gw99

Shitty solder + flux is wrong. Simple.

That is part of production engineering which is mostly about making sure that your product doesn't come back again because it's broken.

Yes it’s additional flux that you don’t need.

Kimwipes soaked in isopropyl pushed around with some guaranteed 100% nylon brushes (usually the black ESD brushes are fine for this).

Toothbrushes bristles may melt. Not all of them are nylon and if they aren’t they will go sticky and this will wipe off on the surfaces.

This.

I encountered hell the other day. I saw a corporate Citrix deployment that had 45 users running three electron apps on an underprovisioned server with the CPU, disk and memory rammed at 100% lagging out. That’s 135 separate browser stacks basically.

Microsoft are moving office to this stack as well. Ugh.

Of course I was there trying to work out why our simple old fashioned web app was running slowly in a chrome tab…

Oh look they turned Chromium into IE6. Forced ads, difficult to eviscerate search engines, proprietary extensions, dubious security posture! Oh goody!

Correct. Once you go Metcal you don’t go back. When I got divorced the first thing I put on the “mine” list was my Metcal :)

You can solder on 0805 parts and switch to soldering bolts onto nuts without changing the tip or any settings.

Actually this crap will probably be bodged into a rats nest nightmare project if it’s an instructables user.

Anyone who has debugged one of them knows to do things properly or suffer the wrath of intermittent problems.

Oh please not the flux over everything argument. This is completely wrong.

Buy a decent iron (metcal - get a second hand one off eBay) and some decent solder (felder 62/36/2) and you don’t need it.

Also don’t use a toothbrush with isopropyl. They tend to dissolve and leave crap all over the board.

You should even really do that. There are loads of nice solder in crimp terminations now that you can use for wires. Or wire to board connectors.

Just stay away from any Molex crap. Tends to charcoal itself.

There’s some terrible advice in there which is merely cargo cult thinking. The whole thing needs garbage collecting.

The final straw was when I saw someone using a wire brush on a Metcal tip after reading one of these mil spec guides.

I was production engineer defence sector for a few years.

I did several years in production engineering. We never used flux. Not once. It’s a crutch for people who don’t know how to solder.

What we did was use solder that wasn’t shitty. Big fan of felder 62/36/2 but it ain’t cheap.

We also cleaned stuff properly before soldering it. The reason people tend to flux things to death is that they didn’t clean the oxide layer off before soldering. Or used shitty solder.

Good advice.

It’s worth expanding on my comment now I have a few minutes. You can terminate solid core like this if it has some strain relief but not stranded!.

My favoured construction method is to take a Hammond box lid and screw a piece of blank FR4 single sided copper to the inside of it leaving enough space around the edges for any (proper) connectors you need. You can then drill out anything you need, usually BNC, SMA, DC jacks, FT capacitors and D connectors for me. You build the prototype on the FR4 board dead bug and use solid core or RG174 to wire up the connectors and lap solder them to the boards or components as required. This is done carefully with thought for weight distribution and to keep the total mass of the wires low. When it works the Hammond box is closed. If it needs to withstand vibration or moisture you build it into the bottom of the Hammond box and when done fill it with potting compound.

You shouldn't really lap solder wires to boards. They tend to pull the pads off the boards or crack. Better to use wire to board connectors or solder terminals.

I'm not so sure. All you have is another layer of abstraction between you and the problem that you are facing. And that level of abstraction may violate your SLAs unless you pitch $15k for the enterprise support option. And that may not even be fruitful because it relies on an uncertain network of folk at the other end who may or may not even be able to interpret and/or solve your problem. Also you are at the whim of their changes which may or may not break your shit.

Source: AWS user on very very large scale stuff for about 10 years now. It's not magic or perfection. It's just someone else's pile of problems that are lurking. The only consolation is they appear to try slightly harder than the datacentres that we replaced.

The current 2022 SE is the same size and form factor.

Was 2019 so I expect so unless they replaced them since.

I’m a regular train traveller in the UK. It’s a shit show especially for us hikers. Trying to navigate the mess that is different operators and ticket splits to not get utterly shafted is a nightmare.

Then half the trains go missing or are on strike suddenly.

I have got to the point I prefer the rail replacement busses.

The Caledonian sleeper is hell on earth. I did it once. The only worse experience I had was a rotten old YHA hostel in the 90s where I stayed in a bunk room with three people with bowel disorders. And it wasn’t much worse.

That was 1/3 of the problem domain of scheduling things. The other 2/3 was made considerably more difficult by it.

I wrote an RFC5545 parser and event generator once. No thanks.

Also not as flammable as OVH ones.

One of my hobbies is outdoor photography. I don’t mind people taking actual photos of the outside. The objection is having 75% of the frame taken up by someone repetitively taking photos of the same pose (the good side of their face) while doing an impression of a fish and/or wearing something completely in appropriate that is going to land them in hospital one day from hypothermia.

As for the selfie, I’m on the fence on your semantic definition. I consider myself to be a meat flavoured selfie stick when asked. I’m merely a tool that happened to be walking past that is good for pointing their device at a bulbous ass obscuring the scenery.

That’s a fair assessment of the situation.

They beyond meat McPlant is a hell of a lot healthier than a Big Mac or a quarter pounder with cheese here in the UK.

I’m not a vegetarian as such but the McPlant burgers are rather better tasting as well.

Sort of.

I encounter many miserable looking poorly equipped people constantly asking me to take selfies of them posing with a fake smile. I was stopped 7 times on a 50km hike recently.

People want to be seen to do it. They don’t appear to be enjoying it though.

Edit: ironically considering the article I tend to wear AirPods now because people don’t ask me to do it.

I have learned that someone who excessively stands between an interesting subject and a camera rather than stands behind the camera should not be a part of my life. This includes my ex wife.

Instagram is also full of that. One of the cesspools of humanity.

However this appears to be roughly the usual “modern clipart” image selection for the headline image for the article.

Working on something at the moment more as an experiment that might turn into a product.

Stack is Go + SQLite + nginx + htmx.

I am now working on a simple orchestrator in Go that manages hundreds to thousands of these small silos across multiple servers giving people proper isolated SaaS type environments which can be entirely downloaded and run locally if desired as only two files (program + database)!

At least it's not Gnome "Let's rewrite again what we didn't get around to finishing and fixing 2 years ago"

No comment :)

Watch that. Doesn't always work. Not everyone you will work with loves what you love or gives as much of a shit about it as you do. And it's painful watching them fuck it up day after day after day. Eventually you end up disliking it by proxy.

I'm also a weirdo. I intensely dislike what I do for a living but I'm good at it and the money is pretty excellent. And I hate it enough to want to do a quality job of it and automate as much of it as possible so I can do something more interesting with my time instead.