@acsawdey@fosstodon.org
@acsawdey@fosstodon.org avatar

acsawdey

@acsawdey@fosstodon.org

Ph.D. EE, gcc developer, cache protocol hacker (IBM power), space geek, alldogmn.org dog foster, LeechLakeLegacy.org board member, photographer, he/him (@sawdey over at the other place)

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thomasfuchs, (edited ) to retrocomputing
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io avatar

What's your favorite mobile form factor?

Reply has an example for each category.

(Please reply why!)

acsawdey,
@acsawdey@fosstodon.org avatar

@thomasfuchs I've got a soft spot in my heart for the Kaypro II, IV, and 10 ...

acsawdey,
@acsawdey@fosstodon.org avatar

@thomasfuchs The Kaypro II was the first computer I ever overclocked ... turns out that a 2MHz z80 isn't enough to keep up with a 130wpm keyboarder (not me 😂) ... though the code in Wordstar coped pretty well. It would stop updating the screen and just print ! characters and keep buffering the input. Then she'd stop typing and it would take a good 60 seconds to unload the input buffer and get back to normal. Same person regularly wore out 80's mechanical keyboards, which takes some doing.

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

I had a pretty amazing score of tools today.

Last weekend at set build, one of the other volunteers was admiring my homemade tool battery. Today you came up to me and told me that someone had his condos was getting rid of a bunch of tools because they didn't have a battery. He asked if I wanted to have them to see if I could build a battery for them like I did for my drill.

I said yes, not really expecting anything good, but he walked me out to his car and handed me a big bag of tools, all of which use the exact same type of battery used by my drill and my impact driver that I dug out of the trash a few weeks ago.

He gave me a cordless sawzall, a drill, a flashlight / lantern, and another battery charger. A whole suite of these tools now!

First thing I'm going to do is convert the incandescent flashlight/lantern to LED

acsawdey,
@acsawdey@fosstodon.org avatar

@MLE_online @morgan Could replace the guts of the charger with li-ion chargers, just use the case and battery connectors?

mattblaze, (edited ) to photography
@mattblaze@federate.social avatar

Commuter Trains, Ewing (West Trenton), NJ, 2010.

All the pixels at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/4377309058

acsawdey,
@acsawdey@fosstodon.org avatar

@mattblaze you’re making me think of this air show photographer and his crazy rig. Of course even that’s only 800mm.

https://petapixel.com/2017/06/07/photographer-captures-air-show-nikon-800mm-crazy-shoulder-rig/

acsawdey,
@acsawdey@fosstodon.org avatar

@mjf_pro @mattblaze Yeah pretty much .. I think the block down by the wheels is actually a gel cell lead acid battery which functions as a counterweight to balance it and provides power for the camera.

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

Lettuce is such a weird looking cat, so my sister and I were trying to figure out what exactly makes her look so odd.

It's definitely something with her eyes, but also her ears point straight up too much.

acsawdey,
@acsawdey@fosstodon.org avatar

@MLE_online It seems like her ears are disproportionately large compared to "average" cats, they are more along the axis toward fennec fox or corgi ears.

One of my jobs at with a rescue I work with is to take pictures of all the surrendered animals so the placement person has something to work with. Anyway, I have a lot of pictures of cats. It seems to me you can sort of draw a line from the point between the eyes to the tip of the ear, and see where the outline of the skull intersects.

niconiconi, to random

"too large for casual users to have downloaded [...] even using 56k modems"

LMAO ​:blobcatlul:​

acsawdey,
@acsawdey@fosstodon.org avatar

@niconiconi thinking of all the times I downloaded something that took a large fraction of a day … I don’t think having a separate line for your modem was all that atypical.

acsawdey,
@acsawdey@fosstodon.org avatar

@azonenberg @niconiconi definitely a perk when I became a grad student however I don’t recall cd-r being a generally available thing until a bit later (late 1990s?). Usually floppies, a portable hd, of Zip disk …

azonenberg, to random
@azonenberg@ioc.exchange avatar

First time plastic welding since shop class at RPI in like 2011.

Definitely not my prettiest work but it looks like it'll hold, and should be way better than the epoxy I used before (this is polypropylene so annoyingly low surface energy for adhesives).

