multioculate

doer of deeds

electronics, applied math, software, ungovernable & unmarketable

Forever a friend of eggbug

pronouns: they/them, it/its

Last Notes

2026-04-06 19:40:01 UTC

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whoa, I had no idea they made something like this. The inclusion of a 10/100M MII Ethernet MAC is awesome, I'd be so stoked to use this as the basis for a permacomputing environment

2025-04-20 16:03:49 UTC

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the biggest reason this never took off is random vs. sequential access. Magnetic tapes (e.g. LTO-9) get about that density at outrageously low prices, but we only use them for specialized archival work, because if you have an 18TB tape and you want data from the middle of it, you need to wait several minutes to mechanically wind the delicate tape to the right spot. If you're reading everything sequentially, that's fine, but you can't do, e.g., fast full text search sequentially.

2024-10-24 23:38:03 UTC

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I'd love to see a technical standards guild controlled democratically by practitioners (even just in principle) that offered free alternatives to the perfectly cromulent but totally inaccessible ISO series. I mean, QR codes are already outrageous to restrict, they have a multi-thousand-dollar paywall for their _chemical processing pipe labeling standard_, which feels like safety data you'd want everyone with even a passing interest to be able to access

2024-10-24 13:16:19 UTC

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the year of Linux on the desktop will come in the next economic downturn when the general public starts doing its computing on last-generation Dell SFF boxes that cost 30$ on the secondary market because they can't upgrade to Win11. Relatedly, no one can convince me that SFF boxes aren't desktops.

2024-10-24 12:54:33 UTC

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what are your feelings about low-temp rework solders, like SnBi eutectic? I've started to use the paste for a bunch of one-offs because it's the only paste I have to hand and I find it nicer than high-temp lead-free most of the time

2024-10-21 06:30:09 UTC

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charmingly, this happened as a happy side-effect of the original numbering scheme being the number of dies the wire had to be drawn to, or at least so I was told by an old HAM who seemed trustworthy.

2024-10-15 22:54:38 UTC

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Re: "do big industrial furnaces have more than two nines of reliability": The phrase "ladle/vessel hot spot" comes to mind. Honorable mention to wet scrap charging, of course.

2024-10-01 02:20:47 UTC

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I'll chip in a couple tens of dollars, especially if it gets me a copy of the photo

2024-09-27 04:53:29 UTC

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This is me, as a post-millenial who went and bought a cheapish house in a generally-held-to-be-unpleasant part of a B-tier US city; my little shop is a 50/50 mix of ancient heavy cast-iron tools from the first half of the 20th century, and modern steel-and-aluminum AliExpress specials. It's all down to your local market and what you can cram into your space (and what you can scavenge from your employer's unguarded trash, of course)

2024-09-19 11:46:28 UTC

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Ok! I'll be at the stream (almost certainly, anyway, I work a mostly-in-person 9-to-5 in mostly-UTC-4 but my sleep schedule is flexible :) )

2024-09-19 11:39:40 UTC

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I've written a bunch of JS and I figure I can pick it up? Maybe that's unfounded confidence

2024-09-19 11:34:53 UTC

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I'm not an amazing frontend dev (my current simulator front-end is a GTK3 thing written in Rust providing KiCAD-like schematic capture and it's usually that or web Canvas for me) but I'd be excited to contribute to a frontend for this -- I'd definitely use it!

2024-09-19 11:28:59 UTC

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this sounds incredible and I'd be thrilled to watch that stream. I've been bolting together a dubious little non-SPICE analog circuit simulator and this would be absolutely fantastic for cosimulation

2024-09-18 04:44:27 UTC

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Americans should found a local counterpart to DIN, and call it NID: New Institute for Destandardization. They can become the new governing body for hydraulic fittings, wood screws, modular shelving, mystery electronic connectors you can't find on AliExpress, and whatever is going on here