Career Advice from Jim Donovan - I stumbled upon “The Making of an Investment Banker”, a talk given by Jim Donovan to the UVA school of law, which was posted to their YouTube channel. I found the advice to be quite good, regardless of your chosen career path, investment banker or otherwise. 3 pieces of advice before starting your career / job: Read the Wall Street Journal every day, no matter what. You should read 3 articles: one macro article, such as related to what the Fed is doing with interest rates, for example. one on a specific company that recently released earnings, or a specific transaction / acquisition. one op-ed

A consortium of U.S. federal agencies has pooled their funds and wide array of expertise to reinvent the emergency vehicle. The hybrid electric box truck they’ve come up with is carbon neutral. And in the aftermath of a natural disaster like a tornado or wildfire, the vehicle, called H2Rescue, can supply electric power and potable water to survivors while acting as a temperature-controlled command center for rescue personnel.

If you were around when the Model T was first announced, you could have built the organizations that became Disney, McDonald’s and Holiday Inn, all of which were powered by cheap, plentiful cars. You could have become a major developer of suburbs, mortgage banking and even pop music record labels (car radios changed the way music was consumed).

When a resource can be used more efficiently, we end up using more of the thing, not less.

When you first start with a blank sheet, you’re forced to search your memory and put on paper what you know (or what you think you know) about a subject. As you read, you see that understanding grow as you add new knowledge to the foundation.

inxi is a handy script that provides you with the system hardware and software information about the Linux system it is executed on. Learn more about using it.

This animation of the Moon’s shadow across North America simulates the view from a spacecraft 125 miles high chasing the shadow! On April 8, 2024, everyone inside the shadow will experience the breathtaking sight of the Sun’s corona during the total solar eclipse. Totality races from Mazatlan to Newfoundland.

Jason Kottke recently said he could spend all day watching Koen van Gilst’s Pong Wars, a JavaScript-based mashup of Pong and Breakout (designed by Steve Wozniak with help from Steve Jobs) that feels like a hyperactive digital lava lamp. Pong Wars features two balls, Day and Night, that bounce according to the physics of those games. The Day ball travels through light areas and turns dark blocks light, whereas the Night ball does the reverse, turning light blocks dark.

Like pretty much any Apple device, you can directly connect a Vision Pro to external pointing devices—at least, you can connect the Magic Trackpad and some Bluetooth keyboards. I was able to get a Magic Keyboard connected to it simply by opening the Bluetooth area of the Settings app and selecting the Magic Keyboard. It really couldn’t have been easier.

iFixit's disassembly of the Vision Pro reveals several internal components, including an array of cameras and sensors, fans, lens motors, and more. Unsurprisingly, it appears that opening and repairing the headset will be difficult.

Maybe you know about the early (first?) 6502-based computer, the KIM-1 from 1976. I recently built a replica (the PAL-1) and wanted to flip through some of the original documentation. Fortunately archive.org has quite a bit of early KIM-1 texts.

The book that started it all for me. Sometime around 1979 #kim1 #6502 #robot #diy #developer

rickception is a fun take on the classic breakout game with popup windows!

The 6 Most Captivating and Addictive Space Opera Book Series of Modern Science Fiction

Overall, I like Base and Core Data Lab better, but Base has been giving me a lot of internal errors lately, and I’m unsure whether it’s still under development. However, Ducklet looks promising, so I purchased it on sale.

Artificial intelligence still can’t beat a human when it comes to programming. But it’s only a matter of time.

The cover’s hero image draws you in. What is that beautiful-looking tape deck? (And wow, even today, that thing is pretty awesome.)

Web development moves at lightning speed. I still remember when I first started using libraries like jQuery, Prototype, script.aculo.us, Zepto, and many more. Even with modern tools like Angular, VueJS, React, Solid and Svelte, we still have to deal with the Document Object Model (DOM). While these frameworks encapsulate and hide direct DOM management, they still give us access to work with the DOM via refs and event handlers.

Good pizza is rare, even though the method to create it is well known.

In 2010, Airbus initiated a research collaboration with ENAC and Université de Toulouse III on a prospective study to define and validate an “Aeronautical Font”: the challenge was to improve the display of information on the cockpit screens, in particular in terms of legibility and comfort of reading, and to optimize the overall homogeneity of the cockpit.

