atoav

The variables aren't that hard to learn. The one thing many beginners struggle with is that they don't really get the principles involved. They treat a soldering iron as some sort of heated paint brush and wonder why they can't get the paint off the brush.

In reality there are multiple factors at play, but a simple and useful abstraction is to think about solder as something that flows more easily to places that are hot. That means the solder always likes to go onto the iron, since that is likely the hottest thing around.

This means your first goal is simply to heat up the places you want to solder far enough so they can melt the solder if you touch them with the solder wire¹.

This usually means heating two things at once: be it two wires you solder together or a pad and the leg of a resistor. That means knowing the geometry of your tip well is useful: How to wedge it in to heat the two things at once. Typically only the shiny, plated bits of the tip are really good at conducting heat². A little drop of solder on the iron can help conduct the heat to a bigger surface, a bit like the fat in a frying pan.

But generally you heat the parts with the iron and then you feed the solder wire into the parts. If they are hot e ough, the solder melts. If not, you wait.

The solder wire typically has a resin-like fluid inside, that helps with soldering as it reduces the surface tension of the metal (this is most of the stuff in the fumes). Capillary effect is the main thing that makes solder flow where you want it to. When the flux is evaporated soldering gets harder, so you may need to add fresh solder after a while or you use flux from a dispenser that you add manually.³

Then there is a lot about logistics. Heated air travels up, on earth solder tends to be affected by gravity and has a tendency to go down (although capillary effects are really the dominant force here), gravity affects parts, wires bend where their material wanta them to etc. The logistics part means: you have only two hands, an iron, solder wire and typically two or more parts that need to be joined.

Being good at soldering is (1) having a good mental model and intuition about how and why the solder flows the way it does and (2) have skill and experience to get the logistics right. The first you can learn to understand, the latter is a matter of practise.⁴

I have thought soldering sucessfully to well over 400 people during the past decade.

¹ This means your iron and tip need to be able to deliver enough heat to heat the parts. If you try to heat up a 200W copper CPU cooler with a 14W soldering iron you can wait forever for the solder to melt. This also has to do with thermal mass and regulation of the iron. Modern irons with modern tips have the temperature probe inside the tip. This helps a ton with avoiding temperature dips when you start to touch something and makes soldering much easier.

² This means keeping tips clean with a proper cleaner literally before every solder joint is crucial. If your tip is toast and has no shiny bit anymore, clean it. If that doesn't help use Ersa Solder Tip Reactivator or buy a new tip. Of course your parts should also be clean (Isopropanol)

³ There are ways to remove excess solder. The simplest being using the right motion with the tip on a coldish joint, making the excess solder stick to the iron and not to the (colder) joint. Other things are spring loaded suction devices (very useful to get solder out of through holes!) and solder wick (very useful to clean old pads)

⁴ There a tools like third hands and so on, and watching some videos by experienced solderers is a good way (nowadays) to learn it, but a steady hand only comes with practise

How do you usually remember uuids or hashes if you have to?

Many people basically just read the start and the end and compare that, given the huge collision space.

I find 51ac0759fc4d far less memorable than kalo-tadu-komu-tigi. Also if I had to tell one of those over the telephone to my parents and my life depended on it I would choose the latter.

My guess would be that the best solution is multi sensorial anyways. So you have GPS, but then you would have an Inertial Measurement Unit, based purely on acceleration and inertia, radar and barometric systems and maybe optical systems for terrain identification and celestial navigation.

I have recently heard an episode of Amp Hour podcast¹ where they talked about using Bluetooth from satellites as a GPS replacement for asset tags. So maybe alternatives to GPS on different bands are on the verge.

Another interesting idea would be to have an antenna array on the plane that captures different radio sources and the angles from which they seem to come from and create a always updating radio activity map that maps a certain "radio landscape" to a position on the planet. AFAIK this is currently being worked on as well under the name "radio-SLAM" (with SLAM standing for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping). This means, jammers could maybe even be used as potential beacons themselves.

¹: The episode in question: https://theamphour.com/728-space-age-bluetooth-with-alex-har...

Ot to rain on your parade. But I made videos, songs and pictures, wrote stories back in ca. 2006 when I was 16 and read my first AI book. Without AI.

