the ring wouldn't stand up

posted on 2026-07-01 15:00:00

Or: a floppy PVC hoop and the one hinge I forgot about

I'm building a little wave-following buoythe Lagrangian Wave Interrogator — a boogie board with a vertical PVC ring on it, carrying two cameras and an IMU, meant to ride in the surf zone and record what a wave feels like from the inside rather than watch it from a pier. It reached the dry-fit stage last week, and the ring — the part that's supposed to be a rigid roll-cage — flops back and forth like a metronome. I knew it hand to be handled sooner or later, and I had a moment today.

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can a computer on your desk read a plat?

posted on 2026-06-30 16:30:00

Or: a field test of local vision models, for surveyors

A narrow, practical question, the kind I actually care about: can a vision model running entirely on your own machine, offline, read the bearings and distances off a plat well enough to be useful? Not a cloud servicei.e. not "upload your client's recorded document to somebody else's server" — the whole point is that nothing leaves the desk. A model that lives on the desktop and reads the calls the way you'd skim them before typing them into your drafting software.

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speaking blackboard without knowing it

posted on 2026-06-30 14:00:00

Or: a 1970s AI pattern I reinvented one accident at a time

"Good heavens! For more than forty years I have been speaking prose without knowing it." — Molière, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme

I've been building a thing that reads survey platsplat2json — scanned or vector plat in, CAD-ready geometry out. The name tells you everything about my naming instincts and nothing about what it does. The longer I work on it, the more it rhymes with a piece of old AI I'd been reading for an unrelated project: the blackboard system. I want to write the rhyme down, because it's the most interesting thing about the project and it changed how I think about the parts that actually work.

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2026-06-26

posted on 2026-06-26 15:17

Notes and such.

Wave calculator up. animated!

Land-survey plugin for opencadstudio bumped up to verion 0.33. Moderately proud of the line labelling. ( I ... appreciate rust- a statement that in most rainy and wet contexts would be absurd)

OpenCAD Studio plugin registry.

I don't remember if I memntioned coleslaw emacs mode

The other site grew a CI/CD spine. kevingriffin-new.github.io now builds itself on every push: a GitHub Action installs SBCL + Quicklisp, compiles Collardskingcons' static-site generator — the same hand behind Coleslaw, which renders this blog, so it was a familiar shape from source, runs collards build, and ships the result to Pages. No committed HTML; CI regenerates the whole site each run.

Not all cleanthe first red run died in a destructuring-bind deep in Collards — it was trying to render my .github/README.md as a page, because hidden files get ignored automatically but hidden directories don't. One :ignored (".github") line in .collards and it went green — but it's up, and the homepage finally has a stylesheet that's seen a stylist this decade.

notes in the margin

posted on 2026-06-23 16:40:00

notes in the margin, safe offramps in the rabbit warren

"Throw me back in the briar patch" - Br'er Rabbit

"I prayed for a mission. For my sins, they gave me one" - Captain Willard

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The extensionless-binary trap in macOS notarization

posted on 2026-06-22 22:10:00

Or: Apple code signing fussiness

I packaged music chop — a PyInstaller-frozen Python GUI that bundles ffmpeg, ffprobe, and rubberband — into a macOS .app, and went to sign and notarize it so Gatekeeper would just stop with the warnings. Here's the whole chain:

1. Apple Developer Program ($99/yr). The approval is the prerequisite
2. A Developer ID Application certificate. Make it in Xcode → Settings → Accounts → (team) → Manage Certificates → + → Developer ID Application. This needs Account Holder / Admin — the plain "Developer" role can't create one. It installs the cert and its private key into your login keychain; without the private key, security find-identity -v -p codesigning shows nothing.
3. codesign, hardened runtime, with entitlements for whatever your app does that the runtime would otherwise block (mine needs allow-jit + allow-unsigned-executable-memory for numba, and disable-library-validation for the bundled third-party dylibs).
4. notarize with xcrun notarytool submit --wait, then staple the ticket.

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2026-06-22

posted on 2026-06-22 21:55:09

Three out the door.

Today:

Pushed a live test of the GEOM 2120 trainer — gamified survey-computations drills. Out of the Downloads folder and into a browser at last.

Got my land-survey plugin accepted into the OpenCAD Studio plugin registry. First time something of mine landed in someone else's registry.

Closing in on an Apple signed music chop installer. Developer ID sorted, fought a keychain, and ran a notarization rejection to ground — three bundled CLI tools (ffmpeg, ffprobe, rubberband) weren't getting signed. Fix is in; waiting on Apple's notary queue.

Sidequests:

Also wrote up a construction deficiencies list and got it translated into Punjabi and Hindi. May have a reusable template for that soonish.

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2026-06-21

posted on 2026-06-21 11:44:39

A double-clickable dv2mv.

Solstice.

Today: packaged dv2mv — the DV-footage-into-a-music-video chopper — into a real macOS app and cut a first alpha.

dv2mv / music chop is really just a wrapper for ffmpeg, scenedetect, and a pile of numba-accelerated audio math. ffmpeg and friends ride along inside the bundle now, so there is nothing to brew install.

Unsigned for the moment. Gatekeeper gives it the sideye for now, until I get a Developer ID and notarize (membership still pending); right-click → Open gets you past it.

arm64 only, macOS 11+.

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2026-05-29

posted on 2026-05-29 19:09:18

A return to a sort of contributing mode.

Today: stood up an mirror of the old gbbopen page. gbbopen-archive

Went on a side quest about parkinsons and a recipe llm epicure

Setup the new pi for the cameras and IMU.

Ate some greens

Also made some progress on A freeCAD plugin because I have strong feelings about expensive Surveying CAD software.

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2025-04-01

posted on 2025-04-01 16:18:24

• This would have been a title

Here is my content. There is much other content like it. This was a placeholder that I, shocklingly, forgot about and did not return to for Fourteen months.

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