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I know humanoid robots are all the rage, but as I sit here on the 3rd day of a broken dishwasher, I find it’s appliances that I’m really partial to.
Chris Gammell's Analog Life
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I recall writing a diary entry about a young crush on the family i386 desktop, naming it something innocuous, and saving it to a 3.5" floppy disk and hiding that in my desk. …and that’s the oldest sounding sentence I have ever written
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Dad, what were video games like when you were little?
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This ain’t a lake, it’s a dammed river!
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I have visceral memories of coming home from school and my head feeling overflowing with new things that I learned. I also remember thinking it paled in comparison to some of the things people a generation above me needed to hold in their head (ie. Math methods I was allowed to offload to a calculator). Will my kids generation feel the same if they’re allowed to offload to AI models? Or just…
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Did I spin up a bunch of new infrastructure for t-shirts just to make this silly new design idea available? I mean, maybe. Update: Now available: https://www.etsy.com/listing/4540117432/beyond-return-smith-chart-seance
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I was going to make a MicroPub front end clone, but decided on a CMS instead
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It’s the particular stage of life I’m in where I get in my car and the smart functions are like “oh don’t worry, I put on an Elmo song for you” (no children currently present)
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I love Crepe Myrtle season where I live. It’s hotter than Hades around here, but these tree / bush things decide it’s time to sprout beautiful flowers all over town. From an ecological niche perspective, I bet they do QUITE well with the local bees…
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Thanks, Instagram, for reminding me every time I go to your trash site that I don’t need to be in a place that recommends violent, terrible content. Or honestly just any recommended content. I didn’t ask for your opinion, zuck. Good lord, I can’t believe people use that site (or really much of the social web anymore)
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Waiting around for the clanker to finish processing code feels like my first job when I would stand around in a bunny suit waiting waiting waiting for a dry etch machine to tell me a batch of silicon wafers were done and to move them to the next step. Except if we were being accurate, in the machine example, once the machine’s memory got too full it would start doing weird things and be like…
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Taking a moment to admire a grand ol’ country at 250, despite all the things we know are challenging right now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZYH8v42a2w
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Ultimate dad mode: taking on a golf announcers voice and quietly narrating as I find places for luggage in the trunk of the car. Quiet golf clap follows 👏
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It is downright amazing that i can put a model on my mac mini m4 and it can crunch through the 750+ episode back catalog of The Amp Hour for transcripts. Won’t be perfect, but it’ll be a lot of data.
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I want to bottle the energy and joy of “first goal scored by team/country that has never been to a World Cup before”. Bring that out on a rainy day.
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How have I lived this many years of my life (MANY of them in the nerd realm) and I only recently discovered ssh-copy-id? Makes me wonder what other magic incantations are out there…
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The one saving grace of being an inside-kid nerd in the American south in the summer is, “oops, I forgot to go outside today” can be easily explained away by “…because wow, it was just TOO HOT”
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for some reason “i have a fully functional chatbot running on my computer” became a lot more real when I found out “oh yeah, it also speaks like…every languge”
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That moment when you think “wow, I could go for another cup of coffee” and in fact, you haven’t finished your coffee your travel mug (so it’s still hot). It’s the little things, y’know?
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I have been leaning into the combination of laptop and comfy chair for writing lately, and that has been having some positive impacts. I think just the context switch from work to writing helps too.
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“Never meet your heroes” generally doesn’t apply when your heroes are just random nerds from the internet who are unassuming yet brilliant people
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I figured out the building where they store all the capacitors in Madrid
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Just found a to-do item I don’t remember adding to my journal that says “cheeseburger robot”. So yeah, I’d say I have my priorities straight.
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Just held a 3rd “AI Tooling for HW/SW” meeting. I don’t think I have ever gone wrong gathering a bunch of fun, smart, and nerdy people into a room (online or IRL) and seeing what happens.
