OldSchool

Family and friends aren't impressed by experiments measuring C either...

10 GS/sec is very impressive as far as I'm concerned! One sample every 20mm or so at typical transmission line speed.

That said, anything with a floppy drive scares me because it undeniably indicates how old it is. My SDS7102V is no Tektronix, but an honest 1 GS/sec and at the time, under $200 on eBay.

I am always reminded at a convenience store if I pick up a candy bar that some of my earliest memories include them costing 5 cents in the early 1970s that very quickly became 10 cents and by the late 70s, maybe 25 cents max for a standard size. Today, easily 10x this.

Mine are from 2011, R410a and on the rare occasion that it gets to 22F here in Austin, they are painfully ineffective!

Yep, electricity cost kills its viability in California.

Heat pumps are probably vastly under-installed in the southern part of the US because natural gas has been cheap and plentiful. If you live where natural gas isn't available your fuel option is propane. Propane tracks the price of gasoline, perhaps slightly lower in my experience.

Here in Texas, electricity is only about $0.11/KWH so heat pumps work out like this:

Heat Pump 5.0 COP : $6.50 per MMBtu Natural Gas : $12 - $15 per MMBtu Propane at $3.00 / gallon : $32 per MMBtu

The unfortunate characteristic of heat pumps is that they become less efficient the more you need them, i.e. cold weather, but if weather is generally above freezing, heat pumps are close to their spec range that is based on 47F outdoor temperature.

A buried heat exchanger or a water well makes it a weather-proof geothermal system- this seems like the ideal; if you also need air conditioning it will make your cooling more efficient too.

A very welcome service! Here's a request: I haven't tried the process, so maybe you do, but if you don't offer a variety of PCB materials you will potentially lose opportunity in the mmWave space where antennas are printed on the PCB so the material must be from a subset of those material that are available overall.

Excellent example of a creative effort that even includes the physical satisfaction of building a physical object! Sometimes that makes it way more fun (motivating), and actually probably helps you learn and understand whatever you're doing more completely by involving another sense.

I think in general, there are too few people putting in the deep time that prepares them to be an engineer in their near future. You're practically there already: it will feel the same after perhaps you decide to call yourself a degreed "engineer" but you will have more mental tools, broader knowledge, confidence from having been able to make what you envision, understanding across disciplines. You have a lot to look forward to! As I told my kids: don't let imposter syndrome take hold of you for a moment! You are a rarity in any group.

I'm old, but I get this subjective read: of my friends and even family who had sons, they seemed smaller and less bold than we were 50 years ago.

I worked as consultant at a major west coast-based health insurer in 1993. A family plan, that is, two adults plus any number of children, was $300/month; a figure that wasn't far off from the cost of a studio or 1 BR apartment at that time anywhere but the most expensive coastal cities.

Today, that family plan, even as a HMO, can easily be $3000/month. I would guess that mythical apartment is maybe $1200/month now.

So what happened Health Care? how has the caregiver:administrator ratio changed in the past 30+ years? You've performed about 3x worse than Real Estate in terms of value, yet you're not quite as visible and complained-about because you hide behind employment. Hmmm.

Interesting read, in effect, the live room level defined the envelope of the added reverb in the original discovery at least- I was not aware of this detail.

Perhaps much more subtle and useful, (certainly more timeless...) is the technique of gating the bass guitar sound with the envelope of the kick drum, either reducing the volume of the bass guitar on the drum hit, or the dropping its volume except when the kick drum is hit.

However... those professions are encouraged to donate basic human needs/rights to those without resources. Yes, even tradespeople donate their time to those in need sometimes, but normally only to those in need.

Contrarily, open source can be easily observed to take resources in the form of created capital (ip) for less than full value or no value from the arguably more needy (individuals) and gives them to the not-needy-at-all (business).

This has always confounded me when presented as a first choice when developing something with value. I can't think of any other fields with so much practical value where all participants are practically shamed for not giving away something that is identical to their most commercially valuable skill.

Most of my life has been financed by closed source products I developed on my own to fill a real need and others had it too. Had I given them away, the best I could have hoped for was what, a job offer?

As an electronics-enthusiast kid in the 70's, just before home computers showed up at all, I wished the 555 was for Time Travel