I see AI as a useful tool, but doing art with it is extremely bland compared to the real thing. I can't eben begin to describe what people who let the machine do the art miss out on.

Your comment got downvoted, because on this site it is frowned upon to write lazy, confrontative and uninformative comments. If you don't have an argument that furthers the discussion consider not writing instead.

Simple systems have the advantage that there are less moving parts. Less moving parts means less chance of failure. That is a trade-off an engineer will sometimes take even if it means building a new thing, sometimes something with more moving parts is needed and that is okay as well.

Maybe your requirement is to have a doorbell that does work when the internet is out. Who knows? OP might live in a place where this happens more often. Or they might not and like the idea to never again have to think about their doorbell-manufacturers cloud and the latests exploits targeting that IoT product. There are many reasons why simple can be the right choice and any true engineer would say: "depends" instead of "so what".

It might be seen as this ideologic thing, but I don't think it is to the degree many people believe. I have lived in Iceland. Most Icelanders are pretty open-minded and an astounding amount of them have lived abroad for at least a year.

However their island is somewhat reliant on import (e.g. if you need wood to build something, there is no really useful amount of wood growing there). That means export is really important. And that for many people means fishery.

I could imagine that many young people in Reykjavík have a different experience as many of them can earn a living selling online services internationally.

As a EU citizen I don't see this as a Brexit-like event, it is clear that our Icelandic friends are EU-friendly and aligned with many of our laws and regulations already. The fact that they don't want in does not change that there are existing deep ties to the continent.

If you find one that meets your requirements that is an option.

Granted maybe your requirements are ridiculous. But I also had cases where I DIYed a solution because the commercially available solutions all either didn't fulfil the requirements and/or had anti-features that ruled out their use. I haven't had any regret so far with these solutions, with some of these being active for over a decade.

There may be over engineering, but replacing a bought solution that needs to connect to the internet and someone else's computer to ring a bell with a simple 433MHz sender and a MP4-player module isn't that. Do you know what is required for a device to even connect to a WiFi? That alone is more complex than the whole system the user built here.

Ahh I just created a blog post about my Ikea Helmer modification: https://atoav.com/2026/08/30/ikea-helmer-mod/

Turning the thing into something a little bit more mobile.

Situations change, asking the same question a few years later is good, not bad. Especially since getting into the EU isn't BAM you're in, but a lengthy process with many exits along the route. I am convinced if a country doesn't want to be in the EU there are many off ramps to not actually be in the EU. And be it some last minute re-negotiation of fishery regulations.

I am not so sure. I have seen similar things in the wild. Admittedly nothing thst BSD, but still clearly identifiable as generated.

As someone from the Austrian alps: Of course as the climate is warming the glaciers are collapsing. At this point thst has been observable with my own eyes during my relatively short lifespan.

That of course means the old wisdom in which places to settle is safe no longer holds. However placed like Austria or Switzerland have top notch tech and public serviced, meaning glaciers are condtantly surveiled and such risks have a much bigger chance of getting noticed here than in the relatively poor Nepalese mountain region. But that doesn't mean black swan events are always preventable.

It really hits the most kind and humble people in Nepal as I know from the stories my grandparents (both avid alpinists) told me about being there.

Huh, I am sorry my comment seemed to pushed wrong buttons, no need to get all angry here. It appears you projected some emotion or intention into my comment that simply wasn't there. I did not minimize your struggles with my comment.

Granted, out experience level may differ since I read my first book on CSS in ca 2004 as a teenager and have worked with this ever since, so I may have a biased opinion, but come on. That is really no need to become bitter. "See how your pretty website behaves"? Really? Please keep that kind of emotional pettiness out of this website.

I stand by my statement if you have understood CSS it is not hard nowadays to create simple responsive designs. I come from times where you had to center elements in five different ways for all the common browsers out there and true responsiveness was either impossible or required javascript polyfills and weird nesting of (unsemantic) HTML. This is why my sentence about semantic HTML was relevant. Today it is possible to write semantically clean HTML and style it as you need for 99% of the cases. That was not the case in the past for certain designs. Today we do not usually need to create a hundred HTML elements that carry no information and have only relevance for the design. And even if you would need it there are at least ways noe to keep the info relevant for people who have a need for clean semantic HTML, like people with screen readers. Nonetheless, the separation between the roles of HTML and CSS has gotten so much better over the past two decades.