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A modern day Loki that really only unmutes microphones on video calls at inopportune times
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I have been getting exposed to more programming paradigms via the Clanker explaining what it is doing for projects. YAGNI (“You Ain’t Gonna Need It”) actually explains alot about HW vs SW people making boards. With HW, you just might need it…(for bodges)
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This AI generated video could have (no should have) been a slide deck
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“Have we considered making electronic components sufficiently stabby?" “Well sir, we’ve checked with the lawyers, and putting knives on board is forbidden, but we can place knife-like pins 0.1” apart to really get the users fingers” “Sold!”
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For some reason I have put off replacing broken speaker for my computer (perhaps “oh, I should really repair those”? Laziness? Cheapness?). Anyway, after finally just paying to fix the problem, I think this stereo audio thing is really going to catch on.
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In my 40s, I find that there is a direct correlation of my happiness and neighborliness (probably also could be called “friendliness” or “social activity”). One nice interaction can turn my whole day around in a positive way. That Fred Rogers was smart.
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“It’s fine”, my wife says after I nod towards it. My heart sings! These are the most beautiful words I have heard since “I do” and “we’re having a baby”. I’m all aflutter! Yes, the 3D printed q-tip holder can stay in the bathroom after all.
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Most uncontroversial opinion ever: laminating things is incredibly satisfying
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You need to learn all the long form calculations: 80s - you won’t always have your slide rule on you! 90s - You won’t always have your calculator! 00s - You won’t always have your graphing calculator! 10s - You won’t always have your iPhone! early 20s - You won’t always have your LLMs! late 20s - Nm, if you don’t use AI, you’re fired
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It’s late night, you hear your partner whispering into their phone. You catch them sending messages and hiding the screen. Eventually, you discover the worst: they’ve been talking to the clanker and “coding” this whole time…
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I get a chuckle how webpage design has looped back around to the answer being “static HTML”. Won’t last forever, but I enjoy it for now.
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After a few weeks of doing demos, I think it’s always good to remind myself: no one cares as much about a demo as the person making it. No one cares how long it took to mak. Everything is about how it’s being perceived in the moment.
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The best part about travel in the age of working on the Internet is 3Dimensionalizing faces on the screen.
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There is seemingly no digital equivalent of a fancy fountain pen that people used to ceremonially sign contracts/agreements. Maybe I need to get a gold plated enter key cap?
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True wealth comes not from income or holdings, but from the variety of coffee one can buy from Costco
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All throughout my time at my old job at a component data company and since then while looking at AI tools, I kept saying “all I want is a tool that will fill in resistors and component values for me”. Well, you had your shot startups, Claude does it now.
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Buying a new computer or laptop in the age of countless YouTube reviews has all the fun of buyers remorse before you even hit the purchase key…
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Old San Juan, as seen from a WW2 turret installed onto a fort/castle built in the 1600s
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When you see a strip of thin green plastic on the grass, think “weed whacker cord” and not “a 3D printer is missing some PLA”. Perhaps a corollary to the medical idea of “zebras”.
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Rereading what I just posted and realized how trite it sounds. Take it from the perspective of a stressed parent trying to figure out if a restaurant will work for taking kids somewhere…
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Feels like one of the most immediate acts of service one can do is to take photos of the internals/seating layout of restaurants and post those to Google Maps.
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After years of saying I’ll never go back to a dedicated RSS reader, I have finally gone back. I am now self hosting miniflux and have been consistently reading it. Just in time for all the sites to stop publishing their feeds, I’m sure.
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Sniff sniff sniff Oh yes, I did mean to use that hot glue gun I turned on an hour ago
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Spent an afternoon spent chasing answers on how to expose a locally hosted app while I’m away from home (Tailscale, caddy, etc). The right answer was likely instead “install it in the computer you already rent on the cloud”…
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These books are so gimmicky and I’m totally here for it
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Given how I am almost always starting out my measuring process with “where the heck are my calipers”, you’d think I’d give them more of a vaunted place on my bench…