Category: Personal

Digital Artist Spotlight: Seerlight

Given lockdown continues, we’re effectively not expecting to join other fans for conventions for quite a while longer. This also means not finding new artists in person, for a while, and instead relying on more… modern options. Indeed the artist that I’m going to write about today is one that I found on Facebook, thanks to a share from an acquaintance who shared the post of a page that (for once!) credited the original author.

Seerlight is a digital artist that draws extremely detailed scenes. Many are inspired by popular anime, including Studio Ghibli or (as shown to the right) 90s anime like Sailor Moon and Card Capturor Sakura, but also games such as Final Fantasy and Zelda. A number of others are original, and are just as cute and interesting.

One of the main thing that piqued my curiosity with Seerlight is that is the first artist that I have found that provides a lot of their focus on animated wallpapers for phones and (it seems more recently) desktops. And indeed, the animated wallpapers are what you get access to by subscribing to their Patreon (and since it’s an up front charged Patreon, now is a great time to subscribe, if you’d like them.)

As an aside, it seems like animated live wallpapers on Android are… very manufacturer specific. On my Huawei P30 Pro, I ended up getting this app, which has in-app upgrade to ad-free, and didn’t request any risky permission beside file access to load the video. I can’t guarantee it’s perfect, but it seems to do the job.

Another thing that I found very interesting as an option (and one that I have not ordered yet, but I’m sure thinking of ordering soon), is that they sell credit card covers β€” not travel passes, which we’re totally used to in London (and possibly UK), but stickers to put on the actual credit (or debit) cards. This is something that I had seen in Japan before, particularly for IC cards, but I have not seen as being popular in Europe, which is not totally unexpected, as credit cards have typically had the owner’s name and 16-digits PAN, and covering those up would be… strange.

To be fair, the store (Cucu Covers) does sell half-height covers that are not meant to cover the information area, which depending on the colours on your credit card might make it still feasible. But more interesting, a lot of credit cards nowadays have stopped providing embossed names and numbers, and quite a few of them decided it’s cheaper and easier to print everything on one side of the card.

Revolut for instance now only put the cardholder name on the front, and the rest is all logos. Curve does something similar, although if I remember this correctly, they don’t even put the cardholder on the front. Admittedly, both me and my wife have gotten used to just relying on Google Pay at least here in the UK, and have not bothered taking the card out of the wallet for, well, a really long time now.

But if you have something that you need to keep with you and use daily, for instance a travel pass, or a building access pass (well, after the lockdown is over at least), and you want to give it a bit of a spirit, you may want to take a look at these covers, I find them absolutely gorgeous.

So, if that’s your cup of tea, consider subscribing to their Patreon, or at least follow them on Instragram or Facebook to see when they’ll release a live wallpaper you’ll be ready to pay for!

Cultural Diversity

I would say that in most cases, I’m the worst person to talk about diversity as, like John Scalzi said, I’m playing at the lowest difficulty setting. There is a small exception to this when the matter relates to cultural diversity in a vastly USA-based environment, which is what I would like to spend a few words on this time.

Let’s start with language. For open source developers, working with people from different countries, and for which English is not the native language, is not uncommon at all β€” indeed, projects such as Gentoo and VideoLan tend to have overall more people for whom English is a second (if not third) language. There is a difference, though, when it comes to work environments such as my previous bubble, where you have to speak English a lot β€” impromptu, on the spot.

It took adjustment when I moved to Dublin, despite having spent most of the previous year in Los Angeles: on one side, South-Californian English and Dublin English are significantly different in tone and intentions, and on the other hand, it required “checking the gain” on what people coming from other languages meant with certain words. Again, not something totally new for those who spent time in various Open Source projects, but even IRC allowed you to take a moment to type an answer back, or to re-read what the other person said. And while the voice tone and body language help, it’s still harder to process, understand, and form a reply in your second (or third) language in real-time than it would be over asynchronous medium.

London was another kettle of fish altogether β€” maybe because I have listened to enough Radio 4 to grasp many Londoners expression fasters than I picked them up in Dublin, or maybe because I have built up the experience there. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t hard β€” indeed in my experience I found that British-born-and-raised people tend to be (unwittingly) less forgiving for mis-speaking, expecting every word used to having been carefully chosen by the speaker, including any obvious-to-them rude turn of phrase. This doesn’t appear to be my impression only β€” the FT’s Michael Skapinker wrote about it, more than once, and I would suggest reading his articles to both the English native speakers, and those of us “second-languagers” that find it hard to work productively with them.

