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So a new job opportunity didn't pan out because it caused me a meltdown and a depressive episode the likes of which I haven't felt since the last worst day of my life.
This means I will be trying to find work that doesn't trigger all my mental health problems at once, which is going to be so so much harder. I am disabled and unqualified for most things.
It would save me if I started getting sales more regularly than once every couple months. If you (yes, you!) would be interested in buying a crocheted *anything,* whether I have it in my store or not, please hit me up!!! I will do requests!!! I can also do embroidery!! I can embroider a penis if you want!!!
Please boost my posts and give me a follow and think about if you'd like to buy something. I'm feeling... so bad right now. So so bad. So so so bad.
#actuallyautistic #disability #DisabilityPrideMonth #depression
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Brief outage because the new server accidentally came disconnected from power.
Everything's back up. Anxiety levels returning to normal.
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Can anyone in Waterloo region recommend a place (such as a coffee shop) where one can just sit down with a book for a while? I don't mind if I have to buy a coffee or something. Just looking for a change of scenery.
There's always the library, but the nearest one to me is in a high school, and I feel weird about loitering around there.
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"Another person who won't debate me because they can't handle my arguments."
No friend, another person who won't debate you because you're freaking exhausting and I just can't be bothered... but you keep telling yourself that.
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while we've managed to scrimp and save to make it to kitsune tails' release day, releasing august 1st means we won't see any money for almost 2 months until its the end of september
our other games are currently on sale on itch at eniko.itch.io/ and steam at store.steampowered.com/bundle/… and buying some or all of them would help tremendously
EDIT: just for clarity this is a "we're worried about making rent" situation and not "oh no the business' coffers are looking a little bit empty"
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![[In voice of 90s GameShow Host] “Come one down to the DATA CENTER. We have..”
crashy bois (servers)
oxygen theif (halogen)
freezy boi (HVAC)
spagoot (bad cable mgmt)
fire hazard (high BTU rack mount)
depressing clouds (cisco appliances)
via: u/herecomesthedrums](https://social.jlamothe.net/photo/preview/640/4711066 "[In voice of 90s GameShow Host] “Come one down to the DATA CENTER. We have..”
crashy bois (servers)
oxygen theif (halogen)
freezy boi (HVAC)
spagoot (bad cable mgmt)
fire hazard (high BTU rack mount)
depressing clouds (cisco appliances)
via: u/herecomesthedrums")
A while ago I asked a question of the #ActuallyAutistic and #ADHD communities on my old Fosstodon account and got some pretty good feedback, so now that I'm back in my regular fedi home, I figured I'd do so again (as before, boosts welcome).
I find that when something is stressing me out, I'll obsess over it until I've either solved the problem or it overwhelms me to a point where I need to completely disengage (at least for a time). Often when this happens, loved ones will notice my distress and try to help in the form of asking questions or making suggestions. The problem is that if I'm in problem-solving mode it derails my train of thought, and if I'm in "disengage" mode it prevents me from... well, disengaging.
This frequently results in me responding in ways that are... unpleasant for all persons involved. I've identified this as a problem and am trying to find better ways of handling such situations, but it's easier said than done. Has anyone else experienced this? Are there any good strategies for dealing with it?
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@loose cannon I hadn't considered that, nor in fact did I realize it was a thing to consider.
The most recent example was when this server failed. It's actually what prompted me to start asking. In addition to being a fedi server, it also runs a bunch of other services I depend on: calendar, file synchronization, contacts, to-do list, etc. All stuff I use to make navigating everyday life possible. Took me four days to fix (should've taken two, but I had to keep taking mental health breaks).
This was an extreme example, but it usually happens when something disrupts my regular routine, like losing my phone or keys.
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One of my pet peeves: when someone (often an advertiser) says that something is "chemical-free".
What the hell does that even mean?
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Happy #DisabilityPrideMonth! 🌈
Invisible disabilities are of course included ❤️.