Keep in mind, this discussion tree started out with the discussion whether it is hard to limit text to a width of 60ch. It is not. This can become hard depending on the complexity of your website and the content that mixes with that text (e.g. if you need to break out images that are wider than the text on occasion). But that was not the discussion here. If you have a raw HTML document and you simply need to limit the width of the text body, to a maximum that is dead simple. Any web-browser on any device is capable of displaying a simple HTML page with their browser default template in a way that the user sees the content.

I argued most 90s style layout patterns (e.g. header, navigation on the left, body in the center, footer at the bottom) are not hard to get right, provided you know how to use responsive units and this isn't your first responsive layout. Of course we need to consider how to deal with the width-taking elements on devices that are very narrow (this may require re-arranging or making menus foldable) — that is usually the part that requires the boldest decisions. Other devices like Landscape tablets for example usually don't require a lot of separate work other than adjusting some sizes and ensure the content fits.

If your project is some ultra-flexible thing where the displayed elements are not fixed or predictable, then this can become a hard task, but thst has nothing to so with the CSS and everything with the information it may or may not need to style correctly all at once.

Well, depends. Maybe it can go up to 900mph¹?

¹ drivers are responsible to get the car into a low earth orbit themselves and need to be familiar with the orbital maneuvers needed to accelerate the car to 900mph

main should contain the semantic content of the website, you can still make full width headers and footers and have on the side. Well and <aside> can be just where the name implies, depending on the screen width.

This is really not that hard nowadays. How to do responsive design is no black magic and can be done with only HTML and CSS.

You basically just need to wrap (no pun intended) your head around a few basics. Especially CSS grid templates combined with media queries allow you to rearrange the whole page depending on the screen width in a simple way, especially compared to how we had to do this 20 years ago.

You write your website semantically (or ensure the template produces semantic HTML) and then you write the CSS with realtime preview right there in the browser.

Really? I know people in the hardware space for whom the tariffs have been an unmitigated disaster. They had to go through a lot to not lose their customer base outside the US. I have seen many US-people with businesses swearing about that admin, especially the smaller ones.

Yes, it should be illegal. The default expectation when you buy a device should be that something as simple as a power supply can be replaced.

I could agree with you if products that fail with the regulation have to put these shortcomings front and center on every place they are marketed on and not some fine print in some manual.

The idea of regulation is to allow consumers to just buy a thing and have certain expectations met.

If you buy a piece of lettuce you should be able to eat it without owning a fucking biology lab to check it first for example.

Depends on your proficiency. As a former philosophy student I find it one of the more readable books. It still is probably hard to wrap your head around as a layperson not used to this kind of theoretical thinking.

But what it is not: Some authors use word plays, complexity and semantics to make their ideas appear more sophisticated than they are. This is not that.

It is probably better to just thermodynamically ballpark the whole thing. How much energy goes in? Some percentage of that is gonna need to be radiated out either directly as IR radiation or by pushing a heated medium out (water, air). Someone did the math on that in the construction of the data center.

It is completely understandable that it is in the interest of the public to enforce some limits on the resource use, radiation, etc on any building, be it a data center or not. And these limits ideally should take local, state-wide, national and global considerations into account.

Well many of the countries where the war crimes happened are signatories to the ICC, so that isn't gonna be the problem you think it is.

Also: the US acting as a rouge state is not a power move it is a sign of moral decay, corruption and a critical failure to uphold the principles laid out in its own (wonderfully written!) Declaration of Independence.

It is just sad to see how hollowed out these great ideals have become.

As a European I would want my goverent to summon the US embassador and declare them a persona non grata over this. Then as a next step to work on sanction the US on an EU level like the rouge state it is.

I would say depends what you're trying to do?

Is NodeJS the simple, solid and rugged way this has been done for a decade now? If not, then it is an innovation.

Second it depends on what your or your teams experience level is.

Have you ever built a serious thing with it and do you have multiple years of experience running and maintaining it? Yes? Then it is probably the boring choice.

Would you be okay with leaving the final product unmaintained for a few years and it would not be a major problem? That may be a factor as well. E.g. a static HTML website needs next to zero maintenance, while a wordpress blog may fall apart every once in a while.