Now, before somebody says that I’m painting the whole group of native English speakers with a single brush β€” that is certainly not the case. I already singled out the Dubliners before, and I have plenty of friends, colleagues, and ex-colleagues that have learnt not to assume that every word is perfectly weighted beforehand, particularly in spoken lines, and have asked me more than a few times if the word I used was meant to sound as aggressive as it did.

There’s another fun interaction that I learnt to appreciate: talking shop with people coming from cultures that are very direct, such as some of my Romanian friends β€” we can start cussing and repeat the word shit many times in a row, get excited, and maybe even disagree vehemently on concepts, solutions, and decisions, … and then go grab coffee together like nothing happened. At least once I’ve been asked not quite directly whether I have been a hypocrite β€” but no, it’s just that for me (us) technical disagreements among friends are just that… technical disagreements.

If all of this boggles your mind and sounds like me trying to justify my tone or behaviour, I would suggest you to read The Culture Map. The book is a fascinating read, and goes into a lot of examples of how different culture “baselines” differ β€” with repeated reminders that the fact that a culture baseline does not mean that everyone in that culture behaves exactly the same way, we’re not in a world of hats.

Another point that I feel should be spelled out explicitly is about general (popular) cultural references β€” they don’t really translate very well, under different axis. I have a friend who gets annoyed at Harry Potter references in documentation and service naming, because they didn’t actually care for the series, and so anything that feels “obvious” to a fan goes straight over their head, and I sympathise.

I know of similar complains with most other “big fandoms”: Star Wars, Star Trek, Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, Dragonball, Naruto, … it’s a type of gatekeeping that is subtle, but still present: if you don’t happen to have at least dabbled in most of these, things will be slightly harder for you, and give you a feeling that you’re not welcome. Also it turns out that those who read/watched some of those big names in another language might be just as annoyed, because a lot of times names and terms got translated to something different, maybe closer to the target culture, that makes the reference even harder to grasp.

Also, let me be clear that this is not only a problem within the tech spaces dominated by white male geeky engineers. A few years ago I found myself having an argument over the fact that I missed the window of time to submit intern projects ideas, because I went on to check the old site, which was handily named “iwantanintern”, rather than finding out that they switched it over a new one named “redfishbluefish”. When I pointed out it’s a very opaque name to me, I was informed by a surprised HR person that they were expecting everybody to know the book by Dr. Seuss – which turns out it doesn’t even appear to be translated in Italian according to Wikipedia – and that it fit perfectly well with the companion Waldo website, named after the North American name of the protagonist from Where is Wally? As it turns out, I at least knew Wally as a kid, but most of the other children books I was given were either Italian or Disney, or both, so Dr. Seuss never figured into my upbringing.

So what’s the point of bringing up all of this? Well, I wanted to point out that there still is quite a bit of discrimination that can be felt among those of us that are otherwise well into a privileged class β€” with the hope that this can both make it easier to empathise with those who are less privileged, and as an answer – that I should have provided there and then, and out loud – to those I have heard before saying that I shouldn’t complain, since I can completely pass for British if I wanted to (cannot, and will not!) and so I have nothing to fear from drunk right wingers at a pub the day after Brexit deadlines.

Lockdown Is Not Over For Me

It’s July 2020, and after a number of months of somewhat absolute lockdown, London appears to be breaking free from the chains of coronavirus, at least on the surface. Indeed, the lockdown rules have been eased, and things are, supposedly, going back to normal. Except…

Except this is not true for everyone, and in particular, it’s not true for me. Long-time readers probably remember that 13 years ago next month I’ve ended up in the hospital with an acute pancreatitis from which I already nearly died. It also left me with secondary diabetes β€” that is, a diabetes that is neither of the “usual” types. And given that there’s multiple reports of Covid-19 attacking the pancreas, that is making me feel particularly paranoid about the situation. Indeed, my understanding of it at this point is that it’s very likely that Covid-19 would just be deadly to me with a probability close to 1.

What this means is that I still haven’t left the flat since May, and I don’t expect to go anywhere until a vaccine is found and I received it. This would be much easier if it wasn’t that everyone else out there has forgotten that this pandemic kills people, and decided that everything must reopen. We live across from a hotel, and it was much easier to spend all your time at home when you didn’t have random guests looking into your apartment at all times. And it was easier to enjoy’s one apartment when the short-term let on our floor didn’t have different groups of partying people every weekend, being loud in the early morning hours. And even working from home was easier when we could go to bed before 3am β€” because there was no work being done on the flyover of the motorway we live next to until that hour.

