tomchuk

Wired up Twilio & Anthropic API on a Cloudflare Worker so I can chat with Claude via Garmin InReach during a 3-week backcountry trip to Alaska's North Slope. Location metadata is included in the system prompt for accurate location-based info (weather, hunting regs, etc). Waiting to hear back from Garmin sales for access to their professional plans, which include their inReach Portal Connect inbound/outbound APIs.

Also working on a small, portable USB-PD bench power supply: Regulated 3V3, 5V, 12V & unregulated PPS/EPR AVS pass-through. RP2040 running the show, driving a little OLED screen & some buttons for configuration. Includes a separate, galvanically isolated USB-C port in CDC-ACM for data: Dumps CSV data by default, then switches to a native protocol via handshake with a desktop/cli app. Desktop app shows live graphs for all outputs, exposes configuration, alarms, etc. CLI can turn every config knob, give live readings, or run a TOML-defined test plan. PyO3 wrapper around the protocol lib for easy scripting. Firmware is Rust/Embassy, GUI/CLI is Rust/eGUI/Ratatui. Goal is for it to be about the size of a pack of cigarettes.

Oh, you’re right, I do have the DM16L!

Treated myself to a SwissMicros DM16C [1] while waiting for HP to re-relase the original.

[1] https://www.swissmicros.com/product/dm16c

… and a M1 MacBook will source 5V/3A all day long to a non-PD negotiated sink. Somewhere between the M1 and M3 Apple decided to buy into USB-IF compliance and limit to 500mA.

Has lead to some very embarrassing “works on my computer” situations on prototype boards shared with my EE colleagues (I’m a software guy who dabbles in hardware when I need to)

IAM, Cloudfront, Route53, ACM, Billing...

Yesterday's discussion around Kagi[0] prompted me to poke through some settings there, as it had been a while. They've also added a "Exclude AI generated images" which they describe as "Best-effort removal of AI generated images from search results"

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44594475

Can't mention Fibonacci and memoization in the same sentence without me breaking out my favorite Python party trick:

    def fib(n, cache = {0: 0, 1: 1}):
        if n not in cache:
            cache[n] = fib(n-1) + fib(n-2)
        return cache[n]

Very relaxing. Until impossibly small $15 Incabloc springs start flying around the room. I'm convinced these sublimate into a vapor the moment they fly out of view of your loupe.

During a recent move, I found my WikiReader [0] from 2009 at the back of a drawer. Tossed some new AAA batteries in it and it fired right up. It contains a fairly complete offline copy of (2012-era) Wikipedia and some reference material for survival, medicine, farming, and repair of various mechanical and electrical devices. Remarkable little device for the $20 I paid for it.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiReader

I have a shell function I use all the time to keep track of both calendar and timezones where our teams are located

  now() {
    cal -3
    echo
    echo -n "Local:       "
    date --rfc-3339=s
    echo -n "UTC:         "
    date -u --rfc-3339=s
    echo -n "New York     "
    TZ='America/New_York' date --rfc-3339=s
    echo -n "London:      "
    TZ='Europe/London' date --rfc-3339=s
    echo -n "New Zealand: "
    TZ='Pacific/Auckland' date --rfc-3339=s
  }

I have an older iPad mini for this purpose (but an old iPhone without a data plan would work too). I setup a separate home@<domain> iCloud account under my family plan and use it exclusively for streaming music vi AirPlay, cooking w/ recipes on Paprika, HomeKit controls, reminders, timers, etc. - no Slack notifications, no calls, no calendar reminders. The AppleTV goes on the same account too. It's really been a great solution.

Kenji Lopez-Alt, of Seriouseats and “The Food Lab” fame, is coming out with his new book, “The Wok”, here is his travel rig: https://www.instagram.com/p/CaxbNwdvOTR/. I’ve had a similar wok hob for years, and while fitting the wok to the curvature of the hob is essential, once you’ve got that figured out, it’s an absolute joy to use. Even, fast, powerful heat - nowhere near to a commercial gas hob, but neither is my gas range at home. My next home or kitchen reno will be induction, not even considering gas.

I’ve divulged my camera & network setup. Sure, you could use that info to sneak up to my house, turn the gas off to my generator, cut the power, wait 3h for the batteries in my UPS to run out….

Or you could walk up and smash a window wearing a balaclava.

I’ve been very happy with Ubiquiti’s Unifi Protect doorbell. It does mean having to buy into their whole ecosystem, but I was already most of the way there when I added the doorbell and a couple 4k cameras.

