I’m a technical kinda guy, doing technical kinda stuff.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • I loaded the video, paused, jump jump jump jump jumped through the timeline looking at the thumbnail images, about 5 seconds of actual playback while I watched them mess it up, more minor adjustments in the timeline, paused for 15 seconds at the thing I actually wanted, closed the video.

    Good luck getting any kind of decent metrics out of that.

    I can skim documents at 800 words a minute, they are mostly nicely arranged and indexed/sectioned. Compare that to videos where half the words are “um, so”, and it’s no wonder I prefer text.


  • Today I had the pleasure of trying to search for how to shift a chartjs array and finally had to try and watch a “tutorial video” where they allegedly discussed it.

    Cut to me clicking around just trying to find the screenshot where they are actually doing the thing that I want to do, and then they proceed to fuck up its usage three times with much scrolling back and forth through their example code that they didn’t show in full anywhere and rapidly clicking between windows while they got their shit together.

    I just wanted to see like, three lines of code.

    Maybe I should have just asked chatgpt.



  • It’s only one wire in the cable, and it’s not the wire, but it looks like the pin, or possibly the crimp point on the female pin.

    So a few possibilities:

    • Bad pins. Female pins (sockets) have internal wipers that grip the male pin and there is also the crimp connection. Bad QA on those leads to hotspots in the pin under high current draw. I’d probably go for this explanation, looking at the photos.

    • Bad electrical layout on the card that means that the bulk of the current goes through this pin. Milliohms on the track traces are enough to cause imbalances. This might be balanced out by having a small-but-still-larger resistance in the (standard) cable, which leads to:

    • It looks like thicker cabling is soldered and heatshrinked to smaller cabling that actually goes into the pins in the connector. There’s a reason why industrial cable connections aren’t soldered. Possibly a solder connection on another cable has broken and hidden in the hearshrink leaving more current to pass through this one.

    • Following from this it’s also quite possible that the thicker cable with less resistance , now has less voltage drop across it, and simply allows more current then designed through a connection already at its limit.

    • It’s quite possible that there are different pins/connector sets for different current draws. This cable might be using the wrong connector with the same physical size but lower current rating. The fact that the cable has been soldered to skinnier wires in the actual connector suggests this, but it’s quite possible that the connector is the right one.




  • TVs that do anything more than displaying a signal exactly as it’s input shouldn’t exist.

    Some of that input could do with a bit of tweaking though.

    I wouldn’t mind if the TV was able to do things with the audio track, like remove background music, or lift the volume of people speaking, or erase laugh tracks/live audience hooting& hollering.

    There’s probably similar manipulation that you could do on the video side (eventually, once TVs stop getting the worst processors ever, not here and now). Imagine a prompt that says “Airbrush every recognisable brand name on-screen so that it blends with the background”.

    I seriously doubt if any major manufacturer would do that kind of thing though, so better get working on jailbreaking those TVs.


  • Samsung front loader washing machine here.

    It is generally musical while selecting program options. It sings a little song when finished, which is only after it unlocks the door. The little song only plays once. The little song can be changed to other tunes by subtle and undocumented button presses.

    After about 10 minutes it plays a few notes while turning itself off that are easily recognisable as the notes it plays when it turns itself off, so if you miss the first little song, once you hear that you know it’s definitely finished. After that it is done. No more door locking shenanigans or tumbling or clothes.

    Generally I use the “sportswear” cycle which is about 1 hour, my clothes are generally not that dirty. Sometimes I treat towels / linen to a hot cotton cycle which is 2.5 hours and a 90 degree (Celsius) wash.

    Had it for 10 years now, no mechanical or electrical issues. I always leave the door ajar when finished and once every few months I do a cleaning cycle.

    I also have a Fisher and Paykel dryer. I have owned it for 8 years, in which time it has needed a replacement drive belt as it gets used heavily. The bushes on the drum need replacing soon, but I just turned it upside down so it will last for a while longer

    Regarding your door issues, well that’s because idiots try and open the door during a load, and then when it’s locked, they turn it off and still try and open the door. They subsequently complain about the water going everywhere. Don’t forget that manufacturers have to deal with the lowest common denominator end user.


  • You don’t need an entire web server in your daemon, you just need the socket.

    Include a websocket listener in the daemon. Keep a ringbuffer of the last X data points, whatever nicely fills your client graph, for example. Wait for clients to connect, dump in the ringbuffer, then update clients as data comes in.

    The webserver can serve up the page with the client code that links to the websocket. After that it’s strictly a discussion between the end client and the daemon over websockets.





  • And holy shit does their algorithm latch onto any minor interest in their content.

    Accidentally tapped on a floor tiling video the other day, three days of tiling and handyman videos jammed into my feed and me pressing the “not interested” button on every single one.

    Facebook, I am there for the rare post from my 150 or so friends and family. That’s it. Nothing else.

    The reason we don’t use it anymore is because actual posts from real humans we know are buried under a torrent of shit. Sometimes their posts take days to surface leading to all sorts of chain-mail posts on how to “get your feed back”. None of which work because the whole business model is about jamming sponsored shit down your throat.



  • Starlink sats have enough transmit power and receive gain to use normal cellular frequencies with a normal antenna on the phone side.

    You might think it’s a long way to space, but a few hundred kilometres of direct line of sight to your cellphone antenna isn’t that much more to overcome compared to say, 25 km to a cell tower on the ground.

    The biggest hurdle was getting a few thousand satellites into orbit so that coverage and availability is there.