@scruss@xoxo.zone
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

scruss

@scruss@xoxo.zone

auld hairy scottish git in Toronto. Does futile things with electronics, including trying to sell them. This ended very badly, so now I build cameras instead. I've built and operated wind farms in many places: I may know what I'm talking about here.

I've been known as scruss since 1981. Some people know me by it and may not recognize my real name.

(he/him)

formerly https://mastodon.social/@scruss

Hey! If you follow me and you've got 0 posts and 0 people following you, I'm going to block you.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

tantramar, to random
@tantramar@nojack.easydns.ca avatar

I thought of this example when I boosted earlier but couldn’t remember the specifics. This is pure gold. https://hackers.town/@maddiefuzz/112254503373621396

scruss,
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

@tantramar was party to something similar when some people decided to attack my former industry. They even tried to claim my boss was practising engineering outside his expertise. I don't have the exact cit, but it went something like this:

Opponent: Have you even read Mesoscale Wind Modelling by J. R. Salmon?

Party: I am J. R. Salmon ...

mathowie, to random
@mathowie@xoxo.zone avatar

NYT cooking hit me with a Chana Masala recipe this morning and I’ve been craving it for weeks so I made it and the verdict is: it totally kicks ass.

A photo of the completed dish

scruss,
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

@mathowie all chana masala is good. A chana masala double (two cornmeal fritters with a layer of chana masala in the middle) is the best

scruss, to amiga
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

Hyperion Entertainment appear to be in receivership:
https://www.amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2024-04-00029-EN.html

scruss, to random
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

TIL there is an emoji for the confederate flag: 🏳️

SpaceAce, to random
@SpaceAce@esoteric.party avatar
scruss,
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

@flockofnazguls @SpaceAce Very very oh yeah

scruss, to random
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

I may be in a different country, it may have been decades ago, but I will never stop doing this: on April 8th, raise some milk to erase the memory of Maggie "Milk Snatcher" Thatcher

scruss, to random
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

I pre-ordered the Chumbawumba EP "In Memoriam: Margaret Thatcher", and as good as their word, they delivered it in 2013 — https://www.punknews.org/article/51241/media-chumbawamba-in-memoriam-margaret-thatcher

“Our deepest sympathies go out to the families of all Margaret Thatcher's victims”

scruss, to random
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

still dead, thank goodness. Enjoy some milk today and flick the Vs at her and her ilk.
https://www.isthatcherdeadyet.co.uk/

MLE_online, to random
@MLE_online@social.afront.org avatar

The controller for my trash e-bike helpfully provides a plug for attaching a headlight. Less helpfully, it outputs the entire voltage of the battery (40V) through that plug.

scruss,
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

@MLE_online 2x 24 V truck LED headlights in series?

scruss,
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

@MLE_online maybe I've worked with too many ex-Army device electrics, but I've definitely worked with 24 V systems on larger vehicles

scruss, to random
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

I just watched the 1984 Dune movie and, whoo! There's a film that needs a sense of humour

scruss, to random
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

Kids who got frustrated by Where's Wally grew up to write AI image classifiers

simontatham, to random
@simontatham@hachyderm.io avatar

A widely misused phrase: "HTML parser".

The primary duty of a parser is to tell you the overall syntactic structure of the document, in the form of a parse tree, or an equivalent serialisation.

But things like Python's html.parser module just separate the input file into text, opening tags, and explicit closing tags, and leave it to the client to know the HTML rules about when tags implicitly close. Which are hard.

Anything that stops there isn't a parser. It's just an HTML lexer!

scruss,
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@simontatham ditching DTDs was a mistake.

And I still miss SGML's </> entity, aka "close the most recent open entity"

scruss,
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

@henryk @simontatham I've never seen that markup style ... but then, my mind and memory have been warped by Quark tags (where repeated tags toggle the entity, and don't have to be any any nested order), also a typesetting language where tags looked like >this<, ... oh and exposure to DSSSL, which really should've been banned under the Geneva convention

ross, to random
@ross@fosstodon.org avatar

The Verge article on the best printer in 2024 is just completely brilliant in so many ways.

And also kinda sad.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/2/24117976/best-printer-2024-home-use-office-use-labels-school-homework

scruss,
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

@ross @mijndert old HP printers were good. New ones are trash

(We're on our third "just buy this" Brother laser. We gave the other two to people who needed them, not that they failed. The fact they work with AirPrint so every device automatically sees them and can use them is magic.)

scruss, to 3DPrinting
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

Anyone else's go into thermal runaway if the room gets too cold? My one starts emitting alarm tones with all fans flat out if the room gets down to 10°

sergio_101, to amateurradio
@sergio_101@mastodon.social avatar

I just delivered a .. it's like a telegram over .. via .. but the conditions were sketchy, and we had to relay the message.

Local Slow Nets are awesome for learning Nets at a comfortable pace.

scruss,
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

@sergio_101 I don't know if they still do it, but hams in Canada welcomed every newly licensed operator with a radiogram. I was so glad to get mine!

scruss, to Canada
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

Is anyone interested in (aka or ) here?

It's a sort of BASIC running on a modern microcontroller. It talks VGA and stuff.

I was thinking of getting some boards made: the current design is all pre-made SMD using an RP2040. It would be nice if some folks in wanted some to cut costs

Here's the current hardware revision
https://www.thebackshed.com/forum/ViewTopic.php?TID=16837&PID=219735#219735

scruss, to ontario
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

I'm not a fan of the "Public sector salary disclosure" (aka Sunshine List), but it does turn up some disturbing details:

  • Const. Douglas Holmes, ordered fired by tribunal for violating public trust (found guilty of assault by the SIU) and hasn't worked since November 2019: earned $112,605 last year

  • Const. Conal Quinn, jailed for 4 years for sexual assault: earned $117,679 last year

scruss, to RaspberryPi
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

I'm calibrating v3 wide cameras, and I think I've discovered a hole in reality ...

kyonshi, to random
@kyonshi@dice.camp avatar

Hmmm... did anyone ever think about making a sort of local bulletin board system with a small computer/old phone/sbc? The machine provides a wifi hot spot, but when logged on people only have access to a single local website where they can post messages to one another.

One could even have messages carried between multiple of these systems style. Kind of an alternet.

scruss,
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

@kyonshi aka "pirate box". Quite in-vogue when the ESP8266 came out

scruss,
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

@kyonshi yes, I think the hyperlocal BBS is a better implementation. I did see one that had a message board but it was a little too early for many people to have mobile devices

scruss,
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

@kyonshi maybe slightly closer to your idea (but less interactive): Spread ideas with a pocket wi-fi portal 📶 — https://iffybooks.net/pocket-wifi-portal/

I'm not wild about having to hard-code the web stuff in the Arduino IDE, but maybe a slightly bigger board could have a captive portal and a MicroPython webserver

scruss, to random
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

And some other folks no longer with us:

  • English prog rocker Keith Emerson was born 29000 days ago;

  • American poet Sara Teasdale, born 51000 days ago.

see: Thousand Days: Concept — https://gist.github.com/scruss/3e52ce929b651eedc815baf78df10874

scruss, to random
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

A couple of other folks celebrating Thousand Days today (who probably don't even know it):

see: Thousand Days: Concept — https://gist.github.com/scruss/3e52ce929b651eedc815baf78df10874

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