Again, my last blog post has been a while ago. I also, again, forgot to publish some other posts for quite a while. So, what has happened since last time?

EYE-TAP

EYE-TAP has seen a lot of work and we got close to publishing a paper on it, but more work is needed to finish that up. It is fully working, but the onboarding needs more work.

BeatSketch

BeatSketch is a Beat Saber map maker in which you do the movements that should be in the map. While it is completed, it still has a lot of potential for improvement, but has now become low priority

MusicPlayer

MusicPlayer has suffered from performance and reliability issues and a barely, if at all, maintainable code base. This is currently being via a complete rewrite, which will also add a much-needed feature in that you can save your custom playlists and load them again.

This is not just a reliability upgrade, it is a FULL rewrite, almost zero lines of code have been carried forward. The whole design language has also seen an update, but has not been finalized yet, so I won’t be sharing any screenshots.

New Desktop

My desktop has also seen a big revision, I am back to using Waybar, but the overall theme is now generated using matugen and includes configs for kitty, alacritty and more. The theme can be set either via command, or via yazi opener integration. My Hyprland configs are now also Lua-based and I am using swaync for the notifications, still wlogout for logout manager and rofi as the launcher.

More secure development environment

Since in recent times, there have been many supply-chain attacks via npm, pypi and more, I have decided to use docker containers for running npm and more.

Website migration

Furthermore, my whole website has moved hosting providers! I am now managing things myself on a VPS due to increasingly large amount of downtime I have experienced with my previous hosting provider. This has also enabled me to use software written in languages besides node, php and python, which is improving performance in many cases. I am further considering writing a second backend for MusicPlayer in Rust to see what the performance and RAM usage difference is.

I am also self-hosting a mail server as a result and we’ll see how that goes, as that has been by far the hardest component to set up.

Store update

With the move to the VPS, I have also decided to stop doing my own authentication software and my account system has been deprecated and replaced with an existing OpenID-Connect Solution, which allows me to ship FOSS software that I can offer hosting for that allow for the self-hosted variants to also feature login and some of the verification, without needing separate login implementations.

The store thus also needs to move its authentication source.

Time tracking via Wakapi

Back in the beginning of June, I have started tracking my coding time using wakapi, which is a self-hosted wakatime-compatible time-tracking solution. That has been very interesting to see and you can see some of my stats below.

This of course is not that much due to ETH exams taking place in August and thus the need for me to prepare for them.

ETH Guide

This year I will be attending the ETH Erstie-Day and since I was not satisfied with the available materials for first year students, I wrote my own guide, which can be found here