Projects

Project development has sped up a bit this week.

MediaCow Touch 2

Development of MediaCow Touch 2 somewhat stagnated in Week 10 mostly with concerns about the use of GOWIN FPGAs. If I had to switch the IC that bridges RGB to MIPI to another FPGA or a video bridge, this may not require changes in other parts of the design.

Website

After being pointed out the appearance of the website multiple times recently, I have started to consider doing a redesign.

I have done multiple redesigns of the website in the past though they ended up always looking more or less the same. This is likely because I did not make a plan for how the website should look. By comparison, this is how the webpage sort of looked in late 2019:

I have been keeping a now long list of personal portfolio websites that I have found through the About Me section of Discord users and miscellaneous other sources. I plan to take some inspiration from these websites.

One thing I considered is using JavaScript though have it optional to remain compatible with lightweight browsers that do not support JavaScript and browsers that have JavaScript disabled. I have avoided using JavaScript for mostly compatibility reasons and because I do not have much experience with it.

I want to avoid having to make yet another dynamic webpage generator as these have proven to be time consuming but if done correctly, it could be very useful.

Personal MediaWiki Instances

On March 7, 2025, I decided to look over WIKT, one of four private MediaWiki instances that I self-host. WIKT in particular covers my projects and organization. A lot of the information is greatly outdated and most of it may need rewriting. The instance fell into disuse where I started to use this website as a personal wiki to keep track of my projects. The problem with using the website as the wiki is that everything is public.

I am starting to consider using MediaWiki more as it has proven to be reliable with my use of it dating back to 2021.

Though late for me to include this since this is on Monday, March 10, 2025 (Week 11), I have considered making an instance of MediaWiki dedicated to covering research and plans for MediaCow Touch 2 as doing this on the website has not been as effective.

Dedicated Task and To-Do List System

On March 9, 2025, after moving my desk to the other side of the room and missing some important events, I have started to work on the new setup for displaying the To-Do list among other things. I plan to use dual-monitor setup, a 16:9 monitor for tasks and a 5:4 for the calendar. On March 9, 2025, I set up the two monitors with a dedicated desktop computer, a small ITX build with a Biostar J4105NHU motherboard.

Unlike the prior setup, using a single 720p monitor on the side of a bookshelf, the new setup is to have two monitors: one 5:4 monitor and one 16:9 monitor. Due to limitations of the system I was using before, an ASRock AD2550B-ITX that has a single VGA port and one PCI slot, I had to use something else.

I first tried to use the J4105-based system with the Biostar J4105NHU motherboard that already had an AMD Radeon R7 340 graphics card. Support for this GPU was limited, with its use of the GCN1.0 architecture. Generating the configuration for the Xorg server would select the "amdgpu" driver which prevented X11 from starting. After specifying the "radeon" driver, X11 started normally, however, I was not able to rotate one of the monitors. I tried using the iGPU instead, with the graphics card removed. This worked but one of the two monitors started to flash which I presume to be caused by there not being enough memory available to the iGPU, the limit appearing to be 512MB in the BIOS setup. I tried using an Nvidia GTX 750 Ti though the motherboard could not supply enough power to it, preventing it from booting.

Desperate to get something running, I set up the extra AMD Ryzen 5 3600 system that I formerly used for hardware testing with an AMD Radeon RX 480. This system is greatly overpowered for what I plan to use it for though it allows for more flexibility in what could be done. Since it is more powerful than what I needed, I disabled the memory XMP which set the memory frequency back to the default of DDR4-2133 with standard timings at 1.2v, the memory ICs are more than capable of running DDR4-3200 at this voltage and standard timings but I would likely leave it alone for now. I also disabled AMD Turbo Core (CPB) on the CPU.

It may be possible to use the RX 480 in the smaller J4105 system as this card has a PCIe power connector but since it is now working, I do not want to touch it again.

ToDoKiosk and TaskSystem

I decided to keep the name, TaskSystem, despite it being able to do much more than just tasks and calendar events. It is sort of my own version of DAKboard where it relies on self-hosted services than Internet services. TaskSystem is to be the successor to ToDoKiosk, which I found it surprising that it has been in use since October 2023, being the longest time I have used one of my own software projects without having to make significant changes to it.

I plan to add a digital photo frame sort of feature to TaskSystem where it can display images from a directory.

NetKart

Recently, likely earlier in the week or late last week (Week 10, 2025), I have started to work on NetKart again. We started by finalizing the engine mount, no longer using the tall rubber mounts that allowed the engine to shift, having the belt fall off as seen in the video in the Week 13, 2024 blog post.

Personal

After some unfortunate events this week, I have been working on improving my organizational skills.

College

On March 5, 2025, I realized that I completely forgot about the Tech Club meeting on Tuesday, March 4. The club members already started to build one of the two desktop computers that we picked out parts for. I currently do not know which one of the two builds were started. I will try my best to remember to attend the next meeting.

Other than Tech Club, I have been generally "out of it" in relation to doing anything related to school.