ktemkin

ktemkin, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago) to random

now that KiCad has quite-decent Altium import capabilities, what's your opinion on the debate of whether it's fully "open hardware" if the sources are Altium, an expensive/closed tool?

ktemkin, 1 month ago to NixOS

nix users: what bothers you most about nix (ux-wise or otherwise)? what seems the most mysterious to you?

#nix #nixos

ktemkin, 5 months ago to random

finally bought a pair of soldering tweezers (metcal ones for our multi-handle station);

let’s see if they actually improve anything about (de)soldering passives~

ktemkin, 5 months ago to random

wait, i forgot what you do when you're not working 24/7

ktemkin, 3 months ago to random

security budget:

• $1 looking into languages that don’t trivially buffer overflow
• 50¢ looking into enabling exploit mitigation features
• 1¢ research into things like compile-time diversity
• $10M hiring a disgraced CISO from a FAANG company
• $100 hiring a red team to ignore feedback from

someone who is good at the economy please help me. my enterprise platform is dying

ktemkin, 5 months ago to random

finally going entirely lead-free over here, it just so I don’t have to be so careful to keep the cat away from the lab area

ktemkin, 20 days ago to random

Thanks so much to everyone who hung in this week as we’ve all worked to fix the state of the Nix community. It’s been a ride; but I think things are going to get better.

Here’s the last major piece of the puzzle — the product of several months of work from an absolutely incredible team. It’s not ready for a full announcement, but we’ve opened our beta so people who are fleeing the core Nix community have a place to go.

https://lix.systems

ktemkin, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago) to random

okay, here's an interesting wide-open one: what services [in general, no restrictions] do people like/recommend?

e.g we use:

• Mattermost (self-hosted work chat)
• FastMail (work & personal e-mail, work calendar, work storage)
• Xero (work accounting software)
• Simplifi (personal accounting)
• NextCloud (self-hosted personal storage, calendar)
• SearXNG (self-hosted [meta] search engine)
• Forgejo (work git; gitea but federated)
• BookStack (work wiki)

what do y'all use/recommend?

ktemkin, 3 months ago to random

it’s vital I never become well-known for my music…

… or I’ll have a biography that says things like “Kate didn’t produce anything for a year straight because she didn’t install her VSTs on her new composition machine”

ktemkin, 5 months ago to random

vendor: this won’t work unless you drive it differentially in the range of [-400mV, 400mV]

me, a maniac with single-ended GPIO and a bunch of resistors: you don’t say

ktemkin, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago) to random

seriously considering buying land (in the mountains but not far from towns), plopping a temporary trailer down on it, and then trying my hand at building a house and serious/dedicated lab space

is this a terrible idea?

ktemkin, 5 months ago to random

Does anyone have a recommended FPGA development board that brings out 10Gbps+ transceivers?

Preferably AMD/Xilinx GTX ones?

ktemkin, 2 months ago to random

me, throwing down a tiny chipscale package to save space: yeah, hells yeah, it’s all miniaturizing so well

me, trying to get PCB houses to make them: hey, c’mon, it’s not like the laser drills are /that/ small? it’ll be fiiiiine

ktemkin, 4 months ago to random

something that absolutely sucks:

Going to electronics and hacker-cons (& giving talks and trainings at them) has historically been one of the main ways I've shown off "indie" projects, spread knowledge, and found good opportunities

I no longer go, because I don't want to support organizations creating mass-spreader events for COVID; and I don't want to give other underrepresented folks the impression that I'm fine with the utter lack of diversity in a lot of these cons speaker lineups.

ktemkin, 5 months ago to random

so, who recognizes the Only Vaguely Cursed thing I just started making? >.>

ktemkin, 5 months ago to random

periodic PSA:

development board have blindingly bright LEDS?

slap some kapton atop those suckers; it's wonderful as a attenuator/diffuser

ktemkin, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago) to random

speaking like 3-5 languages is

ktemkin, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago) to random

what’s your opinion on the Anti-Capitalist Software License?

ktemkin, 2 months ago to random

oh my gods; this form just keeps giving

ktemkin, 4 months ago to random

amazon recommended me a book called "learn C++ quickly"

and at this point, I think they'd be better off marketing me a "forget C++ quickly" book

ktemkin, 5 months ago to random

I swear, half the CVEs I hear about are “if your computer is connected to the internet and someone sends you a text message, they now have your power of attorney”

and the other half is “if a trained thief were to sneak into your house and replace your hard drive with an identical copy, an attacker with an exact predictive model of that drive could interrogate the SSD wear leveling algorithm and reduce the search space for your bitlocker password by up to 12 bits without you even noticing”

ktemkin, 3 months ago to random

folks tend to think that NixOS users spend a lot of time fighting their configuration — but the truth is, often we’re doing something that boils down to “fighting some app’s personalized configuration format so one never has to worry about configuring it again”

ktemkin, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago) to random

Suppose I want to make a cool new USB emulation toolkit -- think something that's like FaceDancer, but the way I've always wanted to make it.

What language do you think it should be in?

• Ruby naturally lends itself to creating DSL for things like this.
• Python is used heavily by the hacker community.
• Rust isn't great for quickly hacking things together, but could theoretically compile emulated devices to run on a uC.

ktemkin, 1 month ago to random

hot take: english needs the essen/fressen distinction because it is just so useful

ktemkin, 5 months ago to random

beginner hot air rework tip: never be ashamed that you accidentally turned the airflow up too much or at the wrong angle and blew away all those tiny components

you have to learn where the right zones are on your equipment, and sometimes the best way to do that is to have some fun catastrophic failures