tesseract

On the one hand I get why that is - the calculus notion of infinity is the one that tends to be useful in applied math - on the other hand it's a shame because the set theoretic notion of infinity has more to offer to someone trying to ponder the nature of the infinite.

Or put another way, "what's ∞ + 1" basically invites the non-answer "that's not a well-formed question" whereas "what's ω + 1" gives you a whole intellectual thread to pull on.

It also infamously had an issue where the battery would loosen and become disconnected during flight, rapidly followed by the drone falling out of the sky.

Well, there's less of it, since typical airliner cabin pressure is equivalent to being at 8000ft altitude or so. Do you typically spend long durations driving in the mountains?

I've definitely noticed worse service at many restaurants, but less commented-on seems to be worse food quality (lower quality ingredients and less consistent preparation) and a worse atmosphere (piles of takeout supplies in the dining room, ramshackle outdoor seating areas that were hastily built 3 years ago and never upgraded to something more permanent, etc.) both of which I am also seeing at many places I used to frequent.

I think that's also true in most of the US for first-party gift cards like Starbucks.

The typical offenders for expiration dates and/or fees are bank-issued gift cards that run via a credit card network. Does the Alberta regulation cover those?

It was already dead when it was bought. The founder wrote a postmortem: https://medium.com/@ericmigi/why-pebble-failed-d7be937c6232

If by "embedded" you mean "MMU-less", it's definitely rare these days, even though historically general purpose computers had binary loaders long before they had virtual memory.

NuttX is the only one I can think of off the top of my head with this feature.

On Reddit at least, posting links to your own site or your own content on third party sites tends to be seen as "self promotion" and at least a little bit icky, even if you don't financially benefit. Some subreddit communities will tolerate it if you are an active participant in other threads on the sub; others dislike it even then.

WAAS doesn't cover Australia.

No personal experience with it, but the Compulab Fitlet2/Fitlet3 looks interesting.

The spread of the "ranged weapon"/"melee weapon" classification terminology from the roleplaying games world into writings on real-world anthropology and military history (without acknowledgement of the direction of the borrowing!) is a personal pet peeve. I haven't been able to pinpoint Wikipedia, much less a specific article, as the source of this but it seems to have at the very least accelerated the trend.

I feel like it might be more accurate to say the 60s and 70s were sort of a golden age of logo design and perhaps of graphic design more generally. Glaser was certainly one of the most famous practitioners of that era but elevating him over and above equally famous contemporaries like Paul Rand, Massimo Vignelli, and Saul Bass feels like a stretch for sure. And there was also a lot of great and enduring logo work during that period by less well-known designers (think Bruce Blackburn for NASA or Peter Oestrich for Kodak).

The smallest Lattice iCE40 are under $2 in volume, it may be "overkill" but also pretty tough to beat economically at low quantities. Especially keeping in mind one of the limitations of these MPW silicon runs is the parts you get are untested... reasonable in prototyping but an obstacle to scaling up to low volume production.

Dialog (nee Silego) Greenpak is a cheaper programmable option if you can find one that your design fits in. The design flow is a little more idiosyncratic.

Of course often the cheapest option these days for low-end digital logic requirements is to emulate your logic in a microcontroller, if you can get away with that speed wise. It might not feel very elegant but the economy of scale is tough to beat.

Personally it's analog and mixed signal design that I'd love to see cheap and easy custom silicon for... I've got a design with some DACs, analog switches, jellybean op amps, and a dozen-ish discrete transistors that would be really great to integrate and miniaturize, but it doesn't seem practical at ~10k volumes.

Cost (reputational as well as CSR hours and the actual replacement units) of a bunch of warranty claims for bricked units is a factor too.

In practice pretty much every embedded device I've worked on that has supported in-field firmware updates has had either double buffering and/or a recovery mode to limit the possibility of bricking.

For the products where every last penny really needs to get squeezed out of the BOM (toys, low-end appliances, ...) the ability to do in-field firmware upgrades itself is IME often one of the first things to go.

