Linux

I collect hobbies. Soldering, 3D printing, things the house needs, servers that want rebuilding, software I started and put down. Every one of them leaves a residue of things I meant to do, and they all end up on the same list, where most of them sleep for months - the mood for soldering does not arrive on a schedule. Then an evening opens up and the mood is there, and the only question worth answering is: what was I in the middle of? Not what is overdue. Nothing here is overdue, because none of it was ever due. What I need to see is which of these hobbies has something already in flight, and which one has a heap of things waiting to be picked up. ...

I spent the first evening certain it was a udev permissions problem. The second, equally certain it was WinUSB. The third I spent reading OrbbecSDK.dll’s import table and finding out it was neither, and that the thing I had been trying to fix could not be fixed at all. The scanner is a Creality CR-Scan Pika. Creality ships CrealityScan for Windows, macOS and Android, and as of 4.3.1 there is no Linux build and no sign of one coming. The scanner sits on itw, the desktop I actually work on, and the alternative to solving this was rebooting into Windows whenever I wanted to scan something. That is the kind of friction that ends with you not scanning things. ...

The Pain Before the Solution I started with Gentoo. If you know, you know: USE flags, emerge --sync, watching a browser compile for six hours, and the quiet satisfaction of a system shaped entirely to your will. It was maximum configuration at maximum cost - every package exactly how you wanted it, every kernel option hand-chosen, every dependency chain personally audited. It was also completely unreproducible. The system on disk was the result of hundreds of commands typed across months. If the disk died, so did the configuration. You could document it, but documentation and reality drift apart fast. ...