I’m extremely fortunate that my new job is not expecting me to get back to the office until it’s absolutely safe to do so. But I’m also sad about all the events we’ll now be missing β€” because a number of those won’t be rescheduled to next year, and so will likely be taking place well before the vaccine is available. The one that makes me the saddest is the wedding of my best friends, in Italy, who will be getting married in September, way too soon for the vaccine to reach me.

As you can tell from the various electronics projects, I find myself having a lot more time on my hands than I would generally have, and since I’m an awful baker, I left the breadmaking to my wife. Instead I’m taking up the whole office space between work and the various terrible results of PCBs. It is a learning experience, and in that regard I shouldn’t complain, but it also feels sad that out of the original run of prints I made for Birch Books I’m barely keeping one design around (the actuator boardΒ β€” barely because I had to bodge it).

But the fact that I have time on my hands doesn’t mean I’m being particularly productive either. There’s been days that after spending the whole day in meetings to meet new colleagues I could only drop myself on the sofa to watch Murder, She Wrote. And despite maintaining my two-posts-a-week schedule for the blog, my sARTSurday series ended up drying up because I was running low on artists from which I actually bought something, and it started saddening me more than cheering me up.

It’s tough, and it’ll remain tough for the foreseeable future. There’s not going to be a vaccine before next year, and by then, I might as well have turned into a misanthropic recluse β€” although I sure hope not. It reminds me a tad too much of how lonely it was when I was running my own company back in Italy β€” living in my mother’s big house, but with no easy way to go anywhere unless someone would pick me up (no public transport, no easy cycle lane either). And let’s just say that I’m not looking forward to go back there, much as I miss seeing some of my friends and spending late nights playing Magic the Gathering.

Hopefully, this will be a one-off blog post on this topic, and more of the future will be filled with me posting project updates, notes, and pictures of cutesy stuff…

Diagonal Contributions

This is a tale that starts on my previous dayjob. My role as an SRE had been (for the most part) one of support, with teams dedicated to developing the product, and my team making sure that it would perform reliably and without waste. The relationship with “the product team” has varied over time and depending on both the product and the SRE team disposition, sometimes in not particularly healthy way either.

In one particular team, I found myself supporting (together with my team) six separate product teams, spread between Shanghai, Zurich and Mountain View. This put particular pressure on the dynamics of the team, particularly when half of the members (based in Pittsburgh) didn’t even have a chance to meet the product team of two services (based in Shanghai), as they would be, in the normal case, 12 hours apart. It’s in this team that I started formulating the idea I keep referring to as “diagonal contributions”.

You see, there’s often a distinction between horizontal and vertical contributions. Vertical referring to improving everything of a service, from the code itself, to its health checks, release, deployment, rollout, … While horizontal referring to improving something of every service, such as making every RPC based server be monitored through the same set of metrics. And there are different schools of thought on which option is valid and which one should be incentivised, and so it usually depends on your manager and their manager on which one of the two approach you’ll be rewarded to take.

When you’re supporting so many different teams directly, vertical contributions are harder on the team overall β€” when you go all in to identify and fix all the issues for one of the products, you end up ignoring the work needed for the others. In these cases an horizontal approach might pay off faster, from an SRE point of view, but it comes with a cost: the product teams would then have little visibility into your work, which can turn into a nasty confrontation, particularly depending on the management you find yourself dealing with (on both sides).

It’s in that situation that I came up with “diagonal contributions”: improve a pain point for all the services you own, and cover as many services you can. In a similar fashion to rake collection, this is not an easy balance to strike, and it takes experience to have it done right. You can imagine from the previous post that my success at working on this diagonal has varied considerably depending on teams, time, and management.

What did work for me, was finding some common pain points between the six products I supported, and trying to address those not with changes to the products, but with changes to the core libraries they used or the common services they relied upon. This allowed me to show actual progress to the product teams, while solving issues that were common to most of the teams in my area, or even in the company.

It’s a similar thing with rake collection for me: say there’s a process you need to follow that takes two to three days to go through, and four out of your six teams are supposed to go through it β€” it’s worth it to invest four to six days to reduce the process to something that takes even just a couple of hours: you need fewer net people-days even just looking at the raw numbers, which is very easy to tell, but that’s not where it stops! A process that takes more than a day adds significant risks: something can happen overnight, the person going through the process might have to take a day off, or they might have a lot of meetings the following day, adding an extra day to the total, and so on.