Ah, the comfort zone—a snug emotional space where stress is scarce and predictability prevails. While it’s not all bad, staying there too long can effectively serve as a straightjacket for your potential. Let's peel back the layers and dissect the interplay between your comfort zone, personal growth, and the 'magic' that happens when you dare to stretch your boundaries.

Shoelace: A forward-thinking library of web components.

But behind the scenes, there’s a lot more going on. I’ll describe some of what happens, and (much much more importantly!) explain some tools you can use to see what’s going on behind the scenes yourself. We’ll use readelf, strace, ldd, debugfs, /proc, ltrace, dd, and stat. I won’t talk about the Python-specific parts at all – just what happens when you run any dynamically linked executable.

“The ability to do hard things is perhaps the most useful ability you can foster in yourself or your children. And proof that you are someone who can do them is one of the most useful assets you can have on your life resume.

I got a pair of AirPod Pro earbuds and set them up for my personal hearing needs. Later that day I went for a walk in my local woods and literally gasped out loud at hearing the birds I'd been missing for some years!

When you write some code and put it on a spacecraft headed into the far reaches of space, you need to it work, no matter what. Mistakes can mean loss of mission or even loss of life. In 2006, Gerard Holzmann of the NASA/JPL Laboratory for Reliable Software wrote a paper called The Power of 10: Rules for Developing Safety-Critical Code. The rules focus on testability, readability, and predictability:

UnsuckJS

In the pre-media world, we bumped into fables, or news from across the village, but mostly, our role models and experiences were based on reality.

In the process, they've given us vivid examples of why folding phones could be more than the latest gadget gimmick or another screen to scratch. They could actually be useful. According to these fictional futures, three primary reasons stand out:

NASA keeps the original film negatives from the Apollo program sealed in a frozen vault in Houston, TX and rarely grants access to them. As a result, nearly all of the photos we see of those historic missions were made decades ago or are copies of copies. Recently, the film was cleaned and digitally scanned at "an unprecedented resolution".

A few years ago I gave a short talk (slides) about myths that discourage people from blogging. I was chatting with a friend about blogging the other day and it made me want to write up that talk as a blog post.

It really is one of the best product names in Apple history: Vision is a description of a product, it is an aspiration for a use case, and it is a critique on the sort of society we are building, behind Apple’s leadership more than anyone else.

But, I’ve used essentially every major VR headset and AR device since 2013’s Oculus DK1 right up through the latest generations of Quest and Vive headsets. I’ve tried all of the experiences and stabs at making fetch happen when it comes to XR. I’ve been awed and re-awed as developers of the hardware and software of those devices and their marquee apps have continued to chew away at the “conundrum of the killer app” — trying to find something that would get real purchase with the broader public.

tldr InBrowser.App is an offline-capable PWA for tldr-pages. Fully runs in your browser. Zero API latency.

Implement DNS in a weekend

Vint Cerf is the recipient of the IEEE Medal of Honor “for cocreating the Internet architecture and providing sustained leadership in its phenomenal growth in becoming society’s critical infrastructure.” PETER ADAMS

Passkeys, the popular name for FIDO, are not only easy, they offer better protection against phishing than other forms of multi-factor authentication. This is how they work.

What is a passkey? A passkey is a new way to sign in that works completely without passwords. By using the security capabilities of your devices like Touch ID and Face ID, passkeys are way more secure and are easier to use than both passwords and all current 2-factor authentication methods.

Over the last year, cloud storage services Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive—and probably others—have migrated from custom kernel extensions to Apple’s new-ish File Provider extension. It provides an Apple-approved framework for integrating remote files into macOS and displaying them in the Finder. I touched on this move a year ago in “Cloud Storage Forecast Unsettled, with Possible Storms” (4 February 2022).

Writing Javascript without a build system

Analyzing the characteristics of real-world applications is difficult. We often make generalizations about applications we see in the wild, both anecdotal and statistical: "Single-Page Applications are slower than multipage" or "apps with low TTI loaded fast". However, the extent to which these generalizations hold for the performance and architectural characteristics we care about varies. I believe one of the primary determinants of this variability are a product's features and design constraints, and classifying applications based on their features & constraints can enable more targeted and impactful solutions to the problems faced by each.

Community hexagon stickers

Hello! A few days back we talked about problems with floating point numbers.

The Eisenhower matrix is a popular time management tool that can help you prioritize your tasks and make the most of your time.

