Toby Kurien

Small weekend #3dPrinting #diy #maker project: adding corner protectors for my solar panel so I can take it camping. Whipped up the design using #FreeCAD then sliced it with #PrusaSlicer and printed it. It was a tight fit as I didn't leave enough clearance, but gently heating the printed part up with a flame torch and then sliding it into place worked well.

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First prototype of my #diy #handheld #cyberdeck powered by a #RaspberryPi Zero. Unlike my previous tablet designs, this one is aimed at low power for extended battery life, focussing on command-line use. It will be used mainly for reading ebooks/websites, e-mail, SSH, note-taking and some coding fun. It could work well as a #writerdeck too. It has a 2000mAh battery under the keyboard providing 13 hours of continuous reading time. Next I need to design and print a cover… https://tobykurien.com/post-1769934638

The new iteration of my #DIY #RaspberryPi #Linux #tablet looks great, in my opinion! Very happy with how it came out, and it feels much more comfortable to hold and use than the previous version. The back cover was designed using #FreeCAD. I added "fingers" over the screen buttons and engraved symbols into them, added air vent holes on one side with SD card access hole, and a button on the back for screen backlight brightness control.

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After a year and a half of daily driving #GhostBSD (which I love and recommend), I moved to base #FreeBSD on a new desktop machine. I wanted a lightweight desktop with XLibre. I decided to try #lxqt but found the default pcmanfm-qt to be quite buggy and uncomfortable. I finally found my happy place with lxqt + QtFM.

These are the packages I installed to get to a comfortable desktop:
xlibre xlibre-slim lxqt lxqt-qtplugin
oxygen-icons oxygen-fonts noto-emoji… https://tobykurien.com/post-1780220596

#SimpleX came close, however it was let down by several factors (some may have changed since):

• is funded by Jack Dorsey of Twitter (big red flag),
• issues with group messages arriving out of order or not at all, and getting de-sync'd
• is written in Haskell so harder to contribute or write bots for
• is a memory hog on both mobile and desktop
• poor UX including onboarding (private routing? incognito mode?)
• poor multi-device support (must have mobile app running to use desktop)

Like the illustrated and animated watch website posted earlier, this is another beautiful exploration of some great #mechanical #engineering in everyday products.

Mechanical Pencil https://mechanical-pencil.com/products/zippo

I built a simple #DIY #oscilloscope and logic analyser using a #RaspberryPi Pico. It uses the pico-sigrok firmware, so I can capture and decode signals using sigrok on a laptop. Tested it by adding a basic analog frontend and then playing a guitar note through a tube overdive pedal and the results look quite good!

"It seems that my default consumption speeds for reading and eating (and maybe everything else) reduce the rewards of those things significantly, undermining the point of doing either."

raptitude

https://www.raptitude.com/2025/12/maybe-the-default-settings-are-too-high/

Besty gifted me his #diy #printrbot #3dprinter that he's honed to perfection over the years, and I've been having a lot of fun learning to use it! I've also been brushing up on my #freecad skills so that I can design more portable computers and #cyberdecks in future.

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Fun weekend #diy #maker project: Pi Zero Tiny computer! I was curious about how low power I could go with a #RaspberryPi Zero 2W with a super power-efficient (but puny) screen. I had a Waveshare 1.44 inch LCD HAT lying around, so I looked up it's chip and found an Adafruit driver that seemed close enough. I looked at the schematic of the LCD HAT to see which pins where connected where, and thought I'd give the following a try in config.txt (betting with myself that… https://tobykurien.com/post-1769257911

When it comes to #computer #programming I firmly believe that making it human readable is one of the most important things you could do. This video from Computerphile eloquently demonstrates exactly the kind of programming style I strive for and consider to be beautiful code. The satisfaction of writing a test that reads like an English sentence is peak programming for me.

Computerphile https://youtube.com/watch?v=SJocPm2E8eQ

Printed a very basic quick-and-dirty 3D model of a guitar pickup cover that clips onto the pickup bobbin, to make it easy to swap out covers without needing to remove the strings or pickups. Got lucky with the first try. Looks pretty good, I think! #3dprinting #diy #maker #guitar

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The largest collection of free stuff on the internet! This is quite the rabbit hole...

fmhy.net https://fmhy.net/

I've written an "Ode to elinks" on my #Gemini capsule before, and I recently stumbled upon this great article that goes into more details and reasons why #elinks is one of the best text web browsers out there. Excellent for when you want to access information from a #RaspberryPi Zero or other low-powered device.

Dion Moult https://thinkmoult.com/using-elinks-browse-web.html

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The Mastodon web interface is so sluggish on a #raspberrypi 4 that I decided to write a quick-and-dirty lightweight CGI script to display just the content and links to media (deliberately avoided embedding previews). Now I can read my Mastodon feeds anywhere in comfort, even on Netsurf or w3m.

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Breaking the Spell of Vibe Coding - “People who go all in on AI agents now are guaranteeing their obsolescence." -- Jeremy Howard #ai

fast.ai https://www.fast.ai/posts/2026-01-28-dark-flow/

@Lydie@tech.lgbt I believe this is what you have in mind:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdcX1ghOkFM

The slow refresh rate and poor visibility under dim lighting make me less enthusiastic about e-ink though.

@ChrisWere@toot.wales if you like bash and self-hosting, you might like this self-hosting method I came up with that started as a way to host my Gemini capsule: https://fossil.tobykurien.com/bws