Cedric.io

Building myself a framed e-calendar

I am terrible at both planning and remembering stuff. It's been a curse for the past 36 years and I can't imagine it getting better over time.

I've tried a bunch of things over the years to overcome that, including writing a bullet journal - which I did for almost 3 years - but I was constantly frustrated by the fact that I never seem to have it on hand. The journal was living on my desk or in my bagpack, which was fine during working hours, but not outside of those hours.

A few months ago I started to look at TaskWarrior. I was instantly seduced by the tool - mainly because it lives in the CLI, of course - but it was definitely not a more portable option until I discovered WingTask, the mobile-first PWA companion to TaskWarrior.

Things went better, but not just yet. I soon realised that I was too often surprised by my schedule - that sneaky Slack notification that catch you off-guard : "<important meeting> starts in 1 min" was constantly taking me aback.

Not only am I terrible at planning and remembering - I already said that, didn't I? - But I'm also terribly lazy. If the information doesn't come to me, chances are that I'll never even try to find it.

And then on a beautiful morning, I stumbled upon MagInkCal, a project built with Raspberry Pi, e-ink screen, and a wooden frame. This was it : I needed something to remind me of stuff right in front of me, and luckily, I have just the space in front of my eyes.

Now I am known to get really excited real quick, and I have a Raspeberry Pi Zero on hand, so I promptly order a 7.5inch E-Paper E-Ink Display and a battery, completely ignoring the fact that my very old Rpi Zero is not build with a Wi-Fi chipset.

Obviously I took way too long trying to make my Rpi Zero play nice with a USB Wi-Fi dongle - which is surprisingly frustrating - before I realise that the Wi-Fi dongle would require the use of an additional power supply. The idea being to have a low-consumption e-ink calendar, relying on a powered USB hub would make no sense.

What I didn't know though, is that there is currently a global Raspberry Pi shortage, so buying a brand new Raspberry Pi Zero with built-in Wi-Fi was not an option. I was this close to let that project die in a corner of my head when I discovered the ESP32 - A tiny, low-consumption, Wi-Fi and bluetooth-ready microcontroller that is dirt-cheap.

But that's a story for another day.

#esp32 #eink #calendar

Cédric Bousmanne

They say “buy a plunger before you need one”.
They forgot to mention “buy a second one in case you break the first in the toilet”.

Cédric Bousmanne

Migrating photos from iCloud / iPhone to Nextcloud - part 1

2 min read

Today I finally decided to give Nextcloud a try. I want to free myself out of iCloud / Google Photos / Amazon Photos and the like, so after I installed Nextcloud on a brand new digitalocean droplet, it was time for the great migration.

At first I tried to sync all my photos with my Nextcloud instance straight from the Nextcloud's iPhone App but I bumped into a few issues :

The app was detecting some 13k photos - whereas the Photo app on my phone claims 7.6k
The app was crashing every so often
After a few crashes, I had to log back in, and redo the whole process from the start

No need to mentionned it bored me quite quickly, so I decide to look for another solution and cutting the process in half : first getting my photos back from iCloud, then sending them to Nextcloud.

I quickly discovered a tool just for that : icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_downloader

Sadly at the time of writing, the tool is not compatible with the stable version of python (3.10.x).

I installed python38 via the AUR and thanks to this comment, I was able to run the tool to download all my photo off iCloud

yay -S python38
virtualenv --python=/usr/bin/python3.8 .venv
.venv/bin/pip install icloudpd
.venv/bin/icloudpd --directory ./Photos \
--username testuser@example.com \
--password pass1234 \

Cédric Bousmanne

What the heck happened with the Raspberry Pi Zero stock? It's nowhere to be found :(
https://brid.gy/publish/mastodon

Cédric Bousmanne

3D printed Mario wallart with wooden frame

2 min read

I wanted something special to decorate my home office when I came upon this vintage-looking Mario wallart on Thingiverse (Details of the make). The original photo picture the 3D printed framed, so I figured, why not?

First step, fire the 3D printer and extrude the hell out of Mario

Vintage Mario - 3D printed on black PLA

Retrospectively, I could have done a better job with the printer, I used a 0.6mm nozzle whereas a 0.4 would have given a cleaner look.

Also, I am aware that the painter's tape on the magnetic bed is old school, but I do have layer adhesion issue and so far I couldn't bother trying and fixing them.

Next to the frame : I have some oak that I received from a friend. The blank was to thic and too wide for my taste so I took care of that on my table saw.

For the backgroud, I had a piece of 3mm plywood laying around. The original color was too dark to my taste and didn't play well with the oak frame so I decided to cover it up with a few thin layer of white spray paint.

The joins were really weak. It took me 3 tries to get them to hold onto each other. On my third try I ended up drilling through-holes in the corner and filling them with wood dowels to have a better joins. Oak frame with a painted plywood base

Lieke I mentionned, the PLA was a bit too rough to my taste. I sanded it down to 220 grid and spray painted the print.

I alternated between black and red layers of spray paint just to experiment a bit and I ended up with this rusty/metalic look that I very much like. 3D printed vintage Mario wall art in an oak frame