Old abandoned project for Pebble watch. I think it could be revived for the FlipperZero.

#1bit #FlipperZero #PixelArt #GameDev

I just found this https://github.com/NishantJoshi00/flipper-template

"A modern, production-ready template for developing Flipper Zero applications using the Zig programming language."

My Flipper is sooo ready for this ;)

#ZigLang #FlipperZero

Got back from RMA - new unit!
We're back in the game.

#FlipperZero

Dirt Cheap LiDAR Detector

The Dirt Cheap LiDAR Detector is an small device which uses PIN silicon infrared diodes, a Schmitt Trigger, and some math to detect the TrueDepth Dot Grid Lattice LiDAR projected from the backs of iPhone Pros, and possibly other LiDAR sources too! [...]

https://blog.dirtcheaphackingtools.com/dirt-cheap-lidar-detector

#weeklyreview 03/2026

Summary

The week started with ice skating on the frozen lake and continued slippery with black ice on Monday and Tuesday during my walk to the office. Birthday of the kid with delicious cake, bunch of software news and finally some more deconstruction in #project25.

Frozen Water

Our rules usually is that Sunday is for swimming as long as the water in the lake is liquid. Well it wasn’t liquid last Sunday. It was a rather hard solid layer of 15cm thick ice and a bit of snow. Our chance to get our ice skates out and score the lake on the surface.

Nevertheless on of friends got an axe out and opened a square hole to take a dip in the lake. That’s not for me. I have to be able to swim to warm myself a little but first and foremost to distract myself from the cold water.

I walked into the office on the first three days of the week. Of course the bike lanes were not cleared from snow and ice and I deemed it just too dangerous to take the bike. So I walked … or partially waddled as it was really slippery. The snow from the weekend had been compressed by too many feet into a solid layer of ice. On Tuesday it got warmer, but the ground was still largely frozen. Thus any moist or thaw turned into more black ice rather quickly.

Due to ongoing renovation we had to move inside the office into another floor and wing. Meanwhile this is a quick move. Because of clean desk policy and formally no dedicated desks we just had to take our cardboard box and walk over to the new space. We also usually move our monitors as we all had order larger screens over the default screens. But even that was done within a few minutes. They crammed our whole department into the same room now. That sounds reasonable on paper since we’re all from the same department. But we’re actually working on different projects with different people. So it’s just a room of people having video conferences with other people most of the time.

On Thursday I could bake my favourite New York Cheesecake for the kids birthday. Came out delicious again. The Cake. Kiddo was happy as well. Especially as his most awaited game finally was released a day before. He was talking about Hytale by Hypixel studio for something like 6 or 7 years. It’s a better version of Minecraft – sort of. And given that Minecraft has been bought by Microsoft and they’ve begun the process of enshittification, chances are good Hytale is taking marketshare quickly. It looks promising from my point of view.

Software tinkering

Jellyfin

I finally got around to install Jellyfin. That’s a streaming software for once own media library. I have a few records that are not available on any streaming service because they are audio rips of DVD that I own. Always wanted to test out whether it’s feasible and usable to have ones own streaming service. Jellyfin looks rather promising. I eventually found a good iOS/macOS client in Manet+. Bought it right away.

Watchtower

After my home servers mysteriously rebooted (I think one of the kids accidentally touched the PDU) I noticed that Watchtower wasn’t running anymore. I order to fix it, I had to eventually switch to a fork of the original. The maintainers had announced the end of their engagement with the software and thus no updates were produced since over a year. That eventually led to it no longer being easily compatible with the new Docker APIs.

Fortunately I found a fork in the issue comments on GitHub and was able to switch to that. It’s actively maintained and practically a drop-in replacement.

Map comparator

Last weekend we talked with a friend about how big various cities and areas are. That our countryside villages probably fit into Berlin. We thought it would be cool if that could be visualised somehow. I recently read that one can have AI coding agents control browser with Playwright in order to debug web applications it’s writing. I took to Claude Code to develop this map comparator application and got a first version up and running. It’s a pure static site with JavaScript and OpenStreetMap as a map provider. The repo can be found here.

Hytale

As mentioned above, this week the first playable release of Hytale by Hypixel studio came out. This is quite remarkable as I thought they’d never make it. They announced that game a little over 6 years ago. Their aim was to build the perfect Minecraft (they developers were running large Minecraft servers with lots of mods themselves). But as you know… perfect is the enemy of done. So they coded and polished, but never released anything, because they wanted it to be perfect. The screenshots they produced from their game as teasers looked promising. Eventually they even got a deal with a developer studio (Riot Games). But couldn’t deliver (for whatever reason). Finally the studio cancelled the release and one of the developers was able to buy back the rights and code from the studio and set out to finish the came himself. And he and his friends finally delivered. They changed their approach to release playable beta versions so they can get feedback from their audience. I believe this approach will work better. The first playable demo looks really good. Feels like minecaft but with lots of improvements. I was positively surprised that it even runs smoothly on Kiddos old gaming Laptop (Nvidia GTX) despite the vastly improved graphics.

Flipper Zero WiFi Board

This week my Flipper Zero WiFi Developer Board finally arrived. Still trying to figure out what I can usually do with it. But it’s a good reason to do more 3D printing 😉

Project25 update

This week the correct and remaining roof windows finally arrived. Our roof tiler was so kind to accept the delivery so I didn’t had to drive out from Berlin just for that. He also already installed the two new large windows and the room is starting to look really nice and light.

My brother and me wrecked the remaining walls in the attic to the tiler and carpenter can reach every beam of the roof properly. Of course it was messier than we thought … But we got it done on Saturday.

Learning

What did I learn this week?

I always had this concept that Berlin was as large as the Ruhrgebiet. Berlin is really large with all the outskirts etc. Using the Map Comparator that I had created I was finally able to do take this to a test. I believe the Ruhrgebiet is a bit larger than Berlin 😉

Reading

Still making steady progress with “Manual for Cleaning Woman” by Lucia Berlin.

Printed a case for my Flipper Zero WiFi Board

#FlipperZero #3Dprint #3Dprinting #3Ddruck