jdcarter
Joined 14 years ago
Karma
1,003
Submissions
183
Member since
Mar 26
Recent submissions
Comment · 5 months ago
Adafruit's documentation and software maintenance is also top notch. I just built a new project using an ancient, no-longer-sold Adafruit PiTFT Plus which I had in my parts bin. Their software installer worked great on latest PiOS, and their data sheets had all the dimensions I needed. Outstanding.
Comment · 3 years ago
Brilliant execution. I see so many knob-based inputs on home appliances where they have physical detents but the input encoder does not match the detents. Say you turn the appliance on, it starts at setting one, and you need to turn the dial to setting three. Any reasonable person would expect one physical click to take you to setting two, another click would take you to setting three. But I keep seeing devices where the detents are completely arbitrary and you have no idea how many “clicks” it takes to get to the setting you want. This makes the detents actively misleading.
Comment · 3 years ago
I've had very good luck with the integrated fixtures. I have a number of them in my house and only one has failed (of maybe a dozen). This is a lot lower than the failure rate of LED bulbs. They are far brighter than the lights they replaced, and I personally like their lower profile. I also installed a number of the integrated fixtures in my father's house, and the increased brightness helps him quite a bit (he's 80).
Comment · 3 years ago
I bought many of the Home Depot private label LEDs...and had to replace every single one of them. Outright failure, buzzing, flickering. They're just terrible. I've replaced them with Philips.
Comment · 3 years ago
I'm just the other way: had an Instant Pot for a couple years (which is great) but I bought a Zojirushi rice cooker and LOVE LOVE LOVE it. Japanese medium-grain rice in the Zoji is amazing. I cook 1-2 cups nearly every day to snack on.
Comment · 3 years ago
The red handwriting font is exceptionally good; I'd love to know what that is. It looks very natural, I assume with a ton of ligatures.
Comment · 4 years ago
I used Photoshop and Illustrator for years and years (going back to 1990's) and switched to Affinity about 2 years ago. There's a lot of little details that are different--say, when you grab a resize handle, does aspect ratio stay locked or do you have to hold down shift?--but I found that it wasn't tough to retrain. Most things are where you'd expect. It's certainly not like Gimp or Inkscape, where absolutely everything is different and it feels impossible to get anything done.
Comment · 4 years ago
For the HP48/50 fans here: try the HP Prime. The color display is amazing. It requires some relearning because the UI is different, but it still has full-featured RPN mode. The keys are good, too--it looks and feels like a proper HP calculator. I used a 48SX in college and 50G later, but the Prime is the one to have now. (It's also the one my daughter steals now that she's in more advanced math and science classes.)
Comment · 4 years ago
Only the last Danger device ran NetBSD; all prior ones used a proprietary, in-house OS. It didn't run any of the normal BSD userland, however, as Danger had its own Java-based userland and UI layer.
Danger was bought by Microsoft, however, right around the time the NetBSD phone was going to market. AFAIK the tech didn't continue much past the Microsoft acquisition. (Source: worked at Danger on the NetBSD project, but left shortly before the Microsoft deal.)
Comment · 4 years ago
> why do you say setup and loop are the worst imaginable way to write embedded software?
Because there's neither abstraction nor ways to combine things. Say you have a device that needs to do two things, and you look up some examples of how to do each thing. Each example is going to have its own loop() function--but how do you combine them? There's no notion of tasks or threads. There's no abstraction for device drivers. Arduino is a system that paints you straight into a corner.
[edit to add] Any reasonable software environment needs to provide three things, quoting "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" here [1]:
* primitive expressions, which represent the simplest entities the language is concerned with,
* means of combination, by which compound elements are built from simpler ones, and
* means of abstraction, by which compound elements can be named and manipulated as units.
Arduino only provides the first.
[1]: https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/...
Comment · 5 years ago
I'm using XXHash3 for verifying data integrity of large (10+MB) blobs. Very fast and appears to work very well in my testing--it's never missed any bit error I've thrown at it.
Aside: when storing hashes, be sure to store the hash type as well so that you can change it later if needed, e.g. "xxh3-[hash value]". RFC-6920 also has things to say about storing hash types and values, although I haven't seen its format in common use.
Comment · 7 years ago
Thanks! Glad you found the site useful. Unfortunately, we were too far ahead of the time in lots of regards--processors were slow, screens were bad, battery technology iffy, no mobile data service that normal humans could afford... These days an iPhone costs just as much as a Magic Cap device did, and you can definitely see that that's what we were trying to accomplish, but there was no way for General Magic to stay in business long enough to see it realized.
Comment · 7 years ago
I worked there for 5 years, and I maintain some historical artifacts from the time, including a gallery of Magic Cap handheld devices and some interesting concept art from Magic's very early days:
Comment · 7 years ago
Migadu is the place to go--they charge for traffic, not mailboxes. I'm in a similar boat with lots of domains, aliases, and mailboxes. My family comfortably fits in their "mini" plan, $48/year.