Recently, I decided to standardize on a small number of MCU for various projects. Since I’ve had good luck with the STM32 line, and they’re widely available and supported, I picked the STM32C5 series, specifically the STM32C552 . This chip has a ton of peripherals on it, include I2C and I3C, USB, and FDCAN. With 512KB of flash and 128KB of SRAM, it has plenty of storage for most applications, with…
N.B. THIS IS A VERY PERSONAL VIEW AND DOES NOT REPRESENT ANYONE BUT ME. TODAY. AT APPROXIMATELY 13:50. Triggered by a question from yesterday, I thought I’d throw some thoughts together that have bubbled along for well on a decade for me. The question was “are you trans?” Seems perfectly reasonable. I don’t identify as either male or female exclusively, so certainly… But then that requires a…
Checking in on my last blog post, I find that it was over 3 years ago. Specifically, 29 January 2023. That’s quite a long time in the past; not that anything has changed, obviously . But, with everything happening, it seems like maybe—just maybe—it’s time to return to writing a bit more long form than my ramblings on Mastodon can really support; although, truth be told, there’s now support for…
Depending on the week, and mood, I tend to cook a decent amount of Thai and Vietnamese food. That means that certain ingredients (lime, lemongrass, ginger, etc.) are commonly available. This morning I wondered if I might leverage them to a sweeter purpose than the normal. {{< figure src=“/media/pudding-lemongrass.jpg” alt=“A short V shaped class is seen filled with a light…
Like just about everyone else in the world, I have a home network. Being more than a bit of a nerd, I thought I’d write a little about what is on it, some decisions I made, and some decisions I might regret. First, let’s start with a top-level view. To start with, the network is largely built on top of Ubiquiti networking gear, including: Switch 8 PoE (150W) Switch Lite 16 PoE 2 x Nano HD access…
I have always been someone passionate about typography, ever since I did design work on my highschool yearbook on a Mac IIfx running the original Aldus Pagemaker and an original Laserwriter. I’ve done letterpress work, and continue to find typography itself to be a fascinating field. I’ve paid for a bunch of typefaces over the years, including a bunch from Emigre . One thing I have never paid for…
I wanted to document this so that hopefully some poor soul will be able to discover it and know what’s going on. When I recently upgraded my iPhone from an 11 Pro to a 14 Pro, everything went super smooth, except I noticed that I was no longer getting voicemail. I opened a case with T-Mobile, my carrier, which was escalated repeatedly, each time saying that everything on their end was good.…
In San Francisco, the Thanh Long restaurant is justifiably famous for their garlic noodles with crab. I had never tried to make them myself until I saw this recipe from J. Kenji López-Alt. This is not the same as the one in his cookbook, as I’ve adjusted it for what I personally like. If you love garlic, try this. It’ll become a regular member of your cooking rotation because it has an enormous…
UPDATE 2023-08-28. Wow, what a difference some time makes. About 3 months ago, my HX-90G died. This is the same basic hardware as the HX90, but with a dedicated mobile GPU. The video stopped working, and it has been a never-ending pain to get it resolved. Here’s the timeline: 2023-01-06 - HX90G ordered. $799 including shipping. 2023-06-15 - HX90G video stops working. Just black (not no signal, but…
In the long-distant past, I, like most people on the Internet, leveraged Google Analytics to keep track of visitors to the website. Unfortunately, that’s also a privacy nightmare for so many reasons. Earlier this year, based on complaints by NOYB, the Austrian , French , and Italian have all ruled that use of Google Analytics violates the privacy guarantees their citizens expect. So, I yanked all…
Recently, it came to my attention that Cloudflare is back to its old tricks, and is fronting for Kiwifarms , a well known hate site that has driving multiple people to suicide through hounding, doxing, and other evil behaviors. Even though my experience with them was good, and their service for hosting the website was good, I just couldn’t see continuing to support them. After a brief Twitter…
Update (2022-8-6): I’ve added some information on the rather underwhelming performance of iSCSI on a 10 year old low-end Synology NAS. At home, I recently added a Minisforum HX90 to my home collection, and added it to my existing Kubernetes cluster (a hodgepodge of several things). I decided I’d stop using a Synology NAS (via iSCSI) for storage, and evaluate a a more “native” approach. In this…
As I [mentioned earlier]({{<relref “tools-to-make-life-easier”>}}), I’m a huge fan of Tailscale . Last year, they added a beta ability to issue X.509v3 certificates (via Let’s Encrypt ) to systems on your Tailnet. As they explain in a blog post , they do this by giving you a (somewhat randomish) FQDN, and then doing the DNS-01 challenge dance for you. To get the certificate: $ sudo tailscale cert…
For the last few months, I’ve been working on learning the F# functional programming language. The reasons for this are both intellectual curiosity, but also getting a better understanding of the .NET ecosystem. After a few months, I’ve come to a point where I’m hitting a gap of understanding of the underlying libraries and interop with the rest of .NET. Because of that, I’ve decided to take a…
