busybee

This video about cutting down on phone dependency has been making the rounds:

I have some thoughts about it.

Some of my Tundra Trackers have been having an issue recently where they’ll get stuck in a flashing red light mode and refuse to connect or turn off. This is a known issue from Tundra and they have provided a sequence of steps to fix it. For some reason they opted to make it as a video with no transcript, however, and this is both difficult to find and annoying to follow.

So I’ve opted to provide the steps in written English so that people can actually find and follow them.

1. Disconnect all VR-related peripherals from the computer
2. Connect the Tundra tracker to the computer via USB
3. Open the lighthouse control application, which is usually at C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\SteamVR\tools\lighthouse\bin\win32\lighthouse_console.exe
4. In the console window that comes up, type reboot
5. Wonder why people need to provide all such instructions in an impossible-to-read low-resolution poorly-narrated too-long video instead of it just being a text file
6. Also not stated in the video, but the light might not stop flashing until you unplug it from the computer, and that would be a lot easier to add into a text file than a video after the fact, as well

I’ve been accepted into Furality’s Dealer’s Den as a musician! I have a month to get my booth together and I’ve already got it like 90% done. It’s actually in an acceptable state already but there’s some more little things I want to do with the background video, and I’m learning so much DaVinci Resolve stuff to do it.

I also have a show on Sunday, at around 4:30 PM PDT. I hope folks can make it!

Okay, it turns out that there was a lot of hidden magic on the SOMA Connect image that was infeasible to try to migrate/clone over myself, both due to dependencies on how the old-ass Raspbian image is setup in terms of networking, and a whole bunch of random/hidden scripts that do who-knows-what. So I decided to take a different approach, and modify the SOMA Connect image instead.

Last time I had a sorta-working shairport-sync configuration on my Raspberry Pi, but I didn’t have the SOMA Connect hardware actually working, and I had to make a bunch of compromises in order to get things to even try to start up without reimaging to the 32-bit Raspbian operating system.

Well, somehow the filesystem got corrupted and the device was refusing to boot, so I figure this is as good a time as any to document how I got things working in a much nicer way.

I’ve got stuff going on, figured I’d ramble a bit for those who care.

I just watched this video about energy dependence and it got me thinking about some stuff.

In particular, it struck me how one of the quoted figures is that even LED lighting is only about 30% efficient in its conversion from final energy to usable light. My experience with LED lighting has been that 120V AC lamps do indeed generate a lot of heat, and I guess 30% sounds about right, but so much of that heat is just from the power circuitry: namely from having to convert AC to DC and step the voltage down.

But does it have to be that way?