If I Learn Something Small, Then I'm Not Procrastinating
I should be dedicating most of my free time to finishing the two albums I've got more or less on a downhill slope to completion, but because of creeping creative anxiety, I'm putting off progress in favor of a little project. In the process I've taught myself a tiny bit of FreeCAD, so it's not procrastination.
A topic for another post is my obsessive management of music media via my Plex server. I'm among the minority in that my Plex server has 0 video on it, but just over 1TB of music on it. Musical data hoarder. Plex is maybe not specifically designed for music, but it has all the tools I want and need, and in conjunction with Plexamp, a very flexible and well-designed mobile app for music playback, I can't imagine ever moving.
A very simple metadata trick I've implemented on my server is to tag certain albums/tracks/artists with custom genre tags so that I can arbitrarily group otherwise disaparate music. I've got a tag called "Put it On" which contains all music that I can confidently put on in almost any environment. It's a useful tag when a lot of my library contains skronk. Another tag is, for opaque historical reasons, "Singlenista," with which I tag any and all music I could imagine putting on a jukebox in some imaginary venue or bar.
I get a lot of mileage out of a smart playlist I've created that's all the highly rated "Singlenista" tracks, filtered by date played (nothing too recent). And so, what if I made listening to that playlist both easier and more complicated? This is the sweet spot.
Ever since I migrated my Plex server off my Raspberry Pi and on to a NAS, I've had a Pi burning a hole in my pocket. Now it will be come an overpowered little jukebox that I leave plugged in to the mixer in my studio. A button press to shuffle the playlist, another one to shut it off, LED feedback on everything, and it runs Linux because why not.
This all started because I wanted to use Cherry MX keys to control the Pi, so of course I had to import the STEP files of the keys into my ECAD library so I could lay a little board out, and then of course with that board designed I had to update a STEP file of a Pi case I found online to accommodate the switches and a couple LEDs, and so here we are. I barely have any idea what I'm doing in FreeCAD, but I've broken the seal on importing STEP files to ECAD footprints and on creating my own 3D printing STEP files, so it's ever upward, no regrets on all the time I could've spent on the albums I'm scared to finish.
The case I printed is waiting for me at a local library. I've installed all the software on the Pi and just need to button up a Python script for it. The boards I designed are en route. It's all smiles.