Recording to a local device does mean you have to consider things like power/network outages if you want remote access and recording to continue during those events. I’ve got all my network gear and the doorbell transformer running off a UPS to cover the time between a power outage and my whole-home generator kicking in. I’ve also got an LTE modem to fail over to on my Dream Machine Pro (Router/network controller/video storage).

Looks like the author is running BSPWM, their configuration (in their dotfiles repo) is available here: https://github.com/siduck76/dotfiles/blob/master/thinkpad/bs...

Depending on the make, this could be something you could disable via app/ODB dongle. I use the Carista app/BT dongle and have used it to disable the panic button on my last two Toyoyas.

Looks like the embargo just lifted today. reMarkable just sent out an email with links to reviews:

https://mailchi.mp/remarkable.com/first-remarkable-2-reviews...

Couldn't agree more. My primary monitor is a 43" 4k LG at unscaled, native resolution. I can fit five 94 column wide terminals tiled across, each showing 140 lines of text.

Is the text super crisp? Nope. Would I give up all this space for smoother text? Not a chance. Would I replace it with a 43" 8k monitor? In a heartbeat.

Canon has their DO (Diffractive Optics) technology[1] which I think only ever made it into a 70-300[2].

Mirror lenses have been around for a long time. They fold the length of larger telephotos into about a third with some trade-offs in speed and image quality.

[1] https://global.canon/en/v-square/34.html [2] https://www.usa.canon.com/internet/portal/us/home/products/d...

As mentioned, you'll need to ensure your /etc/fahclient/client.xml includes:

  <config>
    <!-- Folding Slots -->
    <slot id='0' type='CPU'/>
    <slot id='1' type='GPU'/>
  </config>

If you check your logs in /var/lib/fahclient/logs, you'll probably see something like:

  CUDA Device 0: Platform:0 Device:0 Bus:51 Slot:0 Compute:7.5 Driver:10.2
         OpenCL: Not detected: Failed to open dynamic library 'libOpenCL.so':
                 libOpenCL.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or
                 directory

Take that missing library over to the Ubuntu Package Search[0] and it will lead you to ocl-icd-opencl-dev

  apt install ocl-icd-opencl-dev

Restart fahclient and you should see something like:

   CUDA Device 0: Platform:0 Device:0 Bus:51 Slot:0 Compute:7.5 Driver:10.2
  OpenCL Device 0: Platform:0 Device:0 Bus:51 Slot:0 Compute:1.2 Driver:440.64

[0] https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?suite=bionic&arch=amd64&m...

The website lists a restaurant (Southern Proper in Boston) that shut its doors months ago. The space already has a new tenant, has been renovated and has new signs up.

Edit: It appears the site immediately posts any user submissions without any verification. I posted Toro, and it immediately went live on the site. They’re worth posting, because they’re sharing 50% of gift card proceeds with staff through the end of April: https://www.instagram.com/p/B9zIuPkB4U-/

I was disappointed as well. But I get it.

After three years, Pixel users still have to refer to a guide [0] or track down a Google Engineer's Amazon reviews [1] to find a 3rd party USB-C cable on Amazon that doesn't have the potential to fry their device [2].

If I were Apple, I'd be hesitant to jump on to USB-C, when Amazon and gas stations around the world are selling $5 cables and chargers that are so out-of-spec that they introduce the very real possibility of damaging devices that will end up at the Genius Bar for an AppleCare+ repair/replacement.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/wiki/officialguide/usbc... [1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/profile/amzn1.account.AFLICGQRF6BR... [2] https://www.engadget.com/2016/02/03/benson-leung-chromebook-...

Tracking/jamming equipment is available [1] (and pretty cool).

[1] https://www.aaronia.com/products/solutions/Aaronia-Drone-Det...

They're doing this so you (or other shared tenants) can't read your VMs or the host's memory (and vice versa).

http://beta.speedtest.net/result/6880152186 - That's last mile wireless. Throughput is hampered by my crappy usb NIC because all of my thunderbolt ports are in use. With thunderbolt ethernet I'm getting the full 500Mpbs that I pay $45/mo for.

As a Webpass customer in Boston, you really hit the nail on the head. More than twice the speeds of Comcast's best offering at less than half the price, better reliability and none of the bullshit - no outages, no slowdowns, no rate hikes, no forced modem upgrades, no shitty customer service, just 500Mbps up/down for $45 a month.

Not sure how I missed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15293578

Seeing lots of S3 errors as well

"An error occurred (503) when calling the HeadObject operation (reached max retries: 4): Service Unavailable"

"An error occurred (SlowDown) when calling the PutObject operation (reached max retries: 4): Please reduce your request rate."

Or an S meter - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S_meter

Worked like a charm. Thanks!