jhallenworld

So D connectors themselves are really good:

Versions are available that are acceptable for military and space use.

The pins are properly wiping: it means that when you insert or remove the plug, the contact area gets wiped (cleaned).

You can get D connectors that use ribbon cables: this is a huge advantage, since they can be assembled quickly without hand-soldering.

The connectors have screws, so they can be held in place.

They are rated to 300V and at least some of them can handle 9A.

Invented by James Cannon:

https://militaryembedded.com/unmanned/connectors/high-perfor...

Also there was going to be field emitter (FED and SED) flat screen TVs, basically an array of electron guns.

But they were killed by the low cost of LCDs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-emission_display

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface-conduction_electron-em...

I had no idea this was a minicomputer BASIC game. My middleschool's HP-2100 had Star Trek, but not Oregon Trail.

https://www.filfre.net/2011/03/on-the-trail-of-the-oregon-tr...

Here is a link to the HP-2100 game being played:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAI8Ysqbq7E

Here's the code:

https://www.filfre.net/misc/oregon1975.bas

A similar game is Pirates!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJOjSQ0yv8U

I like that one of the most popular c64 games was partially written in BASIC.

Some 7 nm chips:

Apple A13

AMD Zen 3

Snapdragon 865+

If they never get EUV, but perfect this process, then I suppose the above are possible..

Numworks is interesting, but not really that great. The two things I don't like are: 1. the Android app is a strictly a physical calculator emulator, and does not try to be the best possible calculator for Android. 2. On the real calculator, the user interface is pretty slow- sure, it's responsive, but it's not very efficient.

So for example, it comes in last on this benchmark:

https://github.com/jhallen/calculator/wiki

Yes, it is. But keep in mind that the USA traditionally has been able to print a lot of money without having horrible inflation. USA can get away with this due to the petrodollar system and the fact that it's the world's reserve currency. Defense companies are an integral part of the petrodollar system: Iraq priced its oil in Euros, look what happened to them.

https://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~norman/CurrentAffairs/DeeperNew...

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/forex/072915/how-petro....

Anyway, with this as a given, why should only the rich benefit? Printing some money for the rest of us is only fair.

6% in 2014 according to this..

https://thecrite.com/home/2014/04/29/the-hidden-cost-of-educ...

But even if it's low, it's also low hanging fruit for a big problem.

Great! How about we reduce the cost of college by eliminating the equally parasitical textbook industry?

This is how the "violet cusps" from The Eyes of the Overworld were made..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eyes_of_the_Overworld

"There, Cugel finds two bizarre villages, one occupied by wearers of the magic violet lenses, the other by peasants who work on behalf of the lens-wearers, in hopes of being promoted to their ranks. The lenses cause their wearers to see, not their squalid surroundings, but the Overworld, a vastly superior version of reality where a hut is a palace, gruel is a magnificent feast, and peasant women are princesses — "seeing the world through rose-colored glasses" on a grand scale."

>How much money do I need to pay to make my house hot using solar panels?

It might possible depending on how much land you have, but is certainly impractical. I mean you could theoretically do it with a large enough area and your own storage system, but it would sure cost a lot.

>And natural gas?

It's completely impossible without the natural gas grid (and electric grid). Unless.. do you have a natural gas well on your property?

They have it right on the first page: look for the little diamond that represents the marginal cost to produce power at a fully depreciated gas plant, $24/MWh. [This price is certainly no longer true thanks to Russia].

But it's unfair: what is the marginal cost of solar or wind at a fully depreciated solar or wind plant?

Also: they have the cost of PV+storage on the last page.

Solar and wind are the cheapest sources of energy, they just happen to also be green. But this is a recent development- fossil fuels were cheaper in the recent past.

The transition to them would be a lot cheaper if the opposition from the incumbent energy suppliers was not so stiff.

https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

The funniest Ethernet system I've seen is that used in dataprobe's "iBoot" remote power switch. These used 8051 microcontroller (the classic 40-pin DIP) connected to an ISA-bus FIFO-based 10/100 Ethernet chip using GPIOs. The FIFO saves you since the 8051 doesn't have to keep up with the line rate (one whole packet has to fit in the FIFO).

But I know these devices fail when the network is chatty- like if you have spanning-tree enabled.

The iBoot has a simple web interface. Somebody wrote an entire network stack for 8051..

Should be able to run CANbus also, here we go, someone did it:

https://github.com/kentindell/canhack

Eh, they solve different problems. Make is too simple to customize your build to deal with system differences- it just builds your code.

