🇨🇦 tunetardis

I saw one of these on display at the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix AZ, but never heard one played. It’s so huge you can’t reach those frets at the top there, so the inventor had to come up with a keyed mechanism you see the guy working in the photo.

I see what you’re getting at here. The solar constant is the solar constant. If you’ve got a perfect angle to the sun, you should be getting the same amount of power regardless of latitude. I mean I suppose it’s possible there might be a slight attenuation with the sun at a lower angle due to there being more atmosphere to traverse? Otoh solar panels don’t function as efficiently at high temperatures, so it’s possible they may be more efficient in some cases.

But you have to consider that averaged out, you’re looking at shorter daylight hours overall at high latitudes, even if there are periods in mid-summer when days can be super long, so that’s a consideration. So yes, the panels should pull in similar amounts of power while the sun is up, but it’s not up as much.

I work with 32MHz microcontrollers at work and you can do plenty with them. It’s a different world from say general CPUs where speed is king. You’re often more concerned about timing reproducibility than outright clock rates. There are also considerations about power consumption, electrical noise, functioning in extreme environments, etc. that may inform your decision to go with one controller over another.

This makes me think of my late grandfather. He had been a civil engineer for the US Navy who spent several years working in the Panama Canal Zone. He told me this story of a senator showing up one day with cost-cutting on his mind. He focused on one line in the budget: mosquito control. “Mosquitoes? There are no mosquitoes here! What a colossal waste of money!” The whole area became pretty much unliveable within a year of his returning to Washington.

Thanks, I’ll give that a shot.

Ah ok, thanks!

Thanks, it makes me feel relieved to hear I’m not the only one finding it a little overwhelming! Previously, I had been using chatgpt and the like where I would be hunting for the answer to a particularly esoteric programming question. I’ve had a fair amount of success with that, though occasionally I would catch it in the act of contradicting itself, so I’ve learned you have to follow up on it a bit.

I turned on copilot in VSCode for the first time this week. The results so far have been less than stellar. It’s batting about .100 in terms of completing code the way I intended. Now, people tell me it needs to learn your ways, so I’m going to give it a chance. But one thing it has done is replaced the normal auto-completion which showed you what sort of arguments a function takes with something that is sometimes dead wrong. Like the code will not even compile with the suggested args.

It also has a knack for making me forget what I was trying to do. It will show me something like the left side picture with a nice rail stretching off into the distance when I had intended it to turn, and then I can’t remember whether I wanted to go left or right? I guess it’s just something you need to adjust to. Like you need to have a thought fairly firmly in your mind before you begin typing so that you can react to the AI code in a reasonable way? It may occasionally be better than what you have it mind, but you need to keep the original idea in your head for comparison purposes. I’m not good at that yet.

What caused the jump in the first place? I only just opened an account myself because the folks who run my home instance lemmy.ca started up pixelfed.ca about a week ago and I decided to check it out.

I was actually in both the Bay Area and Portland last month and have to agree. Let Oregon have this one. Even the people in Portland had bigfoot energy. Big scruffy men with tons of facial hair, flannel, and those longshoreman beanies. And I actually picked up a Sasquatch field guide someplace that was the most amazingly detailed document on a cryptid I’d ever seen.

Well the gist of the interview was that American intelligence services are in chaos right now after their top-level management got expelled and their “eye is no longer on the ball” in terms of threats from Russia, China, etc. with new personnel being brought in who have no clue what’s going on.

I wish it were just an imaginary number.

How’s this for an obscure reference? This reminded me of an episode of Max Headroom in which the wunderkind Bryce invented a robotic fly with a spycam that could be used to literally bug a room. They send it on a mission to uncover an evil plot and everyone is excitedly crowded around the screen and heaping praise on it. Then it manages to sneak into the evil lair where it promptly gets swatted, leaving Bryce shocked and devastated.

Darn, I was kind of hoping for a viking raid of Mar-a-Lago followed by some pillaging up and down the gulf coast. Get some pirates back in the Caribbean and rename the Gulf to something even more obnoxious.

Oh ok. Thanks for the clarification. I couldn’t remember the exact details.

Wow, I did not know about the OLED with the bigger screen and presumably better battery life. I really want one now!

I think I read somewhere that Factorio is more efficient running under Linux/Mac because it takes advantage of some quirk in the Unix forking mechanism that Windows can’t use? I don’t know if this means it would burn through battery even faster if the SD ran Windows, but it wouldn’t surprise me…

Mine says 99% health. I don’t know how reliable a metric that is?

Lately, I’ve been playing on battery exclusively and basically going with the 1 gaming session = 1 battery charge regimen to self-regulate. I may need to re-evaluate this as the battery ages, but it’s good discipline for me at the moment…

For instance, in February 2023, the hosting giant disclosed that unknown attackers stole source code and installed malware on compromised servers after breaching its cPanel shared hosting environment in a multi-year breach.

I assumed their security for this was to keep shuffling around their web site to make that cPanel stuff impossible to find? It’s like a store that keeps rearranging their floor inventory. I dread having to do anything with cPanel. Kudos to the hackers who managed to work it out.

Something to be said for the wfh movement too.