This is also another reason why I enjoy this kind of work β€” as I said before, I disagree with Randall Munroe when it comes to automation. It’s not just a matter of saving time to do something trivial that you do rarely: automation is much less likely to make one-off mistakes (it’s terrifyingly good at making repeated mistakes of course), and even if it doesn’t take less time than a human would take, it doesn’t take human time to do stuff β€” so a three-days-long process that is completed by automation is still a better use of time than a two-days-long process that rely on a person having two consecutive days to work on it.

So building automation or tooling, or spending time making it easier to use core libraries, are in my books a good way to make contributions that are more valuable than just to your immediate team, while not letting your supported teams feel like they are being ignored. But this only works if you know which pain points your supported teams have, and you can make a case that your work directly relates to those pain points β€” I’ve seen situations where a team has been working on very valuable automation… that relieved no pain from the supported team, giving them a feeling of not being taken into consideration.

In addition to a good relationship with the supported team, there’s another thing that helps. Actually I would argue that it does more than just help, and is an absolute requirement: credibility. And management support. The former, in my experience, is a tricky one to understand (or accept) for many engineers, including me β€” that’s because often enough credibility in this space is related to the actions of your predecessors. Even when you’re supporting a new product team, it’s likely its members have had interactions with support teams (such as SRE) in the past, and those interactions will colour the initial impression of you and your team. This is even stronger when the product team was assigned a new team β€” or you’re a new member of a team, or you’re part of the “new generation” of a team that went through a bit of churn.

The way I have attacked that problem is by building up my credibility, by listening, and asking questions of what the problems the team feel are causing them issues are. Principles of reliability and best practices are not going to help a team that is struggling to find the time to work even on basic monitoring because they are under pressure to deliver something on time. Sometimes, you can take some of their load away, in a way that is sustainable for your own team, in a way that gains credibility, and that further the relationship. For instance you may be able to spend some time writing the metric-exposing code, with the understanding that the product team will expand it as they introduce new features.

The other factor as I said is management β€” this is another of those things that might bring a feeling of unfairness. I have encountered managers who seem more concerned about immediate results than the long-term pictures, and managers who appear afraid of suggesting projects that are not strictly within the scope of reliability, even when they would increase the team’s overall credibility. For this, I unfortunately don’t have a good answer. I found myself overall lucky with the selection of managers I have reported to, on average.

So for all of you out there in a position of supporting a product team, I hope this post helped giving you ideas of how to building a more effective, more healthy relationship.

Google Maps: Spam and Scams

Last year I wrote an analysis of fishy ads on Facebook, among other things because I had no way to escalate the level of scam that I was getting, and I thought that it would be good for others to be able to follow the breadcrumbs to recognize that type of scams. Since this year I switched company, I find myself being unable to escalate the massive amount of scams and spam I see around me in Google Maps… so let me try to show you what I mean.

For the past two and a half years I’ve been living in West London β€” I’m not going to show exactly where, but it’s in Brentford. And when I moved into the apartment, I noticed that the various pictures I was taking at home (of food, the back of the router, and so on) kept popping up on my notifications with a suggestion by Google Maps to add them to a review of the building my apartment is in. The reason for that turned out to be that the building was marked as Lodging, which had it acting as a commercial accommodation, rather than a residential building. Oops, but why?

Well, turns out that it’s a smaller version of what’s going on in London and the rest of the world, and it became apparent a few months later, and very clear now. On our floor, there’s not one, but two “holiday rental” units β€” despite that being apparently against the leasehold agreement between the building and the owners. And indeed, both that company and another few appears to have tried taking over the Google Maps entities for the apartment buildings in our complex, and in a few of the nearby ones, particularly adding phone numbers for inquiries about the buildings β€” buildings that have no central phone number.

Let me try to show you how deep that rabbit hole is β€” on your right you can see “Pump House Crescent”, which is a road going around some tall apartment buildings not far from where we live. You can already notice that there’s a Green Dragon Estate that has a pink pin instead of the gray one β€” that’s because it’s currently marked up as a Lodge and it has reviews β€” probably for the same reason why I was prompted to add pictures from my own apartment. As far as I can tell, it’s actually part of the various blocks on the crescent, and instead holds residential apartments. I’ve sent an edit request.

When you zoom in a bit more, you can see interesting things. Turner House, Hyperion Tower, Cunningham House, Masson House, and Aitons House are all marked as either Apartment Building or Flat Complex, both of which are residential, and that’s correct. But then there’s Bridgeman House that is marked as Lodging β€” and that is likely wrong (edit sent and published as I’m typing, turns out Google Maps reviewers are very prompt to fix these issues when you report them).

