• 8 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Times have changed. I used to be excited 10 years ago when new android versions came out with cool new features, often better performance, and a lot of gimmicks that sometimes were useful.

    Now it is: “Oh I wonder what feature they are taking away this time, what freedom they are stepping on now, what they have enshittified now, and how they are adding additional surveillance to sell to Palantir…”

    And what they advertise is literally “Location Indicator is slightly darker”. “Settings menu had very slight spacing change” and “brightness icon is mirrored”

    Somebody is getting a promotion for those extremely minor changes


  • Probably because it is all portable and in markdown, the devs are widely available and it is open enough that community, open source plugins can be easily made which allow you to make custom workflows that simply aren’t available in any alternatives.

    Linking is significantly easier and better than any alternative I have tried which significantly lowers the effort of documentation which is the largest hurdle for most people. As all social media shit apps have taught us, ultra low-effort beginning of a habit is the key to consistent use.

    And if the dev enshittifies, all of your notes are safe in plaintext markdown and not a proprietary format and can be imported and cleaned up in your choice of new editor and fix the linking.



  • I have made laundry lists in the past of things that either you can’t do with windows, or you need to regedit and hack around it. Literally basic as fuck things.

    Hell, until a year or two ago, you couldn’t open the location of a file from a file search, and it obscured (and still does) the full path of the file in the search pane. Not to mention how bad the search is in general.

    Don’t get me started on the “modern sleep” bullshit lol





  • Yes but they hide that as much as possible.

    • No longer warranty
    • No specs that indicate longevity
    • also has bullshit WiFi/touchscreens because it is so cheap to integrate for them

    If you are extremely lucky, there is a review for that model somewhere that isn’t just paid advertising, but outside of the US with less-used models, that is pretty much a fantasy.

    For example, even on the most expensive 1400€ Series 8 models Bosch (traditionally one of the best quality washers in the EU) now instead of a drum with bolts and a gasket, plastic welds their drum covers so it doesn’t last as long, breaks at the seam, and is almost impossible to repair correctly.

    And their specs say the size, capacity, programs, and a few useless features like automatic dosing, lighting inside, and “led display” , and that is it.


  • As an engineer, hybrid works best for many of us.

    Design phase can be wfh with some in-person idea sessions or important meetings because I have yet to be at an online idea session that was as productive as in-person being able to draw things out and visualize better, and people tend to not speak up or just check out and agree at the end in online meetings.

    Testing phase has to be mostly in person for lab tool access and collaboration on physical things.

    I have worked with a contractor that did everything from home and had a whole home lab, but it was a big time sink and cost shipping parts back and forth 5 times and you couldn’t physically probe behaviors together which leads to slightly different setups and sometimes different results.

    Socially I moved to a place where I had no friends so I like getting social contact at work since in Belgium, it is extremely difficult to make new friends after you are done with school because of a culture of not talking to anyone else unless people are obnoxiously drunk lol. I like wfh on overwhelming days and in-person on days where I want more social contact.

    That being said, I work 100% in office now because I live a 12 minute bike ride from work, so very easy.


  • This is also why people should seriously think about if they are ready to have a kid or want to have a kid.

    Millions or tens/hundreds of millions of kids have parents that never really wanted them and just gave in to the biological clock and/or social pressures and the kids have a shitty childhood. It sucks to be unwanted, and kids can really feel it.








  • Oh yeah I was quite annoyed with bazzite initially with embedded toolchains… The default arch distrobox also runs vscode variants horribly with tons of freezing for some reason. I had to create a new arch distrobox.

    Also Saleae Logic2 has a Fedora bug where it takes between 2 and 10 minutes just to open because of logfiles and errordumping and timeouts that is very annoying.

    Also menu shortcuts for distrobox only work like for 20% of programs (luckily code-oss is one of them)

    And don’t get me started on running a VM that can see the local network…

    After you get a setup going though, then it is breezy though.


  • So I am in the designing of the circuit and PCB stage right now.

    The usecase is for Meshtastic/Meshcore nodes because those sit outside in a tree or in a high place outside year-round and are solar charged. I am designing it as a RAKwireless Wisblock power module that will be charged by 2, 5V, 200mA small solar panels in series. The whole project will be released on Codeberg like all of my home projects.

    Later I can copy the circuit over to other PCBs for more general formats. One of my future projects is going to be an 8S pack BMS for driving a 12V water pump for off-grid rainwater collection barrels.

    I am targeting 2S systems now because then the entire sodium cell can discharge if the system voltage is set to 3V and I don’t need any buck/boost, just a buck which is significantly cheaper and easier on the batteries.

    I am using an STM32C011 as a custom BMS + buck charger because my original idea of using a very cheap, small mixed signal FPGA (greenpak SLG47105) wouldn’t work well for sodium because it didn’t have enough comparators to have a soft constant voltage region (gradually increasing CV voltage from 3.8V per cell to 4V along with the natural current decrease to prolong charge cycle life), it will have overvoltage/over current protections, 1A or 2A max current, resistive battery balancing, and some safety features and an I2C readout.

    (Sorry, wall of text)