This year we had 317 trick-or-treaters. That’s our new all-time record, at least since I’ve been tracking.

Halloween was on a Saturday and it was nice and clear.

We forgot we were starting at 5:30 and we were running late anyway, trying to eat dinner, so we didn’t start until 6:00. We did have a few doorbells between 5:30 and 6:00, but not too many, so I can’t imagine we really missed a lot. It did seem like 5:30 was pretty early to get started.

Missing/incongruous data:

• 2017 we were remodeling the house and didn’t hand out candy.
• 2018 I walked with Phoenix and the tally got lost somewhere.
• 2020 was COVID and no one handed out candy.
• 2022 we were getting our floors redone due to a leak and the whole house was torn up so we didn’t hand out candy.

Cumulative data:

Our costumes this year:

• Me: Ghostbuster
• Jenn: Joker
• Phoenix: (Not pictured) Coraline

I’ve wanted to be a Ghostbuster since I can remember. When the HasLabs proton pack and wand came out, I ordered it and I’ve been planning this for almost a year.

I didn’t sew any of the stuff this time. Since COVID, apparel fabric shops are scarce. Plus, for a flight/jumpsuit like this, the amount of time and materials to make it vs. build it doesn’t make sense. Vastly cheaper to buy it.

I did modify the pack to have a larger speaker so it sounds better. I also added some aftermarket stickers to it that stick far better and look more realistic than the stock stickers.

What’s cool is that it also goes with our outdoor decor since we have a Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man and Slimer on our front porch.

I would occasionally go outside, “power up” the pack (which makes all the noises like it’s spinning up), and “shoot” the proton wand at the kids up and down the street. This, admittedly, seemed to draw them in as some would cross the street to come over after this. I can’t say this didn’t contribute to the increased number of trick-or-treaters. I had one trick-or-treater ask if they could get a picture of me by Stay-Puft and I was happy to oblige.

Parents also appreciated the costume and we found several groups singing the Ghostbusters theme song or yelling, “WHO YOU GONNA CALL?” from the sidewalk.

I will likely reuse this many times over coming years since it’s an easy costume to get into, it’s reasonably comfortable, and it’s a big hit with the kids.

This year was also, unfortunately, the last year for the annual Halloween party at our good friends’ house that we’ve gone to for… well, this is 26 years, I think.

I enjoy sewing and making costumes, for sure. It’s gotten a lot harder with the lack of fabric stores, especially now that Jo-Ann is gone. Lots of quilting fabric, very little apparel fabric. I was making a new costume every year to start so I could be something different each year at that Halloween party and at work in the office. After that, it was also so I could go walking around with Phoenix.

My kiddo is getting too old to walk around the neighborhood. COVID shut down my office, and I think contributed to the loss of Jo-Ann. Now that the Halloween party is over… it’s just me.

Which won’t stop me from making things, of course, but it just means I can be more thoughtful about what I want to make and also reuse the costumes I make instead of going for something new every year.

But, dammit, I’ll sure miss those parties.

I built a little in-browser app that can create a customizable, full-color 3D model of a coaster with a QR code on it, ready for printing. Go check it out!

There are a ton of these apps out there - apps that create QR codes and let you export them or put them on a 3D printable coaster, but I found there were problems with all of these:

• They’re not free. You want to export an SVG? Pay. You want to customize the logo in it? Pay. It seems like creating a QR code shouldn’t cost you.
• They require an account. Sign in before you finish! I’m not sure why. I think this is one of those “if you don’t know what the product is, you’re the product” things.
• They send stuff to a server. I do not want to send my guest wi-fi password to your server. I do not want to send my contact info to your server. I just want a QR code.
• They’re not feature-complete. They don’t have the options I want. Maybe the model is sub-par. Maybe getting a color print model is hard or manual. In most cases the 3D print part seems like a “bolt-on” instead of a real feature.

I decided to fix it myself.