Cheap hot air rework station on the floor next to a plastic axle in a clamp
Inside of the shopping cart frame showing a couple of not-that-pretty weld beads
Outside of the cart showing more ugly weld beads

acsawdey,
@acsawdey@fosstodon.org avatar

@azonenberg @ignaloidas The “hot staple” tool for fixing plastic bumper covers would be another thing to try. Basically you melt a w-shaped staple (heated by resistance) into the plastic across the break, then use a flush cutter to trim the wire ends sticking out.

niconiconi, to random

time to rebrand bit-sliced CPUs as "Single Data Multiple Instructions"

acsawdey,
@acsawdey@fosstodon.org avatar

@niconiconi 🤣 🤣 🤣

Isn't that also microcoded CPUs?

SPMD was always my favorite ...

geekmomprojects, to random
@geekmomprojects@mastodon.social avatar

We adopted a super sweet 8 month old pup from a shelter two weeks ago and were convinced he was a Rottie-Shepherd mix. Just got the DNA results back, and, through his genes are primarily "mutt," the rest of the results have us going 😳

Photo of an adorable 8 month old pup with a Labrador build and German Shepherd markings laying down looking into the camera
DNA results for our dog Riley that reveal his genetic percentages as: 100% Riley 33.4% Supermutt 28.9% Australian Cattle Dog 12.9% Border Collie 11% Labrador Retriever 5.4% American Pit Bull Terrier 4.3% McNab 4.1% German Shepherd Dog

acsawdey,
@acsawdey@fosstodon.org avatar

@geekmomprojects Wow, that's a lot of supermutt.

Our current record is this one, who was billed as "Pyrenees and hunting dog" 😂

The old adage in rescue was "Labs have more fun" but now I'm leaning toward "Cattle dogs get around" ...

acsawdey,
@acsawdey@fosstodon.org avatar

@geekmomprojects Also -- there is a place where embark lists some breeds for your dog that they grouped into "supermutt" -- for Snowball it was Blue tick coonhound, beagle, Komondor, and Cocker Spaniel.

She is a big marshmallow puff-ball, she got the coat from pyrenees + "American eskimo".

Your guy is going to keep you busy with cattle dog + border collie, better figure out a job to give him!

gsuberland, to random
@gsuberland@chaos.social avatar

if you're a student working on semiconductor materials stuff, I posit that one of the most practically attainable nobel prizes out there is solving the green gap problem in LEDs. find just the right approach with just the right dopants and you're a shoe-in for the prize, not to mention the global energy efficiency and health impact it'll have.

acsawdey,
@acsawdey@fosstodon.org avatar

@gsuberland So the "green gap" is that there are gaps on either side of the two green wavelengths?

acsawdey,
@acsawdey@fosstodon.org avatar

@gsuberland so you are suggesting if we had something in that yellow-green range that was high efficiency, we could drive phosphors with that, and any of that light that escapes the phosphor is actually in a helpful range unlike the blue. Opens the door to cheaper more efficient high-CRI LED lighting?

glyph, to random
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

I saw someone ask the other day what the kernel panic screen looks like on Apple Silicon, and I realized that I wasn't sure I'd seen a panic at all on my M1; a far cry from my frequent acquaintance with the "You need to restart your computer" screen. Felt good, for a moment, about the improvements to reliability.

Today I achieved a kernel panic by accidentally appending to a BytesIO in Python unit test in a loop. (What this looks like is "full-screen magenta flash for one frame, then reboot.)

acsawdey,
@acsawdey@fosstodon.org avatar

@glyph I’ve been getting watchdog timeout panics on my M1 but they’re not very interesting to look at .. everything grinds to a halt and then after about 90 seconds, black screen and reboot.

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

I found a piece of junk (a smashed dog kennel) and I'm going to make it into something useful

acsawdey,
@acsawdey@fosstodon.org avatar

@MLE_online Oh very nice! Since I'm in dog rescue, I have welded those to put them back in service for their intended purpose. But is this going to turn into a giant bike cargo basket (or two)?

azonenberg, to random
@azonenberg@ioc.exchange avatar

New thread on my big ongoing embedded project since the other one was getting too big.

To recap, this is a pilot project for a bunch of my future open hardware T&M and networking projects, validating a common platform that a lot of the future stuff is going to run on.

The primary problem it's trying to address is that I have a lot of instrumentation with trigger in/out ports, sometimes at different voltage levels, and I don't always have the same instrument sourcing the trigger every time.

