Media - darkroom - Page 14 | virtualwolf.org

A photo looking out of our sliding door onto the patio and into the backyard. The water has come up above the level of the grass in approximately half the lawn area, and it's only slightly less than that on the side of the patio closest to the house.

Bloody hell, the rain is so heavy our backyard has flooded. I've seen it occasionally happen before but not to this extent.

Posted on 10 February 2025, 12:09

A photo of a round white UFO-looking UniFi access point mounted on the wall, with an ethernet cable coming out of the bottom of it. There's a blue circle of LED in the middle, looking all cool and futuristic (he says as the table is moved in front of that piece of wall so you can't actually even see the thing is there anyway).

An absolute mess of mostly ethernet cables, plus a power cable, an RCA cable, and a small white D-Link switch sitting on the floor, looking very rat-nesty.

Well, the one for the lounge room was easy because there's already a cable coming straight from the Dream Router to where I wanted to mount the new access point anyway. And with being able to move everything to wireless because there's now a properly solid signal here, and moving the Raspberry Pi directly behind the TV because the only thing it needs to plug into is power and the amplifier, I've been able to clean out a whole rat's nest of cables.

This Power-over-Ethernet thing is pretty sweet, isn't it?

our house darkroom nerd shit

Posted on 4 February 2025, 21:45

A photo of two round white UFO-looking access points sitting on a table. There's nothing for scale but Ubiquiti's tech specs page says they're 16cm across.

I bought a couple of shiny new Ubiquiti U6+ access points because it turns out our wifi is not super-great particularly in the back room, and completely missed the fact that they're powered by power-over-ethernet ONLY, with no actual other way of getting power into them. Oops.

(Fortunately our Dream Router has two ports that can do PoE, but it'll require some rejiggering of the network at the front of the house, plus we'll have to get a sparky out to run some ethernet cable for the back room.)

our house darkroom new toys nerd shit

Posted on 4 February 2025, 16:26

A photo of five people sitting around a somewhat messy music area in our office. The drum kit is empty because I was on it but stepped back to take the photo, but we have someone on bass guitar, two guitarists, a keyboardist, and a vocalist.

In the office again for the first after-work music jam of the new year! As well as the guitar/bass/drums/keyboard, there's a little Korg synth of some description and one of the people had great fun playing around with that despite not actually knowing how to really use it. At one point I ended up just starting a simple little progression on the bass guitar and then everyone else joined in along the same lines and it sounded so good! Completely improvised but we all got into the groove and it was hella satisfying.

Then at the end we played Black Sabbath's Paranoid and oh man such a good song but I was on drums at that point and it absolutely did my arm in, haha.

darkroom friends in the office jamming

Posted on 30 January 2025, 20:44

A photo of our little temperature dashboard display showing that it's 45.1˚C outside right now. (Inside it's a wonderfully comfortable 24.4˚C.)

NO THANK YOU.

our house darkroom too fucking hot

Posted on 28 January 2025, 15:51

A photo of the box of my iPad Pro. The box itself is white with an image of a black iPad Pro on it, and on the screen is some abstract art, mostly black, with a set of lines that kind of give the impression of something having been vacuum moulded underneath it.

Upgraded to the new 11" iPad Pro tonight, 6 years from my 2018 one is a good run! I had unfortunately dropped the old one a couple of months ago and cracked the glass, and it's since spread and is now registering phantom touches. I also likely would have been upgrading later this year anyway since the old one was getting rather long in the tooth (and I've had to have the "automatically remove unused apps" on for a good two-plus years now because I had very much run out of storage space), this just pushed the timeframe up a bit.

The new Magic Keyboard is MUCH more solid feeling than the old one (and there's an Escape key! 🎉), but the first order of business is disabling all the bloody Apple Intelligence rubbish now that I have an iPad that can actually run it.

our house darkroom new toys ipad pro

Posted on 23 January 2025, 21:58

A panorama photo of a group of people sitting around a pair of tables in a pub. Everyone except @thewetmale is looking at the camera and smiling.

Excellent turnout with the Sydney fedimeet, it was great to see @thewetmale @[email protected] @ausfestivus and @[email protected] in person again, and extra lovely to meet @akent @heygeorgie @dropbear @[email protected] and @[email protected] for the first time! 🎉 Big thanks to @yayKM for organising, we'll have to do this again soon!

(Also full disclosure, @thewetmale doesn't actually look that munted in real life, he was in the middle of talking while I was taking the panorama and this was the result. 😅)

sydney darkroom friends people fediverse meet

Posted on 22 January 2025, 22:10

A photo taken from underneath where the espresso comes out of my espresso machine. The whole bottom of the basket is open and the espresso itself is almost curling itself along the underside towards the middle where it flows down into a stream into a mug.

Shout-out to @SeaFury for getting me onto bottomless portafilters for my espresso machine! Now that I can see what's going on with the extraction I've been able to adjust the grind size and shot volume and it's noticeably improved now, especially my single-origin straight shots first thing in the morning. 👌🏻

our house darkroom coffee

Posted on 22 January 2025, 13:32

A photo of seven ESP32 microcontroller circuit boards sitting on a table. The one on top is the old one and is about 5cm wide and 2cm tall. Underneath it are six of the new boards, each of which are about 2.5cm by 2cm or so. The new ones are ASTOUNDINGLY more compact than the old one.

I'm modernising my ESP32 setup! 🎉 The one on top is one of the old Adafruit HUZZAH32s I'm using at the moment that originally came out in ~2017 and has 520KB RAM, 4MB flash, and a Micro USB connector. The new ones are Adafruit QT Py ESP32s with 2MB of RAM, 8MB of flash, and USB-C.

I have a bit of functionality in my MicroPython code where I can trigger the board to update itself remotely by pulling the files down from GitHub, but unfortunately with the overhead of running MicroPython plus my code itself, I only end up with about 80KB or so free after a fresh reboot and so the update-from-GitHub code frequently runs out of memory and I end up needing to update the code by plugging it directly into the computer. (Which in turns means needing to find out a damn Micro USB to USB-C adapter or cable because all my computers are USB-C now.)

The actual physical cable setup with the old boards is pretty messy too, because even though my sensors are all using the nice compact and clean Stemma QT connector, I have to break those out into individual power, ground, SCL, and SDA cables and plug them individually into the GPIO pins on the board whereas the new QT Py boards have a built-in Stemma QT port on them!

our house diy darkroom new toys esp32

Posted on 21 January 2025, 15:42

A photo of two disgusting Plague Marine miniatures, their armour is painted a khaki green and the trim has been done in a bronze colour. The one on the left is mid-stride and has what looks like a huge flamethrower slung under one arm, and the one on the right is holding a gnarled staff up in one hand and has his other hand out in front of him casting some foul cloud of magic. Both of them are in pox-ridden Space Marine armour, with tentacles and pustules everywhere, and the one on the right with the staff has a huge mouth with massive teeth in the stomach of his armour, and some sort of fleshy/tentacley guts coming out of it.

Well, it might not be fast (I have way too many hobbies competing for way too little time), but I'm finally making some progress on my Plague Marines! As with almost all of Games Workshop's miniatures, the further along with painting I get, the more of the little details I notice (and in this case those details are all gross, haha).

our house darkroom kill team games workshop painting death guard

Posted on 20 January 2025, 21:29