#MastoArt #ComicArt #Illustration
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Me in the morning before my #ADHD meds have kicked in:
Maybe the ninth time I walk into the bathroom I'll remember to put deodorant on.
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Content from GG is collapsed
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Our local grocery store has a program where you can get a box of assorted discounted produce so long as you're not picky about what's in it. Katy and I had been meaning to try this out for a while, and it's been a pretty good experience so far. We're both creatures of habit, especially where food is concerned, and finding new recipes to figure out how to use the stuff we normally don't have has been rather enjoyable on the whole.
If keeping your grocery bill low is something you're trying to do, I recommend seeing if your local grocer has such a program.
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We got lemons so we decided to make lemonade (not a metaphor). I know you can do this by mixing lemon juice, sugar, and water, but I couldn't remember the ratio. I decided to search the web for "lemonade recipe". All the results had click-baitey titles, so I instead search for "simple lemonade recipe". First step of the first result: "to prevent the sugar from crystallizing at the bottom, start by making a simple syrup."
I hate the internet sometimes.
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@me The thing about powdered sugar is that it should be finer and thus more aggressive about absorbing lemon oil, right? Except that most powdered sugar also has some anti-caking additives to offset how hydrophilic sugar is - often a powdered starch of some kind - and while it doesn't come through in baking, you'll taste it in your lemonade. Avoid my mistake!
bonappetit.com/story/lemoniest…
jeffreymorgenthaler.com/vacuum…
You'll never go back. It's everything you want lemonade to be. 💛🍋
3/3
Vacuum Seal Oleo Saccharum - Jeffrey Morgenthaler
I’ve said this before: I’m a lazy guy, and yet I’m a perfectionist. I want my cocktails perfectly-prepared, but I’d really rather not work too hard.Jeffrey Morgenthaler
Outage Recovery
The machine that this node was running on failed on 2 Jul 2024. A new machine has been acquired and a restore from backup was performed. It'll probably take a couple days for the database to settle as it re-synchronizes with the rest of the network.
Edit: grammar (proofreading fail)
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I have a cheap multimeter because I do not require one frequently enough to invest in a decent one. I noticed something interesting though: there are a lot of seemingly metallic things in my apartment that are surprisingly good insulators? (e.g.: a (brass?) doorknob)
I thought the multimeter was the problem, but when I measure something like a wire, it seems to be okay. Is this normal?
I'll have to check if I have any spare resistors with known values laying around to better test the meter.
@𝕕𝕚𝕒𝕟𝕖𝕒 🏳️⚧️🦋 I thought maybe it was some sort of protective coating, but this makes more sense. I also found this potential explanation: techiescientist.com/does-brass…
Perhaps a combination of factors.
Need a brief and accessible explainer about the actual harms of AI?
Show folks this:
m.youtube.com/watch?v=TtVJ4JDM…
@thejuicemedia hitting it out of the park, yet again.
#ai #corporations #corporatocracy #billionaires #climateCrisis #BigTech #SiliconValley
Honest Government Ad | AI
The Government™ has made an ad about the existential threat that AI poses to humanity, and it’s surprisingly honest and informative👉 Help us keep Government...YouTube
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Hilarious, this video takes forever to load on Firefox with tracking and ads disabled (on a symmetrical gig connection). Open up Chrome, and away it goes. @thejuicemedia should use a different video platform, IMO.
Was a great video to watch and contribute to closed Google AI with 🙂
Really on point, it always comes down to the fact, that it's not the tool itself that's an issue, but rather how it's being used. Seeing who is in control of the biggest AI products currently and what's the track record of these companies so far, this is very worrying.
Also, it's disturbing that even though these tools are supposed to make work more efficient, the time savings seem to not be passed on to the workers, but rather used to make them do more. This pursuit of constant growth feels like the underlying issue of many current problems.
Just checked the mail and a day that I have been dreading is coming to pass. My family doctor is retiring.
