Media - darkroom - Page 15 | virtualwolf.org

A photo of the corner of our room where the elliptical is, showing a black wall fan attached to the wall next to the window at about head height, pointing directly at where you stand on the elliptical.

The little fan in our elliptical has been on the fritz for a while now and has finally given out the ghost. Even though it doesn't seem like it'd do much, having that airflow really helped when I'm properly powering along and it's VERY noticeable how much hotter I'm getting without it running. I popped the console off last week and opened it up but it's all pretty well sealed away so I wasn't able to get into the motor itself to figure out what happened (I suspect it's had a bunch of sweat get into it and rust something).

So I decided "Fuck it, let's go whole hog" and ordered a nice big 40cm wall fan, it arrived today and I just mounted it, and it's an absolute unqualified success. I've got it at just the right angle so the whole of my torso gets nice and breezy but it's not blowing directly in my face. 👌🏻 It has three speeds, even at the lowest it's lovely and I've got two higher speeds I can crank it to if need be. Plus it has a little remote that can live underneath the tablet holder on the elliptical so I can turn it up without needing to top and lean awkwardly over.

Posted on 14 January 2025, 21:26

A photo of a long table with an array of dessert foods on it: pavlova, chocolate and passionfruit tart things, sliced fruit, and long chocolate-covered cream-filled pastry things.

We had my mum's 70th at Dee Why RSL, there were a bunch of rellies we hadn't seen for ages, it was a buffet lunch, and there was a goodly selection of dessert and oh god I'm so full.

darkroom food dee why

Posted on 11 January 2025, 16:26

A photo of the display on our elliptical machine at the end of the workout. It says I've burnt 1382 calories and covered 17.8 kilometres in an hour and eighteen minutes.

Man, these high-budget long TV episodes are certainly a great way to do a hell of a workout. I just finished watching the last episode of Season 1 of Dune: Prophecy, all the prior ones were an hour long but this was nearly an hour twenty. That workout alone was 250% of my move goal for day.

our house darkroom exercise

Posted on 7 January 2025, 16:01

My sensor-activated Raspberry Pi e-ink display setup for the back room is aliiiive! 🎉 AND I managed to write the Raspberry Pi code fully in Python as well. 💪🏻

The ESP32 polls the distance sensor every 50ms and checks to see if the distance read is less than a given threshold (the distance from sensor to floor is about two metres, so I set the threshold to trigger at 1.5m so it'll go off if someone walks through the doorway). If the threshold is breached, it'll send a message to an MQTT topic with a payload indicating that the sensor was triggered and will not send any more messages even if the sensor is triggered again within a user-specified period of time. Once that same user-specified period of time has passed with the distance threshold NOT being breached, it'll send another message to the MQTT topic saying the sensor is no longer triggered.

On the Raspberry Pi side of things, my Python code listens to the MQTT topic that the ESP32 is publishing to, and if it receives a "triggered" message, it checks to see if the display is already on and being updated and will turn it on and start updating every minute if not. Once it receives a "not triggered" message, it'll clear the display so it's effectively "off".

In the video, I set the trigger ignore period to ten seconds which is why it turns back off so quickly, but in ordinary use I have it set to an hour.

I am by no means a professional Python developer, but if you're curious, the code is on Codeberg (ESP32 and Raspberry Pi)).

our house raspberry pi diy darkroom video esp32

Posted on 7 January 2025, 14:08

A selfie of me, a white man with a relatively short but getting somewhat scruffy-looking red beard and short brown hair, wearing a black Fear Factory t-shirt. I'm holding a white Fender Player II Stratocaster electric guitar and smiling at the camera.

You'll have to speak up, I'm playing a guitar. 😎

I finished the bass line this morning, I've got the broad strokes of the rhythm guitar down and just need to record the rest, so now I'm mucking around with the lead. I recorded some lead earlier in the week but listening to it again now I realised it doesn't go, especially with the increased energy of the new bass track, it was just too slow.

our house selfie me music darkroom guitar

Posted on 5 January 2025, 21:26

A VERY close-up, not quite in focus photo of April the dark brown labradoodle sitting on the lounge almost directly on me and giving a very expectant stare. It looks exactly like she's saying "YES HELLO I AM HERE GIVE ME PETS" which is 100% what she would be saying if she could speak.

A not-quite-so-close-up photo of the lighter brown labradoodle Amber who is also standing on the lounge and staring at me. At the very bottom right of the frame you can see just a bit of April's head because she was sitting on me at the time.

A somewhat blurry photo of both April and Amber sniffing each other's snouts, April is sitting directly on me and Amber is standing alongside. Out of focus in the background you can see @ausfestivus sitting on the lounge as well.

Today we went over to visit @ausfestivus and his lovely wife and their two excellent doggos! One of the dogs, the lighter-coloured one Amber, is a completely chilled sweetheart, and the other darker one April is a complete chaos whirlwind who insisted on being ON me whenever possible but would immediately get jealous if Amber was getting any attention, haha.

dog darkroom friends mount colah

Posted on 4 January 2025, 18:46

A photo of a big thick-skinned potato sliced in half and covered in beef mince with healthy dollops of sour cream on top.

Aw yiss, NYE dinner was baked potatoes done in the air fryer with Mexican-seasoned mince on top and sour cream, so good! 👌🏻

our house darkroom food portrait mode

Posted on 31 December 2024, 19:34

A photo of a smallish room, with stuff against all of the walls but in a neat and tidy and actually arranged fashion, and without a bunch of dust and leaves on the floor.

Did some cleaning and tidying for the final day of 2024: I finally got around to donating Beanie's old stuff to our local vet who were very grateful and assured me they'd be put to good use. The woman who helped me bring the stuff in said in particular that some of their clients have, and I quote, "geriatric dachshunds", so Beanie's old ramp will be particularly helpful, haha.

I also went through the horrifying mess that was the cable box and got rid of all of the cables I had a ton of duplicates of and didn't need anymore (mostly things involving USB-A), and we took all of that plus the rest of the e-waste that'd been sitting there gathering dust to the local e-waste recycling place, and finally I did some long overdue vacuuming as well, phew.

beanie our house darkroom tidying and rearranging

Posted on 31 December 2024, 15:48

A photo of four smiling people sitting around a restaurant table. There's me, a white man with a short red beard and short brown hair, @yayKM, a white woman with short brown hair, @200ok, a white man with short-ish black hair and black-rimmed glasses, and his partner who is a white woman with shoulder-length tinted light purple hair wearing clear plastic rimmed glasses.

Mamak for the second time in two days, whee! Met up with @[email protected] and his lovely partner before they move to Melbourne.

chatswood kristina selfie me darkroom friends mamak

Posted on 30 December 2024, 20:59

A photo of fifteen lightly golden cut rounds (basically scones but more savoury) sitting on a cooling rack.

And finally we have a somewhat belated batch of cut rounds, made very specifically to have with @[email protected]'s jam. 😁

our house darkroom food portrait mode cut rounds

Posted on 30 December 2024, 14:00