Key differentiating features:

• No server connection. All the work happens in your browser. The rendering, the testing, the generation of the downloadable model. Your information never leaves your machine. That also means there’s no account required, no payment required, it all just works.
• 3D printing first. The goal is a 3D printable coaster, not just a QR code generator that happens to also create a model.
  • Print and scan testing. Simulated tests will run based on your selected nozzle size to see if you’ll be losing details or if you’ll have problems scanning the code after print. This allows you to correct the issues before finding out on the printer.
  • Fixed color management. Choose up to four filament colors and ensure all colors used in the model match those colors.
  • Nice edges. The top edge can be slightly rounded with the bottom edge at a nice fillet (no supports!) to make the edges nice instead of sharp.
• Highly customizable. Select from tons of options to make the coaster yours.
  • Type and style of QR code.
  • Logo/icon in the center of the QR code.
  • Optional text above/below the code.

Once it looks how you want, you can download a .3mf file with the geometry, pre-colored using your palette.

I, personally, am a Bambu X1C owner, so I pop this open using Bambu Studio, match the colors to colors in my AMS, and I’m off to the races.

Give it a try! If you want to see more, the source code is here.

Back in 2017 I created an external volume monitor for our Marantz receiver. The receiver is in a cabinet so we can’t see the display on the front, and the on-screen display doesn’t work over 4K inputs. Rather than guess at the volume (to know if you’re going to be blasted out or not be able to hear), I created a little monitor display with an Arduino that kinda did the job.

This is what the original version looked like:

At the time I was pretty good with it. It solved the problem and was… fine.

It’s nine years later and over time I got frustrated with some of the shortcomings. The contrast on the display was never super, so it was always just a little difficult to read from a distance. Combined with my eyes (getting older), it wasn’t cutting it anymore. After a power outage, it was a pain to “recover” because you had to ensure the Arduino was powered up after the receiver or it’d go into a death loop.

Hardware has progressed a lot, so I decided to make an upgrade.

Presenting the new version:

This version has some pretty major upgrades. Built on an ESP32 (instead of Arduino) with a 4” touch screen (instead of a 1602 display), it now has:

• Wi-Fi support instead of wired networking.
• Auto-detection of networks.
• Auto-detection of receivers on the network.
• A nice, large volume display along with a visual gauge.
• Improved display of the source and sound format.
• Full settings menu for reconfiguration, calibration, or checking current connection information.

All still on a budget - the hardware cost about $30.

Here’s the first page of the settings menu:

(Admittedly, the pictures aren’t great… but it’s hard to take a good picture of a reflective touch screen.)

I’ve updated the GitHub repo where all the source is if you want to build one, too. It has all the software, the hardware list, wiring diagrams, even the 3D model I made for the box.

Yesterday I released Autofac 9.1.0. It’s listed as a minor release - 0.X.0 semver increment - because it’s all new, backwards-compatible features, but it’s actually pretty big, I think.

AnyKey Support

Autofac now natively supports the concept of AnyKey. It behaves the same way AnyKey works in Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection, but it is native to Autofac directly. The unit tests here show some very detailed examples of usage, but on a high level:

var builder = new ContainerBuilder();
builder.RegisterType<Service>().Keyed<IService>(KeyedService.AnyKey);

var container = builder.Build();

// Registering as AnyKey allows it to respond to... any key!
var service = container.ResolveKeyed<IService>("service1");

As noted, it behaves like AnyKey in Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection, so there are some “rules” around when AnyKey will work and when it won’t.

• You can resolve a single instance and AnyKey will be a fallback. If you resolve a single instance of a service and use a key that you haven’t otherwise registered, an AnyKey service can provide that instance.
• You can resolve a collection using AnyKey. This allows you to get all keyed services of a certain type, but it will not include the services registered with AnyKey - only services registered with a specific key.
• AnyKey works with singletons. When you register an AnyKey service as a singleton, a different instance of that service will be cached for each key under which it’s resolved. Beware of this - if you’re not paying attention, it could lead to a memory leak.
• Registration order is important. As always, last-in-wins. If you register a lot of AnyKey services, the last one registered for the given type will be the one you get when you resolve.

Here are some examples showing usage:

var builder = new ContainerBuilder();
builder.RegisterType<Service1>().Keyed<IService>(KeyedService.AnyKey);
builder.RegisterType<Service2>().Keyed<IService>("a");
builder.RegisterType<Service3>().Keyed<IService>("b");
var container = builder.Build();

// This will ONLY get Service2 and Service3 - things registered with explicit
// keys. It will NOT return Service1, registered with AnyKey.
var allServices = container.ResolveKeyed<IEnumerable<IService>>(KeyedService.AnyKey)

// THIS WILL THROW: You can't resolve a single instance using AnyKey.
_ = container.ResolveKeyed<IService>(KeyedService.AnyKey);

// This will get you the AnyKey service because no specific keyed service was
// registered with `other-key`.
var noRegisteredKey = container.ResolveKeyed<IService>("other-key");

Again, check out the unit tests for some robust examples.