There's a new doctor taking on his patients, but my current doctor's records are all on paper and the new one's are digital. I need to have my records digitized (at my own expense) to have them carried over.
It gets even better though. I've been assured that the company that will manage this digital transition is "physician-managed" and my records will be "stored securely". I fully trust my doctor's medical opinion, but as for opsec... well... one of the options is essentially: "please write all your sensitive PII on this request form and email it to us in plaintext." Yes, I can drop the form off in person, but that's rather beside the point.
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A piece of information that is repeated frequently enough will have a tendency to assert itself as true in the subconscious mind. This is a fact that is frequently exploited by propagandists.
Perhaps reminding people of this frequently enough will help to defend them against the tactic (with the unfortunate side-effect of being really annoying).
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Oh right, the debate...
I think I'm gonna step away from my feed for a bit. I just don't have the mental bandwidth to deal with it atm.
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It's actually annoying in ghci because the warning gets repeated every time you define something.
--pedantic flag though (which turns warnings into errors).Jeremy List likes this.
🤔🤔🤔🤔
About a year ago, my wife took a road trip to Seattle. I signed up for WA state's "GoodToGo" app to pay for toll usage. I get a monthly statement now about our $0 balance as we don't frequent WA.
I just logged in. And Google alerted me that the password I used had recently been found in a data breach.
🤔🤔🤔🤔
It's a unique, 32-character random password stored in #1Password. I don't use it anywhere else...
Anyone want to tell the state of WA their toll payment system has been breached?
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User-agent: *<br>Disallow: /<br>threads.net/robots.txt
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ive said it before and I'll say it again
we call it AdBlocking because that's what most people use it for
but it's really just a way to control what elements do and do not display on all websites or some
screen reader users often need to block some elements that are NOT ads to make a site functional (although often ads as well)
Banning ad blockers is not just a privacy concern or a quality of life concern or an Internet safety from malicious ads concern.
It's an accessibility concern
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Finally, USB-C is the standard everything uses.
my 10-year-old Kindle: But you still have a bunch of USB micro-B cables.
my bike light: And hang onto any USB mini-B cables.
the printer that still uses USB-B:
Hey guys!
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I have recently bought a bunch of different USBC to usb b (regular, mini and micro) with varying success.
I still have my cables, I I'm hoping to find the adapters that work flawlessly so I can put that one box in long term storage. I will never actually throw them out, I have learned that lesson. Never throw out unused cables. its a trap.
Entitled weirdo behaviour
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You've got plenty of ways to mute, block, and filter your timeline to curate it for yourself. Trying to change the behaviour of other people to suit your tastes or inject your personal beefs is overstepping
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~ Let's make RAM at home, thread #2 ~
In this part:
* Power [source] struggles,
* B-H curve plotting [attempts],
* How [not] to make a magnetic core for memory
* Working "made at home, no rare components needed" DIY magnetic core memory element
🧵
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Recap of the previous episode:
* We are trying to make a DIY computer random access memory. It doesn't have to be awesome, but it has to work and it has to be somewhat "made at home".
* It is quite possible to use DIY valves and capacitors to store bits, but it is expensive and potentially dangerous.
* So we're exploring obsolete memory technologies to see if there is anything cool we've lost/forgotten!
* One such type of memory, magnetic core memory, used to be the dominant type of RAM in computers until 70s.
* The idea is simple: the data is stored as magnetic field in the magnetic materials (such as ferrites). A magnetic ring can be magnetized in two directions at will, and a "sense" wire can read the direction of the magnetization.
* We made a simple circuit for driving 1 bit of commercially manufactured core memory.
* We tried to make our own cores from different materials but failed.
Phew... But that was in the previous thread, and this time we had better luck!
You probably will agree that it is quite hard to improve on the materials when the experimental setup does not allow to test for the properties of said materials 😀
The properties of the DIY cores we want to evaluate are "retentivity" and "coercivity" of a magnetic material. We want material to be "retentive" (B) - storing magnetism after external field is gone, yet we want the material to be "coercive" (H) - changing its magnetic field after being affected by an external magnetic field.