But not far from it is the possible scam you can see on the left. 360 Serviced Apartments is even showing availability for a residential building β€” which they are not in. They provide their address as Masson House for Google Maps to put them there, but their actual company address according to their website is in London W5 β€” and the picture that they posted is quite a way away on the river, rather than where the pin is present. Can we call it scam? I think I will.

It doesn’t end here β€” there’s another similar scam across the road for another serviced apartment that even managed to put their website’s domain in the name of the point of interest! In this case there’s no picture of the outside, so it is possible that the inside pictures are actually appropriate β€” but again we’re talking about a residential building, in a residential area, that, as far as I can tell, is not cleared for subletting. Does it end here? Of course it does not.

In the gallery above you can see one of the most blatant scams that I could find on Maps in this area. As you can see from the first picture, down a lane from Kew Bridge station there’s an Apple Apartments Kew Bridge. Once you click on it, you can see that is reported as a 4-star hotel. With a picture of a station β€” except that the station is definitely not the National Rail Kew Bridge station, but rather the London Underground Hammersmith Station, which as any resident of West London would be able to tell you, is nowhere near Kew Bridge!

And as you scroll the gallery, you can see more pictures uploaded as if they were taken from the hotel, but they are clearly taken at different places. There’s pictures of Kew Bridge itself, as if you were able to see it from the place. And then you can see from the various reviews that this is not a 4-star hotel at all. Indeed, the star rating of UK hotels is defined by the AA, and for 4-star hotels they expect:

4 stars:Β Professional, uniformed staff respond to your needs or requests.Β Well-appointed public areas.Β The restaurant or dining room is open to residents and non-residents.Β Lunch is available in a designated eating area.

Let me remind you that it’s definitely a holiday let apartment that those “Apple Apartments” are.

I’m sure that all of these examples are not limited to Google Maps, as I remember being a “SuperUser” for FourSquare years ago, and having to review similar spam/scam situations, which is why I’ve been doing this on and off with Google Maps, both while working at Google and now. But at the same time, I don’t think it’s fair we, the public, end up having to clean up after this level of spam and abuse.

Anyway, if you live in an area that has lots of residential buildings, do take a look if there’s a lot of them marked Lodging, and that have phone numbers (particularly mobile numbers), and consider giving them a clear up if you can. It’s not just about removing scams for tourists, it’s also making sure that a residential area is not peppered with commercial corridors created by rule-bending (or rule-breaking) holiday let listings.

Controlling Your TV via (Circuit)Python

This is yet another of the pre-announced projects, and possibly one of the most procrastinated ones. I own a Sony Bravia TV I bought in Ireland in 2013, and is still working very well for our needs (we don’t watch that much TV). It’s connected to a Yamaha RX-V475 receiver on one input and a cheap HDMI switch on the other input, because there’s too many devices, although we only use three or four of them most of the time: Chromecast, Portal TV, HTPC, and PlayStation 4. They are split equally between the two inputs. So far, so good.

The problem starts with the fact that sometimes if the TV is turned on by the Chromecast or the Portal, the ARC does not initialize properly, and we hear no audio. The solution is worthy of The IT Crowd: tell the TV to use the internal speakers, then tell it to use the external speakers again β€” turn off and on the ARC itself. It’s annoying and takes a few keypresses.

What I have been wanting for a while is a way to ask Assistant (or Alexa) to “unfuck the TV” β€” that is to reset the audio channel for us, recording a macro to do that ARC off/on dance. It was for this reason I bought the Feather M4 last year, but I only ended up starting to work on it just this month.

To make this possible, the first thing I needed was to know the commands sent by the remote, and have a way to replicate them back to the TV. I already had some experience with infrared receivers as, a long time ago in a different life, I maintained the LIRC patchset for Linux 2.6, for a while. I even tried writing Qt (3) bindings for LIRC. I wonder if I can find the source code anywhere. But that was not as useful as I thought.

Thankfully, Ken Shirriff wrote good documentation on the protocol, and linked to further details, and even to a full archive of all the Sony command codes. Which made my life much easier, but not completely easy. While Adafruit has an IRRemote library, it does not correctly interpret Sony SIRC commands. I considered adding the support directly into it, but it turned out to be a bit more invasive than expected, so I ended up instead writing a separate package that included both the decoder and the encoder (this was before I started the new job, so releasing it was easy β€” but now I’m having to wait a little bit to continue on it.)

Now, once I managed to decode the commands, I need to be able to send them. And here’s where things get interesting. What we usually refer to as commands are a bunch of bits. These are encoded, based on the protocol, as a series of pulses, which are modulated on top of a carrier wave with a certain frequency.

