jdcarter

Adafruit's documentation and software maintenance is also top notch. I just built a new project using an ancient, no-longer-sold Adafruit PiTFT Plus which I had in my parts bin. Their software installer worked great on latest PiOS, and their data sheets had all the dimensions I needed. Outstanding.

Brilliant execution. I see so many knob-based inputs on home appliances where they have physical detents but the input encoder does not match the detents. Say you turn the appliance on, it starts at setting one, and you need to turn the dial to setting three. Any reasonable person would expect one physical click to take you to setting two, another click would take you to setting three. But I keep seeing devices where the detents are completely arbitrary and you have no idea how many “clicks” it takes to get to the setting you want. This makes the detents actively misleading.

I've had very good luck with the integrated fixtures. I have a number of them in my house and only one has failed (of maybe a dozen). This is a lot lower than the failure rate of LED bulbs. They are far brighter than the lights they replaced, and I personally like their lower profile. I also installed a number of the integrated fixtures in my father's house, and the increased brightness helps him quite a bit (he's 80).

I bought many of the Home Depot private label LEDs...and had to replace every single one of them. Outright failure, buzzing, flickering. They're just terrible. I've replaced them with Philips.

I'm just the other way: had an Instant Pot for a couple years (which is great) but I bought a Zojirushi rice cooker and LOVE LOVE LOVE it. Japanese medium-grain rice in the Zoji is amazing. I cook 1-2 cups nearly every day to snack on.

The red handwriting font is exceptionally good; I'd love to know what that is. It looks very natural, I assume with a ton of ligatures.

I used Photoshop and Illustrator for years and years (going back to 1990's) and switched to Affinity about 2 years ago. There's a lot of little details that are different--say, when you grab a resize handle, does aspect ratio stay locked or do you have to hold down shift?--but I found that it wasn't tough to retrain. Most things are where you'd expect. It's certainly not like Gimp or Inkscape, where absolutely everything is different and it feels impossible to get anything done.

For the HP48/50 fans here: try the HP Prime. The color display is amazing. It requires some relearning because the UI is different, but it still has full-featured RPN mode. The keys are good, too--it looks and feels like a proper HP calculator. I used a 48SX in college and 50G later, but the Prime is the one to have now. (It's also the one my daughter steals now that she's in more advanced math and science classes.)

Only the last Danger device ran NetBSD; all prior ones used a proprietary, in-house OS. It didn't run any of the normal BSD userland, however, as Danger had its own Java-based userland and UI layer.

Danger was bought by Microsoft, however, right around the time the NetBSD phone was going to market. AFAIK the tech didn't continue much past the Microsoft acquisition. (Source: worked at Danger on the NetBSD project, but left shortly before the Microsoft deal.)

> why do you say setup and loop are the worst imaginable way to write embedded software?

Because there's neither abstraction nor ways to combine things. Say you have a device that needs to do two things, and you look up some examples of how to do each thing. Each example is going to have its own loop() function--but how do you combine them? There's no notion of tasks or threads. There's no abstraction for device drivers. Arduino is a system that paints you straight into a corner.

[edit to add] Any reasonable software environment needs to provide three things, quoting "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" here [1]:

* primitive expressions, which represent the simplest entities the language is concerned with,

* means of combination, by which compound elements are built from simpler ones, and

* means of abstraction, by which compound elements can be named and manipulated as units.

Arduino only provides the first.

[1]: https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/...

I'm using XXHash3 for verifying data integrity of large (10+MB) blobs. Very fast and appears to work very well in my testing--it's never missed any bit error I've thrown at it.

Aside: when storing hashes, be sure to store the hash type as well so that you can change it later if needed, e.g. "xxh3-[hash value]". RFC-6920 also has things to say about storing hash types and values, although I haven't seen its format in common use.

Thanks! Glad you found the site useful. Unfortunately, we were too far ahead of the time in lots of regards--processors were slow, screens were bad, battery technology iffy, no mobile data service that normal humans could afford... These days an iPhone costs just as much as a Magic Cap device did, and you can definitely see that that's what we were trying to accomplish, but there was no way for General Magic to stay in business long enough to see it realized.