The test setup for this is called "B-H curve plotter" or "B-H core prober". To plot a B-H curve (and learn the properties of our material), we generally need to:
1) Apply known alternating current to the first winding around the core,
2) Measure voltage on the second winding around the core,
3) Integrate the voltage over time and plot it as X-Y chart
And you know what, we're about to hit a major roadblock right with the step one!
In the last thread I have mentioned that commercially available cores of the late 70s require currents of around 0.5A to switch their magnetization. That does not sound like a lot (1.5V AA battery can sustain this current for 2-3 hours).
But DIY cores are bigger, and they require bigger currents. Ideally, something like 2-3 Amps to get us started. On top of that, low voltages are not very convenient to work with, so we want 5V or even 12V.
12V at 3A means that we are going to dissipate 36 Watts in peak - comparable to a small LED TV, guitar amp or an inkjet printer - over a relatively small load and relatively thin wires.
And oh did I mention it must be alternating current for B-H tests? That means we cannot use our regular lab power source. Most signal generators don't expect currents over ~100mA. Using regular 220V AC from the plug sounds risky. What do we do? What _can_ we do?
We had a step-down transformer lying around, scavenged from one thing or another. It had 5:1 transformation ratio, so we figured if we use the maximum voltage from the signal generator - 20V in amplitude, from -10V to +10V - we will get somewhat decent -2V to +2V signal from the transformer, and with the same power consumed we should get ~five times more current.
The left winding of the core connected to the signal source, and we're measuring current by measuring voltage on a known resistor - that's X axis.The right winding is connected to RC-integrator, which is what we measure for Y axis.
There is a formula for calculating the parameters of the RC integrator (clever, using passive components to do maths, because our oscilloscope cannot do maths). The only capacitor with the desired properties we had was super tiny, it was quite a challenge to solder.
We started the test bench in oscilloscope 2 channel mode, and we could clearly see "spikes" up and down in the output winding of the commercially made core that correlated with the waves of the test signal. That means running the AC current through the magnetic core keeps re-magnetizing it in a loop, and we can see it!
Switching the oscilloscope in the X-Y mode, we were hoping to see pretty B-H curve, just like on the Wikipedia page, but the voltage and the current we have are way to low and so the changes are barely registered by our scope.
It seems we cannot avoid investing in the test equipment, after all! Buying a ready-made device would cost us £200 or more, so we will try to build one ourselves.
(When I say "we" it means "my fiancee and me", by the way!)
Power struggles are not exclusive for AC currents. To control my tiny magnetically programmable and erasable memories, I need a source of current that:
1) Can be adjusted in the range of 0.5-2 amps,
2) Can be turned on for a very short time (it takes the core 1-2 microseconds to fully switch) to reduce average power consumption,
3) Turns on really fast (hundred nanoseconds ideally) so the changes in the voltage caused by the core could be measured reliably.
Last time I used a current source from a 2N2222 transistor that I controlled with Arduino. This transistor can barely stomach 0.5A, and indeed I destroyed two of these by over-current.
This time, as a current source, I wanted to try a salvaged Traco Power source that has a "switch on/off" control pin. As you can see, voltage rises to half the target really fast, but then climbs up to the target voltage for ~50 milliseconds! With this voltage curve, even the commercially manufactured core displays zero "memory" characteristics.
The AC power source/H-B core prober is in the process of making, but I still wanted to experiment with the cores I have made, as well as with some new designs. For now, I am using an analogue power source, and try to filter out the contact bounce with capacitors. The current from the source goes straight through the core, and the oscilloscope is connected to the second ("sense") winding. It is wonky, but it works as a test bench.
The steel-ferrite winding core I've made last time clearly has wrong qualities. But from what I have seen in reference books and papers, nickel core should possess the desired properties.