The initial segment of what will be the first underwater fiber-optic link to skirt the North Pole, connecting Japan and Europe, will light up in early 2023. This stretch, called Iris, will link Iceland to Ireland. In subsequent years, the Far North Fiber project will lay down a cable through the Northwest Passage, connecting Iceland to Greenland, then Canada, Alaska, and finally Japan. Far North Fiber will help increase the geographic diversity of the world’s fiber-optic network; currently, submarine cables are laid along a few well-trodden routes, leaving the network vulnerable to local hazards, like ship anchors, earthquakes, or fiber-eating sea monsters.

The ANSI escape sequences you're looking for are the Select Graphic Rendition subset. All of these have the form

It is not uncommon to hear about C/C++ programming as a shorthand for “C and C++” programming. This implies that C and C++ are similar, but distinct, programming languages with the obvious interpretation being that C++ is a proper superset of C. However, this does not accurately describe the situation. The C++ programming language is inspired by the C programming language and supports much of the syntax and semantics of C, but is not a superset that is built on top of C. Despite sharing a historical relationship to one another, the languages have evolved independently and are specified in separate language standards. Due to this separation of the two specifications, incompatibilities have crept into the shared space of code that can be compiled by either a C compiler or a C++ compiler.

Last week, we blogged about the making a very small RISC-V emulator. Folks asked the author the next logical question after finding out that the emulator works: Can it run Doom?

For years, a small pedantry war has been raging in our address bars. In one corner are brands like Google, Instagram, and Facebook. This group has chosen to redirect example.com to www.example.com. In the opposite corner: GitHub, DuckDuckGo, and Discord. This group has chosen to do the reverse and redirect www.example.com to example.com.

SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS is a long time. It’s so long that most of us don’t remember a time before the transistor, and long enough for many engineers to have devoted entire careers to its use and development. In honor of this most important of technological achievements, this issue’s package of articles explores the transistor’s historical journey and potential future.

APIs for Personal Weather Station Contributors

Culture shifts. But it’s held in place by norms, and those are driven by status and affiliation.

IF GRAIN MUST be dragged to market on an oxcart, how far can it go before the oxen eat up all the cargo? This, in brief, is the problem faced by any transportation system in which the vehicle must carry its own fuel. The key value is the density of energy, expressed with respect to either mass or volume.

Welcome to MicroPython on Unicorn!

Raspberry Pi Pico W brings WiFi to the Pico platform while retaining complete pin compatibility with its older sibling, and now as of CircuitPython 8.0.0-beta.2, there is CircuitPython WiFi support for the Pico W! This guide includes examples for testing your WiFi connection, using requests to pull JSON feeds, ping API's and log sensor data for IoT projects; all using CircuitPython!

LINUX Unplugged 396: How Linux Got to Mars

Persistence-of-vision, or POV, displays work on the principle that if a light blinks in front of your eye, you perceive it for some amount of time after it’s gone. Blink lights in sequence when moving, and you can create what looks like a static image. “Programmer with a soldering iron” B45i found a deal on ATtiny13 microcontrollers for roughly $.30 each, and was able to create a POV display with one for less than a dollar.

In this blog post, I want to refine your mental model for Flexbox. We'll build an intuition for how the Flexbox algorithm works, by learning about each of these properties. Whether you're a CSS beginner, or you've been using Flexbox for years, I bet you'll learn quite a bit!

Kiosks are designed to offer users specific information or a specific experience, while preventing access to any other activities on the device. They are often found in airports, shops, hospitals, cafes, and museums — any location where people need easy access to information or services like timetables, waiting times, product information, directions, self check-in machines, and so on.

When was a word first used in print? You may be surprised! Enter a date below to see the words first recorded on that year. To learn more about First Known Use dates, click here.

Dutch daredevil Mark of The Flying Dutchmen shared stunning 4K POV footage of a coaster ride down a mountain into the Oeschinen Valley in the Bernese Oberland region of Switzerland.

Pathfinding Visualizer

Back in college I used to run part of my website from a Linux box in my room. I made it into a speech synthesiser, and people could connect to the machine to talk into my flat.

NOVEMBER MARKS THE 50th anniversary of Pong. Why should we care?

This installation enables a live plant to control a machete. plant machete has a control system that reads and utilizes the electrical noises found in a live philodendron. The system uses an open source micro-controller connected to the plant to read varying resistance signals across the plant’s leaves. Using custom software, these signals are mapped in real-time to the movements of the joints of the industrial robot holding a machete. In this way, the movements of the machete are determined based on input from the plant. Essentially the plant is the brain of the robot controlling the machete determining how it swings, jabs, slices and interacts in space.

