What's with the obsession of USians to measure thicknesses in ounces?
I can kind of understand measuring copper thickness of a PCB in oz/ft^2, as that is easier to measure than actual thickness in the µm range. Especially if you don't care about the thickness being even.
But who the f*** came up with the idea of measuring leather thickness in oz? What thickness is an 5oz leather? And does that change with each leather type or do you just pretend it's some ideal animal hide of known density?
The only measure more ridiculous than this, that I know of, is measuring nails in pence. Yes, the price that nails had somewhen in the 18th century is the way how nail thickness and length are measured. Today. In the 21th century.
20 years ago, I showed engineering students how to use google to find stuff in minutes after they told me that they have been looking for days and found nothing.
Today, we have way more non-technical people online. And these have way less of an understanding of how computers work and interpret search strings. It's no wonder that people are even less able to google for stuff than they were 20 years ago.
People keep complaining that it's harder to find things online now than 20 years ago. Do any of them stop to think about how much harder it is to make a search engine now than 20 years ago? Unlikely.
@mansr It is harder to find things? I remember the good old days of altavista, of having to wade through dozens of pages of unrelated search results to find that one link I was looking for.
Yeah, search engines have gotten more in-your-face with sponsored results, there is more SEO that obfuscates what we are actually looking for, but overall, we get far more and more relevant results than we ever did.
@azonenberg Congrats! The SA.22 is a nice Rb standard. The tiny header-socket at the bottom is a bit of a unfortunate design choice, but otherwise it's quite solid. If you need manuals, let me know.
BTW: there are breakout boards floating around ebay from time to time... though making one yourself is probably quicker.
absolute chaos on a new unmoderated listserv this week as tens of people used the ‘thumbs up’ feature in outlook, which apparently now sends an email, causing an unstoppable torrent
@mansr The normal ones? No, they are regular superglue. At best, they have paperwork to prove that they do not contain anything really toxic. At best...
The non-normal ones use a different adhesive that can be resorbed, i.e. you don't have to remove them from crevices they got into. But these are not the stuff you usually get on amazon or your local pharmacy.
@mansr I don't think the rest-chain of the cyanoacrylates poses a significant difference in the behaviour of the glue. Maybe the longer chains delay the polymerization reaction a bit, which might be helpful in applications where things are generally very wet... like when there is blood around. AFAIK the first siture glues were off the shelve super glue.
Hypocrisies abound in the responses to protests by different political factions and in police response to genuine dangers, versus the ginned up crises invented by right-wing fascist populists like Greg Abbott.
Is the US even a democracy with rule of law anymore? It sounds like it has split into many little fiefdoms with wannabe autocrats at the top of each of them.
After a very windy afternoon Puget Sound Energy is now tracking 140 separate outages across the region affecting roughly 22.1K buildings.
Lab is operating on generator power and some equipment shut down when a loose UPS EBM cable resulted in running out of battery before the generator started.
So much for a nice relaxing weekend. Guess it's an excuse to do some hardware maintenance I had been putting off trying to avoid downtime.
@azonenberg If northern Germany has good enough weather to do solar at industrial scale, then all of the continental US are perfect! You not only have much more sunny days than northern Germany, but also a much higher angle at which the sun shines, thus giving higher output per m^2.
As for outages: It doesn't matter whether they a large scale generation/distribution problem or a small scale distribution problem. Point is you have outages and solar panels on your roof would solve both of them.
@azonenberg Oh.. I see. Yes, if you have a fully equipped electronics lab running 24/7, then your power consumption will be high. Especially high-speed/high-frequency measurement equipment.
A few weeks back I encountered a FOSS guy here explaining that when he sees open source devs ask for money, he blocks them and then stops using their code because they're morally wrong and he only wants to work with tools made by people who are doing the work for the right reasons. (I'm paraphrasing to avoid indexing the post.)
I've resisted writing about it because I'm slammed, but the question I can't shake is: Who benefits from the ideology of "pure" volunteerism?
@kissane As someone who spent over a decade write OSS, one that millions of people use every day, I can wholeheartedly say: f*ck this guy. We had so many bright and productive people who had to leave projects because they needed to put food on the table and after a long workday had no energy left to keep on coding for other people.
OSS has an idealistic aspect, but at the end of the day, everyone has bills to pay. They can either do that working on OSS or on commercial software.