* Translation between USB PD and whatever communication protocol runs on the center Magsafe pin (in Magsafe 1 and 2 it was Dallas 1-wire)

* Disabling power output when the cable is not connected to a computer, so that a metal object touching the spring pins can't create a dangerous short circuit

* Driving the LED

"Amateur" in the context of this chart specifically means licensed amateur radio aka "ham radio".

We concentrated in one place the internet traffic of people who care enough about privacy that they are willing to pay for an extra service. What could go wrong!?

I would not take it as a given that the individuals laid off were the worst performers at the company. It could be that they were highly compensated and deemed too expensive, or happened to work in the wrong department/business unit.

The straight style is more common in US home kitchens; the Y-shaped style seems to be more common in Europe. In the US there has been a trend of chefs and food writers evangelizing the Y-shaped peeler.

In my experience the straight style is more ergonomic for carrots and parsnips whereas the Y-peeler works better for potatoes, citrus, and other roughly spheroidal foods.

(I also use my [very sharp] Y-peeler for shaving hard cheeses into flakes so sure, I guess it is a cheese slicer too :) )

I think in this case the behavior is that the initial generation of the password is random, but subsequently it is, shall we say, "trivially deterministic": it (intentionally) always spits out a cached copy of the initial randomly generated password.

I think security implications here would mostly apply to cases where you wanted to create multiple accounts on the same website within a short period.

> It brought me job opportunities and gigs.

I would guess that is a significantly more lucrative monetization strategy than something like running ads on the blog.

I had a hard time distinguishing them with night shift enabled on my display. With a daylight white point it was easier but they are still close.

In practice, electrical heating is is often spot heating in one room or even aimed directly at a person - a niche that isn't really served by indoor gas-fueled heating appliances.

Somewhere around 50x is the dividing line between "I want to see normal stuff really up close" (best done with a stereo microscope or camera with macro lens [some "digital microscopes" fall in this realm]) and "I want to see microscopic things that are invisible to the naked eye" (best done with a biological style/compound microscope with stage and slides, etc.). They can both be interesting! The Foldscope is definitely aimed at the latter case.

Rightfully considered a classic in the field, and its third edition was highly anticipated for many years.

This book's niche is in building the intuitive understanding that is often lacking after the typically highly mathematical treatment seen in 200-level circuit theory courses. It's a great transition from "ok, I can manipulate the equations for a circuit with one or two transistors" to being able to design complete, practical electronic devices. The book is also heavily used as a cookbook and reference by practicing electronics engineers as it contains a lot of expert wisdom particularly in the area of high-precision analog circuits (the authors' background is in physics lab instrumentation design).

Hence the development of things like power-over-ethernet LED lighting: it can be installed by non-electricians.

Yes, that is the architecture of a modern offline SMPS. But the rectification losses are minimal compared to other losses in a PSU and there are options, like active rectification, to improve efficiency in that block if needed.

I will concede there may be advantages to centralizing power factor correction. But on the flip side, components like circuit breakers, connectors, and switches for high voltage DC face arc quench challenges that their AC equivalents basically don't at domestic line voltages and currents due to the zero crossing.

In-home batteries are a case where the benefits of DC wiring may outweigh the drawbacks though. That is also the basic situation in those datacenters I mentioned, where power to the racks all comes from a UPS system.

Long distance (including room-to-room) distribution of low voltage DC power is inefficient due to I^2*R losses in wiring unless impractically large wire sizes are used. There may be some marginal efficiency gains to be had with high voltage DC supply and DC-DC converters in electronic devices (this architecture is used in some datacenters) but house-wide distribution of say 5V is impractical.

Even within a system the size of a desktop PC, the architecture that has been determined to maximize efficiency and cost savings is an AC-to-12VDC power supply box, feeding additional DC-DC converters that produce the necessary logic supply voltages (~1.2V) as physically close to the actual load as possible.

Game Neverending --> Flickr

One of the more confusing examples of this I've encountered was a manufacturer describing a material with improved eco-friendliness over a prior version as "dark green"... taking the color metaphor perhaps a bit too seriously. (For what it's worth, the material happened to be black in color.)