Now, you don't just go hooning any old EV around the strip, at least not if you're Ken Block. In this case, his ride is a stunning one-off electric Audi, the S1 Hoonitron, inspired by the 1987 Audi Sport quattro S1 Pikes Peak car.

Building and testing different types of Lego Pneumatic Engines that run on compressed air.

A university group named the GreenTeam, from the University of Stuttgart set the Guinness World Record for the fastest 0-62 mph (0-100 kph) electric vehicle acceleration in a 1.461-sec 0-62 mph run.

Whether they are used for powering information displays, automating testing, controlling machinery, monitoring an environment, or doing other tasks, enterprises see Raspberry Pis as serious devices for doing serious tasks. Each model has a long product lifecycle—even the older models (1B+, 2B, 3A+, 3B, and 3B+) will remain in production until at least January 2026. There is little risk that they will go obsolete, so you can maintain a sufficiently large stock and treat them as modular components that you replace rather than fix.

How can we “fingerprint” a codebase to see its structure at a glance? Let’s explore ways to automatically visualize a GitHub repo, and how that could be useful.

The crossed spikes that you see in some images of stars are not actually parts of the stars. They are imaging artifacts that are created by the telescope itself and are called diffraction spikes. Certain telescopes have a large primary mirror that focuses the incoming beam of light onto a secondary mirror or a sensor that is held over the primary mirror. The secondary mirror diverts the light out of the telescope so it can be seen or further processed. Or, alternately, a sensor held above the primary mirror converts the image to an electrical signal that is delivered to a computer.

The entire Pro Git book, written by Scott Chacon and Ben Straub and published by Apress, is available here. All content is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 3.0 license. Print versions of the book are available on Amazon.com.

When life gives you lemons, write better error messages

May 2021 Occupation Profiles

Slow Roads - Endless Driving

At a macro level, you learn programming concepts that are largely transferable regardless of language. The syntax may differ, but the core ideas are still the same. This can include things like: data-structures (arrays, objects, modules, hashes), algorithms (searching, sorting), architecture (design patterns, state management) and even performance optimizations (e.g. eager vs lazy evaluation, memoization, caching, lazy-loading etc). These are concepts you’ll use so frequently that knowing them backwards can have a lot of value.

The Threading Module

1st solution: add root to sys.path

Open Token and Secret Key

An unofficial Python client implementation of the SwitchBot API.

Python provides a getopt module that helps you parse command-line options and arguments.

Features

Peek — The Ultimate Quick Look Extension

This repository contains Ansible examples developed to support different sections of Ansible for DevOps, a book on Ansible by Jeff Geerling.

Why do Makefiles exist?

How to install Ansible

By doing open source contributions, you will learn a lot. It allows you to become a part of the open-source community. It can be hard at the beginning, but it’s definitely worth it.

GitHub uses a syntax called Markdown to format text. As many Python folks use GitHub, here’s a handy reference to how Markdown encodes the typical document formats including bold/italic/lists and much more – Twitter (open for full two page reference).

Running Virtual Machines Under Vagrant on the New Mac M1

The Internet Pi runs Pi-hole for DNS privacy and ad-blocking, and Prometheus and Grafana to provide Internet connection monitoring dashboards.

The process of changing the DNS server on your Raspberry Pi is a pretty simple process and involves modifying a single file. In addition to showing you what file you will need to edit, we will also walk you through a couple of methods of ensuring your Raspberry Pi is using your newly set DNS.

Microsoft announces the availability of the Python and Jupyter extensions for Visual Studio @Code - August 2022. Updates include a new Python Tools extension template, Web app debug setups that are automatically generated and more. #Python #Jupyter

sftp sync extension for VS Code

A Docker-based Dev Environment

"Docker-composing" a Python 3 Flask App Line-by-Line

New installation¶

Debian versionCode nameRelease date

Welcome to the PurpleAir API

Lingon X 8 released!

In computer networking, link aggregation is the combining (aggregating) of multiple network connections in parallel by any of several methods, in order to increase throughput beyond what a single connection could sustain, to provide redundancy in case one of the links should fail, or both. A link aggregation group (LAG) is the combined collection of physical ports.

