On Sunday, in my weekly report on my free software activities, I wrote about how sustainable my current level of activites are. I had identified the risk that the computer that I use for almost all of my free software work was slowly dying. Last night it entered an endless reboot loop and subsequent efforts to save it have failed. I cannot afford to replace this machine and my next best machine has half the cores, half the RAM and less than half of the screen real estate.
The PATHspider software I maintain as part of my work depends on some features in cURL and in PycURL that have only just been mereged or are still awaiting merge. I need to build a docker container that includes these as Debian packages, so I need to quickly build an APT repository. A Debian repository can essentially be seen as a static website and the contents are GPG signed so it doesn’t necessarily need to be hosted somewhere trusted (unless availability is critical for your application).
Quite a while ago I obtained an Adafruit NeoPixel Stick. It was cheap enough to be an impulse buy but it took me some time to get around to actually doing something with it. I’ve been wanting to play a little more with the ATtiny range of microcontrollers so these things seemed to go together nicely. It turns out that getting an ATtiny programmed is actually rather simple using an Arduino as an ISP programmer.