iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Chris Smith @chameth.com · 18/04/2026

I'm usually a fan of 0-based counting, but not like this. Never like this.

Screenshot of a "Tops & Shirts" size chart. On the left is a size column, with entries: M, L, XL, 1XL (?!), 2XL, 3XL, 4XL. The rest of the table has measurements in centimetres and inches.

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Chris Smith @chameth.com · 19/01/2026

Drove through two of these villages, and was not given a single reason why I should switch from X11.

Picture of a road sign. It says "Welcome to GREAT HOCKHAM, A Wayland Village, Please drive carefully". There's a planter of pretty flowers in front of it.

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Chris Smith @chameth.com · 01/12/2025

Got a letter from the hospital asking if I still wanted to be on the waiting list I'm on. All I can think about is this:

Screenshot of a stale bot on GitHub. A comment posted by `github-actions` (bot):

> This issue is stale because it has been open 30 days with no activity. Remove stale label or comment or this will be closed in 5 days.

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Chris Smith @chameth.com · 08/09/2025

Made a little app that transforms all the album art for my music so it looks like it's in a CD jewel case. It makes me irrationally happy.

Screenshot from a music app playing The Emptiness Machine, from From Zero by Linkin Park. The From Zero album art is shown inside a transparent jewel case, with some small colour tweaks and other effects to make it look like it's actually inside.

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Chris Smith @chameth.com · 01/09/2025

I’d drifted away from board games a bit. That turned around in August!

BG Stats Aug 2025

Plays: 175
H-index: 7
Games: 35
New: 11
Players: 151
Locations: 4
Hours: 84
Days: 30

Can't Stop: 29
Cartographers: 21
Martian Dice: 14
7 Wonders: Architects: 10
Coffee Rush: 9
King of Tokyo: 9
Flip 7: 9
Obsession: 6
Arkham Horror: Lovecraft Letter: 6

40 designers:
Andrew Looney: 5%
Jacob Fryxelius: 5%
Matt Leacock: 5%
Richard Garfield: 5%
Adam Hill: 2%.

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Chris Smith @chameth.com · 23/06/2025

Picked up a new board game: Cosmoctopus, by Henry Audubon. Just had a very enjoyable first play. It has Splendor vibes, but with more depth and a fun theme. I'd collected 7 tentacles and was poised to win on my next turn when my opponent got their 8th and successfully summoned Cosmoctopus.

Cosmoctopus board game setup on a green play mat showing various components including purple octopus miniatures, coloured tokens, different coloured cards and a grid of summoning locations in the middle.

Close-up of a purple octopus miniature with eight tentacles arranged around it. The figure sits on a card base with a starry galaxy design, with inserts for each of its eight tentacles. Blue star-shaped tokens and game cards are visible in the background.

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Chris Smith @chameth.com · 18/06/2025

I gave all the floating figures on my site a little sticky tape effect, and I love it. #indieweb #smallweb

A photo of a hammer, set inside a grey square that's titled slightly. At the bottom of the square is a caption: "THIS, DEAR READER, IS A HAMMER. IT IS ALMOST ENTIRELY IRRELEVANT TO THE ARTICLE. ENJOY.". At the top and bottom of the grey square are two tilted rectangles, that are a translucent blue. They overlap the square and the background, appearing like sticky tape holding the square in place.

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Chris Smith @chameth.com · 04/06/2025

Yesterday I added a little wave pattern to the edges of some boxes on my website. Last night I woke up questioning why the waves didn't actually wave. Now they do! I remember first learning CSS 20+ years ago using examples that came on a CDROM attached to a magazine. It's come a long way!

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Chris Smith @chameth.com · 01/06/2025

@xkcd.com 1168: nightmare mode. (Why yes, I have spent the evening trying and failing to make GitHub actions work, why do you ask?)

An edited XKCD comic strip.

Panel 1:
[Megan and White Hat stand next to a nuclear bomb. The bomb has a hatch open on top, and a small blinking screen. The two people are shouting off-screen.]
Megan: Rob!
Megan: You use GitHub!
White Hat: Come quick!

Panel 2:
[Megan, White Hat, and Rob look at the screen on the bomb. Rob peers closely. The screen is on the bomb, but is shown at the top of the panel in black with white letters, except "ten" which is black but written in a white box. The text reads:]

To disarm the bomb,
simply commit an
action workflow
that works first time.
You have ten minutes.
~# _

Panel 3:
[They all stand in the same position, but without the text displayed. Beat panel.]

Panel 4:
[Still in the same position but White Hat becomes impatient.]
White Hat: ...Rob?
Rob: I'm so sorry.

