I have an object I'm getting ready to rebuild, so I deleted it down to bare sketches. The resulting viewport made me miss the cool mech tech readouts of my 90s youth, so I tweaked the theme in a way that kid would've found faboo. #FreeCAD
Complete: when someone says "we're on the same wavelength," they're saying they can:
RE: https://freeradical.zone/@bitartbot/115628047985299055
In the Vector Fields is the name of my 1-bit microcontroller music Bauhaus cover band.
Hypothesis: hackers like chiptunes in part because they sound almost appropriate on thinkpad speakers with Linux drivers/mixers.
I just realized: the only complex number "named constant" I know of is i itself.
Are there any famous constants in ℂ?
[ ed: inb4 "They're all in ℂ, if you write out the +0i" ]
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/live/ has a live NHK stream if you want to watch the domestic coverage of #tsunami information. They have English translations of the audio and chyrons in English.
My instance has a 2263 character limit on posts, which I just realized is maybe too much. 200 characters is like a detailed laundromat poster, with the bare minimum information. 500 characters is one of the pages of "Room for Rent" information in whichever language you can only sorta read. Room for context and nuance.
2,263 characters is going up to each and every person who follows you and saying "Here's my pamphlet!"
(I appreciate the generous limit, but I can't imagine getting anywhere near it on a regular basis. This isn't LiveJournal, after all.)
I bought a used 3DConnexion Space Pilot Pro on eBay. I spent yesterday evening figuring out how to bind all the buttons to Sketcher functions in #FreeCAD. I'm still very clumsy, but it feels so, so nice.
@hds Thank you for your async/await blog post series! I'm fumbling my way into Rust finally, and it's been super helpful to understand things. It reminds me of writing a C function declaration parser, which is basically the only way anyone can learn how those actually work.
Maybe it's an 80s kid thing, but "type-along" tutorials are the absolute best way for me to learn. So thanks for putting one together on a topic that's pretty foreign to those of us who learned to code on machines that booted into BASIC.
(Now to find one that shows how to structure my code such that lifetimes line up nicely…)
It occurs to me that "As long as anyone can remember" is a euphemism for "within living memory," which is a lot less impressive. Ask anyone whose grandparents were in WWII: we're the last ones to have had conversations with the eyewitnesses of all that.
This boundary puts a whole different spin on "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." And I suspect there's a lot of truth to this version. I've talked with WWII survivors, and I will write you off if you take the other side. But I'm one of the younger people to have done this, and I'm not young anymore. It's not just fading away: there is a cliff coming soon.
It gives me a very different, very pragmatic view into creed: religion provides a way to use that entirely reasonable "this generation will be offended if you do XYZ to disrespect their grandparents" feeling across more than 3 generations, creating cultural memory. (Also, it feels like maybe we've left some stuff out from ours… we need to make sure not to do that again.)
(#uspol only for the filters: this isn't politics, but it's probably correlated enough to count.)
I'm sure you're all familiar with the old saying, but it bears repeating:
A ham with one SWR meter knows how well-tuned their antennas are; a ham building up two different SWR bridge designs will slowly descend into madness trying to understand why they don't agree.
I can see the 280 flyway down to the southbound 101 from my kitchen, and it has been bumper-to-bumper *crawling* for at least 5 hours now. We're talking "idling in first gear" speeds here.
I finally looked into why: it's almost certainly due to a lack of investment in #infrastructure maintenance 🥳
I wonder how much CalTrans "saved" by not preventing the drainage problems, how much they'll spend on overtime to fix it, and how much the traffic has cost the overall economy in time lost.
@hachyderm Is there a guide on the acceptability of "Punch Nazis" under our current moderation standards?
Asking for a friend who doesn't want to make y'all's volunteer time any more busy than they already are. (Also: thank you for volunteering! Having worked in anti-abuse, I appreciate the challenges.)
Not enough people are talking about how the US economy is looking more and more like the Soviet economy did to Americans.
Everything is as cheap and minimal as possible, and all the options you have to "choose" from are made by a handful of companies. These are run by powerful figures, removed from any meaningful public accountability.
The difference is that we are constantly innovating new ways to market the same schlock at every-better margins, while paying workers less and less.
#uspol
US #amateurradio folks: let us ignore the ARRL's existence for a moment, and think about what we'd like from a country-level organization.
In your mind, what are the key things for a national club to do in service of our community? And then a follow-up: why are those things important?
(And links to anyone who's already done this kind of research would be appreciated. I haven't found anything, but it's hard to search for.)
This article about the flood risks in Asheville, posted almost two weeks ago, is painfully on the nose. It's eerie to read these interviews, knowing that the worst case scenario was weeks away from coming true.
"Asheville’s flood risk will only grow as rain events and climate change intensify"
Google will start replacing search results with a chatbot soon. Duckduckgo is an excellent search engine; I switched to it a year or so ago. Whenever I accidentally wind up using google to search, it takes a minute to realize why the results are so crappy.
A somewhat obscure #HamRadio question: are there any examples of buffered/amplified SWR circuits? If not, is there an obvious (or well-known) reason that it's a bad idea? I can't find any, so I assume there's a reason nobody makes them.
(It feels most likely to be "any situation where you need to amplify it is one where it doesn't warrant the complication of two annoying-to-dial-in amplifier circuits.")
Had a little mental record scratch while reading this email's subject line.
"Oh, sure, 'Time is running out — last chance to resubscrib…' blah blah okay random marketing droid at *scratch* NIST, nevermind, gotta go deal with this one."
There are very few organizations whose press releases I want to read, and even fewer with whom I've got no pecuniary interests.
One might say that #NIST meets my 🥁 standards.
