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.

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.

To those who argue "my VPN can't track me because I pay them in bitcoin":

You know they have your IP address, right?

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.

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.

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.

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

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??

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.

A thing that's been stuck in my brain for a while:

A couple weeks ago, @Cory Doctorow wrote this blog post about how AI shouldn't be used to write code (edit: among other things). I agree with his rationale, but I can't help but be reminded of a (perhaps apocryphal) story I once heard about a similar argument being made against compilers in the early days of computing. The same kinds of arguments could've been made back then.

Building a small personal project in #Rust to teach myself the language. As I was looking over my code, I noticed a mistake I'd made that technically worked, but was kind of silly so I fixed it.

This got me to wondering if Rust had a linter (it does) because surely I'd made other similar rookie mistakes. I found the linter and ran it on my project. It came back with one result that I already knew about: a value in a struct that doesn't get read because I haven't written that code yet. That was it.

I was surprised. It's still a very small project, but perhaps I'm a more competent developer than I give myself credit for.

Does time::OffsetDateTime::now_local() always fail in a testing context or something? It keeps returning Err(IndeterminateOffset).
#rust

Edit: it's working fine when I use it in src/main.rs.

More musings on #Rust:

I wonder if it would be possible to write an #SNES #ROM in Rust. It seems like exactly the kind of resource-constrained system that would be a prime candidate for that sort of thing. Unfortunately, it seems that the SNES used a custom processor, so it's very possible that I won't be able to specify it as a compile target. A quick search reveals that many people have made SNES emulators in Rust, but at a glace, I see nothing about writing ROMS.

I believe the original NES used an off-the-shelf processor (6502 if memory serves?). Perhaps that's more likely to be supported, but that may be a little too resource constrained.

I shall have to dig deeper into this idea. I love the idea of building a custom ROM rather than just pirating something off the internet.

Has anyone done anything like this? Links to any relevant resources would be very much appreciated.

Newbie #Rust question time:

I wan to use the current_local_offset function from the time library, but I apparently need to import it into my project with the local-offset feature.

I assume I need to specify this in Cargo.toml but for the life of me, I can't figure out how. Can someone point me in the right direction?