OnACoffeeBreak

There was a YouTube video of (I think) a Kia that was towed into a shop because it would not start on the side of the road. The reason for no-start turned out to be a failed backup camera module. So, the car stranded the owner because it could not communicate to the backup camera.

Cool story with an interesting ending (to me at least).

Just a tiny nit... Should "Brewed as directed for 4 minutes in boiling water." be "Brewed as directed for 4 minutes in boiled water." Was the tea sitting in water that was boiling or placed in water that just boiled? The later is how I brew my teas.

And then we add the diminutives like Kolichka. Though, admittedly, there's much more of a pattern there.

I assumed that in urban USA the map would be fairly complete and opportunities for edits would be somewhat rare. My assumption was very wrong. The app showed a dozen quests just outside of my office building. Thanks for suggesting it!

Borderlands 2 (BL2). I love the characters, the writing and the story. Handsome Jack is my favorite villain of all time. The game play mechanics feel good to me. The difficulty levels goes up with subsequent play-throughs (True Vault Hunter Mode (TVHM) and Ultimate Vault Hunter Mode (UVHM)). There's decent DLC; "Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep" was my favorite. Also, it is possible that the story of BL2 hits for me because I also played the snot out of BL1 and fell in love with the characters there who re-appear in BL2 in very well written ways. For the record, I think BL3 and BL4 are inferior to BL2 by a long shot.

Stardew Valley. The first play-through without spoilers and without knowing what I was getting into was magical. After that, the variety of things to do and different ways to play the game kept me coming back. You can just chill and take things slow, or min/max it, or try a speed run, or just focus on your farm.

Edit to add: GTA V. Love the characters and the open world. So much to do.

"The darker colours are points that were updated closer to 2007 and the brighter colours closer to December of last year." It's possible that this area was just more recently updated and is not necessarily more densely covered compared to other areas.

I pick a category, like fruits and vegetables or cars, and then try to come up with a word in that category that starts with every letter of the alphabet in order. To keep it relaxing I synchronize it with my breath. On the breath in, I note the letter I am on: "C" for example. On the breath out I note the word: "Cantaloupe". If I don't have a word for that letter by the time I breath out, no big deal, I conceptualize whatever was in my mind at that point and then repeat the letter on the next breath in.

Another thing I do that works well for me is just counting breaths. On the breath in I think "in-n-n-n-n" and on the breath out I count. When I lose count, and I am still awake, I start again from 0, as any sane programmer would ;-).

ETA: For a couple of months I have been doing a short gratitude routine as I am getting into bed. I acknowledge the good and positive things that happened during the day, and I tell myself that I did a good job (if I did) or that I did as well as I could today and that's good enough for today. Then I think, "And now it's time for rest. I've been looking forward to this." If any part of me starts thinking about the day again or thinks about tomorrow, I gently reassure it that I will attend to all of this tomorrow morning and that now it's quiet time and time to rest.

All of this plus 250 mg of magnesium an hour before bed has made falling asleep super consistent and easy.

From the Introduction: "Each satellite may carry traffic for dozens of independent networks through an array of on-board transponders, each covering a diameter of thousands of kilometers (at most a third of Earth’s surface)".

Can someone help me understand the use of "diameter" in this sentence. I am guessing it refers to the satellite's signal coverage of the Earth's surface. If that's the case, wouldn't something like arc degrees be a better measure? I just can't figure out how "diameter" can be used to describe a coverage arc or area.

"Unbreakable: The Western States 100" [1] came to mind after you reminded me of the Barkley documentary. “The Barkley Marathons, the race that eats it’s young” seems more human and better grounded than "Unbreakable", but "Unbreakable" captured the excitement of running ultra marathons so completely for me.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zy1as6CTYXI

What's the method for connecting the watch to the Internet?

Garmin Bounce [0] has some of the features on your list and many more (like on-watch LTE). I don't believe it includes the ability to use heart rate and stress levels to trigger automatic alerts. I have no first-hand knowledge in this field, but I would imagine it would be very difficult to implement this without many false positives especially for kids in the day care and school settings because excitement and play likely look very similar to anxiety and distress from the point of view of the heart rate sensor.

0: https://www.garmin.com/en-US/p/714945/pn/010-02448-02/

The author says that they tend to load all of the assets on init. This sidesteps the issue of the C#'s garbage collector (GC). I am not a C# developer, but seem to recall reading that GC can cause unexpected slow downs. Web search shows articles on tips and tricks for optimizing GC in C#, so it seems like a real issue.

