Notes for June 21-28 - Tao of Mac
Rui Carmo
Tao of Mac
Jun 28th 2026 · 6 min read<br>·<br>#3d-printing<br>#ai<br>#cad<br>#feeds<br>#hardware<br>#notes<br>#rss<br>#weekly
Notes for June 21-28
The weather is… infuriatingly tropical, but tolerable (we’re used to the heat this time of year, but the dampness is relatively new), and shifting all my morning meetings to my standing desk has markedly improved (but not fully healed) my back, so it was a relatively OK week.
Other than it being the last fiscal month at work, that is–my thresholds for patience have become somewhat elastic over the years, but it’s still a busy part of the year.
That, and the ongoing industry madness pushed me into another reassessment of how I have been spending my time, and I decided to go back to more hands-on work.
The Photogrammetry Detour<br>Since I have a bunch of CAD work to do, I tried my hand at photogrammetry over the week to see if I could speed up creating SBC cases:
Photogrammetry capture of the Radxa Q8B
The main conclusion so far is that although the photogrammetry process itself worked (and I could probably write a fairly detailed post about the C++ libraries I used and how I automated the process), even with 4K inputs and a few passes at refining the mesh it’s just not accurate enough to do what I need, partially because the BRIO 4K’s autofocus is a bit of a wash:
A sharpness map from the photogrammetry scans, still not sharp enough
Now, that is tweakable, but the process is still a bit too manual and error-prone to be worth it for me.
In comparison, flipping the script on my previous attempts at using AI and just feeding photos to piclaw has been working stupendously well, and even if the dimensions are off, I can fix them easily in CAD once I have a STEP file:
CAD model reconstructed by just feeding photos to piclaw
As much as I would love to get my hands on a 3D scanner, I suspect this will be my go-to approach from here on out–although I’m currently investigating if I can re-use the image-processing pipeline to guide the model:
Using the image-processing pipeline to guide the model
Tiny Local Models<br>Before shifting back to more pragmatic pursuits, I still "finished" a few AI-related things, mostly related to Gemma 4.
In short, after some messing around with QAT and MTP weights, I have finally gotten a reasonably smart and speedy version of Gemma4-E4B to run on my RTX3060 at nearly 90 tok/s, but…
It still isn’t as smart (or fast) as I would like for running my agents, and the context window is much smaller than what I ordinarily consider usable. Even for automating "if this (and maybe that) then (this other arbitrary set of things)" workflows… It just barely qualifies.
I might poke at it a bit more, but the core issues I had during my K3 review still stand: both context and capabilities of this kind of model are still far below what I need for regular use (piclaw can use it, but the results are always frustrating), and SOTA models are still much, much more effective than anything else.
Recent price hikes have put me off the notion of ever getting good enough hardware to run anything useful locally unless I win the lottery or something, so this might be a dead end for the rest of the year.
RSS, With Less Baggage<br>I also went after my daily news intake–the news is bad enough as it is, but I can at least try to make it less stressful to consume.
Back when I was moving away from Feedly to FreshRSS I briefly considered Miniflux but discarded it because I thought it lacked features I ended up never using, so this week I decided to fork it, replace its PostgreSQL database with SQLite and create something even more minimalist I dubbed picoflux – which seems to work just fine with Reeder and takes up a whopping… 70MB of RAM when running as a dedicated service.
That’s far less than the PHP and database baggage that FreshRSS brought, and it let me downsize the (already) tiny Azure VM I run "insecure" services in to half the capacity, so that’s a win right there.
Migration was, as usual, another opportunity to prune/fix stale feeds, but completely uneventful other than NetNewsWire not having support for Miniflux–which is not a problem since I am still using Reeder, but said support seems to be coming, and if my UX gripes (which revolve around scrolling and overly garish iconography) get fixed, I might well switch to it.
Going Back To Raw Feeds<br>After three years of experimentation and around nine months of daily use, I am bringing my feed summarization experiment to a close, for the following reasons:
My reading habits and schedule changed to a point where I was not really reading all of the bulletins (especially the noon and evening ones) and they just piled up.
The bulletin structure itself, despite being great for a few of the feeds I wanted to keep a cursory eye on, was just not good enough to surface important news.
Following the links inside bulletins was a bit fiddly (they were too small a target to pick out...