Years ago, in a previous job, I built some software to analyze ADS-B data to do some predictive analysis around flight arrivals. Back then, this was a much harder thing to get access to, as software-defined radios were very much in their infancy, and “legit” radios for it were outrageously expensive. I’ve always harbored a curiosity about aviation, and when I noticed that FlightAware was offering…
Well, I had initially intended to host things on Azure, but to simplify things, I have decided to move things over to Cloudflare Pages . This has reduced the latency of building things, but also just generally made things easier. Another thing I have done is pull out 1,800+ old blog posts from 2000-2009. To do that I… wrote a little Python script that parses all the HTML, extracts the useful bits,…
There’s a few tools that I really like having handy for me on my Mac. These are things that don’t necessarily enable some wonderful new capability, but make my life much easier on a day-to-day basis. So, I figured I’d share them and why I like them: Alfred . A glorious successor to the old Quicksilver . I don’t remember exactly why I switched the first time. I think it might have been stagnation…
While it’s de rigueur in most languages to use an object-relational mapper (ORM) to translate between your internal representation (typically object-oriented) and the relational model, I find that you end up with a bit of the “worst of both worlds” in the end. This article isn’t attempting to dig into all the challenges with ORMs. Instead, I want to look at a Python library for an alternative…
Customer service applications are those that provide administrative access to a system in order to deal with support, abuse, or safety concerns within a system. They are most common with things adjacent to social media and content management, but may exist for nearly all systems. This post is really about those that deal with user-submitted content in some form or another where the subjects aren’t…
Last November, after nearly a decade driving the same Ford Focus ST (only to about 45,000mi), I finally broke down and bought something new. The motivation was a combination of a few factors: restlessness, comfort, features, and an upcoming road trip vacation. Truthfully, as much as I love a fast car, I’ve reached a point in my life where comfort is equally as important. This “review” is written…
In programming, we are constantly told to ensure we write comments, and this is very good advice . One of the things that is often overlooked in this advice, however, is what kind of comments we shouldn’t make. Having written code for some 30+ years at this point, I have run into 3 specific situations where a comment is not a benefit, and is often simply noise and a negative to everyone involved.…
For the longest time, I stopped making homemade pasta. I’m not really sure why that was to be honest, but it just stopped some time before I moved to Seattle in 2014. Earlier this year, I decided to pick it back up, and pulled out my trusty pasta machine, only to find that it had broken at some point in the preceding near-decade of disuse. Finally, a few weeks ago, I broke down and bought a new…
One of the things that can be most challenging when starting to learn a new technology is beginning to wrap your head around the terminology that is used. While the concepts are often somewhat uniform across all the different technologies, each has chosen to use a different term for those things. At least for me, that has been one of the biggest friction points in learning F# and .NET, so I…
This is based on sketchy information, limited releases, and just general experience in the business for the last 20+ years. It is subject to change, although I’ll try to update the thoughts in the future as more information comes around. Much of this is derived from multiple internal conversations, although none of it is based on non-public information. There are a lot of articles about the recent…
Many years ago, my younger sister was a bit obsessed with the film The Never Ending Story . It’s a charming movie of a boy lost in a fantasy world through a fantasy book. 2020 has been the antithesis of that. It’s being lost in a never-ending horror show that just keeps finding new ways to be annoying and tedious. Worse than all of that, though, is that it has illuminated even more starkly just…
As someone who has written Python for almost 25 years, spent years writing various Lisps and Smalltalk, and spent a few years in the Clojure community, it might be interesting to talk about what appeals to me with F# . Appeals enough to get me to restart my blog after an 11 year hiatus (2000-2009 being the original dates). There are a few things that appeal: Practicality while still having an…
Well, it has been a long time since I last wrote anything in a blog. In that time, I’ve moved from one coast to the other, had a couple of jobs, and generally aged. I’m not sure if this blog will stick. The last one lasted many years, and I have a todo item that will have me putting a lot of that back on the site so that it’s available for “posterity”. This one? Not so sure. But, I do know that in…