Unfortunately, it turns out that talking to a Sony TV is nowhere near as easy as it might sound. Let’s try to figure out what’s going on by providing a bit of vocabulary. An infrared signal as used by most remote controls usually carries a command and, in most cases, an address to specify which device should take the command (since they are usually used in place where there are multiple devices using infrared remote controls). These are encoded in bits according to the rules of the protocol, and then converted to pulses. These pulses are then applied to a carrier wave of a certain frequency, which defines the speed at which the infrared LED is “blinking” on and off. The LED itself has a wavelength which represent the “colour” of the light in the infrared spectrum.

For Sony’s SIRC, the TV expects a 40kHz carrier, and it seems a 950nm wavelength. It seems like you can use 940nm LEDs but they have worse reception, and only works if they are bright enough. The first batch of LEDs I bought, as well as the pre-soldered module from DFRobot, turned out to not be bright enough for my TV to recognize β€” so I decided to try with desoldering the LED from a replacement remote control from eBay, which worked fine, so I thought I needed 950nm LEDs β€” but no, it works with good enough 940nm LEDs, just not with the tiny ones I originally bought from Mouser.

So once I had a way to send arbitrary Sony commands to my TV, I started looking for options to trigger the ARC reset β€” unfortunately this is proving more complicated than I expected: there’s no command that I could send that would provide me with the ARC menu. Instead I can only bring up the Sync menu reliably β€” but that menu has different entries depending on whether the selected input has working HDMI CEC, which is extremely annoying.

On the other hand, I did find commands that select directly the different inputs directly, instead of showing up the input selection menu and choosing from there. Which gave me a different idea to start with: while I haven’t given up on the macro for fixing the audio, what I can do is to script input selection across the two-level mux.

I started by wondering if I could send the IR command to the HDMI switcher as well, so that I could select between those two easily β€” that turned out to be another pile of yaks to shave. The switcher uses the NEC protocol, which has a 38kHz carrier wave, but that turned out not to matter as much (the decoder it uses seem to accept 40kHz just as well)Β β€” instead I had a hard time to get it to receive the command because it expected a NEC “repeat signal” to seal the command. I guess that’s going to be a blog post in and by itself.

Now, my original plan was to get something running on the Feather, attach an AirLift wing to give it WiFi, and control that… somehow. I also considered re-coding this with ESP32 and ESPHome, despite it not having an obvious way to send SIRC commands while making sense β€” it doesn’t represent the commands the way the protocol expects, and the most reasonable way I could find was to generate the pulse sequence, and just sending that raw.

But then I thought it over and realised that, at least for the moment, it makes more sense for me to use an USB-to-GPIO bridge, and control this from a full blown computer β€” the reason for that is that I would want to be able to open a webpage on my phone, or my wife’s, and select the right input altogether. And while there’s a Python module for controlling the receiver, using that from CircuitPython or MicroPython would probably take some work. And even though I could just control the Feather remotely, via MQTT or USB-Serial, it would still likely be more work than driving this all from the same Flask app locally.

Unfortunately, I don’t have code to show you yet. While my new dayjob has much simpler policies than the last, I need to complete the training before I can start releasing new projects. Hopefully next update will come with code and demos.

Paperless home, sorted home

You probably don’t remember, but I have been chasing the paperless office for many years. At first it was a matter of survival, as running my own business in Italy meant tons of paperwork, and sorting it all out while being able to access it was impossible. By scanning and archiving the invoices and other documents, the whole thing got much better.

I continued to follow the paperless path when I stopped running a company and just working, but by then, the world started following me and most services started insisting on paperless billing anyway, which was nice. In Dublin I received just a few pieces of paper a month, and it was easy to scan them, and then bring them to the office to dispose of in the secure shredding facilities. I kept this on after moving to London, despite the movers steaming my scanner, using a Brother ADS-1100W instead.

But since the days in Italy, my scanning process changed significantly: in Dublin I never had a Linux workstation, so the scanner ended up connected to my Gamestation using Windows β€” using PaperPort which was at the time marketed by Nuance. The bright side of this was that PaperPort applies most of the same post-processing as Unpaper while at the same time running OCR over the scanned image, making it searchable on Google Drive, Dropbox and so on.

Unfortunately, it seems like something changed recently, either in Windows 10, the WIA subsystem or something else altogether, and from time to time after scanning a page, PaperPort or the scanner freeze, and don’t terminate the processing, requiring a full reboot of the OS. Yes I tried powercycling the scanner, yes I tried disconnecting the USB and reconnecting, none seem to work except a full reboot, which is why I’m wondering if it might be a problem with the WIA subsystem.

