tverbeure

There might be a good analogy out there, but this one is not it.

* <my name>.github.io

* markdown files

* push to GitHub

* their Jekyll actions take care of the rest

I don’t see the point in paying for my own domain. I hate it that sources of great information disappear when the owner passes away. Chances are that GitHub pages will exist longer than I do. But if not, I can still move my business somewhere else.

> It required a city-wide ballot initiative, IIRC, and was very contentious.

It's still very contentious and was on the ballot again yesterday to undo the previous ballot measure and make it available to car again. The proposal to undo was defeated.

"The free Shield, rebuilt"

There is nothing wrong with admitting that a (small) part of a hobby is getting recognition from your peers.

I’m just happy that, for now, AI can hold a soldering iron or operate a multimeter.

As for gardening: the town where I grew up has these plots of land for vegetable gardens There’s a long waiting list to get one. You should see how the plot holders compete over who has the best vegetable beds.

Yeah, mine is arriving tomorrow, because I totally needed another unused SDR platform.

mega samples per second. IOW: sample rate.

The significance is that most off the shelf SDR platforms have much lower specs. Almost all of them use the same Analog Devices transceiver chip.

Photopea is one of the clones discussed in the article…

Twitter used to be a fantastic place to interact with other electronics hobbyist. Then it became the nazi bar and that was that. Every once in a while I go back out of morbid curiosity but the Following tab is barren and the For You tab is disgusting.

I found a place on Mastodon, but the critical mass just isn’t there.

It doesn’t help that many cool looking hobby projects are now just AI slop.

Things are bleak.

> Break pads on ICE wear out slower than EV due to torque and weight difference

The only time I use brakes on my Tesla is for unpredictable events on the roads or for going from slow to standstill. For everything else, I use regenerative braking. In fact, back when I just got mine, I asked my tire/brake shop about typical brake pad lifetime. They said that they almost never service brake pads on EVs. It's just not a thing.

If your brake pads don't last at least 100k, then you're holding it wrong.

I don’t have solar panels but own a house with parking spot.

I use the PG&E EV2-A night tariff at home which is still 0.23 $/kWh, though the rate at work is only 0.14 $/kWh which I use as much as possible. I rarely use the superchargers (0.45$/kWh.) Let’s use the 0.23 value.

I drive 15k miles per year. At roughly 2.5 mi/kWh. That gives $1380 per year.

At 20 mi/gallon and $6/gallon, I’d pay $4500 per year. At today’s gas prices, the difference is IMO not marginal anymore. (That said, I didn’t buy the EV for the drive savings…)

> driving includes a lot more costs than just fuel

Oil changes, break pads, oil filters, spark plugs, …

For whatever reason, my wife’s car needs yearly scheduled dealership visits that always cost a few hundred. Meanwhile, my 5 year old EV has had none of that, other than one of those recalls that required a technician to park 15 minutes on our driveway to tighten some bolt (which my wife’s car also had, but it took another visit to the dealership.)

The depreciation thing is true, but I drive my cars into the ground anyway, so it’s not a factor for me.

> seems really quiet too

That would be a bug to me!

That’s understating the importance of the error coding. The modulation scheme is almost a side show, it’s the modern error coding algorithms (LDPC or Turbo coding) that allows you to get arbitrary close to the Shannon limit.

John the Baker.

Moonwalking with Einstein is a fun read. I started using some tricks in real life. One of the key premises is that humans are much better at remembering sensory things than abstract ones.

A good example is remembering names: when one’s name is “John Baker”, it is so much easier to remember by silently adding “the” in front of it.

We’re also very good at remembering salacious stuff. I tried constructing my own memory palace for a grocery shopping list that included cream cheese. If you mentally make Claudia Schiffer take a bath in cream cheese, you’ll never forget that. (I read the book at least 10 years ago and still haven’t…)

Never heard of Hoka either, so I asked my wife just now: “oh yes, I have a pair.”

Mining rigs were using USB-C to transport PCIe x1 by the truckload. Because USB 3.0 cables are dirt cheap and are capable of transporting signals at PCIe x1 data rates.

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256809341543494.html

The closed system doesn’t (only) prevent counterfeit systems, it also prevents someone from maliciously releasing a mod that could make the motor accelerate instead of break at some random time.

It’d be negligent for anyone to release a product like this without locking down the FW.

Many years ago, we did exactly that: our product had FW update support and our biggest concern was a rogue hacker creating a package that would brick the product.

Reverse engineering the way they do it is very satisfying and time consuming. If you want the same results but without the sweat, LLMs are the way to go now. They eat this kind of stuff for lunch. You could literally ask one for a table with all the CAN bus messages and it would figure it out.

I wrote a blog posts where I first did it the traditional way and then, a few months later, the lazy way: https://tomverbeure.github.io/2026/04/12/AMIQ-License-Key-Ge....

The bike derangement syndrome in the US is truly something to behold.

I have some HUB75 boards where the JTAG pins are covered with solder mask or only available by scratching solder mask from non-descript traces.

These boards are programmed in production with SPI pins or assembled with preprogrammed PROMs.

I’ve used this board for an LED cube, but in general I don’t recommend it as a cheap general purpose FPGA board due to the lack of inputs, the different versions, and the uncertainty about getting access to the JTAG pins on later versions.

The Colorlight I5 is a much better choice for that. It’s also a high volume and this cheap HUB75 controller board but with a plug-in configuration so they all pins can be used as input or output.

See my old blog post about it: https://tomverbeure.github.io/2021/01/22/The-Colorlight-i5-a...

What I remember of the V20 was that there was some benchmark (Norton?) that was way faster, but I never saw a difference for any real application that I tested.

It’s not just funny to see, it’s also fun to create, satisfying to see it work, and terrifying to deploy it for hundreds of thousands of users… when it’s a cursed way to update firmware.

That feeling when it finally works is great. I spent $40 on this basket case: https://tomverbeure.github.io/2025/12/24/Repair-of-SRS-DG535.... Took me ages to figure that one out.

TekWiki is great!

100MHz is overkill for most hobbyists use cases, and definitely repairing test equipment: it's always the power supply.

Using SATA gen 1 would be ideal, but the TDS7104 motherboard is old enough not to have that: it doesn't support booting from a USB stick.

Over the years, I've had 5 TDSxxx series scopes, and I still have a few. The common issues are:

NuColor CRT displays going bad. Bad capacitors. Dallas NVRAM units battery running out of juice

Fried electronics are pretty rare.

It's a hobby, not work.