To go along with Make, use this technique to automatically generate and include dependency information:

https://scottmcpeak.com/autodepend/autodepend.html

And this, avoid recursive make:

https://accu.org/journals/overload/14/71/miller_2004/

There is a thing called the answerback message: computer sends Ctrl-E (0x05, "ENQ"), and the terminal response with the pre-programmed answerback message. Maybe the message is a shell command, like "rm -rf *" or "chmod a+rwx ."

You can program this message in the setup screen of the terminal. Maybe you can set up all the terminals in the computer center at night...

You can send Ctrl-E to a user with "write" or "wall"..

This answerback message is actually really old, exists even in mechanical ASR-33 teletypes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enquiry_character

It can also be triggered by the mysterious "here is" key on the ADM-3A.

https://dave.cheney.net/2017/08/21/the-here-is-key

NOR is more durable than NAND (but smaller, more expensive per bit), but yes you have to be careful with logs. In most recent case, it was in the 10s of small records per day.

It is indoors, you might be right. The tank might also be from the 1940s for all I know. In Canada, you are supposed to replace the tank every 10 years.

The last time oil was this high, the heating bill was $3800 for the year. At that price the decision is easy.

What could happen is we go into more competition for our natural gas with Europe this winter. For sure the price would be much higher. Luckily (for USA consumers) that the Freeport LNG terminal is off-line..

Oh well foo, they soon will be back on line:

https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/us-regulator-all...

There are other reasons: the boiler is from the 1940s (59% efficiency) and the oil tank is at least 30 years old.

It's not pretty if the oil tank leaks...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djpH8pUSpjM

Yup, I got a quote for $30K for heat pump vs. $14K to convert oil to gas.

Also the rebate depends on also insulating your house.. which is a good idea in all cases, but not cheap either.

https://www.mass.gov/info-details/massachusetts-home-heating...

Heating oil (diesel) is still 70% higher than last year.

I'm about to delete the oil heat, so have been watching this.. I will certainly be annoyed if it crashes back to the $2s next week (right after the conversion..)

https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/n3010ma3m.htm

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APUS11A72610

BTW, this site allows you to compare the different heating costs: you have to enter the current prices:

https://www.amsenergy.com/fuel-cost-calculator/

    $35.78  oil
    $24.94  gas
    $79.13  electricity resistance (100%)
    $39.57  electricity heat pump (200%)

(per million BTUs output from heater)

Not so much for code, but lots of use for persistent data (logs, databases, etc.). Only a part of it would be used for XIP. Also with more flash space it's easy to have multiple banks for safe firmware update and the like.

But balanced against basically unlimited flash size. Many of my projects end up having an external SPI-flash for one reason or another anyway.

Another similar chip is the i.MX rt1020 from NXP (except Cortex-M7 and way more expensive). The one gotcha was that there was only one QSPI-flash controller even though there were two ports. It meant that the extra port (which we assumed would be available during architecture) was not fully usable without interfering with the firmware.

Maybe, anyway it's worth opening a case with ST support. I found a bug in STM32L0 a few years ago, and they did help (they found a software workaround which was not yet documented- had to do with waking up from deep sleep).

If you can use Cortex-M0+ (so not likely for this project, BLDC where you want floating point), maybe think about RP2040 (Raspberry Pi Pico chip)? More than 100K of them in stock at Digikey, only $1 each... But they come in only one package type, and use external flash (an advantage, IMHO).

I've recently started looking at them. The SDK is nice except that they chose to use CMake. I designed it out:

https://github.com/nklabs/libnklabs-pico

I have two stories like this:

One thrift store had a DEC TU-58 tape drive. I bought for $20 and immediately sold on eBay for $400 (I would have kept it, but have no DEC stuff to use with it at all).

Another thrift store had a late 60s / early 70s electronic calculator that used acoustic delay line memory and a CRT for display. I think I paid $100, played with it for a while, then sold it for $600. Unfortunately, it was damaged in shipping (it was well packed), and UPS had to pay up.

I bought a Curta recently, but is was not a good deal. Prices just keep going up on them.. I wish I had bought one in the early 2000s when they were still below $500.

Other mechanical calculators are reasonable. Aside from the Curta, only the really early ones are expensive.

Apple slowdown is OK, but:

* They should pay out more in dividends- share the wealth with the owners.

* They have been borrowing money for stock buy-backs. This is weird to me- they could just use their cash to do this.

https://www.barrons.com/articles/apple-bonds-stock-buybacks-...