setq

Incidentally you can demonstrate this by wiring up the relay so it oscillates i.e. use the NC contacts in series with the coil. Then stick your fingers across the coil. It'll give you a nice shock. Not enough to hurt you but enough to go "hmm, I'm not going to do that again" like licking a 9v battery.

Attempts to measure these spikes on a cheap scope years ago ended up blowing the scope input FET up. Whoops. Good job it was a university owned scope :D

It's fantastic. When it fails miserably I am usually in hysterics at the sheer carnage my creation unleashed. So much to learn.

I'm slightly tempted to do a 4th attempt now inspired by the original poster :)

I love these projects. They are always destined to fail from experience but are great fun anyway. I've tried a few times to do similar things. I'll catalog my disasters quickly:

1. Seedlings need blowing around a bit when they pop out or they get all spindly. Cue wiring up two 80mm PC case fans to a chain of a single astable then two monostable 555's to generate an oscillating wind field that goes on for 5 seconds each direction after a delay of 10 minutes. Dried the compost out, blew most of it it away and then killed the plants dead. No tomatoes for me!

2. Watering robot version 1. Similar to above but with a 74hc390 dividing down the clock so it only ran once every day. Used an unprotected MOSFET to control a small water pump from ebay. Back EMF blew the MOSFET up and jammed it as a short. Emptied the entire water reservoir into the pot, down the wall and into the carpet.

3. Watering robot version 2. Same as above with problems fixed. Apart from I ran out of bipolar 555's so I used CMOS ones which are a little more tetchy about noise. Cue last 555 getting jammed in an on state and the same thing happening. This time, the tupperware box with the electronics ended up getting wet and the wall wart exploded.

Edit: meant to say to the OP - nice work. This is the spirit of all things interesting :)

That only works if you have some level of determinism.

Windows is a rat's nest from hell when it comes to privilege separation. That was probably the only privilege level that allows it to communicate with what it needs to.

Even worse, despite this patch, it's still sitting here running as local system on my box. Total fucking nightmare.

You can even start a fire with a bottle of water in this fashion. I've done it!

Doesn't mean the security or the quality is up to spec however. Most of the defence sector people I've worked with pretty much run on procedural knowledge developed independently rather than using their nut or consulting the rest of the industry.

This whole thing has gone wrong before: https://www.wired.com/1998/07/sunk-by-windows-nt/

Indeed. The TI SN7400N is still in production and can still be bought today: http://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/standard-logic-gates/0305490/

That's only 53 years in production now!

Apparently this isn't actually the case entirely. You can do a restore purchases on the old version now. I haven't tried it myself though.

Edit: remove unrelated edit!

I still remember doing a make world on FreeBSD on a 75MHz Pentium. Went out for the night and it was still going when the hangover wore off the following afternoon. This was mainly because it spent most of it's time swapping.

Because everything has no ownership, no standard place to put things and no logical consistency.

Standard job board type sites. I don't use LinkedIn.

openstack swift supposedly but this is a slightly incompatible S3 implementation that nothing else talks.

The filesystem works pretty well though ;)

I've been working for 16 years in the IT sector in software dev (senior/architecture/devops cack) and then 3 years engineering before that.

You don't get cold calls. You plonk your CV somewhere, take a position and then have to change your phone number because they won't go away even if you have taken a position :)

If there's anything I've learned about object storage over the last year, it is: don't use object storage unless you need it for a particularly narrow use case of silly data volumes or CDN storage for a massively distributed content network. Anything else, forget it.

It rarely if ever works properly with standard Linux or Windows tools (s3), it has a rat's nest of arbitrary restrictions which require a language lawyer to decypher (s3/iam/vpc/roles), the APIs are vendor specific and sometimes even region specific (s3), the APIs are obtuse (s3 multipart), the clients are buggy (boto/boto3), suddenly you inherit extra costs and configuration requirements if you want to do something like expose it over http (route53/cloudfront/s3), credential storage is a nightmare for distribution compared to rsync/ssh etc. Ugh.

Please note I have used Google Storage as well and all of the above also apply.

The only thing that is positive is capital expenditure is low.

I will share it in a couple of weeks if I get some time to finish it. It aggregates a lot of info from climate, financial market status, things of cultural interest, native languages, recruitment etc.

Not sure I like this. The reason I tend to use external job sites is that they don't know who I am so I don't have to spend three weeks beating off recruiters with a shitty stick. Google knows who I am.

Thanks for posting. That was fascinating.

I have a spreadsheet going - there are a few serious options available still. I will publish it on here at some point.

This is actually my exit plan at the moment.

I have tried to explain this to many people and I agree. People are entirely ignorant. I have actually given up now. I will have to vote with my feet at some point.

Not necessarily as on at least two times in the past, it didn't work properly without frigging around with timings.

This is why I'd rather lose 25% of the performance these days and take a canned pre-built PC. I just can't afford the time to find this out. It was bad enough trying to find a working set of drivers for my T440 and that only took an hour or so.

I lived through the age of self build K6's, Athlons, dual Celerons and SLI Voodoo 2's and heatsinks the size of a can of coke. I'd rather just have a shitty old thinkpad and a box in AWS now. This all happened when I realised a naff old Pentium III 1.4 GHz (Compaq AP230) was actually my goto machine despite having things 3-5x the speed.

I run a fair few high CPU/RAM simulations with LTspice as well for ref.

I shall have a try next week and see if I can cope with it :)

I can't get over the 1 based indexes in Lua, unless that has changed in recent years.

I have actually tried that and you're right. The whole experience made me consider going back to electrical engineering when I realised that the status quo hadn't improved in 20 years :)

Back in 1999 I managed a similar thing written in C with flat file storage. The whole tool chain chucked out a static binary and a directory full of templates and you just cp'ed it to the target and restarted the process.

When I look back I've got to be honest and say that it was actually a thing of beauty. The heavy lifting required for some core functions was quite bad but the whole thing pales in comparison to some of the enterprise and microservice based c# behemoths I have looked after since which require literally hours of head scratching to deliver a simple change.

I'd rather spend that time writing C than scratching my head. I'd have a lot more hair now.

I wasn't aware that borrowing things wasn't a thing these days. I'm forever borrowing and lending things. Just yesterday I borrowed a hammer drill from a friend because it's ridiculous buying one to drill some holes for a curtain rail.

Can You Survive the Zombie Apocalypse? by Max Brallier is the only one I've gone through and it was quite good.

Inspired by this type of book, I used to write BBC BASIC adventure games in the late 1980's at school. It was great fun planning the structure of them on paper and coming up with the graphs first.