I have finally gotten round to processing pictures I shot at a few gigs last month.

Toxik Ephex + The Eddies + Mark Ayling on 7th April

Numbskulls + Cuttin a Rug + 8bit Psych on 15th April

Atomic Mother + Blackfyre Rising + History of Concrete on 28th April

I have gotten myself a new camera. A Mk 1 A7R. It is quite a long way from actually being new: about 10 years old. So, older than my old GX80 that it is replacing. But full frame and 36 megapixels vs. 2x crop and 16 megapixels so mostly quite an upgrade. I've been lusting after one of these since they first launched and when I saw one on mpb for £230 I clicked the button (they still normally fetch around £500, this one has some issues).

I took it out to a couple of gigs at Krakatoa last weekend, and have now got round to processing the pictures from that.

I don't have any native Sony lenses yet. Using the various PK and M42 manual lenses I've collected since I got the GX80 and started playing with vintage lenses. I'm considering getting the Sony 18-50 PZ to use the A7R for a walking about camera, but not sure if it would be worth it for the few occasions I might take a real camera out rather than just using my phone but don't want to take a better lens.

September last year (though it doesn't feel that long ago) I got myself a new lens. Well, actually quite an old lens that was new to me. A Sigma Pentax-K mount 70-210mm f2.8. It was surprisingly cheap for an f2.8 tele-zoom: £120. I have a 135mm prime that I quite like, but often find I'm too lazy to swap to other lenses and end up with all my pictures being a bit samey. I figured having a zoom that crossed that 135mm might let me introduce a bit more variation.

I've now taken it out a few times and did get some pictures I'm happy with (and a lot that where the focus isn't even close).

All of those were with adaptor that just connects the different mounts. I have now got a .72x focal reducer that will make it a bit wider and faster. On my GX80 it'll be roughly equivalent of a 100-300mm f2 on 35mm. So far I've only had a few minutes to play with it, looking forward to getting out with it to have a longer play.

I have had vague thoughts for a while to make a thing to display random gifs, videos, or other animations as a thing to do with my various screens when they aren't needed to be displaying other things. Kind of like the old days when we used screensavers, but controlled over the network.

I finally got around to making it.

I wanted this to be a web thing so that I only need a browser on whatever displays I want to use. Nim with Jester and Karax are my current favourite approach to web dev. I came across a nice example using this stack that also introduced me to htmx that makes the "open a websocket and display whatever html blobs you get from it" that I wanted for the client side really easy.

The code itself isn't much use without a collection of animations for it to be serving up. My collection has been built up by saving things I've come across in various places online. Most of which I don't have rights to redistribute (and even the ones that are under licenses that would allow that I haven't kept note of that). Beeple's VJ loops are a good start with CC license (though I couldn't find anything saying which CC license). The collection should be in public/img/ in ohm.bee.uns checkout (or relative to working directory for executable if that is a different place).

In the dim and distant past I made an IRC bot for what was then hackerdeen hackspace. It was written in clojure and had become more hassle than it worth to keep running. This was a combination of friction from JVM (it'll eat all the memory if you're not careful, has it's own SSL cert handling etc.) and my code not being very good at handling disconnects so regularly needing to be manually restarted.

I wanted to move to something that would have a more complete IRC client (handling authentication, reconnects etc.) and giving me an interface to send messages from external things happening (e.g. space is opened/closed) and respond to commands.

Options I know of for this are suckless ii and irccat. I plumped for irccat, mostly because I had used it before so already kind of knew what I was doing to configure it and the approach to commands is a bit easier there: irccat will call a command handler executable with some env variables to give context of the command trigger and that executable just needs to print to console for response where with ii you'd have to parse the stream of messages for all channels watching for commands (I didn't get as far as figuring out how that would work for PRIVMSG commands) then write response to appropriate file.

I didn't port over all of the "features" of original hackerdeenbot - some of them connected to other systems that don't exist any more and some were silly jokes that even I think have run their course now.