This is great! And thanks for the link to stuff about Lenia - that was new to me and looks freaking awesome. Next programming side project for sure.

I’ve also been meaning to properly get into using Shadertoy, and I think this was a great introduction through an interesting use case.

Physical anti-tamper, while important for this type of device, wouldn’t have helped for this particular attack. It’s an electromagnetic side channel, so they don’t even have to be touching the the thing to collect data.

I’ve been playing the new Solium Infernum with a friend - the first playthrough I did not particularly enjoy (partially my fault for not playing the tutorial first) but once I learned the mechanics my second game was more fun. The UI is not very smooth to use and there are some mechanics I don’t like, but overall pretty good.

I also picked up Mindustry again last night - it’s an open source Factorio + Tower Defense + RTS that is rather addicting… The new campaign they added a couple years ago is better than the original too.

Which launcher are you planning to use?

There is still a quantum attack against symmetric key crypto like AES, but it just reduces the effective key size by half. If you use long enough keys (256 bits) you’re still fine.

VCV rack is awesome, if not the easiest to start from scratch with. For those who haven’t heard of it, it’s basically a virtual modular analog synthesizer. You can build your own sound generating machines out of a huge selection of modules, including oscillators, filters, sequencers, etc. Some of the modules are based on real hardware modules that you can buy, but there’s a huge variety.

It’s fun to play around with, but if you’re new to modular synthesis then I recommend limiting your module selection to just the built-in ones to start because the full selection is pretty overwhelming if you don’t know a VFO from an ADSR evelope generator.

Reaper is an excellent Digital Audio Workstation with full Linux support

Paprika and cayenne are great too to add a bit of spice!

Pycharm debugger has been great for me recently, I love the feature where you can drop into an ipython repl and interact with your program state.

I really like this statement I heard recently, which I think came from the YouTube Adventurous Way - “Dumb Control, Smart Monitoring”. Make sure that any devices you install have failure models that make sense - you should still be able to control your appliances when the network is down.

That said, the option to remotely control lights, etc is fantastic. I also recommend setting up some temperature sensors in various places - I have quite a few ESP33 boards scattered around with sensors (and and one with an IR blaster) attached.

Here’s some of my indoor salad greens! Love a fresh arugula leaf in a sandwich

(1.) should already be here, at least - on the web version it’s the [-] icon next the commenter’s name, and on Jerboa you just tap the top bar of the comment. Agree that there should be a way to hide posts permanently - it’s kind of annoying to always scroll past the same pinned posts at the top of the “Local” view.