Based on XKCD 1168 by Randall Monroe, released under CC BY-NC 2.5: https://xkcd.com/1168/
Transcript based on Explain XKCD: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1168:_tar

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Chris Smith @chameth.com · 20/05/2025

Well that was a fortuitous time to check how much I’d used @kagi.com. This is more-or-less 10 months of searches, so <$0.01 per query. (And I just did my 10,001st query this billing period to make sure it wasn’t just rounding!)

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Chris Smith @chameth.com · 19/05/2025

Made a chocolate cheesecake yesterday. Today it's almost entirely gone. It is so amazingly good. I'm just not going to think about the sugar content... Recipe over here: www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/malt...

A cake tin lined with baking parchment, containing a cheesecake. Only the top layer is visible, and it's a whitey-yellow colour. There's a very generous amount of Maltesers on top.

A slice of the cheesecake after it had chilled, on a plate. You can see the biscuit base, a layer of milk chocolate, and then the top layer of white chocolate. On top are a scattering of Maltesers.

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Chris Smith @chameth.com · 12/05/2025

Came across this nice Go library for interfacing with Bambu Lab printers: github.com/torbenconto/... I already had a Go service doing home automation stuff, now it has printer support. It turns the light off automatically, reports metrics, and even notifies me of state changes via @pushover.net.

A dashboard in Grafana showing the state of a 3D printer.

It shows the following:
- Current printer state ("Printing" in large letters)
- Current print progress (93%, in a gauge)
- Current time remaining (4 minutes, in a gauge)
- Current nozzle temperature (220 degrees c, with a line graph behind it)
- Current Bed temperature (55 degrees c, with a line graph behind it)
- A live picture from the printer
- A timeseries graph of temperatures, showing the actual and target temps for the bed and nozzle.
- A timeseries graph of fan speeds

A screenshot from the pushover app.

Under a large "All messages" heading there's an entry titled "Printer status", with the text "The printer has finished". Below it there is an embedded picture showing the inside of a 3D printer.

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Chris Smith @chameth.com · 06/05/2025

Today I baked a parsnip and maple cake. It tastes a lot nicer than it sounds! Grating parsnip is a pain in the ass, it turns out.

A blue bowl half full of grated parsnip. It looks a lot like grated white cheese. It does not taste like that, though.

A cake resting on a stove. The cake is brown, with a cream cheese filling in the middle, and a dusting of icing sugar on top.

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Chris Smith @chameth.com · 06/05/2025

Is there a rule that if a product comes with a tool, it is invariably the worst possible version of that tool? Case in point: this horrible little spanner that comes with rotary tools. Pictured next to its slightly better replacement…

Two 3/8-inch spanners. One is completely flat, about 3cm long, and looks like it would bend in a strong breeze. The other is a Wera Joker, which is about three times longer, much thicker, and looks the part.

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Chris Smith @chameth.com · 25/02/2025

Today's adventures in baking: key lime pie. Much less effort than the apple pie, but also much longer to wait between finishing and eating...

A pie tin on a stove top, with crumbled ginger biscuit pressed into the bottom and sides.

A pie tin on a stove top, with sides made of ginger biscuit, and a yellow-green filling consisting of lime zest, lime juice, condensed milk, and egg yolk.

A completed key lime pie in a pie dish on a stove top. About a third has been removed. It consists of a crumbly biscuit base, a layer of lime filling, then a generous topping of whipped cream topped with lime zest.

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Chris Smith @chameth.com · 20/02/2025

My recent netrunner plays bumped by board game h-index up to 18. I don’t deliberately try to raise it, but it’s always fun to get the notification in bgstats. 19 looks like it’ll come relatively soon, but 20 seems pretty far off. #boardgames #bgstats

BG Stats 5 x 5.
Play count:
173: Cartographers;
60: Star Fluxx;
57: 7 Wonders: Architects;
51: Terraforming Mars;
50: King of Tokyo;
48: Can't Stop;
42: Codenames: Duet;
34: Martian Fluxx;
29: Spots;
27: Exploding Kittens;
27: Star Trek Fluxx;
27: Splendor;
25: Space Base;
25: Obsession;
22: Fluxx;
20: CuBirds;
19: Android: Netrunner;
19: Mountain Goats;
16: Codenames;
12: Daybreak;
11: Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition;
11: Lost Cities;
10: Pandemic;
10: Anger Smash;
9: Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game.

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Chris Smith @chameth.com · 17/02/2025

Been playing some netrunner while visiting a friend. Such a good game!

A netrunner game in progress. A green play mat with cards arranged on it; on the closer side are the runner’s cards, with a nearly empty draw pile, a very large discard pile, and 8 cards of various types “installed”. In the right in the runner’s score area there are agendas worth 6 points (you need 7 to win!)

On the opposite side of the mat are the Corp’s cards. They have 6 ICE cards, one of which is face down (unrezzed). Some of the ICE cards have advancement tokens on, and two have virus cards belonging to the runner attached. The Corp’s score section has a single agenda point in it.

