logbiscuitswave

I certainly have an appreciation for a well crafted font.

As a programmer I am super picky and opinionated about the font I use for coding. I can have a very visceral reaction to one font over another. (For instance, I require really good clarity between O/0, and I/l/1, and I really really hate ligatures.)

That being said, I have very little knowledge about what goes into actually crafting a font. Whenever I read an article like this that goes into how the sausage is made I find it very fascinating.

There’s an LED on them

G-15 is just the tint color (the gray/green). It’s not the material. I’m pretty sure that only way you’re getting glass lenses from Ray-Ban is if you get the high index prescription lenses.

With the 3 and newer you can boot from USB drives instead of SD cards. It’s a bit of a faff to set up but it works great.

I had to do this when I was doing some long-running I/O intensive operations and it was basically killing the SD card storage.

I’ve owned many Pis through the years. Always for personal/hobby stuff, but they have been workhorses all the same.

I ran a Pihole server on an ancient 1A for several years. It was considered underpowered but worked great. I’ve run Homebridge services which was a great way to integrate various IoT stuff into HomeKit that lacked native support. I’ve since moved these things onto other hardware to consolidate things (not because of anything inherently wrong with the Pi).

For about a year now I’ve been using a Pi as a BLE data collector to slurp data from a weather station I have on my deck. That being said, the onboard Bluetooth on the 3 and 4 is pretty awful in my experience. I needed to use an external dongle to make it reliable.

For over a year I used a Pi 4 to run multiple SDRs to record and rebroadcast trunked police/fire scanner traffic. I eventually had to retire it for that purpose when the trunked system changed to digital and the Pi just couldn’t keep up with the workload anymore.

Those were all applications that I ran for months/years at a time using Pi hardware. I’d consider them “serious” even though they weren’t anything impressive or enterprise-worthy.

Other things I’ve done with them are use them as emulation stations. Even older Pis are more than capable of emulating 8 and 16 bit consoles without a hitch. Their compact size makes them portable and easy to plug into a TV and work with a Bluetooth controller.

I’ve seen a few 404 Media articles on here as of late and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the high quality of the content.

Yup, this.

The Cure tried really hard to make ticket sales for their latest tour as fair as possible. “Verified fan” sales only, resales disallowed (except where required by law), not allowing dynamic “Platinum” (aka airline ticket) pricing, transfers not allowed, face value resale only, no added fees. They also had their tickets go for extremely reasonable prices (like, $200 for front row tickets down to $25 for the nose bleeds). Even merch was reasonably priced; $20 t-shirts, $35 sweat shirts, and everything was high-quality. It seemed like they tried everything they could to balance playing in large venues (which unfortunately means dealing with TM since they have the monopoly here) while allowing a fair experience for fans and it still went sideways.

Scalpers still found ways to game this. Tickets couldn’t be transferred, so the novel approach they used was to sell the entire account with the tickets attached to it.

While getting tickets for The Cure was a shit show because of Ticketmaster, the fan to fan ticket exchange ended up being wonderful. I lucked into really great tickets at face value the day of the show, and I was able to resell my “still good but not great” tickets in minutes. It was almost zero friction and there were no tacked on fees or other surprises. I wish more artists did this.

Sometimes I want to resell a ticket and I’m not looking to profit but TM makes it so painful to do this under normal circumstances. The fact they can double dip on fees should be illegal. Whenever I’ve tried to sell tickets at face value (because something came up, I got better tickets later, or another tour stop opened up at a better venue), the actual listing ends up being some 20% higher because of the extra fees TM adds. TM doesn’t let you list a ticket at below face value.

I clicked the link and the page was almost completely covered with this overlay:

> Thanks for reading The Times. Create your free account or log in to continue reading.

Without any further context, it was a funny juxtaposition.

There’s a lot here I agree with. I dread text entry on iOS and it never seems to get that much better. It seems in many ways to have regressed in iOS 17 as well with things like invisible/near zero contrast text selection, hit detection being generally broken, it likes to super aggressively interpret taps anywhere near a word as me wanting to select a word when I’m just trying to reposition the cursor (and generally a word that’s not even close), and all kinds of other annoyances and friction.