The current workaround I have is to use the TWAIN system, which is the same that I used with my scanner on Windows 98, which is surprising and annoying β€” in particular I need to remember to turn on the scanner before I open PaperPort, otherwise it fails to scan and the process will need to be killed with the Task Manager. So I’m actually considering switching the scanning to Linux again.

My old scan2pdf command-line tool would help, but it does not include the OCR capabilities. Paperless seems more interesting, and it uses Unpaper itself. But it assumes you want the document stored on the host, as well as scanned and processed. I would have to see if it has integration with Google Drive, or otherwise figure out how to get that integration going with something like rclone. But, well, that would be quite a bit of work that I’m not sure I want to do right now.

Speaking of work, and organizing stuff β€” I released some hacky code which I wrote to sort through the downloaded PDF bills from various organizations. As I said on Twitter when I released it, it is not a work of engineering, or a properly-cleaned-up tool. But it works for most of the bills I care about right now, and it makes my life (and my wife’s) easier by having all of our bank statements and bills named and sorted (particularly when just downloading a bunch of PDFs from different companies once a month, and sorting them all.)

Funnily enough, writing that tool also had some surprises. You may remember that a few years ago I leaked my credit card number by tweeting a screenshot of what I thought was uninitialized memory in Dolphin. Unlike Irish credit card statements, British card statements don’t include the full PAN in any of the pages of a PDF. So you could think it’s safe to provide a downloaded PDF as proof of address to other companies. Well, turns out it isn’t, at least for Santander: there’s an invisible (but searchable and highlightable) full 16-digit PAN at the top of the first page of the document. You can tell it’s there when you run the file over pdf2text or similar tools (there’s a similar invisible number on bank statements, but that’s also provided visible: it’s the sort-code and account number).

Oh and it looks like most Italian bills don’t use easily-scrapeable layouts, which is why there’s none of them right now in the tool. If someone knows of a Python library that can extract text from pages using “Figure” objects, I’m all ears.

The Importance of Project Boxes

Given my background, you may think I’m referring to servers β€” after all I ran the tinderbox for a long while. But no, in this case I’m referring to actual, physical boxes. And a few virtual ones as well.

See, when I listed my electronics projects, it probably sounded like my house is now top-to-bottom filled with random electronics stuff. This might have been the case if I was doing that in Dublin, but nowadays I’m not alone, and while my wife accepts the need for my random projects, making a total mess of the apartment is probably not a great idea. Indeed the “study” (that is, the second bedroom turned into a home office) is not quite sorted out, but it’s also not a total mess right now (you can see it in the test Live whiteboarding).

The way I’m trying to keep all of this together, is through a significant number of boxes. I already bought a number of LEGO boxes back in Dublin β€” the reason for the choice was that those boxes are particularly designed to be used by kids, and that made them particularly sturdy. Unfortunately they are also not particularly big. That made them not particularly useful for storing more bulky items, such as my multimeter, the dremel or most of my screwdrivers’ set. I did bring a toolbox with me from Italy – which includes not one but two hammers, more screwdrivers, one older soldering iron, and other similar tools – but this ended up being the kind of toolbox where tools end up to die, because it’s just so uncomfortable to use.

Instead I now bought bigger, bulkier boxes β€” using one to store the tools, and another one to store my “electronics” stuff, most of which is stored in tiny boxes inside β€” so that I have a box of transistors, two of resistors, a couple of Dupont connectors, and so on. This makes it easier to sort through what I need at any one time. I considered using bigger boxes with more compartments, but it turns out that most of the time I only need three or four smaller boxes, and sorting between smaller boxes is easier. I have unfortunately not found a very good box to hold the soldering kit – TS-100 and so on – but I might end up looking for something with foam inserts if I ever figure out how to properly design those, after all.

The LEGO boxes are now (mostly) project boxes: one of them has all of the glucometers that I’ve either already reversed or plan to reversing soon; another one has the R205 boards that I never made much progress on, and so on. The fact that I have so many half-complete projects is indeed disheartening when I think of it. Unfortunately there’s reason for that: either lack of skills on my part, the lack of time for myself, or the lack of tooling at the right time. I can for instance tell you that I definitely would have a much easier time nowadays trying to solder those those pins, not just because I improved my soldering skills, but also because I now have tools that I didn’t even know existed back then, including the Dupont crimper.