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Chris Smith @chameth.com · 02/02/2025

Had an urge to do some baking. Hadn’t made a pie before, came out pretty good! Might just buy pre-made pastry next time and cut out a lot of work, though…

A chopping board with a pile of thinly sliced apples

A pie tin with pastry lining it, filled with apple slices covered in brown sugar and spices

Uncooked apple pie, with a lattice top, and edges crimped with a fork.

Cooked apple pie. The pastry has gone golden brown, and there is white sugar on top.

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Chris Smith @chameth.com · 24/01/2025

Me: “Today I’m going to make a web interface for my smart home controller” Also me: “I’m finally finished making a pixel art animation to show the blind closing” This was definitely a sensible starting point, rather than implementing a web server or doing any actual functionality. Yup.

Pixel art window frame with a blue roller blind slowly descending over it. The chain of the blind moves as the blind descends

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Chris Smith @chameth.com · 08/01/2025

I treated myself to an Omnifixo (omnifixo.com/en-gb) to replace my old helping hands thing. It's so nice. The individual arms attach to the base with magnets, the jaws are parallel to each other and have a good range, and it has some nifty features for passing power through.

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Chris Smith @chameth.com · 08/01/2025

Slow progress, but I designed a PCB to connect the Pi Pico 2W to an IDC header (because I couldn't face dealing with 16 tiny wires). First PCB I've ever designed and had made! Next steps: 3D print a way to mount everything together, then make it show something other than Bad Apple on repeat...

An LED matrix showing a pixellated scene from the Bad Apple video, with a ribbon cable emerging from the right and going into a blue PCB. On the PCB is a Raspberry Pi Pico 2W, and some silk screened text that reads "chameth.com // HUB75 v1". In front of the LED matrix are four more identical blue PCBs without any components attached.

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Chris Smith @chameth.com · 01/01/2025

Happy new year! Didn’t get many board games to the table in December, but very much enjoyed the ones that we did. Apparently 7 is the magic number for the family games we played over Christmas.

BG Stats 3 x 3.
Play count:
7: Spots;
7: Martian Fluxx;
7: King of Tokyo;
6: Obsession;
4: Cartographers;
2: Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition;
2: Poetry for Neanderthals.

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Chris Smith @chameth.com · 27/12/2024

My plans for the evening didn't include "sink 6 hours into a new MMORPG" but there we go... Haven't really encountered much of the MMO side of things yet, but the story is interesting, combat seems decent enough, and trade skills look exciting.

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Chris Smith @chameth.com · 25/12/2024

Happy new board game day to those who celebrate!

Two board games: Obsession, a large box featuring a picture of an English country estate, and Spots, a small box with cartoon dogs on with dice on some of their spots.

Next to them is a black t-shirt with the text “This shirt is worth 2 victory points”

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Chris Smith @chameth.com · 23/12/2024

Here are my favourite books/series from my reading this year. I read an awful lot of LitRPG, but most are comfort/easy reads that don't really stand out. #books #booksky

Grid of six book covers:

Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi. The cover is an ID card that looks like it's been dropped on the floor of a jungle, with a blood stain in the corner.

Every Tool's a Hammer by Adam Savage. The cover is a picture of Adam with his arms crossed. Subtitle: "Life is what you make it"

Starship For Sale by M.R Forbes. The cover is two figures silhouetted in front of an egg-shaped spaceship.

Heretical Fishing by Haylock Jobson. The cover is a fish jumping out of the sea and passing in front of the moon, all in a cartoon-y style with neon colours.

All The Skills by Honour Rae, subtitle "A deck building LitRPG". The cover is an assortment of icons that give an arcane vibe, with a stylised dragon in the center.

Azarinth Healer by Rhaegar. The cover is a person with long flowing hair facing away from the viewer. Behind them is some kind of giant monster/dragon with large horns.

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Chris Smith @chameth.com · 23/12/2024

Just finished importing my kindle history into Jelu. It was a fairly painful process thanks to the poor export format from Amazon, and the dearth of good metadata sources. But now I have stats! And the ability to easily see what books I've read! #books #booksky

A graph titled "All time stats", covering the years 2020 to 2024.

It shows three series of data: two bar charts, one labelled "finished" and one labelled" dropped", and a line graph labelled "pages read".

The data is:

Finished: 77, 134, 125, 104, 124
Dropped: 14, 11, 21, 8, 13
Pages: 31k, 52k, 53k, 39k, 43k

[One value per year, starting at 2020 and finishing at 2024]

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Chris Smith @chameth.com · 20/12/2024

FYI your sidenotes become ontopnotes with a reasonably wide browser window Screenshot is from ~3000x800, but they start overlapping at anything wider than 1920 by the looks of it

Screenshot of https://vale.rocks/posts/media-review-reasoning showing sidenote text being rendered directly on top of the main content, making it very hard to read

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Chris Smith @chameth.com · 16/12/2024

"What's more important, our AI OKR or the user's muscle memory and ability to quickly navigate where they want to?"