Inject Service Key Into Constructors

The new [ServiceKey] attribute allows you to inject the service key provided during resolution. This is handy in conjunction with AnyKey and is also similar to the construct in Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection, but with native Autofac.

First, mark up your class to take the constructor parameter.

public class Service : IService
{
  private readonly string _id;
  public Service([ServiceKey] string id) => _id = id;
}

Then when you resolve the class, the service key will automatically be injected.

You can also make use of this in a lambda registration.

var builder = new ContainerBuilder();
builder.Register<Service>((ctx, p) => {
  var key = p.TryGetKeyedServiceKey(out string value) ? value : null;
  return new Service(key);
}).Keyed<Service>(KeyedService.AnyKey);

Metrics

Some metrics have been introduced that can allow you to capture counters on how long middleware is taking, how often lock contention occurs, and so on.

Set the AUTOFAC_METRICS environment variable in your process to true or 1 to enable this feature. You can see the set of counters that will become available here.

⚠️ This is NOT FREE. Collecting counters and metrics will incur a performance hit, so it’s not something you want to leave on in production.

General Performance Improvements

A pass over the whole system was made with an eye to trying to claw back some performance. Some additional caching was introduced to help reduce lookups and calculations of reflection data; and a few hot-path optimizations were made for the common situations.

A Personal Note

This is probably the biggest Autofac update made in quite some time - new features, some perf fixes, some metrics - and, with that, I really don’t have any active assisting project maintainers, so it was all just me. I’m pretty proud of this one. I have been suffering from maintainer burnout for a while, but I’ve got a little of my energy back lately and, honestly, it’s due to AI.

I used Codex and Claude Opus on this latest set of changes to help me out and do some of the heavy lifting. Don’t get me wrong, I reviewed all of what was output, but it was so energizing to be able to tell something else to go look for changes, dig for performance optimization opportunities, and validate them. I could create a robust set of tests (or, in some cases, adapt existing Microsoft container compatibility tests) to guide implementation and basically say, “Make it pass the tests.” I can safely say I would not have been able to deliver this new set of functionality in any near future without tools like that. Between time constraints and flagging motivation, it wouldn’t have happened.

I’m not at “just vibe code everything” level and I’m definitely not ready for Gas Town, but I see the value here and it counters some of the burnout.

After about 31 years of being a customer of Things From Another World, I closed my comic book subscription box last night.

It feels weird.

I’ve had a comic box there longer than most of the employees have been alive. I started out at the Milwaukie, OR, location, which is just across the street from Dark Horse. (Dark Horse Comics owns TFAW, so there’s a connection.) I moved to the Beaverton, OR, location when I moved to the west side of Portland for work. Through it all I’ve gone at least once a month to pick up Daredevil, Strangers in Paradise, Sin City… lots. I’ve seen TFAW go from just a couple of stores to something like six or seven, add a full online presence, and then cut all the way back to just a couple of locations again.

I have a closet full of long boxes. The storage aspect is not awesome. But they’re my comics, and I’ve had ‘em forever, and I love ‘em.

I’d started getting some notifications from TFAW that I wasn’t subscribed to enough comics, or at least not enough that came out regularly, and I needed to either subscribe to more or close my box. I’d seen it a couple of times before and usually found something new to pick up, but lately I just haven’t wanted something new on a regular basis.

When I told the clerk I wanted to close my box, they didn’t even blink. “OK.” No hard sell, no asking me why, no attempt to retain the customer. Just, “OK.” I was like, “I’ve had a box for over 30 years, I guess I’m not subscribed to enough, but it seems weird that I’ve been a customer this long - that you’ve been getting my money for this long - and there’s not some sort of provision for that.”

“Yup,” said the clerk.

And that was it. It was very anti-climactic and, honestly, disappointing.

I took the last comic left in the box - Umbrella Academy - Plan B #3 - and left the store.