"Pure nickel" (as per seller description) I have used last time turned out to be "nickel silver", or 60% copper, 20% nickel and 20% zinc. This time I am moderately confident I have a strip of nickel. I need to make sure that the "core" - the ring - has no air gaps in the ring, otherwise it won't work.
It seems the simplest way to do this is drilling. I cut the ring to the shape with scissors.
The core? Doesn't work as a memory element, but works as a poor transformer.
This is a good sign. I could add the current, or I could add more turns of wire around the core, and it should improve the magnetic field we generate.
We prepare two test rings - one drilled, and one cold-hammered. I wind two windings of 10 turns each on them, using 0.38mm copper wire for transformers (should be enough for 0.5A).
😢 😢 😢
The windings are shorted. Edges of nickel are too sharp, they scratch the insulation around the copper wires during the winding.
I pack nickel rings in epoxy, and drill the holes in the epoxy. Epoxy is brittle, parts of it fall off immediately. I try to re-wind the cores, but the windings are shorted AGAIN.
😢 😢 😢 😢 😢
As a last ditch effort, I decide to make a BIGGER nickel ring and SHRINKWRAP IT.
In the hindsight, using some sort of kapton tape probably would have worked better. Having bigger nickel sheets would allow for drilling bigger air gap free ring, too.
But I use what I have. I twist the shrink wrap, and wind 15 turns, two wires.
No shorts, yatta!
It is not surprising that this magnetic core memory element works. Nickel should have coercivity comparable to ferrite magnets. It has been used as a test medium for original twistor magnetic memory.
But it is also surprising that such a makeshift memory element actually does the job. You can see the difference between "unchanged" magnetic field reads and "changed" magnetic field reads - the voltage changes much slower. With proper filtering and amplifying, it can be reliably used as a memory element.
Switching time is close to 50 microseconds - which is a hundred times worse than commercially made core and its 500 nanoseconds.
But 50 microseconds means we theoretically could switch this core up to 20,000 times per second. Running this (or a similar-made core) at 10 kHz doesn't sound impossible.
This is twice as fast as ENIAC, and about ten times as fast as Mark 1.
</thread>
The experiment isn't over yet! Harder, better, faster, stronger!
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Anyhow, I initially thought I wanted high inductance factor cores, but by trying eight cores of the same size but with different ferrite materials and inductance factors, it turned out that low inductance works much better for this
@Nina Kalinina On top of this, that's 500mA per bit. If you want to update a whole octet at once, that's 4A, no?
I mean, I don't think you can typically read/write multiple bits in a ferrite core system simultaneously, but you could do this by interleaving the bits across multiple smaller banks.
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Though this only explains how some types of RAM work, like MRAM. If you want a DRAM experiment, you can make a test bench with a transistor and capacitor, and for SRAM you need to build a tiny transistor latch. Could be very interesting to compare how all those perform, even on the macro level: DRAM will be fast and low energy, but will require a refresh; SRAM will be expensive because two transistors; MRAM will be slow by comparison but non-volatile.
@d_prieto I'll be happy to see the photos if you'll make any!
Another thing to try is to find something like a 74xx logic in metal body, carefully decap it, and examine it under a magnifying glass - while it's used in a simple circuit to implement an RS trigger. The chip will need to be protected from the light during the operation.
Mom can we buy some new RAM at microcenter?
No, we have RAM at home.
The RAM at home:
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calling them “rubber bullets” or “foam projectiles” is incredibly misleading
they should be considered “rubber coated” at best
the core is still a slug of metal, so all the coating does is reduce the penetrative capability
the trauma inflicted is still arm-, rib- or skull-fracturingly massive
imagine being beaten half to death with a rubber-coated hammer. do you care that it was rubber coated?
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Dave Smith
in reply to mos_8502 :verified: • • •Joe Cooper 💾
in reply to mos_8502 :verified: • • •