How maintainable would it be if the person who built it leaves? Could someone else pick up the slack right away? Would they need some time to get up to speed? Would it be literally impossible to get up to speed?

How hard is it to get the build system setup if the devs laptop is crushed under a truck? Is it as simple as cloning the project or does it need ritual sacrifice and dark chants and incantations to even get near running?

The boring thing is one that scores all the easy points on these questions.

Turns out, it is hard to understand a potential future problem if your salary or comfort in the present depends on you not understanding it.

Climate change is pretty much the same.

  A: Let's keep handing out band aids
  
  B: I think it would be far more important to remove the razor blades from the handrails which causes the bleeding   
  
  A: I simply want to stop the bleeding, why can't we keep handing out band aids? People should not suffer
  
  B: I think we can do both as needed 
  
  A: You misunderstood me, that is what I said  
  

Ahh?

Great, you sucessfully showcased the idea that analogies can be bent around till they no longer reflect the scientifically measurable reality.

So again:

It is possible for humanity to create unsurvivable conditions in our earths athmosphere.

1. Should we create it if there is enough profit in it? Y/N

2. If not, where would you draw the line and how would you set/enforce the limits?

If your answer is Yes to (1) you are in a suicidal, planet killing cult. If your answer is No, you realize the simple fact there are limits to what can be done in a limited space. But then you have to draw a line and find a mechanism even if you don't like it from an ideological standpoint. And that is what I would be really, honestly be interested in.

Either accept it and perish or mitigate it obviously? What would you propose?

Ah yeah, the myth that a society can't walk and chew gum at the same time. Do you really belive we can't both address the root causes and install AC?

Which other things do you believe a society can't do at the same time? Taxes and waste managment? Breathing and thinking?

No. The societal impact of crypto currencies is net-negative.

I know the original idea. In 2009 I bought coffee using Bitcoin. I had to wait 30 minutes till it went through despite using a fee that back then mirrored what PayPal would take. Then I knew: OK this is not going to be used as a cash replacement.

Then it became clear that it was used as a way to pay for illegal shit on the internet, be it drugs, botnets or services of questionable ethical value. Of course also to speculate, to launder money, to blackmail, to extract ransom, to run ponzi schemes or rug pulls, which became a big driver by people who wanted to get the wealth without having to put in the legwork.

And these are still the main drivers behind crypto currencies today by a wide margin. So yes: Net-negative. Prove me wrong.

I grew up in the 90s and there was a book in climate in my shelf that talked about thousands dying today, nearly three decades back. At some point we should stop pretending this is a new and surprising danger and start treating it as the risk we willingly steered ourselves into.

If you live next to a road and every other month a car crashed through your living room wall you'd probably fix the root cause after the first time it happened. If you are clever you fixed it even before it occurs. What you would not do is only deal with the damage caused month for month and pretend there is no need to address the root cause.

The reason why many pretend our only option is handing out band aids while the blade keeps spinning, is because it is hard to imagine anything else, if your salary depends on you not addressing the problem.

It feels more and more like watching a bus driver playing chicken against a solid, immovable concrete wall. It is obvious who wins, the only question is into which directions the scrap explodes most, while the driver eyes for the ejector seat. And all the kids pretend driving into the wall is the only reasonable option.

It is possible for humanity to create unsurvivable conditions in our earths atmosphere. Should we do that if there is enough profit in it? If not, where would you draw the line and how would you set/enforce the limits?

Sure. But you have to weigh any application relative to (1) how useful it is and (2) how easy it would be to rely on a carbon-neutral alternative.

And I would argue the usefulness of bitcoin is negative from the viewpoint of a free society.

AI is to a certain degree a different story, but also there it depends what you're doing.

We live in a thin atmospheric skin around the planet, and that skin has a finite volume. If earth was the size of an apple, the atmosphere is thinner than the Apple's skin in proportion.

Pretending we can do whatever we like for infinitly long inside an finite volume is completely unhinged. The financial and political elites, who some frame as the true geniuses point to technological solutions that are always "just around the corner" for the past decades with some of them even eying to leave the planet behind entirely.

All of that while we know how to address the issue.

Yes and: doing things that fight the cause of the warming?