And this is where the project boxes come into play. Being able to put everything for one particular project into a box and not worry about it for a while is a liberating experience. I had to literally do that when I started my new job β€” it’s not that difficult passing from one Big Tech company to another, but it is time consuming, and after spending nearly eight straight hours in front of a monitor watching videos and/or reading tutorials, the last thing I wanted was to spend some more time in front of the computer… having all the half-projects in front of me was tough, and I preferred shoving everything into a project box, and going back to it a week or so later β€” I have indeed gone back to one of my projects already and will likely have a blog post about it later.

But as I said, there’s also “metaphorical” project boxes β€” that work for me both at work and at home: there are times when working on the same project for months at a time is not feasible. It may be that what was once a priority isn’t anymore, or a higher priority comes out. Or maybe you’re just too burnt out to work on one thing, and decided that it’s time to work on something else for a while. Having the ability to set aside a project, and come back to it later, having state and notes about what something was about is something important. For most of my opensource projects, I leave my own notes in the blog, which is why there’s so many posts of old projects that have not gone anywhere. For work projects, I try to leave design docs or notes, and for other stuff, I started having proper journals dedicated to the ideas. That’s how Birch Books started as well.

The main advantage I found for doing this at work is that it allows collecting rakes without losing track of the main objective of your job. Many of the examples I gave in the previous blog post on the topic have been months-long efforts. Some of those took two years to close the reported issues! And in at least one case, the work had to literally be halted, and wait for two quarters, because one of the blockers could only be solved by deleting the whole source of a service that was being replaced.

So what I’m advocating about is the ability to keep things around, but out of sight. It’s the reason why I can’t stand certain policies in projects (at work and FLOSS alike) that pretty much disallow “long-standing bugs”: sometimes you want to keep all the information you have on a project together, and a bug/issue/task that has been opened for a number of years might just be the right way β€” closing it for the sake of an OKR target is unlikely to do anyone a good service.

And also allowing ourselves (all of us), to box up projects β€” whether it is for a while or forever. Being reminded of the stuff you have not completed is not going to make you feel any better, in my experience. Being able to say “Yeah it’s in the box, one day I might or might not get to it” is a way to breathe in, and give yourself space.

Clothing & Games Spotlight: TeeTurtle & Unstable Unicorns

β€” What do you do at the office?
β€” I keep it weird.

I have already written about Genki Gear, which is probably the “uniform supplier” for British Isles’ geeks. They are clearly not alone β€” and I thought I would give a shout out to another geeky supplier.

TeeTurtle makes clothes, slippers, plushies, underwear, stickers, … with some of the geekiest art ever. You can find on their website original art, Disney and Marvel, Star Wars or, if that’s your cup of tea (it’s not mine), Rick & Morty.

And they have probably my favourite filter selection for an art clothing store: by animals! Because whether you’re into puppies, cats, foxes, pandas, bunnies, dragons, … everybody needs their favourite tshirt.

And, let’s not forget, Unicorns!

Indeed, these are the same people behind Unstable Unicorns and a bunch of other awesome board and card games. If you have not had a chance to take a look at those games, do now. Unstable Unicorns is one of our favourite party games, together with Exploding Kittens.

If you’re locked in with your significant others, or with other housemates, you may want to give it a try… but just remember the advice on the box: Unicorns are your friends now!

Bragging sARTSurday: Plushies At Home

#plushie #plushieathome #seagull

In this week’s sARTSurday, I want to show off my own creation, for once.

Because of the lockdown, we had to sacrifice not just our conventions, but also our visits to Kew Gardens β€” and despite it reopening next month, we’re not sure if we feel safe enough to go and visit, since with diabetes I’m considered at risk. And Kew is where I would usually spend some time taking pictures with the weather we had… and that’s not happening any time soon.

Instead, since I started this weekly column, I have been taking quite a few more pictures inside the apartment. I even decided to invest in a couple of accessories for my camera to make it easier to take pictures of those and my art project β€” namely a flashgun, and an L-bracket (which will be useful even in Kew when I’ll be able to get there again.)

So for the past week or so, inspired by the last post header picture, I decided to take “candid” shots of the plushies that we have home. Most of these used to be on my desk at the office, both in Dublin and London β€” but given the current situation, they are likely going to stay at home for a while.

Good morning! Your usual?

I’m clearly not a professional photographer, I’m not even a particularly good photographer. But I thought it would make people smile to see them, and that’s all I care about.

If you want to see more pictures, particularly of squirrels, you can find them on Flickr, Facebook (separately from this blog) and Instagram. I have some more pictures to take of Star Wars plushies and LEGO sets, so keep your eyes on them if you’re into those.