But in addition the keyboards just don’t seem to be very good. I can’t tell you for how long now I’ve been infuriated by entering a search in iOS Safari only to have every word separated by a ‘.’ because of how it overloads the right edge of the to have a period right where my thumb likes to go.

I’ve tried numerous third party keyboards and they are all some sort of combination of “bad”, so I always end up going back to the built-in one after a while.

These are all far from solved problems, it’s just that it seems like a lot of people are so accustomed to the friction that it just seems like one of those inevitable things.

It’s pretty remarkable that they attempted to perform this live. Fairlight CMIs weren’t exactly renowned for their reliability.

As legend has it, there were several mishaps during setup and the gear wasn’t working until minutes before the performance (and what they had was completely bodged together). This may explain why they look so nervous during the start.

I’m a big PSB fan. Their subversive mix of clever lyrics, dark humor, and leftist politics under the veneer of highly commercial pop and dance music has long appealed to me. I’ve also been a long time visitor to this site. I can always count on it for thought-provoking and insightful analysis of their work. Design-wise, the site is a delightful throwback to the uncomplicated and messy glory days of the web in the early 2000s.

It’s worth nothing PSB is still going strong. They continue to release new and interesting material and tour the world. I saw them twice in 2022 when they were co-headlining with New Order and they haven’t lost a step after all these decades.

That was delightful. Reminds me of a Google Maps hack from back in the day that tracked Sir Mix-a-Lot’s trip through the Seattle area as documented in the song Posse on Broadway.

My Gmail account is the same way. I constantly get people using it as a throwaway email address for various dating sites, commerce sites, and porn sites. After enough annoying emails, I’ll typically change the account’s password or delete it if I can. (These sites usually aren’t the most reputable, so often times about the most I can do is change the password to lock them out.)

I don’t get why people do this. It’s not like it’s difficult to get a throwaway email account.

If you don’t have a full size spare, you generally always want to put it on the back. (Even if it means swapping tires around if you blew out a front tire.) You don’t want to compromise steering by putting it on the front wheel.

I’ve also been somewhat scarred by having a previous boss who was on the older side. He only became a manager because of an ego thing where he “didn’t want to report to someone half his age”. He ended up being a terrible manager and basically ended up driving me to leave for another team. I don’t want to become that guy.

That experience was very eye opening to me. As a result, despite being offered lead positions several times, I’ve always declined. I know where my talents and interests are, and they most certainly aren’t in “people problems” or managing someone else’s career. Thankfully my employer still has a very robust career track for people like me.

Just for anybody that’s interested, here’s a ton of information about the G5 dev kits for the Xbox 360.

https://www.xenonwiki.com/Alpha

Calling it the Xbox 3 would have been super confusing given it was the follow up to the original Xbox. 360 wasn’t a bad name — at least not compared to the One (which _was_ the 3rd Xbox iteration) and One X followed by the terrible Series S/X nomenclature of the current generation console.

I don’t do PowerPoint presentations often, but whenever I do this is basically what I do. Blank template, just enough text (in the default font), sparse animations/transitions (reserved only for slides when exposition is useful for clarity), and light on graphics.

I’ve used quite a few hardware dev kits in my time. These early dev kits are prototypes —- released long before the hardware or industrial design is finalized. They are made in small batches, often by hand (with bodge wires everywhere), and are highly optimized for disassembly, debugging, and troubleshooting. They often have tons of ports.

Early Xbox 360 dev kits were literally a PowerMac G5 with some customizations. Early Dreamcast dev kits were in a mini tower case. Frankenstein appendages are common especially for exotic hardware. I remember using an early Haswell dev kit which was a huge plexiglass monstrosity with a capacitive touchscreen glued to the top. (A later dev kit had a much more manageable iPad-like form factor.)

As you can imagine these dev kits are expensive and rare. The hardware manufacturer will want these early dev kits they loan back, and they are almost always destroyed. (A few may slip through the cracks which is how unicorn find like the Nintendo PlayStation prototype was found a few years back.)

As the hardware coalesces and goes through the various development stages, subsequent dev kits typically become smaller and more manageable. In some cases they may be nearly indistinguishable from retail hardware without closer inspection.

JetBrains makes damn good stuff. I do C# professionally and even though I use Visual Studio for the bulk of my work, it’s built in refactoring pales in comparison to what JB’s ReSharper provides. (Yes, VS has been catching up but it still has a long way to go.)

Anyway, yeah, Rider by itself isn’t cheap but for not a lot more you can just get the entire JB suite. It includes a whole ton of useful stuff that’s multi-platform and multi-language. When I’m doing Mac dev work, I find Rider to be much better for a lot of things than VS Mac is. (As long as I don’t need Azure integration.)

I could get my employer to reimburse it, but I find it all so useful both for work and for personal projects that I decided it was worth just paying out of pocket and not having to worry about it.

Bing doesn’t do a lot of query filters properly. You can put a phrase in quotations and it’ll give you things that … aren’t that.

The stories were something I really liked and they were a great break from the monotony of the usual lessons and a nice diversion. With the latest updates, you don’t get a single story (at least in Japanese) until you’re like at level 37. That’s a gigantic amount of effort to get to. It’s not like before where you had many stories relatively early on.

I’ve been using Duolingo for Japanese and at the level I’m at it’s not even providing any more explanations. It’s just “here’s some phrases, remember them”. The now locked comments sections (which is where the real learning seems to happen making it all the more frustrating that they disabled this functionality) is filled with complaints about the same.

It also has a really aggravating focus on idiomatic translations for phrases that don’t really map to the real meanings.

It was fun to start but now it’s become increasingly frustrating with its focus on remembering things without understanding them. I definitely don’t see myself renewing my subscription when it runs out later this year.

The battery isn’t typically charged by the PSU — it’s often just a regular lithium coin cell. It’s a backup for when it is unplugged so the clock doesn’t reset and CMOS settings aren’t lost.

I remember coveting a friend’s MT-32 setup, but when the GUS came out it was gold. It could do amazing wave-table synthesis in an affordable card. The first time I played Doom with the GUS-rendered soundtrack I was blown away at how great it sounded. I long since parted with my own GUS that I had in the 1990s, and I often wish I held on to it. They seem to be much sought after collector’s items now.

It was definitely worse on old hardware, and with the many old and unrefurbished computers that are likely inflicted with capacitor plague, you’re likely to blow something up if you power one up that’s been sitting idle in someone’s basement for the past couple decades.

With modern power management there’s less of a reason to power it off. S3 can power down most peripherals when they aren’t being used and draw just a few watts.

Even when shut down, the PSU still needs to consume power so it can turn on when you press the power button, keep the internal clock running, and a few other things. It’s minimal draw but it’s still using electricity. Only way to completely turn it off is by switching off the PSU (if you can) or unplugging completely.

This picture from the Japanese IME article on Wikipedia is a pretty good demonstration on typical use:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IME_demonstratie_-_Mats...

There’s a stroke order but the rules are pretty easy to learn. Outside of calligraphy, nobody will likely care if you get the order wrong. There’s also shorthand ways to write kanji called ryakuji.

Yeah, kanji can have lots of readings. There are some rules around when you use an on’yumi vs kun’yomi. A kanji paired with a hiragana is always a kun’yomi reading, but if there’s no kana you just have to know which reading to use. You can only pick that up through context and exposure. Of course any one kanji can have multiple on’yomi and kun’yomi readings. (And then there’s the concept of rendaku which can modify pronunciation based on neighboring syllables.) There’s nothing easy about it, but it is what it is. The you’re serious about learning Japanese it’s something you just have to get used to.

But nevertheless, kanji has many positives. It can make it much faster to read things because they can wrap complex things into a single character. If you have an unfamiliar character, understanding its components can often times provide a hint as to its meaning.

Think of it kind of like reading a conversation entirely in emoji. You may not get the whole meaning, but you can generally pick up the gist. And with far fewer words than it would take to write it out in full.

This was a really great and well-explained article. For an article that went deep into hardware internals, it somehow made it all make perfect sense. Kudos to the writer.

It’s pretty fascinating just how “dumb” the keyboard is and how keyboard input is actually being polled. It seems like this could easily lead to missed key presses or slow response, but I don’t recall the C64 keyboard suffering from either of these things. (It’s been some years since I last used a real C64 though.)

Yet, somehow on an exponentially more powerful and capable modern computer it seems that things like instant input response and no missed key presses is somehow asking for a lot.