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System was down for a good chunk of the day because the main drive suddenly and unexpectedly became full. System is back up and running, but taking a while to resynchronize with the rest of the network.

Hopefully things should level out in a few hours.



electronics ramblings, profanity

Well shit.

I got the parts I ordered from DigiKey. I didn't realize how small they were. I've soldered SMT parts before, but I don't know if I have a steady enough hand to do these ones by hand. 🙁

Good thing I only ordered a few.




shower thought (dark)
What if the reason we've never seen a time traveler isn't because it's impossible, but because humanity is going to wipe itself out before anyone figures out how?
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

shower thought (less light alternative)

Sensitive content



electronics hobby ramblings

So, I was bemoaning the fact that finding chips in a DIP format is getting harder and harder because everything's moving to SMT. I don't hate SMT chips, but they make it rather difficult to play with them on a breadboard before using them in a project.

It just occurred to me that if I'm going to the trouble of designing a PCB in the first place, nothing stops me from sticking a single chip on a PCB with a bunch of pin headers to turn it into a quick and dirty "DIP chip" for experimenting with on a breadboard. I can even do this with a bunch of different chips on a single PCB that breaks out into multiple different units.

I'm sure I'm not the first person to have thought of this, but it was definitely an "aha" moment for me.



I love it when the photo of a component and the schematic drawing on the data sheet disagree with each other.

(e.g.: digikey.ca/en/products/detail/…)

Guess I'll have to wait 'till I have the physical component in my possession to find out for sure.



It's been a while, but I just put a DigiKey order through. Gonna build a thing!





For all the filtering options that DigiKey has on their web site, I wish you could filter based on minimum order quantity.

No, I do not want to buy 3000 voltage regulators.



bear/man
So, I mentioned the whole bear/man debate to Katy, and she gave a perspective I hadn't even thought to consider. Sharing (paraphrased) with her permission:
When a bear attacks you, you generally die and then it's over. When a man attacks, you live with that trauma for life.



The great thing about being an adult is that if you want to have candy for dinner, nobody is going to stop you.

The terrible thing about being an adult is that if you want to have candy for dinner, nobody is going to stop you.




Is anyone else running the community edition of #Nextcloud getting a notification in the Android app that their server is at "end of life" and to upgrade despite being on the latest version? Are they killing off the community edition or something?

𝚛𝚊𝚝 reshared this.

in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

Yes, Just checked. I am. I'm running a #self-hosted #nextcloud instance, version 25.0.10. I've been scared of update since I saw an issue a month or so ago with a bug that scared me (can't recall details sorry!)

Edit... just re-read this...I'm not latest version!

This entry was edited (7 months ago)
in reply to Tom

@Tom I always do a backup immediately before an update in the event that something goes sideways. So far, I've never had to roll back, but it's a good thing to do regardless.
@Tom
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

Yep, however the frequency of upgrades does also scare me. Move fast and break stuff! I must upgrade...v29...but four versions to hop!
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

No, this shouldn't happen. What Nextcloud version do you use? Sometimes, if dependencies like the min. PHP version changes, the server doesn't show the update if the dependencies are not met. In such a situation it might look like you are on the latest version, while you are not.
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

This explains it, Nc25 is out of life since October 2023, see the link I posted. The latest version is Nc29. I assume that you need to update your PHP version in order to update your Nextcloud.
in reply to Björn Schießle

Here you can find the latest versions and compare it to your version: github.com/nextcloud/server/wi…
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

As said, one explanation would be that you run PHP 7.4 which was deprecated in Nextxloud 25 and is no longer supported in Nextxloud 26. In this case you are on "the latest version for your system" but not on the latest in general
in reply to Björn Schießle

@Björn Schießle I think I figured out my problem. I'm running an older version of PHP that is no longer supported by later versions.

Edit: It irks me that it didn't warn me about this before now though.



More Rust stuff

Something that's been bothering me about lifetimes.

When I got to this section in the book, I couldn't (and still can't) understand why it's necessary to specify lifetimes for the references a struct holds. I mean, if I have:

struct Foo<'a> {
    bar: &'a String,
}

Shouldn't it just be assumed that the data referenced by Foo::bar should have to live at least as long as the Foo object itself? Why does this have to be explicitly stated? Is there some scenario where you would want this to not be the case?

Edit: formatting fix

in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

Lifetime elision only applies on function signatures. It might be because no one has done the work? Though I think it's nice to be explicit that the struct holds a reference to something.

Explicit lifetimes would be necessary for a struct with multiple references (or I guess a rule that says they're either all the same or all unique). These are not the same:

struct Foo<'a> {
  bar: &'a String,
  baz: &'a String,
}
struct Foo<'a, 'b> {
  bar: &'a String,
  baz: &'b String,
}

More info on the elision rules is at the Rustonomicon.
in reply to Ryan Frame

@Ryan Frame This makes sense. One would think however that they could infer it if there's only one reference in the struct the say way you don't have to specify a lifetime for methods that only have a &self and return a reference.


TikTok ban
The problem isn't just TikTok. All corporate-owned social media spies on you. That's why you shouldn't use any of it. Full stop.
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

So you'd put up with the sound of crickets to spite them all. Good luck with that.

I need to know what is going on. I don't have cable tv (a real corporate problem) and my "social media" include my local weather info (via Youtube) as does a lot of my news sources etc.

And ALL my interests are in things that no longer have magazines or newspapers exclusive to them, instead them have Podcasts, Youtube Channels, etc. Same with most of the folks I communicate with in my life (since I lost so many friends and relatives to the Pandemic).

It's not the 1990s anymore.

in reply to Joseph Teller

@Joseph Teller That's not really likely to happen though, is it? At least not in the near future. Besides, if everyone jumped ship, there would be no content there to miss out on to begin with.

My original point though was that singling out TikTok as the only problem is rather silly.





Why does my HDMI TV overscan? This made sense in the CRT days, but I can't see any reason for it with HDMI.




Reading up on NES ROM programming.

For some reason, memory addresses 0x0000-0x07ff are mirrored three times (for a total of four identical regions of memory). In a system with such a small amount of addressable memory, why would anyone do that??



Wait, the 6502's stack pointer is eight bits? I knew it was resource constrained, but damn!
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

The largest embedded assembly projects I wrote used about 20 bytes of stack at most. But I didn't use C or recursive functions, which would been an exponentially larger stack crasher
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

@Jonathan Lamothe Depending on the specific system, complex asynchronous code via timer interrupts (or raster interrupts, or I/O interrupts) is possible, but only one "thread" should use the stack.

For example, by default the Commodore 64 has a timer interrupt to trigger code to handle keyboard scanning, blinking the cursor, and other stuff. It's a non-trivial amount of code, but it does not mess with the stack.






mh: ADHD

God damned #ADHD brain.

I either get super hyper-focused on one project, to the detriment of other things (like eating and sleeping) or I'm so scattered between twenty things that I don't get anything meaningful accomplished on any of them.

#ADHD


Only in Stardew Valley does eating a jar of mayonnaise make you healthier.

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