I worked there for 5 years, and I maintain some historical artifacts from the time, including a gallery of Magic Cap handheld devices and some interesting concept art from Magic's very early days:

http://joshcarter.com/magic_cap/

Migadu is the place to go--they charge for traffic, not mailboxes. I'm in a similar boat with lots of domains, aliases, and mailboxes. My family comfortably fits in their "mini" plan, $48/year.

Based on the review, it looks like the iOS 12 password manager has matured quite a bit, but it doesn't say anything about integration with an external password manager. How have things changed for 1Password users?

Does anybody else miss the style of Aphyr's older posts, with animated Barbie dolls and such mocking the product under scrutiny? Examples:

https://aphyr.com/posts/317-jepsen-elasticsearch

https://aphyr.com/posts/284-jepsen-mongodb

I understand this analysis was paid for by Dgraph so GIFs and memes aren't appropriate... but I do miss them.

Right, BeOS ran like a bat out of hell even on low-end 603 PowerPC's. The 68K emulation in MacOS worked surprisingly well in terms of compatibility, but at a significant performance cost.

I recently looked into the research on this topic, and it absolutely agrees with you--failures are not independent. Papers of note:

https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/fast08/tech/full_papers/...

http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/fast07.pdf

Take note of section 5 in both papers for their statistical models and how they match with real-world data.

If you like the idea of Dwarf Fortress but want more sci-fi and less ASCII, check out Rimworld. The game has a similar bent towards story-telling with crazy events that befall your beloved colonists. It's far less daunting to the newcomer than DF.

That said, this diary is great. "The goal is simple: try to survive and thrive in Adventurer mode of Dwarf Fortress by relying mostly on the poetry and language skills." Oh this is going to be good...

My daughter couldn't breathe easily when she was young--when sleeping you could literally hear her breathing from a room or two away. Like having Darth Vader sleeping in the next room. After tonsil/adenoidectomy at about 3 years old she could finally breathe properly and her sleep become much better. It made a HUGE difference to her quality of life.

"Pragmatic Thinking and Learning" by Andy Hunt

https://pragprog.com/book/ahptl/pragmatic-thinking-and-learn...

I found it tremendously useful both in my career (where I can legit say I'm pretty good) and with outside activities like karate (where I'm very early in the learning cycle). It's one thing to tell people they need 10,000 hours to be competent at something, but quite a lot more helpful to explain all the steps along the way.

Further, if you want to read the Bible end-to-end, consider a chronological Bible. It organizes passages into when they occurred in time, for example in the Old Testament there's overlaps between Kings and Chronicles; in the New Testament there's overlap across the four gospels. I find it much easier to read long-form with that organization.

Unfortunately I can't say with confidence; mine is one of the servo-controlled ones that cost exactly $1K (new). I don't have first-hand experience with the stepper-driven ones. I will say, however, that 3D printers in the sub-$5000 space are pretty much all steppers, and those work great, so I doubt a stepper vinyl cutter would have positioning problems. The forces involved aren't high enough to make the drive system miss steps, skip belt teeth, etc..

Most vinyl cutters can use a pen as well. I have a Graphtec CE5000-40 cutter with a 15" wide bed, and I have adapters so I can stick sharpies of various sizes in it. Plus it has niceties like a USB interface and plugins for Illustrator. (Downside vs. an old plotter, of course, is cost.)

EDIT: also don't forget the AxiDraw! https://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/846

As I understand US law, when you're in public you have no expectation of privacy, and you can't do anything about having your photo taken. This is tangental to your point, but does that also mean that Facebook is legally free to ID you in photos which are taken in public? I really don't know.

(FWIW, I'm with you, it makes me crazy when family members post all their holiday photos on Facebook and tag me in them.)

Relevant recent discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16152050

Also bitfinex'ed writes extensively on manipulation:

https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/

"In case there was any doubt, the US Navy has confirmed that there is 'zero training value' in drawing penises in the sky."

I've switched all my new embedded projects to MicroPython, and I've found it far superior to Arduino for managing complexity in your software. No more loop() function that gets totally out of hand! Having an OS underneath with support for real concurrency constructs (like fibers) makes a huge difference, and Python is a pleasure to work with. Huge props to everybody involved in making this happen!

This makes the radio transponder I put on my cat look totally amateur by comparison. I need to step up my game.

However, this study indicates that ZFS is excellent at detecting on-disk corruption but does little to protect against in-memory corruption:

https://research.cs.wisc.edu/wind/Publications/zfs-corruptio...