So rather than moving around cables all the time and adding splitters, attenuators, amplifiers, etc. to the trigger signals I decided to make a dedicated device using an old XC7K70T-2FBG484 I had lying around.

Of course, as with any project, there was feature creep.

I'm standardizing on +48V DC for powering all of my future projects as it's high enough to move a lot of power but low enough to be mostly safe to work around live. So I needed to design and validate an intermediate bus converter to bring the 48 down to something like 12 for the rest of the system to use.

The FPGA has four 10G transceiver pairs on it. I used one for 10GbE (not that I need the bandwidth, but I was low on RJ45 ports on this bench and had some free SFP drops) and the rest are hooked up to front panel SMA ports (awaiting cables to go from PCB to panel) to generate PRBSes for instrument deskew.

Since I'm pinning out the transceivers and am planning to build a BERT eventually, I added BERT functionality to the firmware as well (still need to finish a few things but it's mostly usable now).

And since I have transceivers and access to all of the scope triggers, it would be dumb not to build a CDR trigger mode as well. That's in progress.

acsawdey,
@acsawdey@fosstodon.org avatar

@azonenberg Wow, what is that, fluidics? 😉

It looks nice but I can well imagine it was a nightmare getting all that stuff bent and lined up so it connects. Especially if you had to deal with extra length …

acsawdey,
@acsawdey@fosstodon.org avatar

@azonenberg oh yikes so the termination for the back panel had to be done first and also had to mount on the outside through the panel? Yeah I could see that would make getting the last few in place progressively more difficult.

tcely, to random
@tcely@fosstodon.org avatar

A reminder: there has never been an "accidental" use of nuclear weapons.

The idea that this can happen accidentally is not an idea that we should be spreading!

Whoever chooses to use these weapons, in the future, should be blamed for that decision, for all time!

acsawdey,
@acsawdey@fosstodon.org avatar

@tcely @ariadne Not for lack of trying, I think we on planet Earth have been exceedingly lucky. See also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_and_Control_(book)

foone, to random
@foone@digipres.club avatar

when I finally build my Workbench Keyboard, one of the weirder options I'm going to add is a way to paste pre-loaded text files from the onboard storage.

like you could have texts\serials\windows\win10.txt and you navigate to the that file and hit paste and it just types out the FCKGW- nonsense for you

acsawdey,
@acsawdey@fosstodon.org avatar

@foone USB keyboard that also shows up as a data storage device so you can put a config file with that sort of thing in it, then a 1-line display on the keyboard so you can navigate and dump?

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

I forgot to post these tiles I saw at the train station yesterday

acsawdey,
@acsawdey@fosstodon.org avatar

@MLE_online So is the "Charles Dickson" who signed (and initialed) this the artist? Installer? Clever graffiti artist?

The contact misalignment between the middle and bottom 3x3's is ... bothersome.

acsawdey,
@acsawdey@fosstodon.org avatar

@MLE_online That's great, so this is a real art installation. This is also an aspect I love about the light rail stations/shelters in the twin cities ... many of them either have art or are an art piece themselves

niconiconi, to random

"the 1966 Palomares B-52 crash, and the 1961 Goldsboro B-52 crash."

Wait, the "B-52 crash" was not one but two separate nuclear weapon incidents?! 💣

acsawdey,
@acsawdey@fosstodon.org avatar

@niconiconi The explosion actually flung 3 things: the massive silo door, the nuclear device, and the second stage of the missile .. which exploded in midair.

Hypergolic propellants are such fun.

jackofalltrades, to random
@jackofalltrades@mas.to avatar

I learned a fascinating fact the other day.

It is estimated that during the Roman Empire 20% to 30% of Italy's population were slaves. For the empire as a whole that share was between 10% and 15%.

In these times, even modest Roman households might expect to own two or three slaves.

1/13

acsawdey,
@acsawdey@fosstodon.org avatar

@jackofalltrades @nyrath I seem to recall that "The Mote in God's Eye" had some discussion of repeated crashes of Motie civilization and how after fossil fuels were depleted they had to advance from wood-burning to nuclear fission after particularly bad "crashes" ..

acsawdey,
@acsawdey@fosstodon.org avatar

@Hcobb @jackofalltrades @nyrath Sure .. fun stuff like various fusion-based neutron sources, which kinda would make it a fusion-fission hybrid.

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