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mikeInAlaska

274 karma · joined March 11, 2020

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mikeInAlaska··on SSD1306 display drivers and font rendering
Here's a rust version i made with bitmapped fonts for both i2c and SPI https://github.com/scopenews/minimalSSD1306driver/ I was running this on my pi as a demo.

I normally work with C++ on esp32 for these little displays, and in there I use a screen buffer for partial refreshes which makes them very fast !!

mikeInAlaska··on What made the Irish famine so deadly
We went to the Dunbrody Famine ship exhibit in New Ross, Ireland a few years back. It was a neat exhibit, first they seat you in a dark small room and show a movie detailing the situation, then the wall opens up and the ship is nicely framed in the view, sitting outside in the River Barrow.

They then take you out to tour the ship.

mikeInAlaska··on Micro keypad to do your regular Git push/pull/add/commit actions
Is this an actual problem to be solved? I would not want our repo "attached" to devices capable of one click operations.
mikeInAlaska··on Alexa+
I enjoy coming up with questions deemed so politically incorrect that alexa responds with a BONK noise.
mikeInAlaska··on Station of despair: What to do if you get stuck at end of Tokyo Chuo Rapid Line
Ended up on Elmendorf Air Force Base (at the hospital) this way once as a little kid in the early 1980s. The bus actually went from Anchorage onto the air force base and then called it quits. That was definitely my station of despair. "Mom... drive onto the military base and get me."
mikeInAlaska··on US Bill Proposes Jail Time for People Who Download DeepSeek
From the article:

> Hawley introduced the legislation, titled the Decoupling America’s > Artificial Intelligence Capabilities from China Act, > on Wednesday of last year.

On Wednesday of last year you say.... hmmm what wrote this article

mikeInAlaska··on OpenAI O3-Mini
Maybe we should take both answers, paste them into a new chat and ask for a summary amalgamation of them
mikeInAlaska··on PCBs, copper pours, ground planes, and you
I switched away from full solid copper floods due to this. (Even with nice soldering equipment.) I still use full size floods but they are more like basket-weave patterns, probably 50% copper. I rotate the pattern on my second inner plane.
mikeInAlaska··on PCBs, copper pours, ground planes, and you
Four layer boards are so cheap now, it's all I choose. I usually do two internal ground planes and route my power on one side unbroken. I haven't made an interrupted return path since watching Rick Hartley videos.
mikeInAlaska··on Half My Life with Perl
I love perl. I work with it every day still, 25 years later. I recently rewrote a cellular provisioning API in it to be fully object oriented.

I do not write it to win an obfuscation contest. I like it to be read as easily as possible. It is a joy to watch the core objects of the system work together so cleanly.

mikeInAlaska··on Teri Garr, Star of 'Young Frankenstein' and 'Tootsie,' Dies at 79
My memory of her is Close Encounters of the Third Kind
mikeInAlaska··on Wizardry Co-Creator Andrew Greenberg Has Passed Away
My friends and I played Wizardry on an Apple II with a green screen for so long that it would blast out the green receptors in our eyes for a while afterwards, and everything would be pink hued.
mikeInAlaska··on Low-income homes drop Internet service after Congress kills discount program
Tethering to 5G and LTE enabled cell phones in this situation is very common. They are certainly getting rid of their broadband fiber, cable or DSL before their discounted cell services.
mikeInAlaska··on Type in Morse code by repeatedly slamming your laptop shut
Surely you can very discretely and ergonomically use this... if you move your lid jussttt above the point where it decides it is closed and then tap.
mikeInAlaska··on Don't use 7-segment displays (2011) [pdf]
As a 1970s kid, a tiny brilliant red LED 7-segment digit is the most nostalgic display possible!
mikeInAlaska··on Haunting Sounds from the Largest Living Thing
I bet the Earth chuckles at our attempts to label either of these the largest living things. I guess as Guinness Book entries go, these will do until something surpasses them. I've got to think that there is a more massive fungus in the Amazon for example.
mikeInAlaska··on British Columbia to recriminalize use of drugs in public spaces
Victoria BC is the only place I've walked past someone smoking heroin out in the open on a busy city street. (Last October.)
mikeInAlaska··on Ask HN: How to improve PCB prototyping iteration time?
It's just faster and easier to iterate PCBs anymore than large breadboard creations.
mikeInAlaska··on Don't bet on the joys of pokies (2011)
And then all this talk about "NSW"
mikeInAlaska··on Breakthrough drug trial saw cancer vanish in every patient (2022)
> How expensive are they to make these days?

A good question, I can't answer. But I can tell you, when my daughter had her liver transplant, they gave her an insane amount of medications for weeks. They only gave her one shot of a monoclonal antibody "Basiliximab". The syringe with it was escorted by two guards from the pharmacy.

mikeInAlaska··on How Hertz’s bet on Teslas went sideways
We rented from a place called SAD CARS in Iceland. The car... worked for our entire trip.
mikeInAlaska··on Spinner-mouse: Arduino-based USB rotary controller for Arkanoid, Tempest, etc.
What is causing the interrupts? Any change to encoder A or B?
mikeInAlaska··on Illness Impacting Dairy Cattle Is Confirmed as Highly Pathogenic Avian Flu
References please. I did not see anything in the article about it affecting BS
mikeInAlaska··on Surgeons transplant pig kidney into a patient
The first six weeks are pretty intense. The recovery is amazing as how fast liver labs drop and how fast the jaundice yellow clears. I would probably say six weeks is a fair figure until you are a whole new person!
mikeInAlaska··on Surgeons transplant pig kidney into a patient
She takes immunosuppressants every day still. We do not practice any additional caution. We've all had Covid more than once, and she gets every cold and other virus and fights them off no problem. She got EBV with her liver, and when that flares up they will reduce her suppressants at times.
mikeInAlaska··on Surgeons transplant pig kidney into a patient
Speaking for liver transplants, they are a many hour traumatic affair. My daughter lost and received more than her entire blood volume during hers. Initial recovery is extremely immunosuppressed and some of the drugs we had to handle with masks and gloves, and had 4x a day medication schedules. So you couldn't burn through pig livers I believe getting them swapped frequently. My daughter received her liver at age 8 months by the way and is now 19 yrs old.
mikeInAlaska··on Why are most sofas so bad?
Any opinions on Ekornes sofa from Norway?
mikeInAlaska··on Rust for Embedded Systems: Current state, challenges and open problems
Linux
mikeInAlaska··on Rust for Embedded Systems: Current state, challenges and open problems
I spent a weekend with Rust, a Raspi4, and our buddy GPT about six months ago. In that weekend I was able to get the Raspi controlling a OLED display via SPI with an SSD1306 controller. I thought it was a fairly clean port from C++, and GPT was well educated on how to use the RASPI SPI and I2C busses from Rust.

I don't think I would be able to approach it on an ESP32 or AVR xMega or some other real microcontroller.

mikeInAlaska··on Eclipse viewing at 30k feet: Delta to offer path-of-totality flight
newegg shipped me six 16TB hard drives that were garbage. Some looked like a claw hammer ripped through their soft aluminum shells. Some had no connectors.
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