Join me in an hour as we review the new @pimoroni Enviro range of sensors, all of which have the @Raspberry_Pi Pico W aboard. It's a hot one today, so this seemed an appropriate show! #sensors #micropython #raspberrypi #picow #influxdb #nodered #grafana

Synology NAS supports multi-LAN, allowing you to combine those LAN interfaces using the Link Aggregation technology. Link Aggregation increases the bandwidth of your Synology NAS by aggregating multiple network interfaces and provides traffic failover to maintain network connection in case the connection is down.

Adaptive Load Balancing: This mode optimizes the network traffic received and sent by Synology NAS devices regardless of whether Link Aggregation is enabled or not. To avoid unexpected circumstances, do not enable Link Aggregation even though it is supported.

Link Aggregation (LACP) will allow you to increase the bandwidth TO and FROM your Synology NAS. In summary, this will allow more clients to send data to and from your NAS without decreased performance. To be clear, this will not double the network speed for a single client.

UniFi Comparison Charts

3d resources to 3d print these compliant mechanisms

I visited the Compliant Mechanisms Research group at Brigham Young University and spoke to Professor Larry Howell:

The kilogram, mole, kelvin, and ampere will be redefined by physical constants

RadioShackCatalogs.com is primarily an archive of old RadioShack catalogs from 1939-2011.

Summary

Casey Handmer's plan to refill the Colorado River from the Pacific with just 15GW of power.

Custom PC

I went with Flickr. It turns out I already had an account… since 2005. Heh.

useful linux commands

The Raspberry Pi is not limited to Raspberry Pi OS. It’s the official distribution, but is far from being the only one. Depending on the model you use, your goals, and your personal preferences, it might be a good idea to examine other options. I tested all of the other options and share my favorites in this post, which should be a great starting point for you.

Apple used the Razer Blade 15 Advanced as a point of comparison for the performance of the M1 Max chip. Here's how the rest of the notebook compares against the 16-inch MacBook Pro.

The Razer Blade 14 has been updated for 2022 to make it more powerful, but it has to fight with the 14-inch MacBook Pro as a creator's choice notebook. Here's how the two laptops compare.

Mechanical Watch

Autofocus Variations Can Ruin Your Focus Accuracy

This drone fly-through of Tesla's new factory in Berlin is amazing. I've never seen anything quite like this – the drone flies through cars being assembled and machinery in between cycles of stamping out parts.

The Mad Ned Memo covers the development of computer technology over the past 40 years to the present day, from someone who has been there through it all. Stories and commentary on the early years of the microprocessor and home computer, the gaming revolution from arcade to mobile platform, hardware and software hacking adventures, and the titanic and sometimes strange shifts in technology that we’ve seen in our lives.

resolution screen sizes for iPhone

Rsync, or Remote Sync, is a free command-line tool that lets you transfer files and directories to local and remote destinations. Rsync is used for mirroring, performing backups, or migrating data to other servers.

Use Scriptable app to run javascript in a widget on your iOS device.

How Many Decimals of Pi Do We Really Need? 3.141592653589793. That’s it. For the whole visible universe!

The Intel Split

This plugin allows the use of Jinja2 directives inside your Pelican articles and pages.

Why RealFaviconGenerator

This plugin generates an index for searching content on a Pelican-powered site.

Current list of Pelican plug-ins on GitHub

European civilization is built on ham and cheese, which allowed protein to be stored throughout the icy winters.

SQLite is a commonly misunderstood database. I myself first heard of the database when I was experimenting with android app development. My thoughts were that since the database was a single file and its name had lite in it, that it could not be taken seriously. But I could not have been more wrong. Now I love sqlite and use it for much of my scientific research. Sqlite is everywhere. It is on every android phone, airplanes, and the storage for many computer applications. The sqlite website details when using sqlite would be appropriate to use and can be summarized with these three questions.

And if you haven't seen this, well then. Let's fix that right now. Via @Oatmeal.

Raspberry Pi Zero W

The Expanse UI Design

The book that started it all for me. Sometime around 1979 #kim1 #6502 #robot #diy #developer

Studio Ghibli just announced they’ll be uploading 50 free stills from each of their movies: “feel free to use them as you wish, within the bounds of common sense”

@photonstorm Thanks to @thomaspalef for this excellent resource. . Worth every penny.

The Anatomy of the Underwater Fiber Optic Cables That Connect the Internet

An Explanation for Why People Don’t Often See ‘B’ Batteries

How should I parse user input in a text adventure game? - Game Development Stack Exchange

A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods

Just gives you hope about the whole world...