Does anyone have any first hand experience they would like to share? Is it easy to avoid the GC slowing down your game unexpectedly? Is it only a problem for a certain class of games?

I am not at all familiar with C# development, but the author mentions Native-AOT, which, from a cursory look, seems like a C# compiler.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/nati...

No BIOS necessary when we're talking about bare metal systems. printf() will just resolve to a low-level UART-based routine that writes to a FIFO to be played out to the UART when it's not busy. Hell, I've seen systems that forego the FIFO and just write to the UART blocking while writing.

Tangential to this... Wright brothers lived and worked in Ohio, but the first flight happened in North Carolina due to its wind conditions and soft sand. In the early 2000's (if I remember right) North Carolina came out with a license plate with the image of the Wright Flyer and a slogan of "First in Flight". Ohio then came out with a license plate with "Birthplace of Aviation". A bit more on this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers#State_rivalry

That's what Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) is trying to accomplish.

https://contentauthenticity.org/how-it-works

PyTorch

The book's code repo: https://github.com/rasbt/LLMs-from-scratch

The basketball thing can be such a shit show. As a parent of a kid that fell in love with basketball, did travel AAU basketball and ended up playing for a D3 college, I've experienced parents at all levels showing their full ass.

Examples... Their coach at a rec league for 9 year olds was assaulted by the opposing team's coach at the end of the game. I've seen the cops being called to protect the refs and parents being escorted out of the game after threatening the refs. It goes on and on.

All that's to say that the steaks don't seem to matter. Folks are passionate in a disproportionate way when their children are involved.

Starlink to T-Mobile is using PCS spectrum (1850 – 1990 MHz) licensed to T-Mobile to provide Directo-to-Cell (DTC) service, not whole 5G spectrum.

To add to what others have posted... Activity (i.e. running, walking, cycling, etc.) FIT files are found in the GARMIN/Activity directory on the watch after connecting it to a computer over USB. File names are date time stamps.

Look into driving apps designed to track miles driven by learners who are working towards their full driver's license. My state's DMV requires a driving log with start/stop times and miles when getting the full license from a provisional learner's permit. I think my kids used RoadReady [0]. It can email a log, but I don't know the format.

0: https://www.roadreadyapp.com/

Current discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41932225

The book has been on my shelf for a long while, and I haven't read it yet, but I really like the full title "Mistakes Were Made, but Not by Me: Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts"

That's my favorite book as well. I came to it much later than college, and still found so much wisdom in it.

Garmin has rolled out a sleep mode feature that makes the AMOLED watch face sparsely populated, and you can set the brightness to the lowest setting for sleep mode.

Compared to my watch set to the lowest sleep mode brightness, the brightness in this image is not set to the lowest level (probably for the purposes of showing the sleep mode watch face features), but this gives you some idea:

https://media.dcrainmaker.com/images/2022/01/Garmin-Epix-Sle...

They probably mean "on-board" instead of "on-chip".

Data sheet [0] section "5.4 Powerchain" shows an external RT6150 buck-boost switcher with an external inductor.

0: https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/pico/pico-2-datasheet.pdf

Edit: reading further in that section of the data sheet, "The RP2350 has an on-chip switching regulator that powers the digital core at 1.1V (nominal) from the 3.3V supply, which is not shown in Figure 7."

It has proven difficult enough to find a PDF of the schematic (I don't have Cadence Allegro installed) that I am giving up.

When I think of "sport" I think of "fitness" watches from Garmin and Apple Watch. Patek sport watch is definitely not that. What is meant by "sport" in case of the Patek sport watch?

This is probably not helpful, but, can you figure out the infra of https://godbolt.org/ and follow what they have done?

Matt Parker ("Stand up Maths" channel on YouTube) gave a very informative and entertaining lecture in 2010 titled "Clutching at Random Straws" [0], which, among other things, covered something similar. From the subtitle of the video: "Did aliens help prehistoric Britons find the ancient Woolworths civilisation?" The answer is "no". Given enough data points, you can find all sorts of patterns.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf5OrthVRPA

Ze Frank (True Facts YouTube Channel) recently released a video about crows crafting tools to solve problems. It's quite amazing and, of course, very funny: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-HF-wBwQsc

Your "my life in weeks" page is just lovely. I teared up from the tenderness of it.

That is such a great idea. I have been toying with the idea of writing a memoir, but I haven't started because it seems so daunting of a task. This, on the other hand, is constrained, but still leaves a lot of room for creativity.