I’ve mostly automated the setup of the software for the Life display frame software. You can find the scripts here on GitHub . Running this requires a Linux system with ansible and git installed.
I am running this on a Raspberry Pi ZeroW , but it should work on just about anything running Debian Linux .
This uses the lite version of Raspberry Pi OS without a GUI. You should download the correct one for your hardware, expand the image, and write it to an SD Card:
Last year I wrote about my sdl2-life program, adding color to it, and seeding it with data from my website logs. This time I’ve decided to make a dedicated wall display for it using an Adafruit touchscreen display and a Raspberry Pi Zero that I bought back before they became unobtainable.
After a bunch of experiments with the design I managed to make a display that won’t fall off the wall and it looks reasonably nice.
After letting the life server I wrote about last month run for a bit I decided that all white cells are a bit boring and I started exploring ways to add some color to it. First step was to keep track of the age of the cells, and I decided that new cells should inherit the age of the cells that created it in the hope that it would be more visually snazzy.
A few years back I was experimenting with Go and SDL2, I wrote a dead-simple Conway's Game of Life program with it, added loading of a couple popular pattern file formats, and was pretty much finished with it. The other day I came across this cool project while preparing for Thanksgiving by browsing infosec.exchange . Brett has an e-ink display running life and is seeding it from tarpit data which struck me as a really neat idea to keep the world from becoming static as most of the more complex ones tend to do.
One of the projects that I work on is osbuild-composer . This is an operating system image builder, written in Go, and is the replacement for the lorax-composer project. I’m going to skim over the details since this post is about profiling things, but you can read more about it at osbuild.org and the [GitHub repository].
Behind the scenes it uses DNF to handle depsolving and package queries. A few weeks back I wrote a patch to cache the results from the dnf-json program in order to speed up the response time when listing all the packages (over 63000 of them in Fedora 35!
It has been quite some time since I wrote about one of my longest running projects, MovieLandmarks . The UI hasn’t changed much in the intervening years. But the backend has been rewritten in Go, and the covers now come from TMDB instead of IMDB .
Recently I decided I wanted the map to open to a view of the landmarks related to the move being passed to it using the #mv-XXXX hash.
Letterbox is a simple Go program that accepts SMTP connections and delivers mail to a per-user maildir directory. I use it to gather reports from various services on my LAN without needing to setup postfix or some other more complex MTA.
Usage of letterbox: -config string Path to configutation file (default "letterbox.toml") -host string Host IP or name to bind to -maildirs string Path to the top level of the user Maildirs (default "/var/spool/maildirs") -port int Port to bind to (default 25) The configuration file is written using TOML .
mpd-status is a simple Go program that queries the music player daemon and prints out the status for use with tmux .
You need to have Go installed, clone the repo and run go build to create the binary.
By default the output is the status (using unicode play/pause/stop characters), the artist name, and song title. Pass --volume to include the volume level from 0-100%, and --elapsed to output the elapsed time and duration, like 2m40s/3m43s.
In 2010 I wrote about a simple method for migrating schema with Python . Here’s the same kind of thing, but this time using Go. I’m using the SQLx extensions for database/sql and PostgreSQL as my database. The only requirement is an extra table named schema with a single version in it. This tracks which version of the schema update has been applied. This table is created in the first schema update below.
