A text I just sent to my mother (presented with no context):

It's sometimes tricky that my wife and mother have very similar looking names and are alphabetically right next to eachother in my contacts. It's astonishing that that hasn't led to more embarrassing mistakes.

Okay, I'm calling uncle.

I've exported the data from the LibreOffice Base database I've been working on to an SQLite file, and I'm just going to write a proper UI for it.

Katy and I like to watch psychological thrillers from time to time, but I've noticed a recurring trope that confuses me. It goes like this: Psychopath lives in an outwardly normal looking house, but has a secret passage to a secret murder basement.

Who built this? Am I to believe he excavated the earth, poured the concrete, ran the (usually admittedly shoddy) electrical himself? Did no contractor at any point ever think to themselves: "this doesn't seem right. Perhaps I should alert the authorities?"

Edit: typo

Edit: I'm an idiot who confused diameter with circumference for some reason. Embarrassing original post follows.

Was playing around a bit with the OpenWeatherMap API. I wanted to know how precise I needed to be with the latitude & longitude values, so I decided to do some quick calculations.

To get a rough idea, I wanted to determine how much a change of one degree of latitude would move in kilometers. I knew the diameter of the earth was something fairly close to 40,000 km but wanted to verify that factoid. I did a quick duckduckgo search, and the top three results (on seemingly separate web sites) all said 12,756 km. In fact one of them hilariously said 12.756 km.

I assume this is the result of LLMs filling the internet with crap, but it's alarming that if I didn't know any better, I'd have just blindly accepted this as fact.

Fine, I'll watch #wwdc24 to see what everyone's been talking about.

Before a few hours ago, I didn't even realize it was happening.

Today I booked an appointment with my optometrist to get my eyes checked. A few hours later I checked the (postal) mail to find a reminder card from them.

I was shocked at how quick the mail was, only to realize it was just a generic reminder that I was due for an eye exam. It was pure coincidence.

Okay, I'm just going to say it because amazingly enough, some people don't seem to get this.

Just because I'm critical of Israel bombing hospitals in Palestine doesn't mean I'm pro-Hamas. I'm not.

It frustrates me that this is a thing that even needs to be said.

Edit: typo

Decided to learn and use #LibreOffice Base for a thing because I thought it would be an easier way to slap a quick and dirty UI on a database than rolling an app from scratch (which I already knew how to do).

I was wrong, but at this point I'm going full sunk cost fallacy.

So, the one advantage to being out of ADHD meds is that I can have a drink without worrying about drug interactions.

I'll take my victories where I can.

Okay, sqlitebrowser (from the #Debian repositories) is actually a pretty decent tool. It provides a nice point-and-click interface that makes working with #sqlite3 databases a little bit nicer. Knowledge of how to write an #SQL query is still a requirement, but it makes creating/editing tables more convenient. Maybe it's well known, but I just discovered it yesterday.

Edit: sqlite browser, not mysqlbrowser

So, I get that #KiCad can't have symbols and footprints for every component ever in their default library, but some of the things they've chosen to include can be a little confusing when compared against what they haven't chosen to include. Here's an example:

There are symbols for the TC74HC00 (quad NAND gate) and TC74HC08 (six channel inverter) series of chips, but none for the TC74HC04 (quad AND gate). Sure, the 74HC00 symbol can fairly trivially be edited into a 74HC04, but still... Am I missing something here?

Fortunately, for this particular board I was able to do some boolean magic with a single 74HC00, so it's a moot point.

I'd try this out on a breadboard, but I don't currently have the necessary parts so I'll just ask instead.

What happens on a 555 timer if you simultaneously drive the trigger low and the threshold high? Is this an error state that could vary from chip to chip?