Mon 22 Jan 2024

It’s been 4 weeks since I updated this log! I fell off the bandwagon after returning from Boston, getting sidetracked adding a capability-based RPC to provision TLS certs with ACME on a nameserver.

• Interspatial networking:
  • Andrew Moore dumped a whole bunch of Zigbee smart lights and plugs on my desk.
  • I got a Zigbee bridge to MQTT bridge working and hooked fn06.org up to toggle the lights.
  • This is basically me returning to the original vision of my MPhil project! If I can get a website to control the lights there’s no reason an AR headset couldn’t do the same. I’m also envisioning a DNS-based control interface with access control, e.g. dig toggle._lights.fn06.org. If I want to try the Hololens development environment I’ll need to get a GPU windows machine. Justas from FN07 is pretty good at Unity from his sensors work and is keen to collab on this.
  • I’m currently hung up trying to build a NixOS image for an old 2011 ARMv6 Raspberry Pi but isn’t going well. A new machine might remedy this.
• Chaired a session at PROPL.
• Spoke to Jess about ‘unifying accounts for federated services’. I think eon could be a key part of this.
• Modified daintree to be a remote Nix builder for e.g. the ARMv6 Zigbee NixOS image (there’s no binary caches for this architecture and the cross compilation is compute heavy).
• I’ve still not really thought this all the way through, but a federated Tailscale-like VPN would be really nice. We need to solve identify for it though.

Goals for the upcoming week:

• Brainstorm with Jess on a concrete idea.
• Add cert renewal to lenscap and deploy some reason services with it (e.g. in Eilean).
• Get a Zigbee to MQTT bridge working for an SNS application demo.
• I also want to implement DoDO!

Jess mentioned fosdem might be interesting with a Matrix room, NixOS room, and a DNS room. It’s on the 3–4th Feb, and I’m thinking of going.