===================================
 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
<https://codeberg.org/defanor/3d.el/raw/branch/master/examples/sphere-and-text.txt>,
the repository is at <https://codeberg.org/defanor/3d.el>.

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 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"
(<https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/act_course/index.html>): 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
