to spend more time with people there, and inspire me to work more on VR things as well.

Comics

Lately I’ve been having dreams about my comics again, which means I really ought to get back into the swing of drawing them, I think.

Or making an effort to find someone else to draw them, I guess? I dunno. It’s hard to rely on others like that especially when I wouldn’t be paying them.

Coffee

I’ve got my new grinder dialed in now, and I’ve also been experimenting with different grind dosing things. In particular I’ve designed a catch cup that’s compatible with my 54mm portafilter, and I’m planning on selling them online. I’d reached out to Timemore asking them if they’d be willing to make a 54mm-compatible catch cup and they indicated that they have no plans to do so, so this is a thing that feels like a pretty good opportunity.

I’m experimenting with making a proper mass-production workflow for these things, and it seems like I’ll be able to sell them fairly cheaply. It’ll probably be on Etsy or something, just because that’s the path of least resistance right now.

Urchin planters, and other sales

On a related note, I have a bunch of urchin planters in my inventory which I’d like to sell, and I again think that Etsy is probably the best way to go for those as well.

I’ve experimented with a bunch of other sales platforms and haven’t found anything even remotely adequate for selling craft goods, aside from Artisans Cooperative which is very promising but right now they’re requiring a $1000 buy-in (being a member-owned cooperative), which I can’t really spare at the moment. Also, Etsy has so much marketing behind it right now.

I was hesitatnt to go with Etsy primarily due to their fee structure, but all in all they aren’t too bad, and I’ll only be selling a handful of items anyway. Or rather, I’ll have a crapton of individual items, but they’ll all be SKUs/variants on a small number of actual items, namely:

• Urchin planters
• Timemore dosing cups
• Cat pins
• Pride pins
• Pronoun pins if I ever get around to actually designing those

I probably have a few other things I could print and sell, like my 54mm tamping stations I guess? That would be very easy to mass-produce as well.

I’m not expecting to make the big bucks on this stuff, it’s just a potential source of hobby income.

Music things

I’m still trying to sell my extraneous music gear. So far all that’s sold is my Yamaha TX7. I’m a bit surprised at how few inquiries I’ve had for the Osmose in particular, given that they were at one time selling like hotcakes, and my price is pretty competitive. I mean, I have gotten a bunch of inquiries on Facebook and OfferUp, but they were of course all scammers, which is par for the course on those platforms.

Anyway, I’ve been enjoying working in the studio again with the new keyboard. I’ve decided that it isn’t nearly as good as the PX-300 was but it’s definitely an improvement for me over the S88. I should have probably tried a bunch more keyboards, though; apparently Roland now has some really good entry-level digital pianos which would have been a better choice. But I’m still happy with what I ended up with and that’s the important thing.

I got all of my parts for making the pedal adapter and unfortunately it turns out that the keyboard doesn’t present continuous sustain after all, it only does half-pedaling in the strictest sense — which is fine — but also its voltage range for that is way wonky. So I ended up just ordering a used SP-34 pedal unit anyway. Maybe I can work on furthering the reverse-engineering of it so that someone else can build a more generic adapter circuit (I bet I could actually get my original intended thing to work if I had a better idea of the actual resistor values etc.).

Also I’ve scored a couple of videos for the Trans Academy. Hopefully I’ll have something to link to soon! The New Years video wasn’t quite what it was originally meant to be although I’m still happy with the music and it’s part of me building up a song library for future videos; the Seasons Greetings video has also been delayed as the editor’s been having technical difficulties (but hopefully will be finished sometime this week) and I’m tickled by the somewhat tongue-in-cheek music I made for it.

Also it helps that I built a little stand for my basement space heater that lets me put it in a good spot to keep my recording space warm this time of year, and also I finally set up a bunch more LED lighting that I had left over from previous projects and it makes the space feel really cozy and nice.

I should also set up more outdoor lighting for the pathway between my main floor and my basement, so that it doesn’t feel so foreboding to go back and forth (for using the bathroom and so on).

I really want to work on Transitions. And Instrumental. And maybe even Maximum Coverage.

Gosh I have a lot of backburnered projects.

Oh, also, choir is going well. We’re taking the next two weeks off. I need to spend more time practicing on my own for the upcoming show. (Y'all should come, incidentally.)

Programming

At some point I really ought to redo the UI for Bandcrash. What’s there works but it isn’t great and there’s a lot of missing stuff, like I’d really like to have a direct preview of the album and track art, and a better layout for the various groups of fiddly metadata things. There’s also a bunch of data binding stuff which could be a lot better. Qt is the least-bad GUI toolkit for Python but it’s still bad.

I also have so many goddamn game ideas and I don’t have the energy or attention span to work on any of them. Maybe I should join more game jams to try to build up a team for some of them.

Cooking

I’ve actually managed to use up most of my Crowd Cow backlog before the next box ships! Mostly by constantly pushing the next ship date back.

Things I’ve been making and enjoying a lot of:

• Chili
• Chorizo
• Pozole
• Stir-fry

I have a big pack of chicken thighs still and usually I’d use that to make a curry of some sort but I think I’m going to try Ethan Chlebowski’s Döner Kebab. I also have some ground lamb and beef which would make a perfect gyros blend.

Gaming

I have not played any games lately, unless you count Sudoku on my phone while I poop. I feel like I’d enjoy some sort of gaming hyperfixation. Maybe I should start streaming on Twitch as an excuse to play down some of my massive games backlog. Just as something to do during the day, because even with all the above I feel like I’m not doing much.