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Chris Smith @chameth.com · 13/12/2024

Heavily inspired by @whatsuphiro.bsky.social's "wall buddy", I've been tinkering with something similar. Driven by a Rasberry Pi Pico 2W, using the Hub75 drivers by @pimoroni.com. Each frame is actually a separate PNG being rendered by a Go server, with the pico pulling them over the network.

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Chris Smith @chameth.com · 07/12/2024

Managed to make solder traces on a perf board for the first time. Wires? Where we're going we don't need wires!

A green perf board, with contacts arranged in a grid. At the centre of the board there are blobs of solder that each span vertically over three contacts, connecting them together.

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Chris Smith @chameth.com · 04/12/2024

New toys! Just received a pair of Raspberry Pi Pico 2 Ws. Was very confused when I couldn’t jab a USB-C cable into the end, and now I’m procrastinating to avoid having to find a micro-USB cable that has data pins connected.

A Rasberry Pi Pico 2 W: a long and thin green circuit board with gold contacts along the long edges, a USB connector on the side, and various ICs and components in the board

The Rasberry Pi Pico 2 W, looking down and focused strongly on the USB connector. From this angle the trapezoid shape mages it clear that it’s a terrible, no good, micro-USB connector, rather than a nice normal USB-C connector.

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Chris Smith @chameth.com · 02/12/2024

Spent 10 minutes debugging why my solution to day two didn't work, before I realised... #adventofcode

Screenshot of code:

main :: IO ()
main = do
input <- parseInput . lines <$> readFile "inputs/01.txt"

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Chris Smith @chameth.com · 01/12/2024

I did a similar post a few days ago when my h-index increased, but it’s a new month now! Here are the #boardgames I played in November. It was an odd month for me, with a lot of travel and a bit of illness, but still got some fun plays in. #bgstats

BG Stats 4 x 4.
Play count:
6: Just One;
4: The Blob that Ate the City;
4: Martian Fluxx;
3: Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition;
3: Obsession;
3: Cartographers;
3: Lovecraft Letter;
3: Unlock!: Escape Adventures;
2: King of Tokyo;
1: Can't Stop.

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Chris Smith @chameth.com · 28/11/2024

I don’t quite understand how I can leave the hugely complex 3D printer alone and it’s fine, but I have to babysit the filament roll because the end won’t self-release properly. You’d think tape would be a solved problem.

A roll of 3D printer filament that’s barely w depleted, showing bits of the cardboard inner tube and a small glimpse of black tape

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Chris Smith @chameth.com · 27/11/2024

I don’t pay a huge amount of attention to my board game h-index, but @bgstatsapp.bsky.social dutifully tells me when it changes. Just hit 17, since I started logging plays in June. Not bad! Do other people track their h-indexes? (h-indices?)

BG Stats 5 x 5.
Play count:
163: Cartographers;
60: Star Fluxx;
57: 7 Wonders: Architects;
51: Terraforming Mars;
48: Can't Stop;
43: King of Tokyo;
42: Codenames: Duet;
27: Exploding Kittens;
27: Star Trek Fluxx;
27: Splendor;
25: Space Base;
22: Fluxx;
20: CuBirds;
19: Spots;
19: Mountain Goats;
19: Martian Fluxx;
18: Obsession;
16: Codenames;
14: Android: Netrunner;
12: Daybreak;
11: Lost Cities;
10: Pandemic;
10: Anger Smash;
9: Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game;
8: Firefly Fluxx.

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Chris Smith @chameth.com · 26/11/2024

I was very tempted to copy this amazingly over-the-top conveyor, though. Source: old.reddit.com/r/BambuLab/c...

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Chris Smith @chameth.com · 26/11/2024

Printed a plain old box, which is very close in size and functionality to your cardboard one!

The rest of a 3D printer with a black rectangular box containing printer poop

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Chris Smith @chameth.com · 26/11/2024

Exciting stuff in this case was a trio of MOVs in a surge protector. Was hoping to figure out the clamping voltage, but they're glued into a rubber box that I don't think I can open non-destructively :(

The outside of a plastic box with a recessed screw with a triangular slot

The innards of a surge protector, showing three blue metal oxide varistors stuck inside a little rubber container

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Chris Smith @chameth.com · 25/11/2024

Not a great size yet, but it's slowly growing!

Two shelves of board games, including: Quacks, Ticket to Ride Europe, Hero Quest, Iberia, several Fluxxes, Terraforming Mars + Ares Edition + the dice game...

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