title: Current Project List
date: 2025-01-12
summary: I have a lot of ongoing/back-burnered projects.  What should I be working on now?

Current Project List - 2025-01-12 - Entry 49 - TOGoS's Project Log

I have this thing where I take on a lot of new projects but don't forget about the old ones. They linger in the back of my mind (and in my project database) and each one adds a little bit of drag.

Lately, for a given day, I've been throw everything in my head into a free MindMup, but I thought it might be interesting to give any random souls who happen to be reading my project log an idea of the projects for which I haven't gathered the time/energy/focus/gumption write a dedicated project log entry.

Some of the following links might not work (yet). Making them work is itself a project.

Interview My Dad (M4909T-265)

I did a 'test interview' with him last month where we talked mostly about CSBwin.

The 'test' was to see how well it would work to hook two USB microphones up to my laptop and use VCV Rack to record a two-channel MP3. Here are the raw recordings:

TODO

Stewie Music Project (M4909T-266)

Stewie asked me to help him with a project about using Wii Balance Boards to control music.

Status

I wrote a Deno script to read data from /dev/input/event123 and turn them into OSC packets (this currently lives in SynthGen2100's the P0027 subtree).

The goal is to use something cheaper to do the Bluetooth-to-OSC translation, since there seems to be a limit of 7 bluetooth devices per host device, and we want to support at least 8 boards, and I don't want to have to buy multi-hundred-dollar PCs or Steam Decks just to add more WBBs to the system. To that end I bought several Pi Pico Ws (the 2040 kind, not the 2350s, which supposedly have some issues).

I haven't programmed the Pico Ws yet, but I have designed 3D-printable Minirail mounts for them:

OpenSCAD rendering of holder (left), and holder with RPi Pico W (right)

TODO

If you click on e.g. "about:M4909T-265 and it says "I coulnd't find about:M4909T-265.html, bro", then I haven't done this yet.

I collect a lot of data about my projects.

For example, between 3DPrintingData.tef and 3DPrintingLog.org, I can tell you exactly which version of which OpenSCAD design and which preset was used to generate each STL file that I have. But currently that's all buried in TEF files in different repositories, so not easy to link to.

Some topics are documented in docs/. Some happen to have entries in my dream journal. Some are documented here in the project log. The generated about page should be able to provide links to those, too.

This keeps getting put off because it feels like part of a larger project and I can't make up my mind about programming language. e.g. should it be contingent on Scripting language [for Java]? But maybe now that I'm finally getting back into Deno programming, I'll just use Deno.

New Factorio server

TOGoS-FBS, the 'Factorio Build Server' PC that I build back in 2017, is all well and good and humming along nicely (when its heatsink fans aren't making horrible grinding noises all night), but the version of Ubuntu on it is 8 years old, and it can't run certbot (which is part of the reason I have trouble serving HTTPS traffic), and it can't, despite its name, even run the latest Factorio server.

I don't want to upgrade in place because (a) that would require upgrading through several versions of Ubuntu, which sounds like a pain, and (b) it is in active use, generating PicGrid collages and turning some lights on and off and probably several other tasks that I have come to rely on but have forgotten about.

So I have bought a few cheap (one less cheap) mini PCs (TOGoS-Mini1, TOGoS-Mini2, and TOGoS-Mini3). The idea being that I can migrate stuff over from TOGoS-FBS at my own pace until TOGoS-FBS is no longer needed, then upgrade it without having to worry about interrupting anything.

Maybe it'll get an optical drive? To help with Sara's VHS digitizing project. Or just general archiving.

And on and on

Implicitly lower-priority than those first four things.

The TOG Software System

The whole 'TOG Software System' is a nebulous project that may encompass most of the other software-related projects. I think 'trying to work on it' is sort of a trap. Instead, I should use that Git repo as a place to document common ideas, but not treat it as an end in itself.

The stuff database and the scripting language for CCouch3 seem to fall under this, which is why I've had trouble starting them.

I guess I need to get better at prototyping. A big part of my problem may be that I'm afraid to 'pollute the global namespace' (be that my list of Git repos, or ns.nuke24.net terms) with lots of temporary garbage. Maybe this means that The TOG Software System ought to include a strategy for organizing prototypes. Yet another project, ha.

Some potential solutions:

The Book of TOG

I also have some ideas about taking all the different documents and data that I generate/collect and turning it into a giant PDF, for purposes of having something to pass on. Possibly divided into volumes with the more personal/important stuff being up at the front.

I like the idea of putting information into a physical book. I often wish that documentation for programming languages/frameworks came in this form so I could go sit down in the recliner and read it front-to-back to get a pretty good general understanding of the topic. As opposed to having to hunt around in some wiki that's divided into lots of tiny pages (the Racket Guide, among many others, is guilty of this).

The 'stuff database' that I want to create to drive the 'about' pages could also be used to generate sections of such a book.

Towards this end, I've started to organize sketches and diagrams as PDFs. For now I'm recording them at the end of ProjectNotes2's README, though I have plans to start a few new ccouch collections to track these.

Here's a few for starters: