myself248

This is precisely what makerspaces are for.

There are many operating models. Some are attached to another organization (a library, a university), some are commercial (RIP Techshop), some are completely DIY and member-run. Any given city might have a handful of different ones, but you'll have to dig around and visit a few to see what you vibe with.

Caveat, it's very easy to get focused on the ooh-shiny tools, and forget to pay attention to the community energy and expectations. Some of the more professional spaces, you just pay for what you want, and staff takes care of the rest. At the other end of the scale, the fully-DIY places are very much a case of "you get out of it what you put into it", and may offer cheaper memberships but expect a lot more involvement.

Visit as many as you can.

Exactly. The sane ones just ask you what year it is at startup, and use that to determine the initial epoch. Then they handle rollover automatically since then.

It's been widely opined that 1024 weeks (~20 years) is the worst possible interval. Either rollovers should've happened VERY frequently (say, 128 weeks) so receivers would be FORCED to deal with it, or extremely infrequently (16384 weeks?), so it's simply never an issue.

The unhappy medium is long enough that developers feel justified in saying "naaaah, our receiver won't still be in use then, we can ignore that!", but in practice it's very likely to happen.

I've heard the advice to use a passport card for this. It has your age, it has your name, but it does not have your address.

Of course passports are expensive and not everyone has them, but if you do, next time you renew, opt for the book+card option.

A twenty-foot ridge in Florida would be the tallest thing in the county and qualify for names like "Matterhorn".

> in german there is a word for this

I am not surprised.

> competence table tennis

Magnificent!

> "Key beep" sounds horrific. :D

And yet, every computer in a TV show seems to have it enabled!

Nothing about B-H curves or magnetization current, must be that other kind of transformer, in that other kind of circuit.

I remember solid-state piezoelectric "flapping blade" air movers in the surplus market in the 80s; they were all over the Jerryco and Edmund catalogs.

Never did get my hands on one. But I wonder how that technology relates to these new things.

...click the Edit button?

We'll see if the NTSB mentions piss bottles in the cabin.

Mine is just a shelf of Chef Boyardee and Campbell's.

I eat one or two a week as regular lunches, to rotate stock. When there's some room at the empty end of the shelf, I shove everything down, and buy some new cans to stuff in at the intake end.

It takes no more time than going to the pantry for a can of soup regularly would. And saves time, because I'm _never_ out and scrambling to find another option. Whether I'm 8 cans down or 24, one trip to the store will replenish it regardless.

Don't overcomplicate it. Folks who blog about things tend to do so because they're proud they achieved something difficult, so you compare yourself to a difficult standard. Resist that.

There are a couple of points:

The L1 signal had selective availability in the 90s, and it no longer does. SA had the real-world accuracy around 30m in practice; the "up to" 100m rarely happened. Without SA, plain L1 with good skyview (low DOP) gets you around 10m, or down under 5m if WAAS is having a good day.

Availability of multiple civilian bands, and cost-effective dual-band receivers, allows an ionosphere-free (no need for WAAS) solution in the 1-2m range, with a single receiver.

Ubiquity of internet connections makes it trivial to apply RTK correction data without having to set up your own base station, and/or, availability of affordable medium-range data radios makes it easy to set up your own base station. In either case, it's easier to run RTK than ever before, and dual-band RTK gets you down into the low centimeters, limited mostly by how accurately your base station was surveyed-in.

And none of that touches the military signals.

> Both BeiDou and GPS are supposed to be limited to 10m precision for civilians.

Maybe in 1998, but Selective Availability was turned off in 2000, and here in the modern era: https://rtklibexplorer.wordpress.com/2024/04/28/dual-frequen...

Estate sales. You can score a dozen CRTs a week if you for some reason want to...

Oh, wow! That seems to fill a gap below LORAN's range, and far exceeding its accuracy. I never heard of it before!

Because if you had modems between the computers, you used straight-through RS232 cables -- the PC would have its Tx/Rx pins according to DTE standard, and the modem would have its Tx/Rx pins according to DCE standard. The modems did the "swap" themselves by choosing tones at dial/answer/negotiate time, then the other modem-to-terminal link was likewise straight-through.

But if you were connecting two terminals directly with no modems, thus the modem was "null", you needed the cable to do the signal swap instead. Hence the name!

When I hacked a USB2-GigE adapter into my old Toughbook CF-m34 to replace the stock 10/100 adapter, it wasn't for the speed. I didn't need the speed, and of course USB2 wouldn't let me use the whole gig anyway.

But GigE uses all four pairs, so the hardware has transceivers behind all four pairs, which means even when they're running at 10 or 100, the chipset can choose which pairs to transmit and receive on. Thus all GigE adapters are Auto-MDIX, and it meant I no longer needed to carry a crossover cable, no matter what other device I was talking to.

It's funny how 10/100 cards with Auto-MDIX capability were exotic and expensive, but once GigE had it by default, it became ubiquitous, cheap, and quickly forgotten.

CPU gets a little hotter, fan runs a little faster. Close the tab, it calms back down.

Thaaaaaaat explains why an open Aliexpress tab always bumps my thermals ever so slightly.

Yup, they even speak HPGL.

Originally, people put knife blades into HP plotters, by modifying the pen holders. Then Roland started making heavy-duty plotters purpose-built to run blades, but they spoke the same HPGL as the plotters, for compatibility.

Then everyone and their brother knocked-off the Roland designs, and of course copied the HPGL compatibility. Along the way, some special extensions crept into the dialect, for setting the downforce (the !FS; command) and maybe other stuff.

And for a long, long time, all vinyl cutters were basically the same. You could use any software with any cutter.

Then Cricut came along and hosed it all up.

Or if they'd been foolish enough to log the recovery on sondehub itself, which some of us do frequently (but not after causing property damage!).

I tried the BMC route, it didn't help.

As far as I can tell, the jumper dance was to enable the main BIOS to use the Management Engine controller to perform some other part of the flash, which would ordinarily be locked out with the jumpers in their normal position. But now that it's tried and failed, it won't try again, maybe?

I also managed to brick a motherboard, though mine was a Supermicro, by missing a line in the README that tells you to move some hardware jumpers on the board before applying the flash. I found one jumper, but the other one was in another corner of the board, and the README says "if you have both, move both", so I thought I just had a board with only one jumper.

Notably, the flash process itself does not check for the positions of the jumpers and exit, or anything like that, it just proceeds merrily along, and renders the board unbootable. I've been around with Flashrom a dozen times and can't figure out the right sequence of flash-this-rerun-that to recover the thing. (It's an X9DR3, if anyone here has hints.)

So I wish I could be mad at Framework, but only the tiniest bit. It's sadly common.

It's appalling that computing in general, and unix in particular, seems to have this habit of intermingling payload and overhead.

It's like in-band signalling in the telephone network, where if you whistled the right tones into your call, you could affect the way the network processed said call. Except Ma Bell responded to that system being exploited by designing a comprehensive overhaul of the way signalling was handled, and spent a squadzillion dollars upgrading millions of tons of switching equipment to categorically exclude that entire class of attack from ever being possible.

Software, on the other hand, would need to replace no equipment whatsoever. Existing processors are perfectly capable of running code that handles the length of a string separately from its contents. There are existing languages that do this, they're just.... not used. String escapes and buffer overflows exist, going on decades now, due to nothing more than laziness, inertia, and negligence.

The only feature I care about here, is that it charges over USB-C PD, which every ebike battery for the last 12 years could have done, and should have done, yet here we are.

Is it the very first? I have no idea. But it's the first that I've run across, and I'm ecstatic that it exists.

Proprietary power bricks for anything are stone-age and should be shunned by the market. Maybe the ebike market will start doing so.

Specially interrogated phrases.

Oh jeez, I cannot wait for the Words. Standing. Alone. trend to be over, it makes me want to hurl.

It sorta made sense when it was clever and the words actually made sense both alone or together, but now that it's become something every two-bit marketroid aims for, they force it even when it doesn't really work, and the result is atrocious.

Makes me yearn for pet rocks. At least that fad knew it was dumb.

Very early in the video, he explains that while previous builds used steel ball-bearings, that's not responsible at these energy levels, so he switches to lightweight balls made of biodegradable plastic. There's comparatively little energy in the projectile after release, and it's only supersonic for a few feet.

Further, you test in an enormous empty field, as he's doing.

That's what I came here to ask! I'd happily fill some slack in production pipelines, by picking the IDGAF-about-speed-or-color option, if that makes it hobbyist-affordable.

Heck, I'd probably pay a bit more, just for knowing it never leaves US soil. But not, like, aerospace prices.

I guess the question becomes, what's the cost of an idle line? Is there merit to running very-cheap production instead of letting it sit idle? What's the smallest order they can profitably process, and will that go down as the order automation improves?

(I have always loathed getting boards made in the US, because there's always a "call for quote" button where there should be "add to cart". The JLC upload-gerbers-and-go experience is legitimately superior, and that pisses me off. I'm super excited that someone's finally fixing that.)

Oooooooooooo.

I bet that's how satellite radios get their firmware updates and stuff.

Actually I bet it's how they get almost everything aside from the audio streams themselves. Metadata. Channel art. Subscription info. Traffic data. Weather maps. Receiver firmware... The satellite is a textbook-perfect fountain, and the receiver may tune in at any time during the stream, and may miss any random number of packets, but fairly quickly it has what it needs.

I believe the various categories of metadata are sent at different rates according to how promptly a newly-awakened receiver should be able to update itself, so what's actually on the air is an interleaved collection of fountain streams, yeah? Hmm.